The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,140

lights were moving among the pines along the side of the road. Saltwood felt the hair lift on his neck.

They were not lanterns. They were moving too fast, for one thing; for another, some of them floated far too high for a man to be holding. By the eerie glow in the bracken, others were rolling along the ground, though the undergrowth, stiff and brittle with frost, did not rustle, only shone with that skeletal light. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, weaving in and out among the trees, but they were definitely following the course of the car.

Saltwood turned on the headlamps and pressed the accelerator, thankful that these Prussian roads ran straight and flat as a Kansas highway and to hell with the ruts and potholes and teeth-rattling jolts of the chewed and broken paving. Whatever was happening, he wanted no part of it.

In the rearview mirror he saw the lights swirl down the bank onto the road, then pour after the car like bubbles on a river. He pressed the pedal harder, and the lights followed in a bobbing swarm; Saltwood thought they were growing brighter. The car bucked and pitched over the broken road, and he veered, trying to avoid the worst of it. But his eyes kept returning to the mirrors as he sped faster and faster, fear growing within him at what he saw—or thought he saw—or almost saw—behind the lights. Something dark and large, something that ran silent, vibrationless, with a faint glint of metal. Something that moved with level and deadly speed.

He pushed the car for more jolting speed, Sara and her father clinging to the interior straps for all they were worth, knowing to the marrow of his bones that whatever was back there, its black shiny smoothness catching the blue gleams of the lights, he must not let it overtake them. Peripherally he was aware of other lights, a bluish glow powdering the frost-stiff bracken and thin blue discharges like tiny lightning sparking down the trunks of the pines. The granite faces of the old glacial boulders by the road glittered as if laced with diamonds. He barely saw them, his eyes glued now to the mirror.

Why did he have the impression that whatever moved behind those blue lights, metallic, shining, mechanical though it seemed, was alive? More speed, the Packard’s old motor clanking hideously...

“TOM!”

His eyes flashed back in time to take in a blurred impression of the road’s sudden curve, the black masses of boulders looming directly ahead. He hit clutch and brake, the heavy car fish-tailing wildly—they should have plowed straight into those boulders but somehow didn’t, and he felt the wheels leave the ground.

The car rolled at least once—Tom wasn’t sure—and struck something with a glancing blow before it came to a rocking halt on its side. Sara twisted on top of him, her flat-heeled shoes digging into his thigh as she wrenched her door open like a hatch. Tom remembered the three five-gallon cans of gas in the trunk and was halfway out of the door after Sara before it occurred to him to wonder if the pain in his legs was because one of them might have been broken. Together they dragged open the rear door, in crammed black panic during which his mind registered nothing but the seconds ticking by until the car would go up like a bomb, and dragged the stunned Leibnitz out of the tangled welter of guns, groceries, and papers in the back. Dragging the old man between them, they ran.

The Packard blew up in a fireball of red light, Tom and Sara falling flat with Leibnitz between them, while fragments of metal and stray bullets from all the spare clips exploded like shrapnel and hissed on the frosted ground. Frozen pine needles jabbed Saltwood’s stubbled cheeks like splintered glass as he buried his face in his arms. Maybe it’ll think we died in the crash.

It?

The blackness moving behind the blue lights, implacable and deadly and... real?

As real as the flying demon head that had ripped his arm?

He sat up slowly, his legs stabbing with pain. Now that the fluid in his veins was turning from adrenaline back to blood again, the pain was starting, in his legs, in his back, in his thigh where Sara had stepped on him getting out of the car, and in a dozen other places where he’d hit the framis in the crash or where flying clips of ammo