More screaming whistles came from overhead, and I felt a surge of raw panic trying to push the thoughts out of my brain. Hell’s bells. If one of those skulls hit closer to us or behind us, where my shield couldn’t cover, we were dead. Another near-miss might blow my shield down entirely, and then the machine guns would have us. There was only one place to go that might be safe from the screaming skulls.

“We’ve got to get closer,” I growled. “Come on!”

And I broke into a flat-out sprint toward the machine guns.

Chapter Forty-three

Things were pretty much a desperate blur between the water’s edge and the cliffs. There was a lot of running and gunfire and spraying dirt and pebbles. Several more shades were destroyed by screaming skull shrapnel. My shield took one hell of a beating, and as we got closer to the machine guns, the angles of fire from either side meant that the shield could protect fewer and fewer of the shades.

There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no direction to go but forward. It was either that or die, and I was as terrified as I had ever been in my life. Honestly, I’m glad my memories aren’t much clearer than they are.

There was a nasty bit in the middle, when I was running between two of the crouching spike beasts. I remember realizing that the things were so heavily armored in layers and layers of bony plate that they couldn’t stand up. The fire from machine guns and screaming skulls alike seemed only a minor discomfort to them. I remember a pair of reptilian eyes flicking toward me, and then dozens of the shorter spikes shot out upon greasy, living tendrils and started whipping around like a high-pressure water hose with no one holding it. One of them wrapped around my arm, and only the spell-armored sleeve of my duster kept the bladed spike from opening my flesh to the bone. Sir Stuart’s ax flashed, and the tendril, separated from the main beast, collapsed into ectoplasm.

I ordered the shades to use their blades, and dozens of swords, axes, combat knives, and bayonets appeared. We hacked our way through the spike beasts, and endured increasingly intense fire. We lost several more protector shades as we did—they were hauled into the open by tendrils and torn to pieces by machine-gun fire.

The mortar skulls stopped coming down near us about twenty yards out from the cliffs, and we finally reached the base of the first tower. The shades and I all crowded in close to its base, where the gunners couldn’t shoot us without getting out and leaning over the top or something. I reversed my shield, so that its quarter dome covered us in every direction that the cliff face or the ground didn’t, though the fire on us had lightened considerably.

“Grenades!” I ordered, in a firm and manly tone that did not sound at all like a panicked fourteen-year-old.