behind it.
It was only a small respite.
The bleak said, in its voice of oil and despair,“You may think this is a victory because you saved a few humans, but I assure you it is not. We already have the broken crown, and our time is drawing near. Come! Come my children!”
It turned as if to lead the dours back through the portal.
Like water, the cornered superdours rose onto their not-quite-feet and slithered and oozed around the edges of the room. Henrik could feel the energy of the whole room change and cool, and he felt hot fury rise up in his chest in response.
He was not going to leave the bleak to escape unscathed with its evil army. Not while he had a drop of power in him. He reared up and spread his wings. He didn’t have Gwen’s words in his head any longer, but he could still feel the power that she had given him.
Before Trey or Rez could react, he was charging forward.
There wasn’t room for actual flight, but a powerful leap closed the space between them and Henrik was pouncing and weaving a spell and shrieking all at once.
The superdours shivered and the bleak looked up at Henrik’s attack in surprise and dismay before it shivered into smoke—just as Henrik’s counterspell closed the portal, slicing it—and the sword it was holding—in half.
The superdours howled and broke down, demoralized, as Trey hit half of them with his flame and Rez stampeded straight into the fray, blue light flickering from his striking hooves. Henrik, reaching into his remaining power reserves, spun another spell like a web of glowing strands that settled over the shades and trapped them together as he squeezed his will onto them.
They screamed and slithered, but his net was too tight to escape, and with his shieldmates at his side, their own magic concentrated on the captured creatures, they slowly dissolved each of them into a puff of smoke and a pile of ash.
Henrik did not note the silence in the room until Trey touched him with human hands, drawing him back from the constricted web of ash and memories.
“Are they gone for good?” Gwen asked behind him, “or did they just dissolve in that way they do?”
“They are gone,” Trey said confidently.
Henrik turned and shifted in one move to find that Gwen was leaning heavily between Daniella and Heather. There was blood on the side of her face.
“My key!” he said in agony. “Are you hurt?”
“No more than you’d expect from a baseball bat to the head,” Gwen said flippantly. “I was able to distract him with voices in his head questioning his manhood, so it wasn’t as solid a hit as it could have been.”
Henrik swept her up into his arms as gently as he could manage and clung to her desperately. “My key,” he murmured into her short hair.
“I wasn’t sure any of it would work,” she said dazedly. “But it was all I could do.”
“Should we take her to a doctor?” Daniella asked anxiously.
“Excuse me?”
Henrik had managed to forget about the warded humans. He hastily dropped the ward.
“Gas leak!” Heather said at once, as loud as she could. “There’s a gas leak! That’s why you’re all feeling so woozy and disoriented! You should get into the fresh air!”
Trey and Rez began herding the humans out into the winter night.
“What am I doing here?”
“Is it snowing?”
“Where are we?”
“What happened to the shop?”
“Oh geez,” Gwen groaned. “We’re going to have to explain this to Ansel again.”
30
Ansel took the news of another battle in his second hand shop with much more grace than Gwen would have managed. Most of the glassware that they had laboriously wrapped for storage had been broken in the battle, and many of the shelves had been smashed. “You can help me with the insurance paperwork,” he said with resignation. “And buy me a case of beer. And someone else can make dinner tonight. And also, we should open a bottle of wine.”
Fabio made slow nervous laps and Vesta leapt up into an unclaimed chair, shivering anxiously. Socks made one foray into the room, decided it was too crowded for her tastes, and left with her tail up.
The broken tip of the sword that had remained behind on their side of the portal had drained of its black color, but Henrik took no chances with it, laying a sparkling yellow light over it that faded away to nothing. He explained that it was a ward and also started to cast