cover that was not there. Several more were hit, gaining savage, bloodless wounds. We lost another spirit, one of the Lecters.
“Behind me!” I shouted again, and channeled my will through the shield bracelet, spreading it out into a quarter dome of faint blue energy that came to life ahead of me. It attracted fire at once—and shed it, sending spalling projectiles hissing through the air as they rebounded.
I started forward, toward the beach, with Sir Stuart’s shade behind me and slightly to one side the whole way, steadying me as the surf kept trying to knock me down. The spook squad began to close in on me, taking shelter behind the shield, and we pressed forward to the beach as fast as I could walk while still holding the shield.
It turned into hard work within a few seconds. Even in magic, there are some laws you don’t get away from—like the conservation of energy. Those pseudobullets were hitting my shield with a certain amount of force. I had to expend a similar amount of energy to stop them. I was cheating by making my shield as rounded as possible, deflecting rather than directly opposing, but even so, it was taking one hell of a lot of my effort and will to keep the fire off us.
My shield wasn’t a solution, really. I was working too hard to manage a simultaneous counterstrike. Sometime soon, within the hour, I wouldn’t be able to keep holding it, and when it went, we were all going to be dead. Deader. I had to figure out a way to silence those guns.
“Sir Stuart!” I shouted. “Do any of the gang carry grenades?”
Sir Stuart’s hand and arm came into view from behind me. He was holding, I kid you not, a little black iron bomb about the size of a baseball. There was a hole in it that had been plugged with a cork, and a fuse stuck out of it. The thing was straight out of a cartoon, except for its size.
I looked back over my shoulder, and saw that several of the doughboys had produced more modern-looking pineapple grenades of their own. A couple of shades dressed in uniforms of the Vietnam era had them, too.
“Neat,” I said. “Okay, here’s the plan. We head for the base of that bunker right there, and your boys blow it up. Then we get the one next to it. Then we blow the nests on that slope between the two bunkers and get the hell off this beach.”
Sir Stuart eyed the ground ahead of me while fire rattled against my shield. He studied it intently for a moment, then nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the rest of the squad, his face devoid of expression. All of them simultaneously nodded back at him.
“That was not even a little creepy,” I muttered. “Okay, stay behind the shield!” And I started pushing forward again, striding across the pebble beach toward the cliff.
That was when the shells came in.
There was a high-pitched whistle from overhead and then a flash of motion. I had an instant’s impression of a skull plummeting at a steep angle and blazing with the same angry scarlet energy as the incoming rounds. It hammered into the beach about thirty yards ahead of us. It didn’t make any noise when it exploded. Instead, there was a sudden and absolute silence, as if the skull was drawing in absolutely every motion around it, including that of sound moving through the air—and then there was a flash of light, and an instant later, a roar of wind and fire. My ears screamed with the pain of the shift in air pressure. Pebbles slammed into my shield, sending it to blazing blue brightness as the incoming energy began to overload what the shield could handle, the excess energy being shed as light. When the dust cleared, there was a crater in the ground, as deep as my grave and twenty feet across.
More screaming whistles came from overhead, and I felt a surge of raw panic trying to push the thoughts out of my brain. Hell’s bells. If one of those skulls hit closer to us or behind us, where my shield couldn’t cover, we were dead. Another near-miss might blow my shield down entirely, and then the machine guns would have us. There was only one place to go that might be safe from the screaming skulls.
“We’ve got to get closer,” I growled. “Come on!”
And I broke into a