Kate Daniels 06 - Gunmetal Magic

a small noise that might have been a clearing of a throat or a choked-up laugh.
    A purple vampire popped out of the bushes, dragging something behind it. The bloodsucker strained, tight muscle flexing across its back, and heaved what looked like a large collapsed leather tent into the open.
    “We found human bones,” the vampire reported.
    “In the ravine?” I asked.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    I knew about the spot. Immokalee had described it to me this morning, trying to scare me into not going. A few dozen yards to the north, the ground dropped sharply into a narrow fissure lined with human skeletons. Some still held their weapons. When a draugr sucked the flesh off your bones, he did it quick, like jerking a shirt off a body.
    “We also found this.” The vampire indicated the tent.
    Ghastek’s vampire raised the top edge, exposing a dark opening, and vanished into it. The leather shifted, mirroring the vampire’s movement inside it. The bloodsucker emerged into the clear air. “The design is ill-conceived. It is clearly too large for one person, but it has no structure or method of remaining upright as a tent, and besides, this side is completely open to the elements. Perhaps it’s some sort of communal sleeping bag?”
    “It’s not a sleeping bag,” I told him.
    “Would you care to enlighten me?” Ghastek said.
    “Look at it from above.”
    The purple vampire leaped onto the nearest tree andscurried up into the branches. A long moment passed and then it dropped on the ground next to me without a word.
    “What is it?” Tracy asked.
    The vampire’s face was unreadable, like a blank wall. “It’s a glove.”
    The wind stirred the tree branches. The world blinked, as the tech vanished, crushed under the onslaught of a magic wave. Cold froze the glade. The other vampire burst from the bushes and came to rest by Tracy.
    In the distance something wailed in an inhuman voice, its forlorn cry rising high above the treetops.
    Gloom claimed the clearing. It came slowly, like molasses, from the dark spaces deep between the roots, washing over trees, leaching color from the greenery, drenching it in shadows, until the shrubs and foliage turned dark, almost gray. Behind the gloom, mist rose in thin wisps, tinted with an eerie bluish glow.
    A crow cried overhead, its shrill caw impossibly distant.
    “They are putting on quite a show,” Ghastek said.
    “Yep.” I nodded. “Going all out. Viking special effects are out of this world.”
    I pulled a canvas bundle out of my backpack and untied the cord securing it. Four sharpened sticks lay inside, each three feet long. I picked up a rock and hammered the first of the sticks into the ground at the mouth of the path. That was the way I’d run when it came time to get the hell out of there.
    I moved along the edge of the clearing, sinking the sticks in at regular intervals.
    “What is the purpose of this?” Ghastek asked.
    “Protection.”
    “Have I given you a reason to doubt my competence, Kate?”
    “No.” I pulled a black box out of my backpack, took a black cloth out of it, and unfolded the cloth to extract an old pipe. The medicine woman had already packed it with tobacco.
    “What is this?”
    “A pipe.” I struck a match, puffed to get the pipe going, and got a mouthful of smoke for my trouble. The pungent tobacco scraped the inside of my throat. I coughed and started to circle the clearing, blowing smoke as I went.
    “What sort of magic is this?” one of the journeymen asked.
    “Cherokee. Very old.” If life was perfect, I’d have Immokalee herself do the ritual. It took years of training for the medicine woman to reach her power, but none of the Cherokees would go near the draugr. Unlike me, they had common sense. All the chants over the sticks and the pipe had been said already. All I had to do was follow the ritual and hope Immokalee’s magic was potent enough to work when an incompetent like me activated it.
    I finished the circle, put the pipe away, and sat back on the log.
    A pair of tiny eyes ignited by the roots of an oak to the left. No iris was visible—the entire eye was an almond-shaped slit of pale yellow glow.
    “Left,” Tracy said. Her voice was perfectly calm.
    “I see it,” Ghastek said.
    Another pair sparked to the right, about a foot off the ground. Then another, and another. All around us the eyes fluoresced, clustered around tree trunks, staring from the underbrush, peering from behind rocks.
    “What are they?”