He jumped away and I could see that the knuckle guard had buckled around his hand. He pried at the metal to free himself as the silver burned his skin wherever it touched. As soon as he’d pulled the knuckle guard away from his sword hand, he dodged under a flashing leg and hit the creature in the same spot, this time with the point of the blade.
There was a great cracking sound, like glass shattering. For an instant I thought he’d broken the thing’s shell, but then I realized the sound had come from the wrong direction.
Beside the damaged piano, on top of the broken plate-glass window he’d evidently jumped through, the king of the goblins stood. Why he chose to jump through the window instead of kicking open the damaged door, I couldn’t say.
He wore no shoes but was apparently unconcerned by the glittering shards of glass under his feet. He wore only a black loincloth; his body, like Adam’s, was refined to only muscle and sinew, though on him it looked stringy, almost as if his muscles worked differently than ours. His extra-jointed four-fingered hands flexed on the pair of short swords he carried as he stepped off the broken window, shaking his shoulders to shed stray bits of glass. If I’d done something like that wearing nothing but a loincloth, I’d have been dripping blood. His skin was tougher than mine.
He spared a yellow-green glance for me, his lips quirking upward. I don’t know if I amused him somehow or if it was just the anticipation of violence. Larry the goblin king was fond of violence.
Adam had kept the fae creature too busy to pay much heed to the sound of the window bursting—and the goblin made no more noise than Adam had as Larry’s first cautious steps turned into a sprint. He leapt atop the spider much as I had, though more to one side, deliberately unbalancing it. The creature fell forward and had to use one of the legs it was attacking Adam with to catch itself.
The tip of the leg had dug into the wood, putting the leg under tension. When the goblin knocked it down, the leg twisted further. Adam’s cutlass, sweeping upward to hit in a previously damaged joint, snapped the leg in half.
The shorn bit of leg flew at me, and I dodged right into the open doorway of the basement stairwell as the sound of the creature crashing into various furnishings echoed throughout the house.
My paws skidded on the smooth wood of the step, and my speed pushed me right over the edge. But my four-footed form is more agile than my human one, and I caught myself on the third step before I rolled all the way down. I hoped Stefan wouldn’t get too upset by the deep scratch I’d put in the beautiful figured wood of the step.
The spider-thing’s leg had followed me through the doorway and rolled over the edge of the top step behind me. As I gained my footing, it rolled through the empty space between the steps of the open stairway and fell to crash on some hard surface below. I couldn’t see the floor, because the basement was dark.
I dug my claws into the wood of the step again, with the intention of flinging myself back up into the fray wherever I might do some good. Then I realized what I was smelling and stopped.
The elusive fae scent I’d been tracking wafted up from the depths of the basement in thick waves of chill that raised the hairs all over my body with the expectant buzz of power. It felt as if, by coming through the doorway, I’d stepped past some barrier that had been restraining both the scent of the fae and the feel of its magic.
And as I paused, I realized that I could not see my feet. As if the basement were a pool of darkness and I was standing knee-deep in it.
This was more Larry’s territory than mine, and I tried to be sensible about admitting when something was over my head. I’d have gone and fetched him except for two things. The first was that the battle royal was still going on upstairs. The second was the feel of the magic.
After spending that time hidden in the witch Elizaveta’s basement, I’d gotten a sense for spell-casting magic. There’s a warp and weft to it, just like a good winter sweater. The magic filling Stefan’s basement was in the process of being gathered, spun, and woven into something big.
Spell casting of this complexity was the sort of thing that did not allow the caster to pay much attention to anything until the spell was done. If the fae lost focus, the spell would fail, probably in a spectacular way. But if I had to pick between a spell deliberately launched at us by an enemy and a chaotic magic bomb of some unknown effect, I would take the unknown any day.
Maybe that was because I wasn’t a spell caster.
To stop the spell, though, someone was going to have to trot down the stairs, into the blackness. That someone was going to have to be me.