“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” I pulled the trigger, but as soon as the shot rang out the shadowborn was gone. The bullet punched a hole in the wall on the far side of the hallway. A moment later, the shadowborn reappeared in the same spot, blinking back into existence as quickly as it had vanished.
I lowered my gun. “What the hell…?”
It occurred to me this was why Ingrid hadn’t been able to stop them downstairs, not even with her fire magic. If they could vanish into thin air like that, faster than a bullet, then Bennett was right. They really were unstoppable.
Keeping Underwood’s Golden Rule in mind, I dropped the gun into my coat pocket. I wanted my hands free.
The shadowborn’s katana cut through the air with a high-pitched whistle. I jumped back, narrowly avoiding the blade. No way was I going to let
Just then, two more shadowborn, identical to the first, walked into the hallway from the bedroom. They drew their katanas in unison.
Three against one. The odds had already been pretty bad, but they’d just gotten worse. I backed up, keeping my eyes on the shadowborn. All three of them winked out of sight. A moment later, they reappeared right in front of me. Startled, I fell backward, landing on the floor in front of one of the closed bedroom doors. The shadowborn raised their katanas. I closed my eyes, waiting to be skewered like shish kabob.
The bedroom door burst open, and an enormous timber wolf bounded out. Two of the shadowborn above me disappeared just as Thornton was about to pounce on them. He crashed into the wall instead. The third shadowborn stayed where it was, bringing its katana down toward me in a swift chop.
With a loud
“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.
I grinned, relieved to see her. “It’s a long story.”
But the shadowborn had no intention of giving us time to catch up. It swung its katana at Bethany, and she parried the blow. They fought, their blades clashing and ringing. I got back on my feet. On the floor of the bedroom Bethany had come out of, I saw another sword identical to hers lying beside a pile of Thornton’s discarded clothing. I scrambled into the room and picked up the sword. It was heavier than I expected, its handle slightly too long for my hand. But then, it had been crafted for the six-armed war god of the Pharrenim, not for me. I hoped I’d be able to handle it. There was no guarantee a sword would be any better than a gun against the shadowborn, but at least it would give me something to defend myself with.
I rushed back into the hallway. Bethany was still fighting, wielding her sword like someone who’d been in her share of swordfights before. But every time she managed a thrust or jab that should have crippled her opponent, the shadowborn simply disappeared to avoid her blade, then reappeared and attacked again.
Down the hall, Thornton was keeping the other two shadowborn busy. Every time he lunged at them, snapping his massive lupine jaws, they winked out of sight and reappeared nearby. They tried to stick him with their katanas, but on four legs he was too fast for them.
One of them noticed me. It vanished and reappeared right in front of me. Its sword was already coming my way by the time I realized what was happening. I brought my own sword up and blocked its attack. It lunged. I blocked its blade again, and again after that, marveling at how well I was doing. As far as I knew, this was the first time I’d ever held a sword, and yet my hands were acting like they knew exactly what to do with it.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been surprised by how well I could fight, though before now it had always been hand-to-hand combat. Somehow, I could fight like I’d been trained by the best. It was something that came over me, like instinct or muscle memory, and more than once I’d wondered if I was a boxer in my previous life.
Now this. Who the hell was I that I knew how to handle a fucking
But in my excitement I got cocky, and the shadowborn managed to get the tip of its katana under my cross guard. With a flick of its wrist, it sent the sword flying out of my hand and clattering to the floor.
The shadowborn came at me quickly. I grabbed both its arms, trying to force the katana blade back as it inched closer to my neck. The shadowborn pushed forward with a strength that belied its slender frame, forcing me back against the wall and pinning me there. I struggled to hold the blade at bay, my own warped reflection staring back at me from the shadowborn’s blank steel mask.
How hard was that steel, I wondered? Only one way to find out. I snapped my head forward, butting the hard bone of my forehead against the mask. It hurt like hell, but I hoped the blow would stun the shadowborn long enough for me slip out of its grasp.
It didn’t work. The shadowborn didn’t seem affected at all, though its mask loosened, slipped off, and fell to the floor.
What lay beneath the mask wasn’t a face, at least not anymore. It was a skull, mossy and brown and caked with dirt. Indistinct fleshy masses wriggled in the empty eye sockets. It took me a moment to recognize them as worms.
I got my boot up against the shadowborn’s stomach and shoved it back. It bent to pick up its mask, and I took the opportunity to grab my sword again. Not that there was much I could do with it. Even if I got lucky and landed a blow, I couldn’t kill what was obviously already dead.
The odds just kept getting worse.
The wolf bolted past me. Thornton was making a break for the stairs. Bethany broke away from the shadowborn she was fighting and ran with him. “Trent, let’s go!” she shouted.
I followed them, risking a glance back over my shoulder. All three shadowborn vanished. They reappeared on the landing before us, cutting us off from the staircase.
We were trapped.
The shadowborn lifted their katanas, the sharp edges of their blades gleaming like razors.
Seventeen
The shadowborn advanced on us, blocking our one exit. I grabbed Bethany by the hand and pulled her into the nearest bedroom. Thornton bounded in after us. Inside, I let go of Bethany and kicked the door shut. Then I hit the lock button in the center of the doorknob, more from habit than because I thought it would actually help. There was no way that flimsy lock would stop the shadowborn. Neither would the door for that matter, not if they could pop up wherever they wanted. We needed a better way to keep them out.
I turned from the door and saw that we were in the room I’d stayed in last night, Morbius’s room. It, too, had been searched by the shadowborn. The bed was overturned, the love seat smashed to pieces, the dresser drawers dumped, clothes from the closet torn off their hangers and heaped on the floor. What the hell had they been looking for?
Bethany pulled a small object out of her vest and slapped it onto the wall next to the door. It stuck in place, a wooden disc with a round, obsidian stone at its center. As the stone gave a brief flash, the charm sent a glowing latticework of light across the entire wall and door before it faded.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
“An Avasthi phalanx,” she said. “It’ll keep the shadowborn from phasing through the wall, but it won’t hold them for long. It’s only a matter of time before they just break down the door instead. But I have no intention of making it easy for them.” She glanced quickly around the room. Her gaze settled on the dresser near the window on the far side of the room. Its drawers had been pulled out and the pictures of Morbius and the Five-Pointed Star had been swept off it onto the carpet. “Trent, bring that dresser over here.”
I hurried to it, kicking the empty drawers and their contents out of my way. I grabbed the top corners of the dresser, but a sudden movement outside the window caught my eye. A sliver of the street below was visible through a gap in the curtains. On the sidewalk across from the house, a shape in a hooded, blood-red cloak moved toward the mouth of an alley between two buildings, an alley that glowed with a flickering blue light. The shape
