Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(34)
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.
Ears pricked, I started down the stairs at a rapid pace. I didn’t need eyesight much because stairways are regular in shape. I could have made less noise, but the feel of my nails digging in was reassuring. And I did not think that silence would save me.
Stefan’s basement staircase was an elegant affair, open underneath the railing and underneath the stairs. In horror movies, this kind of staircase always meant that someone could reach underneath a step and grab unwary feet. I was not sure there were more wary paws in the universe just now than mine.
As I descended into darkness, I concentrated on what my ears told me. But the battle above was loud, full of crashes, breaking glass, and an odd crunch or two. I thought I heard Adam grunt in pain. Below me was silence. If someone was breathing down there, they were doing it quietly.
About eight steps down, one of my raw feet—the punctures made by the hairs on Shelob’s back meant that it hurt to walk—came down upon a thin film of ice. I inhaled and the air felt as if it were fresh off a glacier. It could have been a side effect of whatever spell was being formed. Or it could be the start of a directed attack. If I was wrong about what the spell caster could do while wrangling all the magic, then I was in trouble. I’d spotlighted myself at the top of the stairs, and those same stairs made it clear what my path had to be.
Deciding I’d had enough of being a target, I jumped over the railing, dropped about a foot, and landed on something that felt like it might be a bookcase. My landing was awkward because I’d expected it to be a lot longer drop, and because there were ornaments and pots and other things under my feet. I knocked a fair bit of stuff onto the floor, which sounded as though it might be about a six-foot drop.