The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,141

or miscellaneous junk had hit him...

Sara, too, was sitting up, shuddering with cold and shock, pine needles sticking in her hair.

The blue lights were gone. Beyond the glare of the burning car, which lay on its side with its front end twisted where it had struck a tree, the road ran straight as an arrow out of sight in both directions under pine-shrouded blackness. Tom could see the black tire lines where he’d hit the brakes and the swerve and jag marking the skid where he’d tried to turn to avoid rocks that weren’t there.

Around them in the dark, boots crunched shrilly on the frost.

Tom scrambled to his knees, gun in hand, as metal glinted in the dark of the trees all around. Dozens of them, Jesus...

The flames on the car leaped suddenly higher, outlining a single shape before him, thick ivory hair and the face of a scarred angel.

With a dozen guns leveled on him, Saltwood pulled the trigger. The gun clicked harmlessly.

Automatics did jam, of course.

“Throw it down.” Von Rath’s voice was still that same soft level, as calm as if he had known all along that it would misfire. They might have been back at the house in the Jungfern Heide—Jesus, had it just been that morning?—getting ready for another “psychological test.” Yet there was a difference. The cold angel face almost glowed, coruscating with a kaleidoscope of emotion—fever, hate, and triumph like the crack of lightning that could burst planets asunder; in the red reflection of the flames, the amulets of bone and jewel seemed to bleed glowing blood.

More Storm Troopers materialized from the woods, fire glinting on the muzzles of their guns. To fight would be hopeless, suicidal... Tom wondered how they’d known where the car would go off the road.

“Throw it down,” von Rath repeated. “I’m going to give you a demonstration and you might not wish to lose your hand just yet.”

“Throw it down already!” Leibnitz breathed, using his daughter’s shoulder to haul himself painfully to his feet.

Though it went violently against the grain to do so, Saltwood obeyed, tossing the weapon onto the frozen pine straw between them and standing up carefully, keeping his hands raised and in view. Von Rath looked down at the gun for a moment and moved his fingers.

With a rending bark, the clip blew up.

Von Rath smiled, and one fine, slender hand came up to stroke the talisman’s that rattled and whispered around his neck. “So,” he said softly. “I was correct in my guess. Rhion Sligo has come east, bringing the Spiracle with him. The invasion will not have to be postponed after all. I should hate to disappoint Reichsmarshall Goering, after all of this.” The cold gray eyes, no more human now than a snake’s, passed over Tom and touched Sara briefly, then came to rest upon her father.

“Very good,” he murmured. Two men came up behind him, the bearded wizard Gall and a tall fair Storm Trooper of unbelievable beauty whom Saltwood had the dim impression he’d seen before, but knew he never had. “Just in time for the sacrifice of power, to raise the forces of the equinox to help the invasion of England. There will be, of course, another sacrifice later...” His lips stretched a little, as if part of him still remembered about smiling without remembering why, and he spoke to the beautiful youth who came crowding close to his side. “And that, my Baldur, though a little late for the equinox, will, I’m sure, give us no less of a yield of talismanic power—and no less gratification in the making of it. Take them away.”

Twenty-five

“YOU BROUGHT THE RESONATOR here, didn’t you?” Rebbe Leibnitz spoke so calmly, so conversationally, that for a moment Saltwood thought von Rath was going to be surprised into answering him man to man. The SS wizard paused on the threshold of the great, grim old stone lodge on its flattened hill, startled, and looked back at the elderly Jew in the glow of the hall lights as they passed inside; he even opened his mouth to reply. Then he seemed to settle back a little—Tom had seen the same effect when an Alabama bigot was addressed from behind by an educated black man—and cold superiority returned to his eyes. He had, after all, been addressed not by a real man, but by only a whatever “only” was in these parts.

His smile was that same flat stretching of the lips. “He was a fool to have left