The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,158

and for one second he thought the darkness—the veil—the whatever-it-was that had always seemed to hang there invisibly—was illuminated with a horrible electric limmerance that speared out in all directions along those silver spider strands.

Von Rath shouted “No!” in a voice of rage and disbelief and inhuman despair.

And the very air seemed to explode.

Von Rath screamed.

It was like twenty men screaming, a hundred—dunked into acid, eaten by rats, rolled in fire that wouldn’t die. The chain of amulets around his neck burst simultaneously into—not flame, but something else, something worse, something Saltwood had never seen before—something that sheathed the Nazi wizard in searing brightness even as it sank into his flesh, eating into him as fire streamed back out of every orifice of his body, as if he had been ignited by that lightning from within. The screaming seemed to go on for minutes but couldn’t have lasted for more than twenty seconds or so, while Rhion stood braced, the glare of the lightning that never ceased to pour like water down into the head of the staff blazing off his glasses, and von Rath screaming, screaming like the damned in their long plunge to hell.

Then silence, and the dying crackle of flame. The Spiracle at the head of the staff was gone, the staff itself burned down to within inches of Rhion’s hands. The troops on both sides stood back in frozen horror, staring at the crumbling, burning thing in the SS uniform slowly folding itself down to the blackened ground.

A voice shrieked “Pauli, NO!” There was the flat crack of an automatic, and Rhion twisted, his body buckling over, and fell without a cry.

Baldur Twisselpeck, short and fat—And where the hell did he come from?—stood in front of von Rath’s Mercedes, clothed in a straining SS uniform to which he couldn’t possibly have had any right and clutching an automatic, tears pouring down his pimply cheeks.

Ashen-faced, the men started to move forward in the sinking illumination that came from the fires along the roadbed and the two burning trucks, toward Rhion’s body and what was left of Paul von Rath. None of them seemed to notice Baldur, who had fallen to his knees, sobbing hysterically, clutching his gun to him and groaning “Paul... Paul...”

“Let’s go,” Saltwood breathed, turning to Sara—and found her gone.

The first spattering burst of machine-gun fire from the abandoned Mercedes cut Baldur nearly in half. The second sustained volley took out both Gall and the gas tank of the truck in which he stood, and as men scattered in all directions the Mercedes jumped forward, bounding like a stallion over the chewed-up pavement to screech to a stop a few feet from the boulder where Saltwood and Rebbe Leibnitz still crouched.

Sara yelled “Get in, goddammit!” from behind the wheel.

Saltwood heaved Leibnitz into the backseat, which contained all the guns Sara could collect, grabbed a Schmeisser, and sent raking bursts in both directions at the men who were already starting to run towards them. Bullets panged noisily off the fenders and hood, and Saltwood felt one of them sting the back of his calf as he bent down to haul Rhion’s body out of the way of the wheels.

How much of that HAD been real? he wondered, looking down at the slack face, the broken glasses, the black bruise of the garrote across the throat. If they got out of this alive, there’d be time to mourn. But he was acutely aware that Rhion had done what he himself had refused, for expediency’s sake, to do: he’d come back for them, and to hell with what it cost.

Then he saw Rhion’s eyelids flinch. One of those chubby hands tried to close around his wrist, then loosened again, but by that time Saltwood was hauling him into the backseat of the Mercedes, heedless of the rifle bullets whining like angry flies around him. “Drive like hell!” he yelled as Sara hit the gas. “He’s still with us!”

“How bad?” she yelled back, as Storm Troopers scattered before the big car’s radiator like leaves in a gutter. The burning truck with Gall’s half-roasted body still hanging out of it flashed past; a last bullet sang off the fender and Sara swore. Then there was darkness, and the remote white light of the cold half-moon.

There was an entry wound between the two middle ribs; the exit wound, gaping and messy with splintered bone, was just under the shoulder blade, and hissed faintly with every gasping breath. Behind the rimless glasses