Wulfe was serving the Soul Taker, exactly as well as he had served Bonarata. And that was why I was still alive after roughly five minutes of fighting.
That was a bad idea, Bonarata, I thought. It’s going to bite you in the butt.
Teach him to play with the daughter of a chaos deity. Send the Soul Taker out to kill me and see what that gets you.
I turned aside the Soul Taker again—and Wulfe’s head jerked down and he bit me. Surprised, I rolled away and—
* * *
—
I walked beside someone in the formal gardens at the seethe with rosebushes taller than my head on either side. Some part of me was very concerned about this. It felt like a very dangerous thing to do. I shouldn’t be walking in a garden. I should be—
“Pay attention,” said Wulfe sharply.
I started to turn my head to look at him.
“Do not,” said Wulfe, and I froze before my eyes found him. “We don’t have much time.”
I knew that what I should be doing was fighting off the Harvester—who was Wulfe, or at least partly Wulfe. My body was defending itself on pure reflex while Wulfe pulled me into his dream.
“Do you remember Frost—” he said.
Frost? What did our situation have to do with Frost? Forgetting his injunction, I looked at Wulfe incredulously. But my perceptions were altered by my ties to the Soul Taker, which had tasted my blood and which operated in the world of souls.
I saw Wulfe.
* * *
—
The sickle hooked my katana and ripped it out of my hand at the same time that Wulfe . . . that the Harvester’s elbow cracked against my jaw, knocking me to the ground.
I rolled with the blow and came to my feet, meeting the backhand swing of the sickle with a blow of my own with the walking stick almost before I realized that the walking stick was in my hand. I didn’t try to hit the sickle with the walking stick; I took aim at Wulfe.
“Steel loves flesh,” Adam liked to say, though he said it as if he were quoting someone else. “Wood loves bone.”
I hit the back of Wulfe’s wrist with the wooden stick and heard the bone crack. The Harvester dropped the sickle—and there was a moment when I could have grabbed it before he did, but I would sooner have stuck my hand into a nuclear reactor than touch that blade.
I knew what Wulfe was. I had seen him, seen the power he still held, and twisted and broken as it was, his capacity to wield magic to protect his mind was infinitely larger than my own small measure of ability. The Soul Taker had control of Wulfe. If I touched that thing, I wouldn’t have a chance.
The Harvester picked up the sickle in his right hand, almost before it had touched the floor. He continued the fight as if I had not hurt him.
If the katana had thrown me off balance, the walking stick was . . . odd. Better, I decided, in some ways, even than my own cutlass, because it felt as if I’d always fought with the walking stick in my hand. But if I’d been careful to turn aside blows rather than risk a full-strength sickle-to-blade strike with the katana, I was even more careful with the walking stick.
I had the feeling that if that sickle dug its corrupted blade into the walking stick, something very, very bad was going to happen. But something bad was going to happen really soon anyway. We had been fighting for a relative age for this kind of aerobic full-on, full-contact fight. We were both bleeding.
If I didn’t change the nature of this fight pretty soon, my death was going to be the bad that was going to happen, even if Wulfe was managing to play a reluctant attacker. If I died, according to the Soul Taker’s own calculations, it would have repercussions I was not willing to be a part of.
But I had seen Wulfe.
I used the movement of my body to center myself and gathered my magic, the magic that allowed me to speak to the dead, a magic that I understood better after the Soul Taker had shown me its world of souls and ties between life and death. I tried to form it the way I had when I’d laid to rest an army of zombies. When I’d done that and accidentally included Wulfe in my workings, I’d knocked Wulfe for a loop. I was hoping it would work again.
All this time I’d wondered if I had simply knocked him out that night. Given him the vampiric equivalent of a concussion. There was no question it had affected him more than just physically. He’d behaved more like someone who’d had too much to drink. So it was possible he’d gotten the edge of what I’d thrown at the zombies and been sort of hotboxed.
But, however it had happened, I had just seen Wulfe. If I weren’t fighting for my life, I might have struggled to explain how I’d seen into him. But I’d just had the Soul Taker in my head, and I didn’t have time to lie to myself.