“Someone’s there for Rudolph,” I said, and launched myself forward. “Let’s go!”
25
I looked like a cool guy leading the charge for about a second and a half, and then my brother and my dog left me and Molly eating their dust. If I hadn’t been a regular runner, Molly would have done the same, albeit more gradually. By the time I had covered half the distance, Thomas and Mouse had already bounded around to the back, one around either side of Rudolph’s house.
“Get gone, grasshopper!” I called, and even as we ran forward Molly vanished behind her best veil. It took us another quarter of a minute to cover the distance, and I went around the side of the house Thomas had taken. I pounded around the back corner to see that a large glass sliding door leading from a wooden deck into the house had been shattered. I could hear a big, thumping beat, as if from a subwoofer, pounding away inside the house.
I took the stairs up to the deck in a single jumping stride, and barely avoided a sudden explosion of glass, wood, drywall, and siding that came hurling toward me. I had an instant to realize that the projectile that had just come through the wall was my brother, and then something huge and black and swift came crashing through the same wall, expanding the hole to five times its original size.
The whatever-it-was stood within a step or two, and I was already sprinting. I kept doing it. I slapped one hand down and vaulted the railing on the far side of the deck. I barely jerked my hand from the rail before the thing smashed it to kindling with one huge, blindingly fast talon. That deep beat grew louder and faster as I landed, and I realized with a shock that I could hear the thing’s rising heart rate as clearly as if it had been pounding on a drum.
I was kidding myself if I thought I could run from something that fast. I had a step or two on the creature, but it reclaimed them within half a dozen strides and swiped at my head with terrible speed and power.
I whirled desperately, drawing my blasting rod and letting out a burst of flame, but I stumbled and fell during the spin. The fire hammered into the creature, and for all the good it did me I might as well have hit it with a rubber chicken.
I thought I was done for—until Mouse emerged from the house onto the back deck, bathed in a faint nimbus of blue light. He took a single, bounding, thirty-yard leap that ended at the attacking creature’s enormous, malformed shoulders. Mouse’s claws dug into the thing’s hide, and his massive jaws closed on the back of its thick, almost indistinguishable neck.
The creature arched up in pain, but it never made a sound. It tripped over me, too distracted to actually attack, but the impact of so much mass and power sent up flares of agony from my ribs and from one thigh.
Mouse rode the creature down into the dirt, tearing and worrying it, his claws digging furrows in the flesh of its back. His snarls reverberated in the evening air, and each shake and twist of his body seemed to send up little puffs of glowing blue mist from his fur.
Mouse had the thing dead to rights, but nobody seemed to have told the creature that. It twisted lithely, bouncing up from the ground as if made of rubber, seized Mouse’s tail, and swung the huge dog in a single, complete arc. Mouse hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound sledgehammer, drawing a high-pitched sound of pain from him.
I didn’t think. I lifted my blasting rod again, filling it with my will and with all the soulfire I could shove in, screaming, “Get off my dog!”
White fire slammed out of the rod and drew a line on the creature from hip to skull, digging into flesh and setting it ablaze. Once again, it convulsed in silent agony, and the boom-box beat of its heart ratcheted up even higher. It fell, unable to hold on to Mouse, and writhed upon the ground.
I tried to get up, but my injured leg wouldn’t support me, and the sudden surge of weariness that overtook me made my arms collapse, too. I lay there, panting and helpless to move. Mouse staggered slowly to his feet, his head hanging, his tongue dangling loosely from