the marine said. “And shut it.”
I swallowed, and Sir Stuart turned back to the front.
“You don’t have to be a dick about it,” I muttered. Very quietly.
It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart’s intervention, I’d have been dead again already.
That’s right—you heard me: dead again already.
I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?
I indulged myself in half a second of disgust that once again the universe seemed to be making an extraspecial effort to align itself against me, but it was my pride that was in critical condition. I was accustomed to being the guy who did the fighting and protecting. Fear had been fuel for the fire, meat and potatoes, when I was the one calling the shots. But now . . .
This was terror of an alien vintage: I was helpless.
Without warning, the air filled with whistling and ear-slashing shrieks, and the horde of wraiths washed toward us in a flash flood of strangled moans.
“Give it to them, lads!” Sir Stuart bellowed, his voice rising above the cacophony of screams with the silvery clarity of a trumpet.
Spectral gunfire roared out at once from the weapons of the hovering defenders. Again, clouds of powder smoke were replaced with bursts of colored mist. Bullets had been switched out for streaking spheres of violent radiance. Instead of the explosions of propellant and projectiles breaking the sound barrier, hammering bass-note thrums filled the air and echoed on long after a gunshot would have faded.
A tide of destruction swept over the assaulting wraiths, distorted light and sound tearing great, ragged holes in them, filling the air with faded, warped shadow-images as their feeble memories bled into wisps of cloud that were swallowed by the night. They fell by the dozens—and there were still plenty more wraiths left to go around. Wraiths closed in with the Lindquist Historical Home Defense Society—and it still wasn’t fair.
Sir Stuart’s troops reacted like the fighting men they had once been. Swords and sabers appeared, along with stilettos and brass knuckles and bowie knives. The wraiths came at them with a slow, graceful, terrible momentum and were hacked, stabbed, punched, clubbed, and otherwise broken—but there were a lot of wraiths.
I heard a hollow scream that sounded as if it had come from a couple of blocks away, and lifted my eyes to see half a dozen wraiths who had all attacked together swarm over a phantom doughboy, a scrawny young man in a baggy uniform. Though one of the things was literally opened from one side to the other by a slash of the ghost soldier’s bayonet, the other five just fastened onto him, first by a single fingertip, which was then blindly followed by others. Another wraith expired when the young soldier drew his knife. But then all those tattered fingers began winding and winding around him, lengthening impossibly, until within a few seconds he looked like nothing so much as a massive burn victim covered in heavy, dirty bandages.
The wraiths pressed closer and closer, their flabby bodies compressing until they hardly resembled human forms at all, and then with a sudden scream, they darted away in four different directions as more solid, lethal-looking shapes, leaving behind the translucent outline of a young man screaming in agony.
I watched, my stomach twisting, as even that image faded. Within seconds, it was gone.
“Damn their empty eyes,” Sir Stuart said, his teeth clenched. “Damn them.”
“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Why didn’t . . . Couldn’t you have stopped them?”
“The lemurs,” he spat. “I can’t give them the chance to get by me into the house.”
I blinked. “But . . . the threshold . . . They can’t.”
“They did the first night,” he said. “Still don’t know how. I can’t leave the porch or they’ll get through. Now be quiet.” His fingers flexed and settled on the haft of his ax. “Here’s where we come to it.”
As the wraiths continued to assault and entangle the house’s defenders, Sir Stuart moved to the top of the little stairs leading up to the porch and planted his feet. Out at the street, the shadowy forms of the lemurs had all gone still, each of them hunched down in a crouch, predators preparing to spring.
When it came, it came fast. Not fast like the rush of a mountain lion upon a deer, and not even fast like a runaway automobile. They were fast like bullets. One second, the lemurs were