Magog snarled again in that foreign tongue.

The deep voice hardened. “I seek no quarrel with thee, Fallen One. I pray thee, do not mistake peaceable intention for weakness. I do not fear thee. Begone, or I will smite thee down.”

The gorilla like Denarian howled. I heard its claws dig and rip at the ground as it hurtled forward toward the source of the resonant voice.

Magog, it seemed, had a really limited vocabulary when it came to repartee.

I couldn’t see what happened next. There was a flash of gold-green light, like sunlight reflected from fresh spring grass, and a detonation in the air, a sound that was not quite a crack of thunder, not quite an explosion of fire. It wasn’t even loud so much as it was pervasive, something that I felt along the whole surface of my body as much as I did on my eardrums.

The wall of the cannery shattered inward, and Magog—what was left of Magog—came hurtling through it. It landed on the ground about twenty feet away from me. Enormous sections were missing from the front of the gorilla like body, including its thighs and most of the front half of its torso. It wasn’t a messy wound, either. The empty chunks were limned with a gentle yellow-green glow that seemed to seal in any blood. Even as I watched, Magog quivered once, then went limp. Tiny sprouts of green flowered up from the fallen corpse over the course of a couple of seconds, leaves spreading, then budding out into wildflowers in a riot of colors.

The coating of flowering plants seemed to devour the body of the gorilla from around the mortal body beneath—that of a muscular young man, which gradually emerged, though was still modestly shrouded in a veil of flowers. He was thoroughly dead, his eyes glassy, empty, and there were flowers growing in a hole where his heart had been. He wore a leather collar, and hanging from it, in a little rubber frame like a dog tag, was another blackened denarius. He was a kid, Molly’s age at the oldest.

From outside there was a deep, resonant sigh. Then another heavy, ground-shuddering thump. And another.

Coming closer.

My heart jumped right up into my teeth. Sure, I had no idea who that really was out there, but all those thees just screamed that it was one of the Sidhe. They really got into the archaic modes of speech—or maybe it was fairer to say that they never got out of them. Anyway, odds were running high that this was Eldest Brother Gruff come to settle up with Winter’s champion in this affair, and given that he’d just swatted down one of the Denarians like he was an uppity pixie, it didn’t bode real well for me.

I found myself taking a step back as that thumping sound came again, and the floorboard beneath my foot creaked precariously.

That gave me an idea. The bigger they are, et cetera. If Eldest Gruff was even bigger than the last one had been, maybe I could use the rickety flooring against him—long enough to get myself out to the boat and off the island, in any case. Open water was another fantastic neutralizer for the enormous size discrepancy. Setting realistic goals has always been the key to my success. I didn’t have to win a fight with this thing. I just had to survive long enough to run away.