“Bloody hell,” he panted, as I set him down. “Bloody hell and brimstone.”
I staggered and sat down across from him, panting to get my breath back and to push the sight of Lara devouring Madeline out of my head. “No kidding.”
“Some of the bloody fools I’ve known,” Binder said. “Can’t stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they’re just like us. Bloody idiots.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice raw.
We sat there for a few seconds. From up the slope, there was a low, soft, and eager cry.
We shuddered and tried to look as if we hadn’t heard anything.
Binder stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Why?”
“Once Lara got going, she might not be able to stop. She’d have eaten you, too.”
“Too right,” Binder agreed fervently. “But that ain’t the question. Why?”
“Somebody has to be human.”
Binder looked at me as if I was speaking in a language he’d never been very good at, and hadn’t heard in years. Then he looked sharply down and away. He nodded, without looking up, and said, “Cheers, mate.”
“Fuck you,” I told him tiredly. “How bad are you hit?”
“Broke the bone, I think,” he said. “Didn’t come out. Didn’t hit anything too bad or I’d be gone by now.”
He’d already tied a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. His wet suit was probably aiding it in acting as a pressure bandage.
“Who was Madeline working for?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Think,” I said. “Think hard.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that it was some bloke with a lot of money. I never talked to him. When she was on the phone with him, they spoke English. He wasn’t a native speaker. Sounded like he’d learned it from a Continental.”
I frowned. Television has most people confident that they could identify the nationality of anyone speaking English, but in the real world, accents could be muddy as hell, especially when you learned from a non-native speaker. Try to imagine the results, for example, of a Polish man learning English from a German teaching at a Belgian university. The resulting accent would twist a linguist’s brain into knots.
I eyed Binder. “Can you get out of here on your own?”
He shivered. “This place? I bloody well can.”
I nodded. Binder was responsible for the death of a Warden, but it wasn’t as though it had been personal. I could bill that charge to Madeline Raith’s corpse. “Do business in my town or against the Council again and I’ll kill you. Clear?”
“Crystal, mate. Crystal.”
I got up and started to go. I didn’t have my staff, my blasting rod, or my gun. They were back up the hillside.
I’d come back for them later.
“Wait,” Binder said. He grunted and took off his belt, and I nearly kicked him in the head, thinking he was going for a weapon. Instead, he just offered the belt to me. It had a fairly normal-looking black fanny pack on it.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Two more concussion grenades,” he said.
I put two and two together. My brain was back on the job. “You’d rather not be holding the matches to the one that got Lara, eh?”
“Too right,” he said. I started to turn away and he touched my leg. He leaned toward me a bit and said, very quietly, “Waterproof pocket inside has a phone in it. Boss lady had me hold it for her. It’s powered off. Maybe the lady cop would find it interesting.”
I stared hard at him for a second, and an understanding passed between us. “If this pans out,” I said, “maybe I’ll forget to mention to the Wardens that you survived.”
He nodded and sank back onto the ground. “Never want to see you again, mate. Too right I don’t.”
I snapped the belt closed and hung it across one shoulder, where I could get to the larger pouch in a hurry if I needed to. Then I got on to the next point of business—finding Will and Georgia.
They were both lying on the ground maybe sixty yards from where I’d last seen them. It looked like they’d been circling around the site of the battle with Madeline, planning on coming back in from the far side. I moved easily and soundlessly through the woods and found them on the ground, back in human form.
“Will,” I hissed quietly.
He lifted his head and looked around vaguely. “Uh. What?”
“It’s Harry,” I said, kneeling down next to him. I took off my pentacle amulet and willed a gentle light from it. “Are you hurt?”
Georgia murmured in discomfort at the light. The two of them were twined together rather intimately, actually, and I suddenly felt extremely, um, inappropriate. I shut off the light.
“Sorry,” he slurred. “We were gonna come back, but it was . . . really nice out here. And confusing.”
“I lost track,” Georgia said. “And fell over.”
Their pupils were dilated to the size of quarters, and I suddenly understood what had happened to them: Madeline’s blood. They’d been inadvertently drugged while ripping at a succubus with their fangs. I’d heard stories about the blood of the White Court, but I hadn’t been able to find any hard evidence, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Thomas would ever talk about.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, frustrated. Madeline seemed to have a habit of inflicting far more damage by coincidence than intention.
I heard a short, desperately pleasurable cry from nearby, in the direction where I knew Madeline and Lara were on the ground—then silence.
And Madeline wasn’t on the island anymore.
I lifted a hand in the air and let out a soft whistle. There was a fluttering sound, and then a small faerie hovered in the air beside me, suppressing the light that usually gathered around them when they flew. I could hear its wings buzzing and sensed its position through the island’s intellectus. It wasn’t Toot-toot, but one of his subordinates. “Put a guard around these two,” I said, indicating Will and Georgia. “Hide them and try to lead off anyone who comes close.”
The little faerie let its wings blur with blue light twice in acknowledgment of the order and zipped off into the dark. A moment later, a double dozen of the Militia were on the way, led by the member of the Guard.
Toot and company were generally reliable—within their limits. This was going to be pushing them. But I didn’t have any other way of helping Will and Georgia at the moment, and the insanity was still in progress. Putting the Little Folk on guard duty might not be a foolproof protection, but it was the only one I had. I’d just have to hope for the best.
I reached out to Demonreach to find out about Ebenezar and the others, when a sense of fundamentalwrongness twitched through my brain and sent runnels of fear and rage that did not belong to me oozing down my spine. I focused on the source of those feelings, and suddenly understood the island’s outrage at the presence of a visitor it actively detested. It had come ashore on the far side of the island from Chicago, and was now moving swiftly through the trees, dragging a half-dead presence behind it.
My brother.
The naagloshii had come to Demonreach.
I stood there without allies, without most of my weapons, and grew sick with horror as the skinwalker bypassed the battle at the docks and moved in a straight line toward Demonreach Tower.
Toward Molly. Toward Donald Morgan. And it was moving fast.
I put my head down, found the fastest route up the hill, and broke out into a flat sprint, praying that I could beat the skinwalker to the tower.
Chapter Forty-four
As I ran, I tried to keep track of the battle between the White Council and the forces of the traitor who had brought them to the island. Whatever the enemy had brought with him, they weren’t anything close to human-shaped, and they were all over the place. The Council’s forces, together with the White Court , were arranged in a half circle at the shoreline, their backs protected by the lake. The attackers were stacked up at the tree line, where they would be able to hide, and they were probably making swift attacks at odd intervals. The two human-shaped presences who had arrived first were standing together in the forest, well back from the fight, and I felt a moment of severe frustration.