The Corpsetaker made that shrieking sound again and vanished, and in the sudden absence of her will I almost fell flat on my face. I caught myself by remembering that I could now officially scoff at gravity, stopped falling halfway to the floor, and righted myself again.

The wards were down. Murphy and company would be crashing the party at any moment.

And… for some reason, the Corpsetaker now wanted them to do it.

Right.

That couldn’t be good.

Chapter Forty-six

I let go of my Sight and went up the final flight of stairs, the ones that led from the junction room up to the street entrance—and found them stacked with Big Hoods. I blinked for a fraction of a second when I saw them. I’d practically forgotten the real-world thugs under the Corpsetaker’s control. All the power we’d been throwing around in the duel had been ghostly stuff. The Big Hoods had no practical way to be aware of it.

How odd must the past couple of minutes have been from their point of view? They’d have felt the wave of cold, seen candles burning suddenly low, and then heard lots of boards and candles and paints being smashed and clawed down, while the concrete and stone walls were raked by invisible talons and the candles were smacked up and down the halls and stairways.

There were at least a dozen of them on the stairs, and they had guns, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. For a second, I entertained notions of setting the Lecters on them, but I rejected the idea in a spasm of nausea. I’d seen what the killer spooks had done to the wolfwaffen. If I turned them loose, they’d deal with the Big Hoods the same way—and the Big Hoods, at the end of the day, were as much the Corpsetaker’s victims as her physical muscle—and once you turned loose a force that elemental, you almost had to expect collateral damage. I didn’t want any of it to splash onto Murphy and company.

“Okay,” I told the Lecters. “Go back downstairs and help Sir Stuart and his boys out against those lemurs. After that, defend Mort.” The Lecters’ only response was to vanish, presumably to the main chamber. Good. Mort had still been conscious the last time I’d seen him. He could tell them what to do if they needed any further direction.

Meanwhile, I’d do the only thing I could to take on the Big Hoods. I’d play superscout for Karrin’s team.

I vanished to outside the door to the stronghold and found several forms crouched there. Evening traffic was rumbling by on the bridge overhead, though the street running below it was deserted, and the space beneath the bridge was entirely shadowed. I ignored the darkness and saw Murphy next to the door, rummaging in a black nylon backpack. She was wearing her tactical outfit—black clothing and boots, and one of Charity Carpenter’s vests made of Kevlar and titanium. Over that was a tactical harness, and she had two handguns and her teeny assault rifle, a little Belgian gun called a P-90. It packed one hell of a punch for such a compact package—much like Murphy herself.