Side Jobs

amulet fell from my suddenly unresponsive fingers, and the brilliant light died at once.

Dammit, I had assumed big and hostile meant dumb, and the grendelkin wasn’t. The beast had deliberately waited for Gard to charge forward out of the light of the dropped flare before he threw.

“Wizard!” Gard bellowed.

I couldn’t see anything. The brief moment of brilliant illumination had blinded my eyes to the dimmer light of the flare, and Gard couldn’t be in much better shape. I got to my feet, trying not to scream at the pain in my shoulder, and staggered back to look down at the room.

The grendelkin bellowed again, and Gard screamed—this time in pain. There was the sound of a heavy blow, and Gard, her hands empty, flew across the circle of green flare-light, a dim shadow. She struck the wall beneath me with an ugly, heavy sound.

It was all happening so fast. Hell’s bells, but I was playing out of my league, here.

I turned to Mouse and snarled an instruction. My dog stared at me for a second, ears flattened to his skull, and didn’t move.

“Go!” I screamed at him. “Go, go, go!”

Mouse spun and shot off back down the way we’d come.

Gard groaned on the floor beneath me, stirring weakly at the edge of the dim circle of light cast by the flare. I couldn’t tell how badly she was hurt—but I knew that if I didn’t move before the grendelkin finished her, she wasn’t going to get any better. I could hear Elizabeth sobbing in despair.

“Get up, Harry,” I growled at myself. “Get a move on.”

I could barely move my left arm, so I gripped my staff in my right and began negotiating the precarious stone stairway.

A voice laughed out in the darkness. It was a deep voice, masculine, mellow, and smooth. When it spoke, it did so with precise, cultured pronunciation. “Geat bitch,” the grendelkin murmured. “That’s the most fun I’ve had in a century. Surt, but I wish there were a few more Choosers running about the world. You’re a dying breed.”

I could barely see the damned stairs in the flare’s light. My foot slipped, and I nearly fell.

“Who’s the seidrmadr?” the grendelkin asked.

“Gesundheit,” I said.

The beast appeared at the far side of the circle of light, and I stopped in my tracks. The grendelkin’s yellow eyes gleamed with malice and hunger. He flexed his claw-tipped hands very slowly, baring his teeth in another smile. My mouth felt utterly dry and my legs were shaking. I’d seen him move. If he rushed me, things could get ugly.

Strike that. When he rushed me, things were going to get ugly.

“Is that a fire extinguisher in your pocket?” I asked, studying the grendelkin intently. “Or are you just happy to see me?”

The grendelkin’s smile spread wider. “Most definitely the latter. I’m going to have two mouths to feed, shortly. What did she promise you to fool you into coming with her?”

“You got it backward. I permitted her to tag along with me,” I said.

The grendelkin let out a low, lazily wicked laugh. It was eerie as hell, hearing such a refined voice come from a package like that. “Do you think you’re a threat to me, little man?”

“You think I’m not?”

Idly, the grendelkin dragged the clawed fingers of one hand around on the stone floor beside him. Little sparks jumped up here and there. “I’ve been countering seid since before I left the Old World. Without that, you’re nothing more than a monkey with a stick.” He paused and added, “A rather weak and clumsy monkey at that.”

“Big guy like you shouldn’t have any trouble with little old me, then,” I said. His eyes were strange. I’d never seen any quite like that. His face, though pretty ugly, was similar to others I’d seen. “I guess you have some history with Miss Gard, there.”

“Family feuds are always the worst,” the grendelkin said.

“Have to take your word for it,” I said. “Just like I’m going to have to take these women. I’d rather do it peaceably than the hard way. Your call. Walk away, big guy. We’ll both be happier.”

The grendelkin looked at me, and then threw his head back in a rich, deeply amused laugh. “It’s not enough that I already have a brood-mare and a wounded little wildcat to play with; I also have a clown. It’s practically a festival.”

And with that, the grendelkin rushed me. A crushing fist the size of a volleyball flicked at my face. I was fast enough, barely, to slip the blow. I flung myself to the cavern floor, gasping as the shock of landing reached my shoulder. That sledgehammer of flesh and bone slammed into the wall with a brittle crunching sound. Chips of flying stone stung my cheek.

It scared the crap out of me, which was just as well. Terror makes a great fuel for some kinds of magic, and the get-the-hell-away-from-me blast of raw force I unleashed on the grendelkin would have flung a parked car to the other side of the street and into the building beyond.

The grendelkin hadn’t been kidding about knowing counter-magic, though. All that naked force hit him and just sort of slid off him, like water pouring around a stone. It only drove him back about two steps—which was room enough to let me drop to one knee and swing my staff again. It wasn’t a bone-crushing blow, powered as it was by only one hand and from a fairly unbalanced position.

But I got him in the fire extinguisher.

The grendelkin let out a howl about two octaves higher than his original bellows had been, and I scooted around him, running for the altar stone where Elizabeth Braddock lay helpless—away from Gard. I wanted the grendelkin to focus all his attention on me.

He did.

“Behind you!” Elizabeth screamed, her eyes wide with terror.

I whirled and a sweep of the grendelkin’s arm ripped the staff out of my hand. Something like a steel vise clamped around my neck, and my feet came up off the ground.

The grendelkin lifted my face to his level. His breath smelled of blood and rotten meat. His eyes were bright with their fury. I kicked at him, but he held me out of reach of anything vital, and my kicks plunked uselessly into his belly and ribs.

“I was going to make it quick for you,” he snarled. “For amusing me. But I’m going to start with your arms.”

If I didn’t have him right where I wanted him, I’d have been less than sanguine about my chances of survival. I’d accomplished that much, at least. He had his back to the tunnel.

“Rip them off one at a time, little seidrmadr.” He paused. “Which, when viewed from a literary perspective, has a certain amount of irony.” He showed me more teeth. “I’ll let you watch me eat your hands. Let you see what I do to these bitches before I’m done with you.”

Boy, was he going to get it.

One of his hands grabbed my left arm, and the pain of my dislocated shoulder made my world go white. I fought through the agony, ripped Elizabeth Braddock’s pointy-handled hairbrush from my duster’s pocket, and drove it like an ice pick into the grendelkin’s forearm.

He roared and flung me into the nearest wall.

Which hurt. Lots.

I fell to the stone floor of the cavern in a heap. After that, my vision shrank to a tunnel and began to darken.

This was just as well—fewer distractions, that way. Now all I had to do was time it right.

A sound groaned down from the tunnel entrance above, an odd, ululating murmur, echoed into unintelligibility.

The furious grendelkin ripped the brush out of his arm and flung it away—but when he heard the sound, he turned his ugly kisser back toward the source.

I focused harder on the spell I had coming than upon anything I’d ever done. I had no circle to help me, lots of distractions, and absolutely no room to screw it up.