inscription running along the edge glowed, a faint purple luminescence. The esoteric scrip grew bright enough to read as I kept my hand near.
'What does it say?' he asked.
'It's a ward of protection,' I said.
Not the most complicated charm to weave. It would take a little while, but a decent adept would be able to put this together. The trick here was how it reacted to magick. Someone like Nicols would be unharmed if he walked on the platform while I would set the stone afire. Which meant it was unstable-volatile, waiting to do damage. I might be able to unravel it, but if I failed, the whole platform would immolate. Probably try to take me too.
The Chorus whined.
Nicols flicked his flashlight beam around the room. 'Okay, if we can't get to the circle, then what else is there?' His roving spot illuminated the dry walls of the barn, the empty brackets where horse stalls had once been installed. A broken ladder reached only a few feet down from an upper floor.
A distant crunch of gravel interrupted our examination. Nicols clicked off his flashlight, and I hurried to the door to better hear the sounds coming from outside.
The crunching was slow and regular, a rolling sound that had echoes. 'More than one vehicle,' I told Nicols as he joined me.
We had visitors.
VII
Let's go find out who they are,' Nicols said.
I grabbed his arm as he squeezed past me. 'We have to assume they're the guys who put this here.'
Nicols looked at my hand. 'I know that,' he said. He pulled out of my grip, and reached in his jacket for his gold shield, which he hung around his neck so it was visible on his chest. 'I'm not about to go charging around the building with my gun out. I have to assume they're going to respect the shield.'
But what if these guys weren't the sort to care about the sanctity of the shield? I kept the question to myself. The thought probably ran through his head every time he pulled the shield out. Still, getting out of the barn before we got pinned inside was an excellent idea. We had more options outside.
As he walked across the yard, Nicols unsnapped the flap on his holster, and his fingers toyed with the butt of his gun. I followed, the Chorus swelling into a plume of aggression. Headlights outlined the front corner of the house, and illuminated the empty field to the west. As Nicols reached the edge of the light, I hung back, clinging to the shadows still wrapped around the side of the house.
Two cars in the drive. It was hard to tell exactly what they were with their lights-brights on, naturally-but it looked like one SUV and one sedan. They formed a right angle-bumper to tailgate-across the driveway, like an open compass bracketing Nicols' vehicle. In the light reflected from the farmhouse, I spotted five men. A mishmash of clothing styles-leather jackets, jeans, long coats. Nothing uniform. Civilians, then, not law enforcement.
Nicols stepped into the light. He raised his flashlight, and caught one of the men in its beam. 'Can I help you?' His voice projected a calm and reasoned authority. He was supposed to be here; they were the trespassers.
The guy picked out by Nicols' light swung his right arm behind his back, and it stayed there. Nicols lowered the light to the man's waist, highlighting the fact that he had seen the motion. Nicols' other hand was on the butt of his pistol. He had seen the guy's motion, and rejected it as a casual gesture. The gold shield hanging over his heart flashed in the pale headlights, a wan star that seemed on the verge of going out.
None of the other men moved. Waiting for some signal, whether it came from the man caught in the flashlight beam or from one of the others. It was hard to tell. Nicols appeared to have more patience than any of them, which didn't help the tension of the standoff.
One of them moved finally. A guy in a long dark coat stepped closer to the spray of light from the sedan. His hair seemed like a cap of snow in the reflected light. 'We're inspecting our property,' he said. I couldn't see his eyes-sunglasses at night, that pointless affectation that did more to signal carelessness than menace-but some of the glow leaked around the edges of the frames as he summoned power. 'What brings you out here, Detective?' he asked, referencing the gold shield hanging around Nicols' neck.
'Your barn isn't secure,' Nicols said. The Chorus and I smiled at the audacious gambit of his conversation. 'You should keep it locked. Vagrants and animals might get inside and disturb your. . things.' From his pause, it was clear to everyone that Nicols knew what was inside.
The other man laughed. 'Well, you are probably right, Detective.' Three of the men inadvertently turned their heads toward their white-headed leader, an unconscious twitch toward a sound that no one heard but the three of them.
It was an arcane bit of magickal ventriloquism, used for centuries when adepts wanted to communicate to each other in situations where vocalization could be dangerous. Whispering was like a point-to-point radio transmission: only the sender and the receiver were party to the words. The tic displayed by the three guys showed their naivete.
Neophytes.
However, such inexperience with magick wasn't the immediate problem. Though Nicols and I didn't know what he had told them, the gist was clear. The man closest to us swung his arm around, revealing the black shape of a handgun.
I leaped forward, and grabbed the collar of Nicols' jacket. He dropped his flashlight as I hauled him out of the headlight glare. The gun coughed like an angry seal, and chips of wood split from the edge of the house.
'Son of a bitch,' Nicols spat in disgust, as he got his back against the wall. His drew his own gun. 'A semi- automatic. Whatever happened to cheap revolvers?'
'Couldn't get the job done, I guess.' I kept my voice low. The Chorus flushed my surroundings, and generated an overlay of information. 'One guy coming,' I said to Nicols as I moved in front of him. 'Mr. Semi-automatic.' My fingers lightly brushed the cracked paint of the wall, the dead frame grounding me, giving me a point about which to swing my army of snakes. 'He's got a friend. I can't sense the rest.'
'Think they're going around?'
I nodded. 'I would.'
'Yeah,' Nicols muttered. 'So would I.' He started to sidle toward the back of the house. I crept in the other direction.
The Chorus sibilated in my throat as I exhaled. I bound them in my hands, pushing them out through my knuckles as glittering spikes of force. As the man crept up on the corner of the house, I held my breath.
He led with the pistol, a quick dart of his arm and head to check our position. He didn't expect to find me just a few inches beyond the barrel of his gun, and he flinched instead of pulling the trigger. I shoved his gun hand through the wall, the wood splintering with a brittle groan as the magick in my fist gave the blow added impetus. He fired the gun once, a quick burst that made a dull spattering noise against the plaster of the inner wall, and then he stopped with the trigger action as I shattered his elbow with my other fist.
The Chorus chased red veins of pain up his arm. They lit his central cortex, amplifying the nerve impulses into an overwhelming rush. He passed out with just a tiny squeak of agony, the plaintive noise a mouse makes as an owl drops on it from a moonless sky and breaks its back.
The Chorus reacted to a pulse of magick, a night bloom of Will from the front yard. In the back of my mouth, I tasted the acrid hint of old fruit, and I quit trying to extricate the unconscious man's gun from the wall. Nicols was pressed against the house at the back, gun clasped in both hands as he considered a quick glance around the corner. I tried to reach him in time, tried to get my hand on his arm before the spell from the driveway collapsed on us.
