centers leaping from limb to limb as his body melted and blackened and fell writhing to the ground. When it stopped moving, all which remained were cinders.
“Anyone moves, I'll do the same to Dreamweaver,” the shooter said and adjusted her aim.
The remaining older man of my original guards had a quivering jaw and a pitiful, mourning blubbering noise was trying to emerge from his mouth as he struggled to obey the woman who had shot his friend, presumably by the sole virtue of having narrowly missed Thaimon. The younger, cockier guard hadn't fully understood what had just happened. He stood there, staring with an open mouth at the ashes.
I felt the hands gripping me change in their strength, as if even those who restrained me were not comfortable with what had just happened. Should this leader of theirs not be inspiring their confidence, I might have an opening through reason.
“Please, don't. I'll go with you, I'll do what you want, just don't shoot anyone else.”
The tip of the handgun twitched at me. “If she speaks again, I'll shoot the wraith.”
The hands tensed on my arms, sending a fissure of alarm through me. She was serious. I didn't dare to open my mouth again, but I did lift my eyes to Thaimon, trying to tell him quietly that I'd tried. Wraithbane had once asked me how I'd cope if I couldn't cast spells. He'd had faith that I'd manage. I'd had faith, too. But now … now I felt helpless and as if I had been stupid for ever pursuing a career in the Kettle.
“I am certain we can come to an arrangement,” Thaimon said.
The gun arced at Thaimon. “There is no arrangement to arrive at. You surrender.”
Thaimon held out his hands, palms outstretched. “As you wish.”
The woman locked eyes with the youngster. “Cuff him.”
Skittishly, as if Thaimon were a coiled rattler waiting to strike in the hot sun, the young guard advanced on the wraith. Thaimon made no movement. He stood there, relaxed as if they were talking about the weather, and watched as the man snapped the shackles on his wrists. Thaimon's shoulders sagged but otherwise he showed no sign of distress.
“It is time that justice was done,” the woman said. “Release her.”
A brief hesitation mirrored my own, neither me nor the guards holding me moved to obey. The corner of Thaimon's mouth twitched into a frown and his stance went rigid.
“Release her!”
They did so with a slight shove, so I had to stagger before catching my footing again. Instead of making an escape, I squared my shoulders and checked between my guards and the woman. Their faces were shielded behind helmets, rendering their faces unreadable, but one had an arm extended from his body as if to catch me. Of the woman, there was a smug curl of a smile and she held her gun casually at her hip. The threat to shoot Thaimon was probably still valid, so I didn't ask her what she was doing.
“Run,” she said.
Thaimon shook his head. Don't.
Not daring a verbal answer, I replied to her request by staying exactly in the same place I had been in when the guards pushed me. Mist from the lawn sprinkler drifted over my hair, coated my face, then hissed away. The smile left the woman's face.
“Run!”
Still I kept my knees locked, beginning to feel the tingling paralysis of panic spreading through my limbs. I feared I'd collapse or sway and she'd misinterpret the action. The woman marched over and seized me by the hair.
“It was going to end like this if you worked with me or not.”
Her gun went up, swinging for my face as my heel scraped down her shin. I'd stepped in close to her and with the same movement I grabbed her gun-wrist to bring it high into the air, positioning her elbow over my shoulder. She went on tip-toe but tried too late to curl her arm. Heaving down on her wrist, I bore my weight against her elbow and I felt the snap as tension gave way, her elbow utterly destroyed. The gun fired, striking right through the empty lightbox which had once housed the store's sign before it continued off into the distance where hopefully it wouldn't burn down a building. My hands slid up her wrist and with a clumsy jerk, I yanked out of her grasp and held her gun in a shockingly steady hand.
My first instinct was to draw it on her, but I checked myself when it was pointed at her knees. Beginning a war with the White Wizard Council was not what I wanted to do, even if this person was psychotic and corrupt. Her cohorts had to be the ones to turn her in, but it dawned on me that her companions must be corrupt, too, and that I'd ruined my chances with them by taking the stupid gun. Next, I realized that even with one of their men disintegrated into a smoldering heap of ashes and their leader a broken wreck, they outnumbered me four to one.
“We're going,” I said, sounding confident and in control. “If I catch one of you following me, I have her gun.”
The woman cackled, wincing over the pain of her arm. “You couldn't hit me with that thing.”
“I shot dimes tossed into the air for fun. You'd be far easier to hit, I figure,” I said, hoping to intimidate them into compliance. “Let's go, wraith.”
“You'll be running for the rest of your days. You'll never live through this. I'll see your name ruined and your reputation scandalized. I have witnesses, I have—”
“As do I,” I said and took a step back.
“No!” Thaimon said and lunged for his guard.
The woman had taken up too much of my attention. I hadn't noticed the cocky youngster until he had me in his sights and was pulling the trigger. When I did see what was happening, it was too late to do anything about it other than to freeze in awe and horror.
Thaimon was between bodies.
He was a dark, swirling mistlike shape which seemed nearly revenant, a flicker of movement out of the corner of your eye. He wasn't there at all, no more than a slowly unfurling fog which covers a landscape and conceals its contents behind a veil. As a kid, I used to be convinced that things in the fog were no longer in this realm, but had been transported to another world. No one could convince me otherwise, and right now, that's how I felt when Thaimon's old, crippled body collapsed and the black mist swarmed the young man. Though it took a split-second to accomplish, I felt that it had taken an eternity for the mist to soak through the guard's skin and for his eyes to open and reveal the red radiance of a wraith in a rage.
No one else realized what had happened. They heard Thaimon's yell, saw the old man fall, and returned their attention to me. Something in my face must have showed that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong, because they one by one looked back at Thaimon's old body again where it lay unmoving.
Thaimon said in his new voice, a voice strangely accented and lower than the one the youth had used, “Cold forged iron does nothing against a wraith.”
What followed after was unmitigated, incontestable slaughter.
No, slaughter was too tame a word. Slaughter was what you did to farm animals when they were blissfully unaware of what was to come. Slaughter was quick, clean, and efficient. It was something the butcher felt a bit sad about afterwards. What the wraith did to those people was none of that. Absolutely none of that at all.
I watched in wide-eyed horror as Thaimon, his new body glowing livid red with his presence, cast the gun to the ground and made for the next man. Never before had I thought I would ever see him kill, not when it cost him so dearly.
And he was doing it out in the open, right there in the parking lot where anyone might be watching. The mist trailing after his movement lingered in the air about his first victim, staining the man's torn throat and neck a murky black below his stunned eyes.
Thaimon targeted his next guard. A single blow to the face exposed clean white bone and the pulpy mess of brain matter gleaming in the eerie yellow light from a weak lamppost. The final guard raised his gun and started firing. Instinct would not deny the man a last-second attempt to save himself from the end which had met his comrades. He fired and he fired at Thaimon, but the wraith remained undamaged and unmoved, his supernatural powers being in their full strength after a body jump and fresh from
murder in the darkest hours of the night.
Blood pooled on the pavement as bullets slid though his shadowy form. He simply grinned a lopsided, inhuman grin and displayed the fact that those incendiary bullets did nothing to a wraith. His long claws ripped through the air and sliced the man's still-shooting arm down to the bone and sinew. A fresh atrial spray touched my cheek and made me flinch.
I couldn't stop watching, even as he rounded on the disarmed woman last of all. Without adequate lighting, all the blood and gore was rendered into grayscale, but the copper tang of it duelled with the cleansing scent of water. Against the dark backdrop and under the stars, the mesh of magic shone as it had never shone for me before. Splatters and calligraphic swirls, floral curls and grunge, starbursts and flaring flickers, all of it in the gradients of the rainbow. This was what it was to see spell-casters die, and I was revolted and entranced.
Then, the woman's body fell with her back contorted as if it had been shot through by a crack marksman.
Thaimon was before me, his skin red, his shoulders steaming black smoke as he ran his tongue slowly over his parted lips and started at me.
I am never going to be able to see magic the same way again, I thought. As he stretched a clawed hand out to my cheek, I thought, This is it. But I wouldn't go down with a simpering, cowering pose. My back stayed straight and I gazed into those soulless eyes as the point of his