he come up beside her without her noticing? She looked over at him and met his solemn gaze.
“Strictly speaking,” he said, in a conversational tone, “It was not the Thunderbird that killed her, it was the fall. And strictly speaking, it was not your magic that killed the Air Master, it was the bullet.”
“Oh,” she replied. And that was all she could manage, until he took her by the elbow.
“I think we should make sure of our friends,” he said.
Rosa’s fight with the berserker had gone as she had coolly planned; Giselle read the signs in the snow and the grass when they reached her. She had ambushed him in an area of forest floor scrubbed bare by the blizzard wind. She had goaded him into shape-shifting by taunting him and staying just out of his reach. Then, once he had shifted, she had unloaded both barrels of her coach gun into him—one barrel holding a silver slug, the other silver shot. It had been a short fight. They found her calmly waiting for them, sitting on a stump, with the lacerated remains of the man-bear lying in a splatter of bloody snow at the edge of the cleared spot.
Cody they found slumped over his knees, panting heavily, while the body of Johann’s father lay burning a few feet away. When he looked up at them, they could all see he’d taken a battering. One eye was swelling shut, his lip was split, and his nose was broken and bleeding.
“Mighty glad t’see y’all,” he said, thickly. “Reckon I need a little he’p getting back.”
“What happened?” Giselle gasped, and with Fox, ran to help him up.
“Short story. He figgered I was a-gonna challenge him to a magic-fight once he figgered out I wasn’t you . . .” Cody groaned as they lifted him to his feet. “Dammit, I think he cracked m’ribs. Anyways, instead, I jest waded straight on inter him. We pounded on each other fer a while, then we heerd that witch screamin’ an’ he reared back, an’ I reckoned I was about t’get blasted, so I did th’ on’y thing I could think of. I set m’hands on fire.” He shook his head. “What I didn’ know was that there coat’ve his was oilcloth over wool. Reckon he thought he was purdy smart, bein’ all waterproof in that storm. Turned out that weren’t such a good ideer. He went up like a bonfire. Damndest thing I ever did see.”
“You go ahead of me for a moment,” Rosa ordered, looking at the forest. “I will see to cleaning up the bodies. I would rather they didn’t remain here for more than another hour or so. Don’t worry, it won’t take me more than a few minutes to arrange. But those bodies are still reservoirs of dark magic, and we need to have them gone. Such things can spawn vengeful ghosts or turn innocent Elementals to the bad.”
Giselle started to ask how Rosa intended to do that . . . then saw the look on her face, and decided not to ask. At least, not then. Maybe not ever.
The three of them headed back to the abbey, with Cody leaning on Fox, and all of them stopping when he needed to catch his breath. Rosa caught up with them when they were almost there, and told them with a curt nod that whatever it was she was doing about the bodies had been taken care of.
Giselle noticed that the spot where the mound of snow had been building—which presumably would have become the Frost Giant—had collapsed in on itself, forming a sort of concave dish. And there goes my last worry.
They found Kellermann waiting anxiously for them at the first floor window he and the other two men had gone out of. With much groaning and cursing, they got Cody inside, and there they left him with Giselle while they got a bench to carry him on, and a couple of the cowboys to do the carrying. Or rather, Fox and Rosa went to get the help. Kellermann vanished to get rid of his rather embarrassing “disguise.”
Giselle fervently blessed Elfrida’s handiwork, as the two who arrived were entirely incurious about how Cody had managed to get damaged. He stammered something about one of the broncos acting up, and they just accepted it without asking why he was wearing a strange cloak and Giselle’s braids around his neck. The skirt was long gone, probably in the fight, but Giselle counted that