that feels strange—guess that means you’re seeing a pattern.”
“This is the fifth night running that they’ve come at us,” Sir Stuart replied, as we went out onto the porch. “Stay behind me, Dresden. And well clear of my ax arm.”
He came to a halt a step later, and I stood behind him a bit and on his left side. Sir Stuart, who had been a giant for his day, was only a couple of inches shorter than me. I had to strain to see over him.
The street was crowded with silent figures.
I just stared out at them for a moment, struggling to understand what I was looking at. Out on the road were scores, maybe even a couple of hundred wraiths like the one Sir Stuart had dispatched earlier. They were flabby, somehow hollow and squishy-looking, like balloons that hadn’t been filled with enough gas—sad, frightening humanoid figures, their eyes and mouths gaping too large, too dark, and too empty to seem real. But instead of advancing toward us, they simply stood there in even ranks, leaning forward slightly, their arms held vaguely upward as if yearning toward the house, though their hands seemed limp and devoid of strength, their fingers trailing into shapeless shreds. The horrible sound of hundreds of nearly silent moans of pain emanated from the block of wraiths, along with a slowly building edge of tension.
“Tell me, wizard,” Sir Stuart said. “What do you see?”
“A crap-ton of wraiths,” I breathed quietly. “Which I do not know how to fight.” None of them had the deadly, focused look of Sir Stuart and his crew, but there were a lot of them out there. “Something is getting them worked up.”
“Ah,” he said. He glanced back over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowed. “I thought your folk had clear sight.”
I frowned at him and then out at the small sea of wraiths. I stared and stared, bringing the focus of concentration I’d learned over endless hours of practice in my studies—and suddenly saw them. Dark, slithering shapes, moving up and down the ranks of wraiths at the backs of their lines. They looked vaguely like folk covered in dark, enveloping cloaks and robes, but they glided through the air with a silent, effortless grace that made me think of sharks who had scented blood in the water and were closing in to feed.
“Four . . . five, six of them,” I said. “In the back ranks.”
“Good,” said Sir Stuart, nodding his approval. “That’s the real foe, lad. These poor wraiths are just their dogs.”
It had been a long, long time since I’d felt quite this lost. “Uh. What are they?”
“Lemurs,” he said, with the Latin pronunciation: Lay-moors. “Shades who have set themselves against Providence and have given themselves over to malice and rage. They do not know pity, nor restraint, nor . . .”
“Fear?” I guessed. “They always never know fear.”
Sir Stuart glanced over his shoulder and bounced his long-handled ax against his palm, his mouth turned up into an edged, wolfish grin. “Nay, lad. Perhaps they were innocent of it once. But they proved quick learners when they raised their hands against this house.” He turned back to face the street and called out, “Positions!”
The spirits who had come along behind us flowed around and over us and—though I twitched when I saw it—beneath us. Within seconds, they were spread into a defensive line in the shape of a half dome between the house and the gathered wraiths and lemurs. Then those silent forms stood steady, whether their feet were planted on the ground or in thin air or somewhere just below the ground, and faced the small horde with their weapons in hand.
The tension continued to build, and the seething, agonized gasps of the wraiths grew louder.
“Um,” I said, as my heart started picking up the pace. “What do I do?”
“Nothing,” Sir Stuart replied, his attention now focused forward. “Just stay near me and out of my way.”
“But—”
“I can see you were a fighter, boy,” Stuart said, his voice harsh. “But now you’re a child. You’ve neither the knowledge nor the tools you need to survive.” He turned and gave me a ferocious glare, and an unseen force literally pushed my feet back across five or six inches of porch. Holy crap. Stuart might not be a wizard, but obviously I had a thing or two to learn about how a formidable will translated to power on the spooky side of the street.
“Stay close to me,”