35

SHIT, MEET FAN. FAN, MEET SHIT.

I feel like I’m in one of those submarine movies,” Tula whispered. “The ones where everyone is staying quiet so ships won’t drop bombs on them.”

Nobody said anything. Matthew’s claw had a problem with Tula being a female, and Gabriel was the only one of our claw here besides me, and Gabriel didn’t talk just to talk. I thought she had a point, though. Twelve of us were crammed together in a small basement with thick walls and no windows. The man who lived in the house was recently divorced and currently in rehab.

“They’re called depth charges,” I supplied.

Tula stuck her tongue out at me.

“I feel like I’m in a cow pen,” Brett grumbled. He hadn’t spoken to me directly since I’d broken his neck. I don’t know what the big deal was. He and his wife had been much bigger pains in my neck than any temporary discomfort I’d caused in his.

We were one of three teams scattered around the neighborhood, viewing events through laptops via a system of carefully concealed cams with long-distance lenses. Virgil was leading one of the other teams, and Paul the third. About half a mile from the Apraxin house, the residence we were in was as close to the magical hot zone as I dared get. Knights had moved into a house two doors down from the Baba Yaga shortly after we’d sequestered ourselves.

That neighboring house belonged to a Miss Hanley, an old widow. Two knights, a man and a woman, had greeted Miss Hanley loudly and cheerily as if they were family when they ushered her back inside her home after she opened her front door. But they were knights. I knew it for sure when four more people snuck out of their van and went into the house later that night.

If all went well, Miss Hanley would probably wake up after the raid filled to the gills with a drug that wiped out short-term memory. If she even went to the hospital, most people would probably attribute her loss of memory to old age or a small stroke.

One of the knight’s team, the woman, had walked a dog around the neighborhood several times. A hound that was trained to smell werewolf, I’m sure, but we had been dropped off at our own hiding hole in freshly bleached clothes, and it had been raining off and on for weeks.

Another clan member grumbled, “When are they going to move?”

Matthew smiled but didn’t say anything. We weren’t supposed to be using any weapons without suppressors, but he had a sawed-off shotgun slung over his back and a gleam in his eye. He was finally in his element.

“Tonight,” I said. “It’s supposed to stop raining soon, and the knights won’t want to lose the cover.”

And they didn’t.

“What the hell are they doing?” This from the youngest member of Matthew’s personal claw, Boone, who I kind of liked. Boone was one of the three different people staring at three different laptops, though visibility wasn’t good.

Pairs of knights had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, glimpses of shadows moving through backyards in the dark and the rain, carrying air tanks. They were inserting hoses into house vents and cracked windows, occasionally restocking from two panel vans that were moving through the neighborhood with their lights off. It was two thirty in the morning.

“They’re gassing people in their homes,” I said. “Relax. It would take them way too long to work this far out.”

“What is that stuff?” Matthew sounded worried for the first time. “Are we talking chemical warfare?”

Matthew had served in the army during Desert Storm.

I kept my voice soothing. “It’s just a little something to make sure people will sleep through anything. It probably wouldn’t affect us the way it does normal people even if they did get this far.”

“They do this a lot?” Boone sounded indignant. It was probably some kind of leftover citizen’s rights instinct from his previous existence as a human being.

“Not usually on this scale,” I said. “They’ll do this in rural areas sometimes when there aren’t this many houses. They must not be expecting tonight to go smoothly.”

Matthew liked that. He smacked Boone on the shoulder. “Fuckin’-A, boys. We got ’em running scared.”

Tula was less optimistic. “Do they look like they’re running to you? There must be forty of them out there.”

“This ‘Go big or go home’ approach isn’t usually how they do things,” I said. “Either they suspect we’re here, or they’re planning on turning the Apraxin house into their base of operations when they’re done.”

“Holy shit,” Matthew breathed. “That makes sense, don’t it?”

It did. The knights could turn the house into a fortified camp with the Baba Yaga’s wards hiding them. They could take their efforts in Abalmar up to a whole new level.

“We can have more people drive in if we have to,” I reminded him quietly. “But if nothing else, we can just record as many images as we can and stay put.”

“I didn’t spend two days stewing in my juice just to stay put,” Brett growled, and several of Matthew’s claw rumbled in agreement.

“I’m not starting a firefight in the middle of a neighborhood.” Those were the actual words I used. The tone I used said moron. Brett bristled, and I gave him a look that added and maybe a dead moron if you keep this up. “If it looks like we can contain this to the Apraxin hot zone, we’ll go in as wolves, low and fast. The rain will cover us.”

“Why did we bring all this firepower if we’re not going to use it?” Brett protested.

“To have options. Right now, the fewer of us that are tossing lead around, the better,” I insisted. “I don’t want little Timmy two lanes over catching a stray bullet while he’s asleep in his race car bed.”

I gestured at the laptops. “Besides. We didn’t even know the knights had this many people in Abalmar. That knowledge alone was worth this even if it’s the only thing we get.”

“How do they get away with this kind of thing?” Boone was still staring at the shadows who were gassing homes on the laptop screen and shaking his head. “Somebody must see them sometimes.”

“It happens,” I said. “You ever heard of phantom gassers?”

He shook his head. “Sounds like a fart joke.”

“Urban legends,” I said. “Just more crackpot ravings buried in the Internet.”

The knights charged into an ambush that must have been days in the preparing.

Crows attacked them out of the sky as soon as they crossed over into the hot zone. Black and unnaturally silent, hidden by night and rain, they came hurtling out of the air with claws dipped in contact poison. Not thousands, but hundreds of them, who must have been gathering on the Apraxin house’s roof and going through their windows eight or ten at a time, rotating out so their sheer numbers wouldn’t be noticed while their talons were being coated.

The knights were covered from head to foot in Kevlar weave, but the crows sank claws into their masks and helmets and gloves and cuffs, tugging, baring patches of skin, obscuring the knights’ vision and fouling their aim and buffeting them, hurtling into their bodies.

The knights attacking from the side slope—crossing into the hot zone through backyards and avoiding the lit streets—suddenly found themselves in quicksand, the mud beneath their feet sucking at them hungrily, pulling them down into the ground like a hungry mouth.

A squad moving through the scraggly patch of woods behind the house was buffeted by thorny tree limbs. Those limbs were covered in broken branch stubs that had been trimmed into sharp points. A knight would dance out of one tree’s range only to discover that the trees had been arranged to cover each other’s perimeters. Those knights that avoided branches were ensnared by thick tree roots shooting out of the ground, wrapping around their throats and choking them beneath their bulletproof padding.

One group of knights gave up its dream of concealment and rushed down the paved street, but some fell to armor-piercing explosive rounds from a far-off rooftop, the work of the Night Horseman.

Others found themselves confronted by a short humanoid figure made entirely of flame, burning so intensely that rain evaporated before it struck him and ground ignited beneath his feet. Bullets whipped through the thing without effect. The Sun Horseman.

A wild-haired old woman who I didn’t see clearly until later stepped onto the roof with a staff made of gnarled glass in her hands. She was naked except for oddly shaped metal charms hanging parallel on her breasts and limbs, directing lightning from the sky. Blinding bolts cracked and forked down into knights with a deafening impact that tossed them through the air like straw and left them smoking corpses with stopped hearts. Knights fired upon her, but bullets apparently swerved and curved around her. It had to be those metal charms. They were magnets, and somehow she had found some means of harnessing and amplifying polarities through sympathetic magic. I had never seen a charm or ward like it.

The battle was not all one-sided. After the initial devastating attacks, the surviving knights adapted quickly. That’s what we do. I mean… they… do. At some point, a knight triggered a sonic device too high for human hearing that helped disorient the crows, and men killed the birds with knives and bullets and bare hands by the dozens.

The sniper fire stopped, presumably because a knight on rearguard duty had located the Night Horseman where he was lying on some distant roof with a high-powered rifle and showed him what a trained killer really moved like.

A sniper I never saw managed to shoot the young fair-haired witch while she was just a silhouette in a window. Whatever her part in the attack was supposed to be, it never materialized.

One of the Russian olive trees in the grove was ignited by a flamethrower, and I imagine it was the source of a reedy scream emerging from some hollow place. From the tracks I found later, this created an opening in the killing field that several knights managed to make their way through.

The woman on the roof was felled by a quick-thinking crossbowman who cut the metal tip from a fiberglass quarrel and sank the jagged shaft into her soft abdomen. She fell to her knees and brought lightning down upon the man who had just doomed her.

We were already outside the house and running by that point. Almost everyone except my claw were in wolf form. Tula and Gabriel and Paul had gone looking for the knight sniper who was firing uselessly at the Sun Horseman. I think they must have found him pretty quickly too. Nobody put a bullet through my skull, at any rate.

The wolves were faster than my human form, and they swarmed over the knights on the periphery of the hot zone. The wolves weren’t immune to the effects of the ward, but no magic is strong enough to override survival instinct entirely, and they could focus on the remaining enemy that was turning to fire on them. And they did. The fighting was all but over by the time I got there, only the Sun Horseman still left, circled by snarling wolves.

I ignored all of that and darted around the flaming specter in the middle of the street, feeling the heat of the Sun Horseman on my skin like a tangible thing, a wall or a wave if either of those things burn microlayers of your skin off even while they give before you.

It had to be a domovik, this Sun Horseman, a fiery guardian spirit, though God knows what the Baba Yaga had done to make this one so aggressive. It had to be a domovik, because if it was some kind of djinn, we were all dead.

A knight had tried to drive one of the panel vans up to the house and through the front door, but the lawn had turned to quicksand beneath it. The van was almost completely submerged into the front yard, only the tops of its windows visible while it lay on or in some tangle of pipes. Bullets were thudding uselessly into the armored roof as knights trapped in the van tried to free themselves from below. I jumped from a sidewalk to the top of the van and then to the front porch of the house, running leaps that covered fifteen feet at a time. Greg Apraxin, the Day Horseman, was actually trying to close the door that had been left open when the Sun Horseman went outside, and I shoulder-charged it and knocked Greg Apraxin off of his feet.

There was only one practical way to kill the domovik.

A short hall led straight to the kitchen, and I saw a large pot on a counter there, so I barely paused to shoot Greg Apraxin in the head before stumbling and running on. I did pause then. There was a long mirror in the hallway, and I saw a beautiful black-haired woman with pale skin in it even though I couldn’t smell or hear her. Mila Apraxin. She was wearing a cloak made of dark feathers, and when she began to make a sudden sweeping gesture with her arms, I instinctively grabbed the handle of a bathroom door next to me and threw it open, hiding behind it. Shards of glass exploded outward from the mirror and engulfed the hallway. Some of it was pulverized against the door in front of me, and some of the fragments came at an angle and sank into the door like knives.

If the glass was the kind treated with a film of silver nitrate, and I suspected that it was, it would have killed me.

I didn’t have time to think about that, though. Mila Apraxin was gone when I threw the door flat against the wall and charged into the kitchen. There were actually several large pots on the stove, all of them full of grass and mud and some other things I couldn’t identify by smell. The mixture was bubbling. I think it was the source of the quicksand magic.

I never found out. I just grabbed a pot and ran around a corner into a dining room, then into a large den where the fireplace was located. Flames were roaring in that hearth. I had never actually seen the house when smoke wasn’t pouring out of the chimney, but October was cold in Wisconsin and I had never wondered at it. Now I knew the real reason.

Domoviks are spirits that are summoned and placed into live flames. They are usually ancestors of the summoner, and once they are brought to our plane, the fire that houses them has to be constantly fed. If the family moves, they have to transport flames from the original fire by lamp or torch or firepot, or the domovik is lost.

Which is why I dumped the pot of mud into the fireplace. There was actually another, smaller pot suspended over the fire, and I tipped it over for good measure. It was a foolish gesture. I only did it because my adrenaline was up, and I was fortunate that I didn’t cause an explosion or poisonous fumes or send acid trickling over my feet. Instead, boiling water full of dead, plucked crows with stitched bellies cascaded over what was left of the fire.

I actually saw the domovik wink out of existence through a window, its last few flaming footsteps still sizzling in the rain behind it.

There was no time to gawk. I began to search the house for the third vedma, the woman in the feathered cloak who I had seen watching me through a mirror. Mila Apraxin.

I never found her.

I think I know how the remaining Baba Yaga got away, though. I don’t think those birds were just summoned. I think they were led. I think before the battle even began, before her husband died, before her sisters were killed, before whatever dark dreams she had dreamed were destroyed, Mila Apraxin transformed herself into a crow and flew away.