rage and it bounded into the shadows outside the light of the flare.
She let out a howl of frustration. The head of her ax was smeared with black fluid, and as it ran across the steel, flickers of silver fire appeared in the shape of more strange runes. “Wizard!” she bellowed. “Give me light!”
I was already on it, holding my amulet high and behind my head, ramming more will through the device. The dim wizard light flared into incandescence, throwing strong light at least a hundred feet down the long gallery—and drawing a shriek of pain and surprise from the grendelkin.
I saw it for maybe two seconds, while it crouched with one arm thrown up to shield its eyes. The grendelkin was flabby over a quarter ton of muscle, and the nails on its fingers and toes were black, long, and dangerous-looking. It was big, nine or ten feet, and covered in hair. It wasn’t fur, like a bear or a dog, but hair, human hair, with pale skin easily seen beneath, so that the impression it gave was one of an exceptionally hirsute man, rather than that of a beast.
And the beast was definitely male; terrifyingly so—I’d seen smaller fire extinguishers. And from the looks of things, Gard and I must have interrupted him in the middle of foreplay.
No wonder he was pissed.
Gard saw the grendelkin and charged forward. I saw my chance to pitch in. I lifted my staff and pointed it at the creature, gathered another surge of will, and snarled, “Fuego!”
My staff was an important tool, allowing me to focus and direct energy much more precisely and with more concentration than I could manage without it. It didn’t work as well as my more specialized blasting rod for directing fire, but for this purpose it would do just fine. A column of golden flame as wide as a whiskey barrel leapt across the cavern to the grendelkin, smashing into his head and upper body. It was too dispersed to kill the grendelkin outright, but hopefully it would blind and distract the beast enough to let Gard get in the killing blow.
The grendelkin lowered his arm, and I saw a quick flash of yellow eyes, a hideous face, and a mouthful of fangs. Those teeth spread into a smile, and I realized I might as well have hit him with the stream of water from a garden hose, for all the effect the fire had on him. He moved, an abrupt whipping of his massive shoulders, and flung a stone at me.
Take it from me, the grendelkin’s talents were wasted on the abduct-rape-devour industry.
He should have been playing professional ball.
By the time I realized the rock was on the way, it had already hit me. There was a popping sound from my left shoulder, and a wave of agony. Something flung me to the ground, driving the breath out of my lungs. My amulet fell from my suddenly unresponsive fingers, and the brilliant light died at once.
Dammit, I had assumed big and hostile meant dumb, and the grendelkin wasn’t. The beast had deliberately waited for Gard to charge forward out of the light of the dropped flare before he threw.
“Wizard!” Gard bellowed.
I couldn’t see anything. The brief moment of brilliant illumination had blinded my eyes to the dimmer light of the flare, and Gard couldn’t be in much better shape. I got to my feet, trying not to scream at the pain in my shoulder, and staggered back to look down at the room.
The grendelkin bellowed again, and Gard screamed—this time in pain. There was the sound of a heavy blow, and Gard, her hands empty, flew across the circle of green flare-light, a dim shadow. She struck the wall beneath me with an ugly, heavy sound.
It was all happening so fast. Hell’s bells, but I was playing out of my league, here.
I turned to Mouse and snarled an instruction. My dog stared at me for a second, ears flattened to his skull, and didn’t move.
“Go!” I screamed at him. “Go, go, go!”
Mouse spun and shot off back down the way we’d come.
Gard groaned on the floor beneath me, stirring weakly at the edge of the dim circle of light cast by the flare. I couldn’t tell how badly she was hurt—but I knew that if I didn’t move before the grendelkin finished her, she wasn’t going to get any better. I could hear Elizabeth sobbing in despair.