Chapter Thirty-three
The riot gun went off, though I'm not sure if it was because I'd instinctively decided to use the weapon or if I'd just convulsed in surprise. The bad guys were twenty feet away, which was plenty of distance for the shot from the riot gun to spread. If I'd had it aimed well, it would almost certainly have put one of them down. As it was, the largest force of the blast went between them, though from the way they jerked and twisted, either the sheer roaring volume of the weapon was enough to intimidate them or they'd caught a little shot as it went past. Fire coughed uncertainly from the mouths of the flamethrowers, spattering the hall along the floors, walls, and ceiling, where it clung in globs of what had to be a mix of gasoline or some other accelerant, and petroleum jelly-homemade napalm. The air went from cold to roasting-hot, even from the aborted discharge of fire, sucking the wind from my lungs.
Both men, unassuming-looking types in ragged clothing, their eyes wide and fanatical, hesitated for a second before planting their feet again and taking aim once more. It was only a second, but it was enough to save my life. I dropped the gun, tossed my staff into my right hand, and shook out my shield bracelet. I rammed panicked will into the focus and spread it in a wall of energy before me.
The Renfields cut loose this time, flame as thick as spray from a breached hydrant roaring down the hall. I caught it on the shield, but I had never intended it to stop heat. It was primarily a defense against kinetic energy, and while I had used it to handle everything from bullets to runaway elevator cars in my career as a wizard, it just wasn't all that good at stopping the transfer of intense heat. The napalm-jelly splattered against the invisible shield, gallons of it, and the fire clung to it in white-hot glee. Its mindless fury seeped through the shield and flowed onto me.
It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
"Ten seconds!" Kincaid shouted.
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh. The shield grew weaker yet. The pain got worse. I stood now at the bottom of the stairs, and as the shield faltered, the empty space between me and the doorway behind me might as well have been a mile.
I didn't have ten seconds.
I reached into myself, into the horrible red pain, and drew forth more power yet. I focused it on my staff, and the sigils and runes carved along its surface became suddenly suffused with eye-searing scarlet light. My nose filled with the smell of charring wood, and as the shield wavered out of existence, I screamed, "Ventas servitas!"
The power I'd gathered in my staff shot out of it, an invisible serpent of energy. The shield fell just as a shrieking gale of wind shot down the stairs. The column of air howled against me, throwing my duster forward around me like a flag, and caught the blazing napalm like a tub of Jell-O, hurling the fire back the way it had come and providing it with air enough to treble its size.
The fire went mad. It seared mortar from rough stone, and chewed cracks into the rock floor, the damp stone coughing and popping as water within expanded.
For an instant I could see the two Renfields, still spraying fire toward me. They started screaming, but they obeyed Mavra's raspy howls to stand fast, and it killed them. The napalm molded itself to them and the flame embraced them.
What hit the ground as they fell could not have been easily identified as human remains.
I kept my will on the wind, the carved runes on my staff blazing ember-orange, and it spread the flames into the far room in a deadly river of searing light and charred black ash. For agonized seconds I held the winds and spread the flames, and then my will faltered, the runes on the staff dimming. Pain overcame me for a second, and it hurt so much that I literally could not see.
"Wizard!" howled Mavra's voice, the words sounding like dusty scales and cold, reptilian fury. "Wizard! The wizard! Kill, kill, kill everything!"
"Get him!" Kincaid snarled. I felt Murphy get her arms under mine, and she started hauling me back with surprising power. I started seeing through the blinding agony in time to see a charred, inhuman-looking man wielding an ax leap at Kincaid. The mercenary rammed his spear full into the man's chest, stopping him in his tracks. A second man appeared from the smoke behind the first, this one holding a shotgun. There was a roaring sound, and fire tore through the impaled Renfield, then struck the second one full in the face with hideous, searing results. Kincaid jerked the spear clean of the corpse of the first Renfield, even as the second flailed around wildly, then pointed the shotgun in more or less the right direction.
Kincaid whirled the spear into a reverse grip, slammed it into the second Renfield's chest and the second incendiary round blasted out from the housing at the butt end of the spear, and drove the remaining life from the man. A burning corpse hit the floor a second later.
A gun roared from the smoke. Kincaid grunted and staggered. The spear fell from his hands, but he didn't fall. He drew a gun in either hand and backed unsteadily away, the semiautomatic barking out shots as swiftly as he could send them into the choking smoke down the hall.
More Renfields, roasted but functional, came through the smoke, shooting. Darkhounds bounded around them, the naked and bloody shells of dogs, but filled with horrible rage. Behind them I saw Mavra's slender, deadly form, lit for the first time. She was wearing the same clothing I'd seen her in the last time-a tattered number from the Renaissance, all of black. Hamlet would have been happy to wear it. I saw her filmy dead eyes focus on me, and she lifted an ax in one hand.
The first two darkhounds reached Kincaid, and he went down under them before I could even cry out. One of the Renfields brought a sledgehammer down on him, while the other simply emptied a handgun into the pile as two more darkhounds threw themselves into it.
"No!" I shouted.
Murphy hauled me into the closet and out of the line of fire, just as Mavra threw. Her ax came tumbling end over end down the hall, and struck the stone wall at the back of the closet with such force that the head buried itself to the eye in the rock and the wooden handle shattered into splinters. Two of the children, still chained underneath where the ax hit, let out wails of pain and terror as splinters tore at them.
"Oh, God," Murphy said. "Your hand, oh, God." But she never stopped moving. She shoved me by main force into the back corner of the closet, picked up her gun, leaned into the doorway, and sent eight or nine measured shots down the hall, her face set in grim concentration. Her pale legs were a startling contrast against the black of her Kevlar vest. "Harry?" she shouted. "There's smoke, I can't see anything, but they're at the foot of the stairs. What do we do?"
I stared at a black box up on the wall, near the ceiling. Presumably Kincaid's antipersonnel mine. He'd been right. It was set up to open and spew its deadly projectiles diagonally down, so that they would bounce and fill both closet and hall with death.
"Harry!" Murphy shouted.
I barely had breath enough to answer. "Can you hook up the mine again?"
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes wide. "You mean we can't get out?"
"Can you do it?" I barked.
She nodded, once.
"Wait for my signal, then arm it and get low."
She spun and leapt up onto a wooden chair near the mine, either something she had dragged there or something the bad guys had used too. She hooked up two alligator clips and held up a third, looking over her shoulder at me, her face pale. The children wept and screamed below her.