Scholar of Magic (Art of the Adept #3) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,72

court. In all likelihood the owner was currently at his other home. There would still be a small staff, though, or at the bare minimum a lone caretaker if the lord planned to be absent for an extended period of time.

Will stared upward, then leaned in to whisper in Tiny’s ear, “The last time I saw one, it came from the roof of this building. If they do show up tonight, they’ll most probably come jumping down from this place or one of the other nearby houses. I want you to put your back against the wall and do your best to pretend you don’t exist. The less you move, the harder it is to spot you.”

“I’m supposed to be the bait,” pointed out Tiny.

Will nodded. “Yeah, but if we make it obvious it won’t work. From what I’ve learned they have a keen sense of smell and they may have other senses we don’t know about. They may spot both of us, so I’ll stay close, just a little better hidden over here to your left.” Will moved over to the gate and stepped back into the alcove where entrance was slightly recessed. One thing he had learned from hiding and shifting his senses through different forms of light was that—physical cover trumped everything else. Even if the vampires could somehow see through their camouflage, it was highly unlikely that they could see through the bricks that hid him from view on three sides.

Tiny leaned back against the wall and did his best to relax, while Will tried to do the same. There were challenges that went along with keeping a nighttime vigil, chief among them being the cold. Although it was spring, the night air was still chilly, and since they weren’t moving, it gradually settled into their bones, bringing with it a dull ache.

Will adjusted his vision until the dim light was enough to reveal the street almost as though it was daytime. He already knew the vampires didn’t give off heart-light, so the only reason to keep that would be to watch Darla. He let it go. It wasn’t practical to keep his vision sensitive to too many different types of light, for it tended to muddle his vision and make it difficult to see clearly. In his present situation, the gas streetlights threw off a vicious glare if he tried to use heart-light, so it really wasn’t worth the annoyance.

He had two spells prepared, a force-lance and a wind-wall, and he kept a third spell, another force-lance, ready in his hand. He had adjusted the parameters of the wind-wall to cover a slightly different area than usual, and he also made the effort to keep his level of turyn uncomfortably high. Normally he didn’t do that, but if he decided to use the prepared wind-wall he wanted it to be fully charged.

Waiting was cold and boring. As the hours wore on, Will fought to stay alert. He had thought the cold would help, but as the monotony wore on, even the dull ache seemed to fade out and he caught himself nodding once or twice. Glancing over, he could see Tiny was also suffering, but the big man’s eyes were always open when he checked on him. What if nothing happens? Tiny might spend the worst two weeks of his life guesting at Will’s home.

Then again, the alternative might be worse.

Chapter 16

When it happened, it was much like he had anticipated, and yet it still caught them off-guard. Hours of cold and boredom had dulled Will’s reactions. He heard the creature move, for he had his hearing tuned to be as sensitive as possible, but having sharp ears was no cure for monotony. It might have even made it worse. Being able to hear every tiny scrape and bang, every leaf blowing across the road, had dulled his attention.

In comparison, the creature’s first movement was loud, yet still so ordinary that he filtered it out of his consciousness, along with all the other ordinary noises. It was ten seconds later, once the adrenaline had kicked in, when he was already fighting for his life, that he recognized the sound as the scrape of a foot when the thing had leapt from the rooftop above. It was an odd moment of retrospection, with no real use