“Parking garage less than a block off,” I said. “This w …”
My panting voice trailed off.
Because suddenly corners in buildings all around us had begun to glow with blue light.
“Stars and stones,” breathed the old man. “They’ve sent the whole pack.”
“We should get to my car,” I said.
“Your car got any right-angle corners in it?” Ebenezar said. “Because if it does, we’ll have those things coming at us out of the dashboard or through the backseat.” He shook his head. “Our only chance is to bind and banish them. Move, boy, get us to that garage.”
The buildings around us bulged and warped and deep bass-note sounds began to drop down below the range of human hearing all around us.
“Sooner’d be better than later,” the old wizard said.
“Right,” I said, and forced my weary body to start moving. “Come on.”
12
We ran, and the cornerhounds followed us.
I wasn’t sure how many of them had taken up our trail. It was more than half a dozen, but fewer than twenty. They made oddly light-sounding skittering noises and created small clouds of sparks when they moved on concrete, the result of those steel-hard claws striking the ground. They clung to the sides of buildings like giant spiders, those same talons biting into brick and concrete, easily supporting their weight.
I took us down the alley, in the direction opposite the one where I’d tossed the first cornerhound, across the street, a slight jog, and then down the alley beyond.
“They aren’t following real close,” I noted. All the cardio lately was standing me in good stead now. My heart was working and I was breathing hard and I barely noticed.
“They know we’re dangerous,” the old man panted. “They aren’t used to dealing with our reality, or with beings that can actually hurt them. Makes them hesitate.”
“Here,” I said, and turned into the opening of a parking garage, weaving around the wooden arm that would swing up to allow cars in. I slowed down enough to let the old man catch up to me. He wasn’t covering the ground as easy as I was.
Behind us, the cornerhounds … didn’t lope so much as scuttle, as if they had to stop to consider each burst of motion before committing to it. They were deathly swift when they moved, absolutely oily with speed—and when they stopped, they were statue still, except for the quivering of the little tentacles running down their flanks. On any one of them, it might have looked a little silly. By the time you spread the sudden, darting motions out to a baker’s dozen or so of them, it crossed the line to unnerving. There was something exceptionally primitive about the motion, something reptilian, even insectile about it. It would have been creepy if the hounds had been the size of beagles. When they were more the size of horses, it was downright terrifying.
“Fire’s best,” the old man continued, grimly keeping pace with me. “Anything magic they can shrug off to one degree or another. All-natural fire works just fine on ’em, though.”
“What’s the difference where the fire came from?” I asked.
“The difference is, anything we just make out of our will, they can slip most of the punch,” he said. “I ain’t got time to give you a graduate seminar on intention versus the natural operation of the universe until you’ve completed my ‘why it’s a damned stupid thing to trust vampires’ course.”
The parking garage was built under the apartment building above us, and the top level was mostly full. There wouldn’t be room to do much fighting in there, which meant there was only one way to go: down. As a rule, when you’re running from something, up or down tends to be a bad idea. The higher up or the farther down you go, the fewer and fewer ways there are out of the situation, and when something is chasing you, keeping your options open is another way of saying staying alive.
I gave the old man a worried glance as I headed down. He looked around and came to the same conclusion I had. “No help for it, Hoss. Head down.”
“No need to drag the White Court into this,” I said to him as I led the way. “They aren’t involved yet.”
“You’re here in the first place because you think you’re protecting the vampire’s concubine,” the old man groused. “And for all you know, they summoned these things and sent them after you.”
I glanced back as the first couple or three cornerhounds slithered around the corner at the top of the ramp behind us and let out chest-shivering calls of discovery. Ahead of us, where walls and roof or floor formed a corner, sickly blue light began to glow.
“Not Lara’s style,” I panted, leading us down another level. “She does the cloak-and-dagger stuff for politics, but for her personal enemies, she’s reliable. If she wanted me dead, she’d come at me with a knife. She’s straightforward that way.”
“Until the one time she isn’t, and you’re too dead to complain about how reliable vampires ain’t,” Ebenezar growled.
We spilled out onto the bottom level of the parking garage. It was mostly empty. We were near the limit of how low solid ground could go in this part of the city: The lowest depressions in the concrete were full of water that had the dank smell of long-standing sources of mold and mildew. We had to have been at the water level of the lake, or a little under.
“Place like this isn’t going to react well to explosions and such,” I noted, looking around.
“And it don’t go quite low enough to get us enough water to get them immersed in it,” he added. “All right, boy. Time to start teaching you this starborn business.”
I blinked and almost tripped over my own feet. “Wait, what? You’re going to start talking about it … now?!”
He cuffed me on the shoulder irritably. “We got maybe half a minute. Do you want to take a walk down memory lane?”
“Freaking wizards,” I complained, rubbing at my shoulder. “Fine, tell me.”
“Every couple or three wizard generations,” Ebenezar said, “the stars line up just right, and what amounts to a spotlight plays over the earth for a few hours. Any child born within that light—”
“Is starborn. I get it,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“Power against the Outsiders,” the old man growled. “Among other things, that their minds can’t be magically tainted by contact with anything from Outside. Which means …”
My eyes widened. “Hell’s bells,” I breathed.
See, when it comes to entities from way outside everyday reality, there are only a few options for dealing with them. In the first place, they aren’t really here, in a strictly physical sense. They’re coming in from outside of the mortal world, and that means constructing a body from ectoplasm and infusing it with enough energy and will to serve as a kind of avatar or drone for the supernatural being, still safely in its home reality. That’s what the cornerhounds had done when they’d come to Chicago to mess with us.
Fighting something like that was often difficult. The bodies they inhabited tended to have no need for things like sensing pain, for example, and it took a considerable amount of extra energy to make a hit sink home. To fight them physically, you had to dismantle the machinery of the construct’s body, breaking joints and bones until they just couldn’t function anymore.