“Thousand-pound gorilla who?” asked Drakul.
And River Shoulders roared and hit him with a twelve-foot-long concrete obelisk.
One second, Drakul loomed over me. The next there was an enormous sound and an explosion of shattering concrete that left half a dozen little cuts on my face, and Drakul was nowhere to be seen. The weight vanished from me so abruptly that for a second I thought I was levitating off the ground. I was suddenly dizzy, and my vision narrowed to a tunnel.
“Now, that,” I gasped, “is comedy.”
River Shoulders roared and bounded after Drakul, jumping with all four limbs.
Drakul, for his part, tumbled calmly, and if his shoes had cost more than some vehicles I had driven, they held up well enough as he dug them into the grass to arrest his momentum and bring himself to a controlled halt among tumbling fragments of concrete. He was wearing, I kid you not, a tuxedo under the long black cloak.
And he looked annoyed.
River Shoulders lowered his shoulder to slam into Drakul, but the big guy might as well have been trying to ram water. Drakul took a step and vanished, out from in front of the charging Sasquatch and to one side—where he crouched and swept his arm out at shin height to the Sasquatch, catching River Shoulders’ enormous leg in the crook of his elbow and arresting its momentum as Drakul rose to his feet. The Sasquatch went forward in a sprawl, which he could not turn into a controlled roll before crashing through two enormous side-by-side tombstones.
River Shoulders began to rise and then sank back to the earth with a groan.
Hell’s bells.
Drakul turned toward River Shoulders with his knife, and I saw what was coming in my head as clearly and sharply as if I was remembering it. The Forest People aren’t exactly wizards. They just sort of live their lives so steeped in the world of magic that they just do it, the way a fish swims or a bird flies. Their aura of life energy is especially dense and potent, constantly absorbing power from the natural world around them.
Which would make the big guy a great big tank of nitrous for Drakul’s necromantic summoning, if the master of the Black Court could spill River’s blood to fuel the spell.
I grabbed my staff and brought it to bear, feeling the seething energy stored within its runes and sigils vibrate to life. The staff began to glow with green-gold light, even as I reached out to a portion of the energy stored within it, stirring it, urging it to glow even more brightly. I wanted him to see this one coming.
“Hey!” I shouted. “You! Ugly!”
Yeah, yeah. Not my best insult work. But you know. It’s the thought that counts.
Drakul turned to look at me and froze for a second as if in surprise, presenting a fleeting instant of vulnerability.
“Forzare!” I shouted.
As I began the word, Drakul took a step to one side and vanished.
I whipped my still-glowing staff toward River Shoulders and this time unleashed my will along with the word. “Forzare!”
A glowing column of green-gold light, flickering and ephemeral as the aurora borealis, lashed across the ground between me and River Shoulders—
—and caught Drakul right in the breadbasket as he reappeared standing over River Shoulders’ head with his knife.
The column of power hit Drakul with the energy of a speeding train engine. It blew back his hair and his clothing, ripping the latter to tatters, and sent him hurtling into the side of a marble mausoleum with such force that it sent a spiderweb of cracks through the stone.
Then there was the cry of an eagle from somewhere up above us, defiant and mocking, and the sweltering summer air was split by a sound so loud and a light so bright that it robbed me of my breath. The image of a bolt of blue-white lightning coming down in a nearly vertical column was burned onto the backs of my eyelids. It hit Drakul like a giant’s sledgehammer, pounding him to the ground—and a second later, a bear, a goddamned Kodiak grizzly, just plummeted out of the sky, landed on Drakul, and started slamming sledgehammer paws down onto the pale being’s skull.
Elders of the White Council don’t screw around, either, and Listens-to-Wind knew how to make an entrance.
I staggered, catching my balance on my staff. The lightning had left my eyes dazzled. The thunder had left my ears ringing. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see any of my companions except for River Shoulders. I hurried to his side, and even as I did, River shook his head groggily and began to push himself up.
“That’s cheating,” the Sasquatch rumbled, and his voice was angry, terrifying. River came to his feet in a single fluid motion, gathering with him a small tidal wave of magical energy that suddenly crackled and sparkled with static in the air around him. He screamed and slammed both fists down onto the earth, sending out a wave of raw power that I couldn’t have matched at my best—just as the Kodiak bear let out a roar of pain and went flying away and to one side.
Drakul came to his feet, a marble statue clad in scorched shreds of black and white. He whirled toward River Shoulders, smiled, took a step to one side—
—and collided with empty air with an audible sound of impact.
Drakul blinked, this time clearly surprised, and recoiled in the other direction—only to rebound again, as if from the surface of a fun-house mirror maze. He turned toward the Sasquatch, dark eyes narrowing.
“Okay, Mister Dancy Pants,” growled River Shoulders. “Now, let’s see how tough you are.”
Drakul’s black eyes glittered with an almost sexual intensity, and his sudden, wide smile was utterly unnerving. “I like this game much better,” he said in something like a purr. And he laughed, taking slow steps back. As he did, without a whisper of power evident in the air, the graveyard began to fill with fog, as swiftly and rapidly as if he’d pulled down a cloud on top of us. The laughter lingered behind him like the Cheshire cat’s smile.
The Kodiak rolled to its feet and padded over to us. Somewhere along the way, in the sudden fog, Listens-to-Wind took its place. The old man padded to us and put his back to ours, his eyes and senses clearly focused outward, over the rims of his spectacles. Listens-to-Wind never looked excited, but tonight his dark eyes glittered brightly.
“Mister Dancy Pants?” I asked River Shoulders.
The Sasquatch shrugged. “Better than ‘Hey, you, ugly.’”
Listens-to-Wind made a soft hissing sound that commanded silence. River Shoulders listened to him, so it seemed like maybe it would be wise for me to do it, too.
So I heard the last few deep thuds of heavy paws striking the ground, and a great black nightmare wolf, a creature out of prehistoric nightmares, taller than me at the shoulders and weighing more than many cars, plunged into our group.
I dove out of the great wolf’s path and only got my ankles clipped as I went. It spun me a hundred and eighty degrees before I hit the ground, still spinning.