of my shoes.
Vampires boiled out of the central stairwell, a sudden tide of flabby, rubbery black bodies and all-black eyes, of spotted pink tongues and gleaming fangs. At their center, in their flesh-masked forms, were Esteban and Esmerelda. And looming behind them was the Ick.
Susan and I turned and sprinted. The three illusions did the same thing, complete with the sounds of running footfalls and heavy breathing. With a group howl the vampires came after us.
I ran as hard as I could, drawing up more of my will. I should have been feeling some of the strain by now, but I wasn’t. Go, go, Gadget Faustian bargain.
I gathered my will, shouted, “Aparturum!” and slashed at the air down the hallway with my right hand.
I’d used a lot of energy to open the Way, and it tore wide, a diagonal rip in the fabric of space, crooked and off center to the hallway. It hung there like some kind of oddly geometric cloud of mist, and I pointed at it, shouting wordlessly to Susan. She shouted something back, nodding, while behind us the vampires gained ground with every second.
We both screamed in a frenzy of wild fear and rampant adrenaline, and hit the Way moving at a dead run.
We plunged through—into empty air.
I let out a shriek as I fell, and figured I’d finally taken my last desperate gamble—but after less than a second, my flailing limbs hit solid stone and I dropped into a roll. I came back up to my feet and kept running through what appeared to be a spacious cavern of some kind, and Susan ran beside me.
We didn’t run far. A wall loomed up out of the blackness and we barely stopped in time to keep from braining ourselves against it.
“Jesus,” Susan said, panting. “Have you been working out?”
I turned, blasting rod in hand and ready, to wait for the first of the pursuing vampires to appear. There were shrieks and wails and the sound of scrabbling claws—but none of them emerged from the shadows.
Which . . . just couldn’t have been good.
Susan and I stood there, a solid wall to our backs, unsure of what to do next. And then a soft green light began to rise.
It intensified slowly, coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and within a few seconds I realized that we weren’t in a cave. We were in a hall. A medieval dining hall, to be precise. I was staring at a double row of trestle tables that stretched down the length of the hall, easily better than a hundred yards, leaving an open aisle between them. Seated at the tables were . . . things.
There was a curious similarity among them, though no two of the creatures were the same. They were vaguely humanoid. They wore cloth and leather and armor, all of it inscribed with odd geometric shapes in colors that could only with difficulty be differentiated from black. Some of them were tall and emaciated, some squat and muscular, some medium-sized, and every combination in between. Some of the creatures had huge ears, or no ears, or odd, saggy chins. None of them carried the beauty of symmetry. Their similarity was in mismatchedness, each individual’s body at aesthetic war with itself.
One thing was the same: They all had gleaming red eyes, and if ever a gang looked evil, these beings did.
They had one other thing in common. They were all armed with knives, swords, axes, and other, crueler implements of battle.
Susan and I had come in sprinting down the center aisle between the tables. We must have startled our hosts, who reacted only in time to catch the second batch of intruders to come through—and catch them they had. Some of the largest of the beings, easily weighing half a ton themselves, had piled onto the Ick and held it pinned to the earth. Nearby, the mob of vampires were lumped more or less together, each one entangled in nets made out of some material that I can only describe as flexible barbed wire.
Only Esteban and Esmerelda stood on their feet, back- to-back, between the Ick and the netted minions. There was blood on the floor near them, and two of the native creatures were lying still upon the stone floor.
“Jesus,” Susan whispered. “What are those things?”
“I . . .” I swallowed. “I think they’re goblins.”
“You think?”
“I’ve never seen one before,” I replied. “But . . . they match the descriptions I’ve heard.”
“Shouldn’t we be able