“¿Qué?” said my neighbor.
“Just roll with it,” I said. “Get them rounded up. Go!”
He staggered toward a man who had emerged from the house across the street and was watching it burn. The two talked, then grabbed another neighbor. People started getting herded toward the castle.
“Come on,” I said, “before Marcone does something stupid.”
I strode forward, back to the castle, several yards ahead of the first stragglers to stumble that way. I marched up to the base of the wall where everyone had been observing things and shouted, “Marcone!”
There was a muttered conversation above. Marcone leaned out and peered down at me a moment later. “What?”
“These people need shelter,” I said. “Let ’em in.”
Marcone glowered at me. His pale green eyes tracked past me to the stragglers coming in.
“I am not a charitable organization,” he replied.
“You want to be Lord of Chicago?” I spat, contempt in my voice. “Talk is cheap. Act like it.”
Up on the wall, I saw Mab put a hand on Marcone’s arm in restraint and say something.
Marcone locked eyes.
With Mab.
Then he simply looked at her hand and arched an eyebrow.
Mab withdrew it, her eyes narrowed.
Marcone inclined his head to her in a small bow and turned back to me.
More Huntsmen let out shrieks. They were not in the distance. More of those howling blasts from their spears lanced through the night. I heard someone else scream, maybe a couple of blocks away.
“Dammit, man!” I snarled.
Marcone leaned an elbow on a merlon and considered me for a moment. Then the people again. He nodded his chin once.
“Talk is cheap,” he confirmed. “Send them in.”
I blinked.
Marcone glared out at the smoking, howl-haunted, firelit night and clenched his jaw. The granite of the castle seemed less substantial. “Hendricks. Gard. With me.”
Then the Lord of Chicago spun on his heel and went to see to his people.
Chapter
Ten
So, I and River Shoulders and the Einherjaren and Marcone’s troubleshooters started clearing the way for people to get to the castle. There were a number of short, vicious clashes with the enemy’s Huntsmen, and Marcone’s people acquitted themselves like professionals—which is to say that the fight never even came close to being fair.
Even so, they had a couple of their people taken out with injuries, and the foe just kept coming—until one of the Einherjaren matter-of-factly started hanging up the flapping empty skins of the fallen foe across the street on a ghastly improvised clothesline.
Once that gruesome warning marker was up on the streets surrounding the castle, the foe started giving the area a wider berth. Marcone got snipers onto the rooftops to handle anything that approached along the street, and they taught the enemy to keep back. It was all accomplished pretty much by the numbers.
Of course, I noted, that was the point of sending out disposable light troops to attack the city: have them go everywhere, causing havoc, until someone started killing them. Then all Ethniu would have to do would be to go to wherever the bodies were piling up and engage the enemy—or she could avoid those areas and wreak havoc unopposed, throwing more and more troops between her and us while she smashed the place.
It was a bloody price to pay for the map of the town’s defenses. Apparently they thought they could afford it.
The Erlking himself came down to oversee the downing of a last towering Huntsman. A couple of the largest Einherjaren fought the thing with six-foot claymores and made a bloody mess of the street, laughing uproariously the entire time.
I’m not kidding. Laughing. The freaking eternal soldiers were having a ball tonight. That poor lunkhead Lara had left unconscious in the basement was missing Viking Christmas.
“So what’s the name of the place the Huntsmen are from again?” I asked.
“Annuvin,” River Shoulders said. “Welsh Land of the Dead, ruled by Arawn, once upon a time. But the Tuatha settled his hash back in the day, just like Ethniu did poor Gwyn ap Nudd.”
I had picked up one of their black metal spears. They felt cold and greasy to the touch, and just holding one made my joints ache a little. They quivered with a kind of stone-flake, primitive enchantment that had been shaped into them with hours of throbbing drumbeat and primal screams. “Some kind of iron alloy. I think the damned thing runs on hate. That’s how you shoot it. You’ve just got to hate hard enough.”
“Seems about right,” River Shoulders rumbled. He had one hand wrapped around my forearm, my entire freaking forearm, gently. The other was braced against my chest—my entire chest. “Okay, on three. One,” he said, and he put my arm back into its socket.
There was an explosion of static and then a bunch of the white noise cleared away. River Shoulders released me carefully and arched an eyebrow. I tried my shoulder. It functioned much more smoothly, and I nodded my thanks at him.
“Yes,” agreed the Erlking, turning from the last throes of the fallen Huntsman. “It makes them easy to lure forward and impossible to drive away.” He paused to nudge the deflated remains of a Huntsman with the toe of one boot. “It is not possible to contain more than a handful of such creatures for any length of time. The enemy has been breeding this batch up of late.”
I grimaced. “Yeah. They’ve been taking people since the Red Court fell.”
“Now we know why,” River Shoulders said.
“Wait,” I said, feeling sick. “They . . . breed more of these things from people? Or they make more of them from people?”
“The process is . . . somewhat distasteful,” began the Erlking.
“Wait,” I said again. “Stop. Just stop. I don’t want to know.”
“This,” he said, “will not be the worst of it.”
“Cheerful,” I said.
He shrugged, hunting leathers creaking. “Incoming,” he noted calmly.
A great grey owl swooped quickly down from the night air, backwinged in a thunder of feathers, and landed in a heap. The heap kind of quivered and then resolved itself into the shape of Listens-to-Wind. The old man shimmied his shoulders a little, then winced and rolled one arm while grasping at his shoulder with the other hand.
“Need to do more yoga,” the old man muttered with a grimace. “Hey, River.”
“Mobility routines are important for a human your age,” River Shoulders said, his tone clearly worried.