21
Bitter Fruit
Mae saw the exact moment that fury crashed through Gerald’s patience and shattered it. He lifted a hand, and wind went blasting in Nick and Alan’s direction. The other magicians took their cues from him and the murmurs of spell casting were suddenly all around, half the circle drawing back for what Mae guessed was a spot of demon summoning, the other half advancing with magic in their hands. Nick and Alan drew their weapons.
“Now,” said Mae, and grabbed Sin’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go alert your archers. Tell the rest of them to come out in the open.”
Sin’s voice sounded faint and stunned, but there was a smile in it. “If you go out,” she said, “they’ll follow you.”
Mae blinked. “Right.” She stood up and dusted off her jeans, looking helplessly at Jamie and Annabel, who stood up with her. “Right, then,” Mae said, and strode out into the market square.
Emerging from their places on the side streets at the other two points of the triangle came the Goblin Market: the woman who sold wind chimes, the man at the knife stall who’d tackled a customer, the necklace-selling pied piper with the gleaming dark eyes. The piper wasn’t holding up a trinket made of human bones this time, though. He was holding a bow and arrow, which he loosed into the midst of the magicians.
That was another signal, apparently. From the black fence surrounding the church, the gardens and towering trees, and the very roof of the church itself, there was suddenly a rain of arrows.
The magicians erupted into a counterattack. A small storm front was rising in front of them like a force field, and in the storm were crows croaking wildly to one another and being tossed about in the wind like leaves. From the center of the Obsidian Circle there sprang a wolf.
Mae took out her knife, which was seeming a bit inadequate just now, and braced herself for the onslaught.
One of the shadow creatures at Nick’s feet leaped for the wolf. Alan shot a crow.
The Ryves brothers moved to join the forces of the Goblin Market.
It took Mae a minute to realize that the three newcomers were being guarded: that she, Jamie, and Annabel were being pushed to the back of the fray.
It made sense. All Mae had was a knife, and Jamie didn’t even have that.
There was a flurry of snarls and yelps under their feet, then in the jostling, fighting crowd Mae suddenly saw faces that couldn’t have possibly been there, her father and her friends from school, and Jamie called out, “Mum, Mae, they’re illusions, don’t pay attention to them,” and Annabel struck out at one leering magician’s face only to find her sword went clean through him and was parried by Nick.
“All of you, get behind me right now!”
“No, they need me,” Mae argued.
“They needed you to make a plan,” said Nick. “They may have even needed you to lead them into this square. But they do not need you to be at the front of a fight, because you don’t know how to fight and you’ll just get in everybody’s way!”
He slashed at a crow and connected, bringing it down in a mess of blood and feathers. A pale girl with no eyes rushed for Mae, but Jamie raised his hand and she dissolved into the wind with a sound like a sigh.
Nick raised a hand and the storm died around them, so they could see four people—then five, and then six— coming at them from the narrowest side street, to the right of the town hall.
Only they weren’t people, Mae saw in a burst of magic light behind them. They were demons, eyes like black jewels shining and perfect in ruined faces. The bodies they were using were dead.
“Surprise zombies,” Jamie said faintly. “Fantastic.”
“Not really a party until someone brings the surprise zombies,” said Nick, and charged them.
The bodies moved too slowly to be much of a challenge, Mae saw, bile rising in her throat as Nick hacked his way through them, too fast for their fumbling, grasping hands to touch him, sword slicing through dead flesh and dark fluids. She saw Annabel go in after him; her impeccably behaved mother with a sword in hand and her blond hair falling wild about her shoulders, cutting down the dead.
Mae felt violently proud and violently ill at the same time.
Nick spun and beheaded the body Annabel was fighting, flashing her a savage, gleeful smile. Annabel gave him a nod.
Nick lunged in, sword just to Annabel’s left, inches away from her side, sinking the blade into a dead body and carving its stomach out. He whirled away from the pieces of the dead that were now littering the square and performed a tight circle around Mae, Jamie, and Annabel, protective but restless as well, looking for his next challenge.
The arrows had stopped hailing in from overhead; Mae thought that the Market might have run out. She couldn’t see how many magicians were down, but judging by the chaos all around them, it wasn’t many.
“Alan could probably have organized this better,” she said.
Nick flicked her a look. “Alan couldn’t have organized this at all,” he said. “Who would’ve trusted him? He’s not a leader any more than I am. You two did fine.”
“Illusion,” Jamie’s voice said behind them. “Illusion, illusion,
Mae found herself smiling. Praise meant a lot more when the guy couldn’t lie to you. “I’d like to see you being a war leader.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Nick. “My battle cry would be ‘For blood, vengeance, and my undeniable good looks!’”
“I’ve heard worse,” Mae said, and heard worse: heard the scream of insects, a high buzzing that made her think of plagues of locusts, of the fury of gods.
