Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,38
power the whole house. Once it reached the ceiling, it opened suddenly red eyes at them, bared its wide mouth tipped with sharp fangs, and hissed. “So, that’s how it’s gonna be,” they murmured. They took the toothpick out of their mouth; a flick of their wrist, and it was now a long staff.
The shadow hissed, but Loki was already moving. They changed the angle of their thrust and the rod’s size lengthened , quadrupling its range.
The pole slammed into the lurking shadow’s approximation of a face. It lost its grip, tumbled onto the floor, still twitching from the blow.
“West,” Loki said, but the boy was already on the move. He threw the fur over his head again, and a large mastiff now stood in his place, frothing at the mouth and baring its own set of painfully sharp teeth. The girls in the hallway were screaming and scrambling back, but West ignored them. In two bounds, he was on top of the shadow, snapping at its faceless face. The shadow shrilled as an incorporeal arm came flying off, only to dissolve as it hit the plush carpet.
West made for a particularly vicious dog. By the time he was done, there was nothing left of the shade, and the girls had fled.
West trotted back to Loki. He stood on his hind legs and peeled the fur off his head, revealing the boy underneath once more. “Zoe’s not going to be happy about this,” he said nervously.
A shiver rippled up Loki’s back, and they sensed the explosion before it actually happened. They only had time to grab West and yank them both out of the way before the incoming shock wave nearly swept them off their feet. The ground underneath shuddered apart, the front wall of the mansion coming down upon itself. Looking over the debris, Loki saw black smoke billowing out of a large hole that now took up most of the Doering’s lawn.
“The rabbit hole, I guess?” West offered weakly.
Loki swore.
A loud bellow came from somewhere inside the hole as if in response.
“That wasn’t a person,” West said, looking out at it through the window. From within that newly formed crater, something large moved.
“Better get used to the idea, West.” Loki raised their staff. “We’ve got trouble.”
* * *
Kensington’s six-foot-three-inch frame made hiding behind a pushcart several inches shorter fairly challenging, and a little embarrassing. Quite a few puzzled staff members had seen him trying to be unobtrusive while being anything but, before he’d finally learned to tuck himself completely out of sight.
People who knew Ken well would have asked what he was doing in a library to begin with. He didn’t mind books all that much, but he was a big fan of noise and the sound of his own voice, and liked to exercise that right as often as was humanly possible.
He watched carefully as the shade he’d been tracking drifted from bookcase to bookcase, invisible to every eye but his. But soon another shadow joined the first, followed by a third, and a fourth. He knew it was getting late and that the public library was practically devoid of people by now, though it was one of the few places still open in the area.
Ken scowled. He’d hoped to destroy the lone scout before it could alert any more of its fellows, but already something felt wrong. Shades hated daylight, but when it had first appeared at the school cafeteria, it was still a long way till nightfall. It had also been a pain in the ass to track, given how well they clung to natural shadows, and he knew Zoe was going to kick his ass for wasting so much time on this.
Shades, shadows. Loyal minions of the Snow Queen. Like their fellow nightwalkers (ogres, Deathless, chimeras), they obey her every command. They weren’t supposed to survive in Invierno. That the Snow Queen could overcome even that was a terrifying thought.
Without making a sound, he set his guitar case on the floor, pulling down the zipper to reveal two swords. The first was a katana, bathed in a dazzling white glow. The other was a shorter wakizashi blade that was a shiny obsidian black.
His hand hovered briefly over the black sword before, with a resigned sigh, he selected the other instead. Then he got into position, took a deep, quick breath, held it in for a second, then slowly exhaled, the muscles in his arm contracting as they always did before he struck.