Even through the pain and the fear, my stomach twisted into frozen knots.
Oh, God.
Molly.
I couldn’t see out of my right eye, and I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I turned my head far to the right so that my left eye could focus on the naagloshii crouching over me, its long fingers, tipped with bloodied black claws, twitching in what was an almost sexual anticipation.
I didn’t know if anyone had ever thrown a death curse backed by soulfire. I didn’t know if using my own soul as fuel for a final conflagration would mean that it never went to wherever it is souls go once they’re finished here. I just knew that no matter what happened, it wasn’t going to hurt for much longer, and that I wanted to wipe that grin off the skinwalker’s face before I went.
I wasn’t sure how defiant you could look with a one-eyed stare, but I did my best, even as I prepared the blast that would burn the life from my body as I unleashed it.
Then there was a blur of light, and something darted past the naagloshii’s back. It tensed and let out a snarl of surprise, whirling away from me to stare after the source of light. Its back, I saw, bore a long and shallow wound, straight across its hunched shoulders, as narrow and fine as if cut by a scalpel.
Or a box knife.
Toot-toot whirled about in midair, a bloodied utility knife clutched in one hand like a spear. He lifted a tiny trumpet to his lips and piped out a shrill challenge, the notes of a cavalry charge in high-pitched miniature. “Avaunt, villain!” he cried in a shrill, strident tone. Then he darted at the skinwalker again.
The naagloshii roared and swept out a claw, but Toot evaded the blow and laid a nine-inch-long slice up the skinwalker’s arm.
It whirled on the tiny faerie in a sudden fury, its form shifting, becoming more feline, though it kept the long forelimbs. It pursued Toot, claws snatching—but my miniature captain of the guard was always a hairsbreadth ahead.
“Toot!” I called, as loudly as I was able. “Get out of there!”
The naagloshii spat out an acidic-sounding curse as Toot avoided its claws again, and slapped a hand at the air itself, hissing out words in an alien tongue. The wind rose in a sudden, spiteful little gale, and it hammered Toot’s tiny body from the air. He crashed into a patch of blackberry bushes at the edge of the clearing, and the sphere of light around him winked out with a dreadfully sudden finality.
The naagloshii turned, kicking dirt back toward the fallen faerie with its hind legs. Then it stalked toward me again, seething in fury. I watched him come, knowing that there was nothing I could do.
At least I’d gotten Thomas away from the bastard.
The naagloshii’s yellow eyes burned with hate as it closed the distance and lifted its claws.
“Hey,” said a quiet voice. “Ugly.”
I turned and stared across the small clearing at the same time the skinwalker did.
I don’t know how Injun Joe managed to get through the ring of attackers and to the summit of the hill, but he had. He stood there in moccasins, jeans, and a buckskin shirt decorated with bone beads and bits of turquoise. His long silver hair hung in its customary braid, and the bone beads of his necklace gleamed pale in the night’s gloom.
The naagloshii faced the medicine man without moving.
The hilltop was completely silent and still.
Then Listens-to-Wind smiled. He hunkered down and rubbed his hands in some mud and loose earth that lightly covered the rocky summit of the hill. He cupped his hands, raised them to just below his face, and inhaled through his nose, breathing in the scent of the earth. Then he rubbed his hands slowly together, the gesture somehow reminding me of a man preparing to undertake heavy routine labor.
He rose to his feet again, and said, calmly, “Mother says you have no place here.”
The naagloshii bared its fangs. Its growl prowled around the hilltop like a beast unto itself.
Lightning flashed overhead with no accompanying rumble of thunder. It cast a harsh, eerily silent glare down on the skinwalker. Listens-to-Wind turned his face up to the skies and cocked his head slightly. “Father says you are ugly,” he reported. He narrowed his eyes and straightened his shoulders, facing the naagloshii squarely as thunder rolled over the island, lending a monstrous growling undertone to the old man’s voice. “I give you this chance. Leave. Now.”
The skinwalker snarled. “Old spirit caller. The failed guardian of a dead people. I do not fear you.”
“Maybe you should,” Listens-to-Wind said. “The boy almost took you, and he doesn’t even know the Diné, much less the Old Ways. Begone. Last chance.”
The naagloshii let out a warbling growl as its body changed, thickening, growing physically thicker, more powerful-looking. “You are not a holy man. You do not follow the Blessing Way. You have no power over me.”
“Don’t plan to bind or banish you, old ghost,” Injun Joe said. “Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears.” He clenched his hands into fists and said, “Let’s go.”
The skinwalker let out a howl and hurled its arms forward. Twin bands of darkness cascaded forth, splintering into dozens and dozens of shadowy serpents that slithered through the night air in a writhing cloud, darting toward Listens-to-Wind. The medicine man didn’t flinch. He lifted his arms to the sky, threw back his head, and sang in the wavering, high-pitched fashion of the native tribes. The rain, which had vanished almost entirely, came down again in an almost solid sheet of water that fell on maybe fifty square yards of hilltop, drenching the oncoming swarm of sorcery and melting it to nothing before it could become a threat.
Injun Joe looked back down again at the naagloshii. “That the best you got?”
The naagloshii snarled more words in unknown tongues, and began flinging power with both arms. Balls of fire like the one I had seen at Château Raith were followed by crackling spheres of blue sparks and wobbling green spheres of what looked like Jell-O and smelled like sulfuric acid. It was an impressive display of evocation. Had a kitchen sink gone flying toward Listens-to-Wind, conjured from who knows where, it wouldn’t have startled me. The naagloshii pulled out all the stops, hurling enough raw power at the small, weathered medicine man to scour the hilltop clean to the bedrock.
I have no idea how the old man countered it all, even though I watched him do it. Again he sang, and this time shuffled his feet in time with the music, bending his old body forward and back again, the motions obviously slowed and muted by his age but just as obviously part of a dance. He was wearing a band of bells on his ankles, and another on each wrist, and they jingled in time with his singing.
All of that power coming at him seemed unable to find a mark. Fire flashed by him as his feet shuffled and his body swayed without so much as singeing a hair. Crackling balls of lightning vanished a few feet in front of him, and resumed their course a few feet beyond him, apparently without crossing the space between. Globes of acid wobbled in flight and splattered over the earth, sizzling and sending up clouds of choking vapors, but not actually doing him any harm. The defense was elegant. Rather than trying to match force against force and power against power, the failure of the incoming sorcery to harm Listens-to-Wind seemed like part of the natural order, as if the world was a place in which such a thing was perfectly normal, reasonable, and expected.