aura around him, the pieces flinging themselves violently back into Ethniu’s face.
“Oh hell no!” Bob declared.
I had to reach across to fumble in my opposite pocket with my good hand and withdraw the crystal I’d brought from Demonreach for the purpose. It flickered, deep down, with the faint green light of the crystals in the catacombs under the island.
“Bob,” I said. “We’re going to a bind a Titan.”
“Fuck that!” the skull sputtered. “I’m going to Utah! Stuff like this never happens in Utah!”
“Buddy,” I said, turning the skull to look at me. “I need you.”
Bob the Skull’s eyelights dwindled down to little points and he said, in a tiny voice, “Dammit.” He shuddered in my hand and then the lights brightened again. “Think of all the girls we’ll get when we lock her up!”
Such a long night.
“That’s the spirit,” I sighed.
“Oh! I see what you did there.”
“Dammit, Bob, focus!” I snapped grumpily. “You’re the circle. And if we survive this, you get a twenty-four-hour pass. Shore leave.”
“Whoop!” Bob whooped, and campfire sparks soared out of the skull’s eye sockets and into a swiftly moving cloud in the hellish air.
Ethniu recoiled from the rebounding stone, snarling in frustration, and started clubbing Marcone with one arm, the motion primal, brutal. His shields were comprehensive, if not really first-class in strength—but he just kept spinning new ones off his fingers, defenses akimbo. Ethniu’s furious blows would shatter the shield they struck, but by then Marcone would have spun up another one.
She switched tactics, kicking a cloud of stones at him with her broken foot—which already looked steadier than it had been. Marcone had to drop a new shield low to intercept the stones, which scattered off in random directions as the spell fractured, breaking the rhythm. He had to dive to one side before Ethniu compressed his spine into his tailbone, and she surged after him, snarling.
I took the bloodied knife and swept it over the smoldering light of the crystal, and it flared to life as the blood of the Titan touched it. It might have been really bright. I could barely tell. The world was turning into weird shadows and odd streaks of color. My good hand was shaking hard.
I drove the crystal down into some rubble so that it stood up from the ground. Then I smeared more of the Titan’s blood onto the tip of the Spear.
My heart suddenly skittered along even faster. Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.
Marcone did something that made greasy black smoke condense into a thick, choking cloud and sent it zipping toward the Titan’s face, where it clung in a wobbly bubble of impenetrable fog. The Titan swiped at it uselessly.
“Namshiel,” she snarled. “You greasy little snake!”
Marcone spoke in a different voice even as he ducked behind a chunk of fallen concrete the size of a tractor trailer. It sounded like him, mostly, only with a very formal British accent. “You haven’t changed much, either, darling.”
In answer, Ethniu screamed and surged directly forward and through the concrete and the rebar inside it alike. It exploded and came sloughing over Marcone in an avalanche. Marcone played a desperate move and threw a telekinetic strike at his own feet. Magic is awesome, but physics are still physics. Throw a bunch of force at the ground, and the ground throws just as much force back at you.
Marcone exploded out from under the avalanche of shattering concrete, flew up at maybe a twenty-degree angle, and landed a good fifty feet out into Lake Michigan.
And the Titan’s furious gaze immediately whipped toward me.
“Filthy little thief of Power,” Ethniu snarled. Spittle and foam were falling from the skullified side of her face, along with a steady patter of some kind of yellowish slime as she came skittering toward me over the stones. “I will feed you to the Eye.”
“Bob!” I screamed, and seized the Spear, holding its point up above me.
The cloud of campfire sparks swirled in a helix up around the Spear, touched the blood at the tip like a hound picking up a scent. I whirled the Spear in a circle, gathering up the substance of the spirit around it along with my will, and murmured, “Ventris cyclis!”
Wind and spirit flew toward the Titan, too swiftly to be seen as more than a single blur of light that whipped thrice counterclockwise about the Titan and then settled into place, a whirling cyclone of motes of light, a solid bar of my will that encircled her.
Thrumthrumthrumthrumthrumthrum.
I sent my will into the Spear, my own