“Harry?” Murph asked.

“Get the bike,” I said.

She swung around and did. “Butters, Alphas, on me,” I barked. “Sanya, incoming from the north. Get them organized first, then bring them after me. I’ll try to slow the Fomor down.”

“Da, go!” Sanya shouted. He turned and started bawling at the troops in a voice that could have been heard a quarter mile away.

Murphy rumbled up on her bike, and I swung a leg over. Will and Georgia loped out of the darkness and took up position on one side of the bike, and Andi and Marci took the other. Butters came trotting over. You’d never have guessed the little guy had been galloping all over the damned town all evening, from the spring in his step. I had to give it to him—Butters was never going to be a powerhouse, but the little guy didn’t have an atom of quit anywhere in him.

From the north, maybe two or three blocks away, I heard the scream of Huntsmen’s spear blasts, and a sudden sonic razor blade of ripping, tearing sound that was the simultaneous war cry of a dozen malks going into battle.

And then, flattening that sound was the bone-shaking blare of a Jotun’s horn, the same one from before.

And my stomach fell out. Because shotguns were not going to help against something that big, no matter how many of them we had. They’d only make it mad.

Hear me, Winter, I thought. Converge on that engagement. Kill anything that tries to harm those children.

The air was suddenly split with the screams and battle cries of ogres and gnomes, malks and Black Dogs, the wild ululations of a couple of Wyld Sidhe, the strangled moan of a freaking Rawhead, and the chittering screech of some of those damned big spiders that had been such a pain in my ass on several occasions, as they all leapt forward at their fastest pace to find and destroy the enemy.

Murphy gave me a wide-eyed look, glanced down and back, and then set her jaw.

“Go!” I shouted.

The Harley roared.

And with monsters as our vanguard, off we went to be Jotunslayers.

Chapter

Twenty

   We heard the sound of gunfire ahead, a lone pistol firing measured shots. Its defiance sounded thin indeed against the shrieks of the Huntsmen’s spear blasts.

“Cut the engine,” I said.

Murphy goosed a little more power out of the throttle and then cut the Harley’s engine. The heavy bike rolled forward almost silently on momentum and we had time to see what was happening.

A single man defended the doorway of a staircase that led up to the second level. A sign posted beside him read THIRD WATCH CHILD CARE. He wasn’t terribly tall, was almost unbelievably stout, and with a shock I recognized Detective Bradley from Internal Affairs.

A howling blast from a spear blew an inch of stonework off the doorway next to Bradley, and though chips of stone cut into his scalp, he didn’t flinch as he sighted down the barrel of his service pistol and squeezed off a shot.

One of the Huntsmen’s heads jerked back and the creature fell to join three others on the ground—and those remaining screamed and swelled in size.

The slide of the pistol locked back, as the Huntsmen charged the doorway. Bradley calmly discarded the weapon, reached for his ankle, drew his backup, and put three rounds from a little revolver into the lead Huntsman’s chest as it charged.

The thing staggered and thrust its spear at Bradley. The blocky man slapped the weapon aside with one hand, seized the haft in one thick fist, jammed the pistol up under the Huntsman’s jaw, and emptied the little revolver, sending the thing crashing and thrashing to the ground.

Bradley, half his face masked in blood, dropped the empty revolver, took up the spear in a grip that showed he knew something about using one, faced the remaining Huntsmen, and screamed, “Come on!”

They roared back, the cries like a pack of beasts, none of them the same species.

Five dead Huntsmen. Bradley had picked a good position to fight from, surrounded in stone, slight elevation from the street, good cover. But he was out of ammo now, bleeding, and the remaining Huntsmen would only be that much stronger and more difficult to hurt.

And still he planted his feet. “Come on, you ugly bastards!”

“That son of a bitch beat me in every tournament I ever fought him,” Murphy said. “Harry.”

Winter, I thought. Take the Huntsmen.

The ogres went in first, simply leaping from adjacent rooftops, huge white-furred things like River Shoulders, if he’d been a smoker since childhood, after a heroin bender. Though lean and seedy-looking, they were still enormous, viciously strong, and unremittingly savage. One of them landed on a Huntsman with a three-story atomic elbow and crushed it with a great crackling of breaking bones. The other landed on a planted spear that went in its chest and burst through its back in a welter of gore and silver flame. The ogre shrieked like a demon as the Huntsman arced the spear to one side and brought the dying Winter fae crashing down to the street.

Malks yowled like a herd of chain saws and came bounding in from all angles. The Huntsmen’s spears howled and sent some of the murderous beasts to whatever hell waited for them, but there were simply not enough of them to target the streaking forms of the malks. They overbore two of the Huntsmen and buried them in a mound of thick fur and frenzied claws sharper than X-Acto knives. The Huntsmen died screaming.

Beside them, the troop of gnomes had emerged from an alley and flung a dozen hatchets at another Huntsman, even as it swelled in size and power. The wickedly sharp weapons hit with savage effect, setting the Huntsman staggering, and Black Dogs flashed past, fangs raking, and tore through its hamstrings. Once it was at ground level, the gnomes, chestnut-skinned, white-haired little guys maybe two and a half or three feet high, had no problems reaching its vitals.

One of the remaining Huntsmen turned to flee—only to confront the Rawhead coming out of the alley. The fae beast, made of the bones of slaughtered animals and foes, was an enormous form under a great black cloak. The cloak flared out, and the bulky body of the Rawhead, made of hundreds of sharpened bones, began to contort and shriek in a sound uncomfortably like that of a meat grinder.

The Rawhead seized the Huntsman and dragged it beneath its cloak. Its bones rent and tore, where I couldn’t see it, and the Huntsman screamed in fury. And then there was a lot of blood and sausage tumbling out from beneath the Rawhead’s cloak and piling up on the Huntsman’s feet and lower legs.

The last Huntsman roared, rearing up in size—and the second-largest malk I’d ever seen, the size of a mountain lion but far bulkier, flew like an arrow for the creature’s face. Grimalkin’s forepaws spread out to snowshoe proportions and sprouted two-inch claws that latched into the Huntsman’s face. The Elder malk sank its jaws into one of the Huntsman’s eyes, gripping on like a vise to the orbital bone beneath—and thus braced, the supernaturally powerful, swift cat began to rake with its rear claws.