tortured, half drowned in the icy water of Lake Michigan—but he was alive.
I felt my hands clench as a hot and hungry anger suddenly burned through me. I hadn’t planned on trying to take the naagloshii alone. I’d wanted Lara and her people and every member of the Council present to be there, too. That had been part of the plan: establish a common interest by showing them that they had a common enemy. Then take the naagloshii on with overwhelming force and force it to flee, at the very least, so that we could recover Thomas. I just hadn’t counted on the traitor showing up in such numerical strength.
Taking the naagloshii on alone would be a fool’s mistake. Anger might make a man bolder than he would be otherwise. It was possible that I could use it to help fuel my magic, as well—but anger alone wouldn’t give a man skill or strength that he didn’t have already, and it wouldn’t grant a mortal wizard undeniable power.
All it could do was get me killed if I let it control me. I swallowed down my outrage and forced myself to watch the naagloshii with cold, dispassionate eyes. Once I had a better opportunity, once I had spotted something that might give me a real chance at victory, I would strike, I promised my rage. I’d hit it with the best sucker punch of my life, backed by the ambient energy of Demonreach.
I focused my whole concentration on the skinwalker, and waited.
The skinwalker, I realized a moment later, was enormously powerful. I’d known that already, of course, but I hadn’t been able to appreciate the threat it represented beyond the purely physical, even though I’d viewed it through my Sight.
(That memory welled up again, trying to club me unconscious as it had before. It was difficult, but I shoved it away and ignored it.)
Through Demonreach, I could appreciate its presence in a more tactile sense. The skinwalker was virtually its own ley line, its own well of power. It had so much metaphysical mass that the dark river of energy flowing up from beneath the tower was partially disrupted by its presence, in much the same way as the moon causes tidal shifts. The island reflected that disruption in many subtle ways. Animals fled from the naagloshii as they might from the scent of a forest fire. Insects fell silent. Even the trees themselves seemed to grow hushed and quiet, despite the cold wind that should have been causing their branches to creak, their leaves to whisper.
It paced up to the cottage, where Morgan and my apprentice were hiding, and something odd happened.
The stones of the cottage began to glimmer with streamers of fox fire. It wasn’t a lot of light, only enough to be noticeable in the darkness, but as the naagloshii took another step forward, the fox fire brightened and resolved itself into symbols, written on each stone in gentle fire. I had no idea what script it was written in. I had never seen the symbols before.
The naagloshii stopped in its tracks, and another flicker of moonlight showed me that it had bared its teeth. It took another step forward, and the symbols brightened even more. It let out a low, snarling noise, and tried to take another step.
Suddenly, its wiry fur was plastered tight to the front of its body, and it seemed unable to take another step forward. It stood there with one leg lifted and let out a spitting curse in a language I did not know. Then it retreated several steps, snarling, and turned to the tower. It approached the ruined tower a bit more warily than it had the cottage, and once again those flowing sigils appeared upon the stones, somehow seeming to repulse the naagloshii before it could get closer than eight or ten feet to it.
It let out a frustrated sound, muttered something to itself, and flicked out a hand, sending unseen streamers of power fluttering toward the tower. The symbols only seemed to glow brighter for a moment, as if absorbing the magic that the skinwalker had presumably meant to disrupt them.
It cursed again, and then lifted Thomas idly, as though it planned on smashing its way through the stones using Thomas’s skull. Then it glanced at my brother, cursed some more, and shook its head, muttering darkly to itself. It fell back from the tower, clearly frustrated, and just as clearly familiar with the symbols that allowed the stones