I forced my attention back to the scene around me. “Holy crap. I knew this would put the pressure on him. But this guy’s gone to war.”
“What?” Listens-to-Wind asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t start in on one another!” I snapped. “Lara, we need to work together or we’re all dead.”
She turned her head a little to one side, staring at me. “Why?”
“Because better than a hundred—one hundred ten, now—beings have just arrived at different points of the island and they aren’t here to cater the little mixer we’ve got going. There are only nine of us and fifteen of you. We’re outnumbered five to one.
Six to one, now.”
Mai stared at me.
“What?”
Howls slithered into the air, muffled by the falling rain, but were made all the more eerie by the lack of direction to them. I recognized them at once—Binder’s grey men. They were coming, moving with mindless purpose that cared nothing for the danger of a forest at night.
The second group was nearer. They’d stopped growing at a hundred and twenty-five, and were already on the move toward us. They weren’t as fast as the grey men, but they were moving steadily and spreading out into an enormous curved line meant to sweep the forest and then encircle their quarry when they found it. Red light began to pour through the trees in their direction, casting eerie black shadows and turning the rain to blood.
I forced myself to think, to ask Demonreach the right questions. A second’s consideration revealed that the two forces would converge on us at exactly the same time—they were working together.
The numbers disadvantage was too great. The Wardens might get some spells off, and the Senior Council members would probably leave mounds of corpses piled around them—but outnumbered six to one, on a dark night, when they would have trouble seeing their targets before they were within a few steps, they wouldn’t prevail. The large group would hit them from one side, and the smaller one would come from the other, boxing us in.
Unless . . .
Unless we could get to one of the two groups first and eliminate it before its partner reached us and hit us from behind.
Outnumbered as hideously as we were, the smartest thing would have been to run like hell—but I knew that no one would. The Council still had to recover Morgan. Lara still had to recover Thomas. Neither of them enjoyed the advantage I did. To them, the danger was only a vague threat, some howls in the dark, and it would remain so until it was too late to run.
Which left us only one option.
We had to attack.
The grey men howled again, from much closer.
I gave Ebenezar a desperate glance and then stepped forward, lifting my staff. “They’ve got us boxed in! Our only chance is to fight our way clear! Everyone, with me!”
Lara and her sisters stared at me in confusion. The Wardens did the same—but the fear in my voice and on my face was very real, and when one human being displays a fear response, those nearby it tend to find it psychologically contagious. The Wardens’ eyes immediately went to Ancient Mai.
I started jogging, beckoning as I went, and Ebenezar immediately fell in with me. “You heard the man!” Ebenezar roared. “Wardens, let’s move!”
At his bellow, the dam broke, and the Wardens surged forward to join us.
Lara stared at me for another half a second, and then cried, “Go, go!” to her sisters. They began running with us, effortlessly keeping pace, their motion so graceful and light that it hardly seemed possible that they would leave footprints.
I looked over my shoulder as I slowly increased the pace. Ancient Mai had turned toward the hateful red glare coming from the forest to the south, facing it calmly. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind, with me. Let us see if we can slow the progress of whatever is coming this way.”
Injun Joe went to her side, and the two of them stood there, gathering their will and muttering to each other.
I consulted Demonreach for the best route to follow toward the enemy, put my head down, and charged the demons that were coming to kill us, Wardens and vampires alike at my side.
Chapter Forty-two
Adrenaline does weird things to your head. You hear people talk about how everything slows down. That isn’t the case. Nothing is happening slowly. It’s just that you somehow seem to be able to fit a whole lot more thinking into the time and space that’s there. It might feel like things have slowed down, but it’s a transitory illusion.
For example, I had time to reflect upon the nature of adrenaline and time while sprinting through the woods at night. It didn’t make me run any faster, though. Although if I wasn’t actually moving my arms and legs faster than normal, then why was I twenty feet ahead of everyone else, the vampires included?
I heard someone curse in the dark behind me as they tripped over an exposed root. I didn’t trip. It wasn’t that I had become more graceful—I just knew where to put my feet. It was as if every step I took was over a path that I had walked so many times that it had become ingrained in my muscle memory. I knew when to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, when to bound forward at an angle to my last step in order to clear an old stump, exactly how much I needed to shorten a quick pair of steps so that I could leap a sinkhole by pushing off my stronger leg. Lara Raith herself was hard-pressed to keep pace with me, though she managed to close to within three or four yards, her pale skin all but glowing in the dark.
The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knewwhere they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.
The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”
It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.
After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.
Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.
Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.