I nodded to him and went out into the rain to test my will against the legendary lord of the Wild Hunt.

Chapter Thirty-three

The rain had plastered my hair to my head by the time I got all the material for the summoning out of the Beetle's trunk. I stuffed it all into a gym bag and then walked out to the middle of the backyard. It wasn't quite too dark to see—not yet. But I didn't want to make any mistakes, so I used the last of the chemical light sticks Kincaid had given me before our raid on Mavra's scourge the year before. I snapped it and shook it up, and green-yellow light spread out in a little pool around me. The rain limited how much it could spread, and it created the illusion that the entire world had shrunk to a ten-foot circle rain and grass and green-golden light.

I started with the circle where I intended to trap the Erlking. The coil of barbed wire still gleamed with its factory finish. I uncoiled enough of it to give me several small holes in my fingers and to join into a circle about seven feet across. Though it wasn't cold iron in the technical sense, it was very much what the faeries meant when they said "cold iron"—the wire had plenty of iron in it, and cold iron was the bane of the faerie world.

I laid the barbed wire out, straightening it slightly as I went, and tacked it down into the damp earth with horseshoe-shaped metal staples as long as my little finger. I double-checked every staple, and then clipped the barbed wire from the larger roll and used a pair of pliers to twist the loose ends together. After that, I marked out the points of an invisible five-pointed star within the circle, and placed several articles with an affinity for the Erlking; a heavy collar one might place on a hunting hound, a whetstone, a small bowie knife, flint and steel, and several steel arrowheads.

Then I placed my own affinity items opposite those of the Erlking's, outside the circle; a used copy of The Hobbit, the splintered end of my last blasting rod, my.44, a parking ticket I hadn't paid yet, and finally my mother's silver pentacle amulet. I stepped back and went over the circle again, making sure that it was fixed solidly and that nothing had fallen across it.