the muzzle and jaws of a wolf, which looked damned peculiar without any fur covering it. Their eyes were black, empty holes—and I’m not being metaphorical when I say that. There were simply no eyes there. Just empty sockets. Machine-gun crews and riflemen—or maybe riflethings—alike poured fire into us, a panting, eager hunger to spill blood apparent on their monstrous faces.
I stopped at the other corner, holding the shield until all the spooks had made it across, then took cover myself, redirecting the shield, as I had the last time, to cover us all.
“Handsome fellows,” Sir Stuart’s shade noted cheerily. He looked less faded than he had only moments before. I had a feeling that Sir Stuart, in life, had been the sort of person who was invigorated by action—and that his shade was no different.
“We’ll send them a nice written compliment later,” I called back, and gestured up above us, at the second bunker. “Do it again.”
Stuart nodded and turned to the gangster once more. And again he made two excellent throws, pitching a pair of little bombs up the steep angle and into the bunker. Again, enemy ectoplasm sprayed, and again the tower above us went silent.
“Now the fun part,” I said. “We’re going up the slope. My shield won’t last very long—whoever is behind this is going to put everything he has into taking it down. So we close to grips with them as fast as we can.”
Sir Stuart nodded and gestured to the nearest of the mad ghosts. “Give them the order.”
I pursed my lips for a second and then nodded. “Hey, you guys,” I said, pointing at the twins.
Two little sets of dead, empty eyes turned toward me, along with dozens more, and I felt that same cold chill at the touch of their awareness.
“We’re about to go up that slope. The very instant my shield drops, I want you to close with the enemy as fast as you can and take them down. Don’t hold back. Give it to them hard. Don’t stop until they’re all down. Clear?”
More soul-empty stares. None of them moved. None of them responded.
“Sure,” I said. “You got it. If you didn’t, you’d say something, right?”
No response.
“God, it’s like Gallagher performing at the Harvard Faculty Club,” I muttered. “Here we go, folks. One! Two! Three!”
And I went around the corner again, shield held in front of me. It coalesced into a blazing blue-and-silver dome almost instantly, taking so much energy that the kinetic force began to transfer through, pushing against me like a gale-force wind. I staggered drunkenly, unable to see through the shield and anticipate my next steps up the steep slope. The footing was treacherous. Shale and sand and loose stone twisted and turned beneath me. Even with the occasional supporting shove from Sir Stuart, my forward momentum began to falter and I slipped to one knee, my bracelet getting hotter and hotter around my wrist.
I managed to lunge awkwardly forward a couple of times—and then something hit my shield like a runaway train, and silver-and-blue energy shattered into a coruscation of sound and light. I was abruptly able to see up the slope, where the enemy was momentarily reeling from the explosive feedback of the failed shield.
And the Lecter Specters went to work.
As I stared up the slope, the only thing I could think was that this must be what it looked like in the interior of a tornado. The mad ghosts of Chicago rushed forward with such speed and power that their forms blurred into elongated streaks that jostled to be the first to reach their victims, corkscrewing up the cutting. They ignored ridiculous constraints such as gravity and the solidity of matter, and as they rushed upon the enemy, they changed—and I gained fresh nightmare material.
I’m willing to share the least disturbing bits. The twins, for example, just leaned forward and seemed to slither sinuously through the air toward the foe. As they went, their bodies elongated, intertwined, and twisted into a single entity that looked like a demented artist’s rendition of a battle between a giant squid and some kind of unnamed, deep-sea horror fish with too many spines and too many fins and great, googly-moogly eyes. They reached the nearest bad guy, bobbed up, and then slammed down with so much grace that I almost missed the fact that they’d smashed the wolfwaffen so hard into the ground that he was no thicker than my old checkbook. Tentacles shot out and ripped a