Billy tried to salvage the situation by putting a hand over her mouth, but she bit him and he jerked it away, not that it mattered. Because the fey were already lunging for them, weapons out and glinting in the sunlight. Several spears slammed down, each of their points razor sharp and deadly enough to have ended things right there.
But they only hit dirt and rocks, although not because Billy and his screeching backpack had moved, but because the currents had shifted, taking them both back to spirit form. That may have saved their lives, but Jonathan could see them, thanks to Jo, just as well as I could. They wouldn’t stay hidden for long.
Fortunately, he was way more interested in watching the war than he was in helping the bewildered guards.
A fey approached him, but he waved him off. “Deal with it. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“But we can’t see them, hersir,” the fey said.
“You bloody well can half the time!” Jonathan said, his eyes still on the battle. “Are you that inept?”
“No, hersir.” The fey snapped his fingers, and the soldiers fanned out, some staying in place to guard the other prisoners, but most moving around so that there was basically no open space not within reach of a fey weapon.
Billy stared at me from across the courtyard, and I stared back. Get out of here, I mouthed. Go!
He couldn’t help me anymore, and would only get himself killed if he stayed. I’d have to think of something else. But Billy wasn’t leaving.
He was moving, however. He started dragging the librarian from place to place, trying to stay within the bands of Earth energy as much as possible while also zig zagging around, making it harder for the fey to predict where he’d show up next. The result from their perspective was a wildly flickering target, popping up here, there, and everywhere, with no clear path or destination.
Spears were thrown, swords slammed down, the ring of steel on rock was everywhere. One of the fey guards ended up taking a knife to the thigh when Billy flickered into existence, and then right back out again, and the knife passed through his now ghostly body and hit the fey behind him instead. Several more had near misses, causing the guards to stumble and curse, trying to get out of each other’s way.
It almost looked like Billy was trying to cause chaos, and maybe he was. I realized that I didn’t see the librarian anymore. But he didn’t need to buy her time to flee; he needed to go with her!
Because the guards were closing in.
He was ducking and dodging, but the swirls of power coming out of the portal were unpredictable, and the fey had figured out where he was. He took a glancing blow to one arm, sending a spirt of red arcing across the pale blue sky; he took another, bigger blow to the thigh, causing him to stumble. And that would have been it, if he hadn’t gone transparent again, right freaking then.
But that had been luck, and his was running out.
“They’re going to take him piece by piece,” Jonathan said, glancing at me and echoing my thoughts. “Does he know that, when they kill him, he won’t come back?”
He knew. When spirits take bodily form in Faerie, they could be killed, just like anybody else. And because the body in that case was their spirit, just in an altered state, they didn’t leave ghosts.
So what the hell was he doing?
“Billy!” I yelled, uncaring what the fucking guards did to me. “Run!”
And he did. But not the way I’d expected. I got half a second to see him pause and look my way, and there was something on his face, something that had me surging to my feet, my breath catching in my throat and my body starting to run even as the guards grabbed me, and dragged me back.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jonathan said, looking up at me as I kicked and fought. “What are you doing?”
I never had time to answer. I didn’t have time to do anything. Because Billy tore out of nothing, a hundred and seventy pounds of determined cowboy, who grabbed Jonathan on the way to his feet and—
“Knock ‘em dead, kid,” he told me.
And then they were gone.
Chapter Forty-Two
It took me a moment to realize what had happened. And when I did, it felt like the ground had fallen out from under my feet. As if someone had punched me in the gut, as if the world had suddenly grown hazy and indistinct and gray and lifeless and—
And then I was screaming, screaming my throat raw. And jerking away from my captors to run to the cliffside and throw myself down onto the ground, trying to see—something, anything. But the view from below was obscured by sheets of early morning mist, and it wouldn’t let me.
It was like Billy had just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
I vaguely heard sounds coming from behind me: cries and calls in another language; someone shrieked and abruptly stopped; and no one came to drag me back. Of course, they didn’t, I thought, the ocean crashing in my ears. Billy had just killed Jonathan, sacrificing his own life to do it. But that meant that Mircea . . .
Was now free.