sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.
“The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”
I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs. I caught the spell in time, but it instantly began wrenching at my shield as if it had been some kind of living being, chewing away at it, devouring the energy I was using to hold the shield firm.
Crap. I was not going to fare well in a magical duel with someone who had clearly been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time—not when I had the Lecters to protect. The Corpsetaker would tear them apart if she could to stop us from bringing the wards down. She—I always thought of her as a she, for some reason, even though she could grab any kind of body she wanted, male, female, or otherwise—was far more experienced than I was, with what was probably a much broader range of nasty memories upon which to draw.
On top of that, I was already winded, so to speak. The fight with Evil Bob had been a job of work. If I stood there trading punches, she had an excellent chance of wearing me down enough to kill me. If all I did was keep shielding the Lecters, she’d be free to throw her hardest punches, and I felt certain that anyone from Kemmler’s crew could hit like a truck.
Time to get creative.
I dropped the shield and simultaneously thrust my staff at the black jelly stuff, snarling,
I took a quick look back at the Lecters and immediately wished I hadn’t. The flames of the candles in the hall had burned down to pinpoints of cold blue light. Once again, the ghosts had assumed forms from nightmares—and they were going totally ballistic on the Big Hoods’ hideout. Something that looked like a blending of a gorilla and a Venus flytrap smashed apart a wooden crate supporting one shrine. A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine.
Right. It was working. I just had to keep the Corpsetaker busy until the wild rumpus got finished tearing apart the defenses.
I called up my Sight and vanished to a point twenty feet below the Corpsetaker’s position, reappearing inside solid stone. My eyes couldn’t see a thing, but my Sight wasn’t impaired. I could see dark, violent energy swirling around where I’d last seen the Corpsetaker; nasty stuff. I felt my lips stretch into a snarl as I hefted my staff again and growled,
Ghost fire roared up through solid matter. In an instant, the dark energy had gathered to oppose my spell, but I sensed more than heard a cry of surprise and pain. The psycho hadn’t expected that one.
Then the dark energy vanished.
I scanned around me wildly and found it reappearing behind and above me. I vanished again, flicking out another strike at the Corpsetaker’s location—only to find that the Corpsetaker had blinked to a new one.
The next sixty seconds or so was a nauseating blur of motion and countermotion. We exchanged spells in solid stone, parried each other hovering in open air above the wraith pit, and leapfrogged each other’s positions throughout the sleeping quarters of the Big Hoods. It was all but impossible to aim, since it required us to correctly guess the next position of the opponent and then hit it with a spell, but I clipped her once more, and she landed a strike of pure kinetic force that slammed into my hip and missed my ghostly genitals by about an inch.
Twice she darted into the hallway to attack the Lecters, but I stayed on her, forcing her to keep moving, keep defending, allowing her only time enough to throw quick jabs of power back at me.
I wasn’t her match in a straight-up fight, but this was more like some kind of hallucinatory variant of Whac- a-Mole. Maybe I couldn’t take her out, but I could damned well keep her from stopping the Lecters. If she turned her attention from me, I was wizard enough to take her out, and she knew it. If she went all-out on me, I could stand up to her long enough to let the Lecters finish their project—and she knew that, too.
I could feel her rage building, lending her next near-miss a hammering edge that jolted my teeth right through my shield—and I laughed at her in reply, making no effort whatsoever to hide my scorn.
I shrugged off another jab, letting it roll off my shield. And then Corpsetaker vanished and reappeared at the far end of the hallway, at the door to the old electrical-junction room. The very last of the ward flames burned there, at one final, unspoiled shrine. The Corpsetaker faced the Lecters, who were already moving toward her, lifted her hand, and spoke a single word filled with ringing power: “Stop.”
And the Lecters did. Completely. I mean, like, statue-still.
“Screw that!” I called out and raised my staff, drawing upon my own will. “Go!”
There was a sudden strain in the air between the Corpsetaker and me, and I felt it as a physical pressure against my right hand, in which I brandished my staff. Corpsetaker’s upraised palm wavered slightly as our wills contended down the length of the hallway. I pushed hard, grinding my teeth and simply
My will lashed down the hallway and blew the hood back from the Corpsetaker’s face. Maybe she was wearing the form of one of her victims. Maybe I was getting a look at the real Corpsetaker. Either way, she wasn’t a pretty woman. She had a face shaped like a hatchet, only less gentle and friendly. Both cheeks were marked with what looked like ritual scars in the shape of spirals. Her hair was long and white, but grew in irregular blotches on her scalp, as if portions of it had been burned and scarred. Her skin was tanned leather, covered in fine seams and wrinkles, and there was a lizardlike quality to the way it loosened around her neck.
But her eyes were gorgeous. She had eyes a shade of vibrant jade like I had never seen this side of the Sidhe, and her eyelashes were long, thick, and dark as soot. As a young woman, she must have been a lean stunner, dangerously pretty, like a James Bond villainess.
Our eyes met and I braced myself for the soulgaze—but it didn’t happen. Hell’s bells, I had my Sight wide- open, enough to let me see the flow of energy straining between our outstretched hands, and it still didn’t happen. Guess the rules change when you’re all soul and nothing else.
The Corpsetaker watched me for a moment, apparently not particularly straining to hold my will away. “Again you meddle in what is not your concern.”
“Bad habit,” I said. “But then, it’s pretty much what wizards do.”
“This will not end well for you, boy,” she replied. “Leave now.”
“Heh, that’s funny,” I said. I
She blinked twice at me. Then, in a tone of dawning comprehension, she murmured, “You are not brilliant. You are
“Now you done it. Them’s fightin’ words,” I drawled.
The Corpsetaker tilted her head back and let out an eerie little screech. I think that, to her, it was laughter.
Then she turned, swiped a hand at the last shrine, and demolished it herself.
The wards came down all around us, energy fading, dispersing, settling abruptly back down to earth. I could see the massive currents of power begin to unravel and disperse back out into the world. Within seconds, the protective wards were gone, as if they’d never existed.
The Corpsetaker made that shrieking sound again and vanished, and in the sudden absence of her will I almost fell flat on my face. I caught myself by remembering that I could now officially scoff at gravity, stopped falling halfway to the floor, and righted myself again.
The wards were down. Murphy and company would be crashing the party at any moment.
And . . . for some reason, the Corpsetaker now
Right.
That couldn’t be good.
Chapter Forty-six
