Death's Mistress

Page 10

I grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and stumbled back into the hall, heading up. I needed to find Claire and the kids, but I also needed weapons. I couldn’t fight the weather, so we were going to have to run for it. And I didn’t doubt what we’d find waiting outside.
There was only one group I knew of who could control the weather like this, who could bend it to their will and use it as a weapon. I should have known when I glimpsed the face outside, but it hadn’t been human, hadn’t even been flesh—just a collection of leaves shaped in a strangely recognizable way by the wind. Or, I realized now, by fey magic.
The flashlight was all but useless. I could barely see through the white curtain that fell like rain all around, hissing through the air with deadly intent. And even if I had been able to see, the stairs were almost impassable.
Pipes had burst in the wall, unable to handle the abrupt change in temperature, and sprayed cobwebs of water across the stairs. They had flash frozen, creating an obstacle course of deadly sharp spikes and fans of ice. I stared at them, half disbelieving. It was as if the effects of a five-day-long blizzard had been distilled into a few minutes. I had no idea how to fight something like this. I’d never even heard of something like this. But one thing was certain.
We were all going to freeze to death if we didn’t get out.
I made it through the maze courtesy of the hailstorm, which shattered several of the bigger clumps of ice right in front of me. I pulled more shards out of my legs, cursing the damn skirt, and hauled myself through the gap. And into what felt like a war zone.
The three stories of the house were fast becoming one as hailstones punched hole after hole in the floors and ceilings. I dodged down the second-floor hallway, throwing open the doors that hadn’t already burst off their hinges because of the wind. It snatched up papers and clothes and threw them about, and set the overhead light fixtures swaying. All the movement made it hard to tell, but I didn’t think Claire was in any of the rooms.
There was no one on the second floor, so I headed for the third, but the stairs were almost gone. I grabbed an old clothespress that had fallen on its side and dragged it over. Tilting it against the wall, I climbed up the inner shelves like a ladder. It was getting hard to breathe, and my numb fingers and feet felt like they were encased in mittens. But I made it, hauling myself over the side of the stairwell and into a frozen wasteland.
The third floor of the house was in pieces. At least I don’t have to worry about the roof anymore, I thought dully, staring up at several holes the size of cars showing black sky and swirling snow. Everything was ice—from the floor to what was left of the ceiling to the walls. Icicles dripped from the old light fixture overhead like crystals, beards of ice hung off the stair banister, and frost as deep as my hand coated everything. It was one unbroken white expanse that glittered in the beam of the flashlight.
The storm cut out as I stood there, abrupt enough to leave my ears ringing. One last gust tore through the house with a rattling sigh, and then nothing. No more hailstones, no more crashing china or tinkling glass, no more wind. Everything was totally, eerily silent.
For some reason, that did not make me feel better.
“Claire?” My voice was barely a croak, and there was no response.
The brittle ice crunched underfoot as I pushed on, needing to be sure. I headed for the bathroom because it was nearest. The tub was full, as if someone had been about to take a bath. A toy airplane was trapped half in, half out of the ice that had formed over the surface. I pushed on into my room, but it was the same story: bed and dresser frozen lumps, buried under knee-deep snow.
Something hit me and I looked up, my breath ghosting in the air, and saw dark sky. There was a huge hole in the ceiling, spanning maybe a fourth of the room. That explained the mass of white. But it wasn’t snow that was running down my neck.
The unnatural snowstorm was over, but the rain must have been the real deal, because it had resumed as if nothing had ever happened. The white blanket coating my room was already starting to turn into slush. Raindrops pitted the piled drifts and pattered against my cold, stiff hair as I forged my way across to the closet.
I shoved my feet into a pair of boots, the closet door having kept most of the snow out, and grabbed as many weapons as I could strap on. The problem was that most of mine were designed to fight the residents of this world in their various forms; the fey were still largely an unknown quantity. But I had what I had.
Getting downstairs was a lot easier than going up, with multiple holes to choose from. I dropped through one to the second floor, hitting the slick surface with soles that could grip it for a change. I’d barely gotten back to my feet when there was movement to one side—a brief pale flicker—and I whirled, gun up. It was Gessa.
She put a finger to her lips and beckoned. I moved forward as quietly as possible to join her. She was standing over a large area of missing flooring, looking down. We were partway down the hall, facing the main entrance to the house from the front. It was almost never used; the door stuck and the house kept a mountain of furniture in the vestibule, which it seemed to like just where it was. We’d all given up the fight long ago and used either the kitchen or back entrance.
But someone was headed in the front door.
Or make that something.
Chapter Six
The large windows in front of the house showed a yard blurred and streaked by sheeting rain. But I’d been wrong about it being natural. I watched with perfect shock emptying my mind as the droplets just outside the overhang of the roof began to bend, to congeal, to protrude to form the image of a man’s head.
The outline was sharp, etched precisely against the dark street. It was crystalline clear except for the drops leeching off the roof, which were stained with tar. They eased down the phantom face, giving it the appearance of the weathering on an old statue. They didn’t do anything to make it less impressive.
Or less terrifying.
Water dripping down the face and neck thickened, slowly forming a set of powerful shoulders, muscled arms and a strong torso. The figure itself was quicksilvered with moonlight, but I could still see the yard beyond it—the pale outline of the driveway, the dark brushstrokes of the trees, the glimmer of falling rain. Behind it, the thunderheads were mounting, higher and darker, the lightning that played inside them making them more beautiful and more ominous.
I cursed softly. I hate unfamiliar magic. The known kind is bad enough, with mages inventing new ways to kill me all the time. But at least I have a halfway-decent chance of using my own store of magical mayhem to counter it. Any I’ve never seen before always makes my head hurt.
“What the hell is that?” I whispered.
“Manlíkan.” Gessa clutched a small battle-ax, like a child’s toy, in both hands. “Light Fey make.”
“But what is it?”
Her small face scrunched up as she fought to find the words. She was a relatively new arrival, and her English was a work in progress. But since my troll vocabulary stood at roughly twelve words, half of them curses, it was going to have to do.
“Svarestri control elements. Use power.” She stuck the ax under her arm and made a weird sort of motion with her hands. “Make warrior.”
“Make warrior out of what?”
“Power. Elements.” She did the same sort of wrapping motion, and I swallowed, hoping I was misunderstanding her. But I didn’t think so.
The cascade had dripped lower, solidifying into a firm backside, muscular legs and feet that left watery prints on the hall floor as it came inside. The figure had glided through the wards as if they didn’t exist. They were obviously reading it as water, and therefore considered it harmless.
“They wrap their power around an element and form a doppelgänger out of it?” I whispered.
Gessa just looked at me.
“A double? They make a double?”
She nodded. “Make warrior.”
Wonderful.
Cold, halogen white headlights crept across the floor from some neighbor arriving home later than usual. The pattern of leaded glass in the front door stretched to engulf the creature, highlighting the almost transparent body. It was amazingly detailed, the lights picking out the muscles in the thing’s chest, the crease at his elbow, the dip of his naval—and the pale face, utterly cold and ominously silent as it gazed around.
The light on the floor narrowed to a wedge and slid up the wall as the car passed down the street, leaving the hall in shadows and me with a problem. I’d never seen anything remotely like that thing. Worse, I didn’t know how to kill it.
I decided some experimentation was in order, pulled a gun and pumped half a dozen rounds into the thing. The sound was deafening in the silent house, and the smell acrid. But that was the only way I knew I’d fired. The bullets tore through the insubstantial body like rocks through a pond, exiting the other side to embed themselves in the wall of the foyer. The creature looked up, those eerie colorless eyes tracking across the ceiling until they met mine.
So much for that idea.
“How do we kill it?” I whispered, staring into nothingness that somehow stared back, a gleam of something feral below the ice.
Gessa shrugged. “Not alive.”
I’d already figured that out. It didn’t smell like a person or even an animal; more like wet stone—faintly organic with the acidity of waterlogged leaves. But the hand that had turned the doorknob had been lively enough. “How do we stop it, then?”
“Cold iron,” she said, holding up her tiny weapon.
Okay, snap out of it, Dory, I thought harshly. I should have thought of that. The fey had a serious aversion to iron in all forms. Unfortunately, my knives were blackened steel and my bullets were lead and silver. And I’d just seen how much good they did.
I glanced around, hoping for inspiration. The edge of the fireplace in Claire’s old room was just visible through the open door. And sure enough, there was a cast-iron poker half buried under melting snow. I grabbed it and came back out, in time to see things go from bad to catastrophic.
Claire had come out of the door leading to the living room. She’d lost her glasses somewhere, and in the low light, she didn’t see the transparent form of the Manlíkan standing beside the wall. The faded stripes of the wallpaper were only slightly distorted by its watery body as it slowly raised a hand.