The sound of wings grew behind them.
“Faster!” Jessie shouted.
Helena gripped his hand more tightly and increased her pace to match his, issuing not a word of objection.
He looked at her as they entered an open aisle where there were no granite obstacles to beware of, and he saw that she was holding up quite well. She didn’t seem terrified, merely frightened, biting her lip and straining to get all the speed she could out of her fine, long legs. Then he saw the flashlight that she carried in her other hand, and he relized it was proof of his own terror that he hadn’t noticed, until now, that it was on and that the bright beam danced across the earth directly in front of them, pinpointing their position for Slavek and his pack.
“Helena!” he shouted.
Still running, her breasts shoved out like twin ornaments on a new fluttercar, her yellow hair flying out behind her like a tailfin pennant, holding tightly to his hand, she glanced sideways at him.
“The flashlight!”
She didn’t get what he meant.
“Throw the flashlight away!”
She held up the hand torch, slowing down and thereby forcing him to slow as well, looked wonderingly at the instrument for a moment, then realized what he meant. She pitched it away, to her right. The beam whirled crazily, a spinning yellow lance that shaved paper-thin wafers of darkness off the bulk of the night, then struck a large tombstone and shattered.
They picked up speed again, running as fast as they could, the grass treacherously damp under them.
Still, they could hear wings flapping behind them—and the shrill cries of many tiny creatures: bats.
Ahead, Brutus slowed and came to a full stop, his long tail straight up in the air, his pointed ears thrust forward, the long hair down his neck and back bristling.
In a moment, they were up with him.
“What’s the matter?” Jessie asked. His heart was pounding so loudly in his own ears that he could barely hear his voice.
“A sorcerer,” the hell hound growled.
“Where?”
The hound pointed with his snout.
The magician was an old man, quite tall and thin as a rail, his long fingered hands raised before him as if he were about to cast a spell or a charm; his gray, frizzled beard fell nearly to his waist, ruffled by the night breeze. He stood directly before the main gates in a pool of unnatural, cobalt blue light that seemed to radiate from the man himself. He was dressed all in black robes decorated with crimson quarter-moons and silver stars. He also wore a peaked hat of the same fabric and design.
Brutus said, “He’s a danger to both of us. He could cast a spell on the two of you…. And he could dissipate my soul, if he wanted to, and if he didn’t care about breaking the law.” Clearly, the hell hound was recalling his own treatment of Zeke Kanastorous earlier in the day—and perhaps regretting it just a little.
“Then we don’t go out the main gate,” Jessie said.
“We better go somewhere, and damn fast!” Helena said, pulling their attention back to the aisle down which they had just run. “Slavek will be on us in a minute.”
It came sooner than that.
Behind them, screaming bats swooped out of the darkness, small, eager shadows that swelled rapidly, cancerously into huge-winged, semi-amorphous creatures that posed a more serious threat than they had in their tinier form. Their dark and wizened faces, once pinched and vicious, fleshed out, turned first yellow and then white, deathly white, like expanding balloons losing their deep color. Their claws changed into hands—human hands with wicked nails that gleamed with reflected moonlight Their scrawny legs lengthened, and the transformation into human form was completed.
A rush of cold fog rolled over them, as if drawn toward the vampires, and Helena stepped closer to the detective.
“This way!” Jessie cried.
He turned and ran toward the ravine, from which the fog had come, down between the two round hills on which the major portion of the maseni cemetery was built.
“But it’s so dark down there!” Helena protested, running along beside him, her breath now making little white clouds before her.