Karrin thought about that one for a second and said, “You’re right. Let’s go.”
She dropped the Harley into gear, threw out a rooster tail of dirt and gravel, and we rushed toward the shore of the lake. The steel mills had been engaged in actual shipping traffic in their day, and the level field of construction marched right up to the water’s edge and dropped off abruptly, the water four or five feet straight down.
Karrin gunned the engine, covering the last two hundred yards in a flat-out sprint, and the torque on that Harley’s engine was something epic, its bellow too loud to be wholly contained by the shadow mask, emerging from the shadow tiger’s mouth as a deep-throated roar. Karrin let out a scream that was two parts excitement to one part terror, and we flew twenty feet before the tires crashed down onto the surface of the lake—and held.
The bike jounced a couple of times, but I held on to Karrin and kept from flying off. It was an interesting question, though: If I had, would the water have supported me, like an endless field of asphalt? Or would it have behaved as it normally would?
The entire Hunt swept along behind us, silent but for the low thunder of hooves and the panting of the hounds—when suddenly the silver starlight turned bright azure blue.
“Whoa!” Karrin said. “Did you do that?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I looked over my shoulder and found Kringle and the Erlking riding along behind me, I jerked my head at them in a beckoning gesture, and they obligingly came up on either side of the Harleytiger.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at the sky.
“A temporal pressure wave,” the Erlking said, his flaming eyes narrowed.
“A wha’?” I asked.
The Erlking looked at Kringle. “This is your area of expertise. Explain it.”
“Someone is bending time against us,” Kringle said.
I stared at him for a second and then it clicked. “We’re being rushed forward so that we’ll get there too late,” I said. “We’re looking at a Doppler shift.”
“Is what he said correct?” the Erlking asked Kringle curiously.
“Essentially, aye. We’ve already lost half of an hour by my count.”
“Who could have done this?” I asked.
“You have encountered this before, wizard,” Kringle said. “Can you not guess?”
“One of the Queens,” I muttered. “Or someone operating on their level. Can we get out of this wave?”
The Erlking and Kringle traded a look. “You are the leader of the Hunt,” Kringle said. “What you wright with your power will grace each of us. Would you like to do it?”
Was he kidding me? I had almost as much of an idea of how to screw around with the fabric of time as I did which of my clothes could be safely washed in hot water. “I probably need to save myself for what’s coming,” I said.
Kringle nodded. “If it is your will,” he said diffidently, “we can set our hands against it.”
“Do it,” I said.
They both nodded their heads at me in small bows, and then their steeds raced out in front of the pack. Sparks began to fly from their horses’ hooves, first blue, then abruptly darkening to scarlet. The air seemed to shimmer, and strange, twisted sounds writhed all around us. Then there was a reverberating crash that sounded like something between thunder and the discharge of a blaster. The air split in front of the two of them like a curtain, and as the Hunt hurtled through it, the stars washed out to their normal silver hue again.
“Well-done, I guess!” I shouted—and then I noticed that Kringle was no longer there, though the Erlking still raced along. Over the next few moments he slowed enough to pace Karrin and me. “Hey, where’d Bowl-Full-of-Jelly go?”
“Kringle was our stepping-stone out of the rapids of the stream,” he called back. “To lift us out, he had to remain behind. He will rejoin us farther down the shore.”
“Harry,” Karrin said.
“How much farther down the shore?”
The Erlking shrugged with his uninjured arm. “Time may hold no terror for us immortals, Sir Knight, but it is a massive force, all but beyond even our control. It will take as long as it takes.”
“Harry!” Karrin snapped.
I turned my eyes front and felt them widen.
We had arrived at Demonreach—and the island was under attack.
The first thing I saw was the curtain wall around the island’s shoreline. It was nothing but a flicker of opalescent light, like a dense aurora borealis, stretching from the water’s edge up into the October sky. It cast an eerie glow over the trees of the island, steeping them in menacing black shadow, and its reflection in the waters of the lake was three or four times bigger and more colorful than it should have been.
As the Hunt rushed closer, I could make out other details, too. There was a small fleet of boats surrounding the island—it looked like something out of WWII’s Pacific theater. Some of the boats were modest recreational models, several at least the size of the Water Beetle, and three looked like tugboat-barge units, the kind that could ferry twenty loaded train cars around the lake.
I could see motion in the waters around the shore. Things were swarming up out of the lake, hideous and fascinating—hundreds of them. They smashed into Demonreach’s curtain wall. Light pulsed in liquid concentric circles where they touched it, and shrieks of alien agony stretched the air toward a breaking point. The waters within twenty feet of the shore bubbled and thrashed in a demonic frenzy.
I felt a pulse of power stir in the air, and a bolt of sickly green energy lashed across the waters and slammed into the curtain wall. The entire wall dimmed for a second, but then resurged as the island resisted the attack. I tracked the bolt back to the barge and saw a figure in a weird, writhing cloak standing on the deck, facing the island—Sharkface.
As I watched, I saw a Zodiac boat carrying a team of eight men in dark clothing rush in toward the shore. The man in the nose of the boat lifted something to his shoulder, there was a loud foomp, and a fire blossomed in the brush, burning with an eye-searing chemical brilliance. Then the Zodiac whirled and rushed back out again, as if to escape a counterstrike—or maybe they just didn’t want to stay anywhere close to waters full of piranhalike frenzied Outsiders while sitting in a rubber boat. Half a dozen other boats were doing the same thing, and several other similar craft were sitting still, full of armed men waiting silently for the chance to land onshore.
I stared in shock. The recent rain meant that the island wasn’t likely to burst into flame anytime soon, but I had utterly underestimated the scope of tonight’s conflict, ye gods and little fishes. This wasn’t just a ritual spell.
This was an all-out amphibious assault, my very own miniature war.
“Erlking,” I said. “Can you veil the Hunt, please?”
The Erlking glanced at me, and then back at the Hunt, and suddenly the cold, weirdly flat-sounding dimness of a veil against both sight and sound gathered around us like a cloud.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The ritual would still need a platform, and that would take time and work to set up—at least a day. It would show. They haven’t even gotten onto the island y—” Then the truth hit me in a flash. “The barges,” I said. “They set up a ritual platform on one of the barges. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”