talons, holding it at arm’s length.
But although she had the strength to hold the predator off, she didn’t have the mass. Her boots slid in the gravel as the thing pushed at her. The other talons tried to scrape at her.
Green light flared inside the house. Annalise leaned back, pulling on the predator’s talon just as it tried to retreat. She braced against the crooked doorjamb with her right hand, holding the creature in place while the fire burned. The hissing crackle became a grinding shriek again, but this time it was three times as loud.
The green light shone on her face, and I’ll never forget her expression. She was fierce and joyful, her eyes wide and wild, her teeth bared.
Then the darkness spilling out of the doorway retreated back inside. The talon went limp in her hands, and the limb it was attached to dropped as though someone had let go of the other end. Annalise tossed the talon behind her without looking back, and it nearly landed on me. The thing had been burned off above the elbow. The talons twitched, scraping at the gravel, and for a moment I was sure it was going to start crawling at me, like a hand from an old horror movie.
But it didn’t. Annalise walked into the house. The building groaned and shifted, but it didn’t collapse on her. Yet.
I turned and saw Talbot standing at the edge of the gravel lot. He stared at the house—at us—in amazement, his mouth hanging open. If this was his first real experience with spells and predators, he was having pretty much the same reaction I’d had—stunned disbelief.
Of course, I’d been a citizen. Talbot was already a wooden man; he should have been better prepared. Had the society warned him what this was going to be like? I doubt Csilla would have, but somebody should have.
Something moved in the woods behind him. “Talbot!” I said in a harsh whisper. “Come here!”
He stared at me as if I was a talking dog. A shadow behind him moved against a darker shadow.
“Wake up! Get over here!”
He didn’t want to come any closer to the house than he already was. Then he realized I was glancing over his shoulder and turned, taking a few tentative steps toward me. The wind hissed through the trees, but suddenly it didn’t sound very much like wind at all.
Damn. There was another one out there.
Talbot hurried to me and crouched low. “Call your boss out here,” he said, as though he wasn’t allowed to talk to her.
“Shh!” I struggled to my feet, using Talbot as a support. I hadn’t seen any eyes on the one inside, but that wasn’t necessarily unusual. Did it hunt by sound? By smell? Maybe it could feel its prey with its expanding shadow. Then again maybe it saw “with something other than light.” Whatever, I wanted to be as still and quiet as possible until Annalise finished whatever she was doing inside.
The security light at the front of the house flickered and went out, making the whole area clear in the moonlight. To the left, I saw another dark patch moving against the faintly lit background. Then another and another.
Christ, how many of these damn things had Wally summoned?
I watched them, hoping they were moving away from us. Maybe there was a deer or something they could hunt. It wasn’t happening. The darkness was getting larger, blocking out the moonlit leaves and underbrush. Were they growing or just moving closer to us?
Either way, to hell with keeping still and quiet. “Boss!” I shouted. “There are more out here!”
Talbot backed toward the house, and I hopped to keep up with him so I’d have someone to lean on. I didn’t trust my ankle enough to walk on it. Annalise still hadn’t come out. “Boss!” I shouted again.
The creatures were close to us now, blocking the woods as they glided out of them. There were three—no, four. That I could see, at least.
I readied my ghost knife.
Talbot pivoted away from me, and I had to step on my injured ankle to avoid a fall. I hissed in pain as he broke into a sprint, running for the driveway.
Damn. I hopped in place, ghost knife in my hand. One of the predators changed direction, moving toward Talbot. I threw the ghost knife just as a claw reached toward him.
The spell sliced through two of the creature’s fingers. That horrible grinding shriek sounded out again, and the limb retreated into darkness. Talbot juked toward it to avoid another of the predators, then leaped over a low wall and sprinted down the gravel path toward the edge of the circle.
The bastard. I hoped he’d make it.
I closed my eyes and cleared my mind, then
“Ray, how badly are you hurt?”
“I can’t put any weight on that foot. Sorry, boss.”
“There are five that I can see, and one of them followed Talbot. I only have four more of these.” She held up the green ribbon with the sigil drawn at the end. It was the spell she used to call up her green fire, and I’d never heard her call it by name. Was it a secret?
The predators hovered at the edge of the forest. The darkness that shrouded them stopped expanding when they touched. “You can see them better than I can, boss. Do you know what they are?”
“Claw-in-Shadow. There are only a couple of predators that we could call common, but this is one of them. The summoning spell for it turns up in a lot of spell books, and it’s a popular guardian predator among a certain sort of sorcerer.”
“But … six of them? With only four more ribbons? Are you, um, going to carry me outside the circle?”
