Page 20

"Yes, and how's my record?"

"…Unblemished."

"Mm." She hiccuped and I reached behind me to grasp her hand. Sissily giggled without humor. "Cool. I love that for us."

They came out of the tree line all at once the moment she finished the sentence, and they came low. Like a black fog unfolding over the ground, a rolling carpet of them.

I'd been expecting birds. Why on earth I thought it would be birds was beyond me. The sound off Davon's voicemail, the sound on the road, that dry rushing lift of a hundred wings. It was there. It was just coming from two feet off the ground and moving like a freight train.

Imps.

Hundreds of them. Knee-high, gray as boiled meat gone bad, running in that horrible four-limbed scramble with their wings half-open for balance. Little faces twisting and turning the entire time like a room full of arguing accountants.

I'd met three of these in my life. One of them ate my Prada shirt, the little fucker.

There were enough of them to clear Amber's Thanksgiving table in under a minute, plates included.

"Sissily!"

"On it!" My bestie left all her doubts behind and squared her shoulders.

Fire tore up the whole width of the yard at knee height. The front rank of the imps burned where it stood. The smell hit about a second later. It was instant and appalling, like roadkill left on the side of the road too long in the summer sun.

The ones behind ran straight over the burning imps, not giving them a second glance.

That was the first thing that told me they didn't organize themselves for the attack.

An imp is a coward. An imp will absolutely trample its friends, but it will also turn around and go home the second the math stops working in their favor. No imp in history has ever run into a fire simply because the fire was in the way of what they were after.

These did. All of them.

And then they went silent, which was somehow worse than the chittering.

My magic came up like it had been standing by the door with its coat on, eagerly waiting for me to open it.

I let it fill me to the brim.

I want to be accurate here, because afterward everybody had opinions and most of them were wrong. I didn't aim. I have never once successfully aimed at anything in my life. What I did was stand in the gravel with the floodlight behind me and open my hands.

Something under a hundred years of Greywood land woke up and answered.

Roots came through the yard.

The gravel split in a dozen places and heaved up in slabs, and out of it came the forest — pale, thick, and in no hurry whatsoever. Ropes as wide as my arm whipped up out of the ground. Three imps disappeared into the tangle. Then eleven. Then a whole rank of them, snatched up mid-scramble and folded in half like laundry.

Gold poured up my forearms and off my shoulders until my own shadow gave up.

"HA!" I shouted.

I'm not going to pretend that was dignified.

For about ninety seconds I was the most dangerous thing in Ohio.

The wolves worked the edges where the roots couldn't reach. Ace took the porch steps with three others and held them. River stood ten feet to my left and burned a corridor straight down the middle of the lawn without once opening his wings.

I noticed that. I filed it.

"Byrne!" Sissily, somewhere behind me, delighted and furious at once. "Your hair is on fire!"