Her no-nonsense tone coupled with the effort to be literal sparked Lara’s amusement. Washington, looking both irritated and accepting, gestured them toward a hall. “I can walk you out the same way they brought Kirwen in.”

“I’ll use the public elevator,” Gretchen said unexpectedly. “The press know who I am. They’ll be happy to get a statement from me, if they can’t have one from Lara and Dafydd.” She embraced Lara, gave Dafydd a brief smile, and hurried toward the elevators.

Dafydd watched her go, then turned to Lara with a bemused expression. “I’d hardly think I deserved that from her.”

Lara shrugged and took his hand. “I told her the truth. She believed me. So she has no reason to blame you for anything.”

“Even so,” Dafydd murmured, then nodded as Washington gestured impatiently down the hall.

Silence fell over the little group as they hurried for the cavernous concrete lot beneath the court building. Half a dozen police cars were parked in the area they entered, and Washington slowed before reaching the floor-to-ceiling fence that barricaded the police area off from the rest of the lot. “I don’t suppose this is private enough for your little discussion.”

“Sorry.” Lara glanced upward at the security cameras. “I’d rather not be someplace where there’s surveillance.”

Exasperation flashed over Washington’s features. Lara imagined he thought her paranoid, but Dafydd’s safety was worth that. Cooper, trailing along behind, muttered “Give me a break” as Washington waved a keycard at the gates and they began rattling open.

“We’ll go back to my place,” Kelly said. “I’ll get my car, and, I don’t know, Reg, can you take a police vehicle? There’s not enough room in the Nissan.”

“We’ll manage. Go on.” He waved at the doors.

Dafydd, at Lara’s side, stiffened. She turned a worried glance on him as warning widened his eyes and caught an alarmed sound in his throat.

And then it was too late, as concrete walls and massive pillars rended with magic that let nightwings pour through the gaps.

“Down! Down! Down!” Lara tackled Kelly, laying her out on the concrete. Kelly screamed, more surprise than fear, and Lara rolled off her, reaching for Dickon’s hip. “Get down!”

She suspected it was instinct rather than her orders that made him duck as winged blackness shrieked and flew at his head, but the effect was the same. Lara grabbed a fistful of his shirt and let her body become deadweight, dragging him further down. “Keep Kelly safe! Don’t fight them!” The command and confidence in her voice were alien to her, but Dickon responded, flattening himself above Kelly, whose eyes rounded with outrage as Lara scrambled to her feet.

For an instant she saw everything as though it had been flash-frozen, an indelible image stamped in her mind. The glamour that made Dafydd appear human was gone, and a scattering of objects lay around his feet: loose change, his belt, a ring. No doubt his earrings lay somewhere on the concrete, too small to see as lightning shattered from his fingertips and threw the garage into stark relief. Against that inversion, gunfire flashed repeatedly.

Nightwings squealed, ripped apart by lightning, thrown back by bullets. It seemed ludicrous that human weapons could damage the nightmare creatures, but Lara was glad they did; glad that Washington, whose eyes were as round as Kelly’s, had the nerve to stand his ground and fire into the seething blackness over and over again. She glanced around wildly for Rich Cooper and found him at the open gate, his own duty weapon flashing gunshots into the mass of nightwings.

Some kind of distortion altered the appearance of the nightwings. A shadow, a ghost, nothing more: if Lara looked straight on she couldn’t see the wrongness at all. A part of her was ready to look away, so she might pretend the nightwings hadn’t followed them at all.

But fury bubbled up: fury that they had been followed, fury that her friends were in danger, fury that someone was trying to kill her to hide the truth of an investigation she’d promised to see through to its end. That anger wouldn’t let her look away, not even to study their ruined shapes—though with monsters scattering around them, anywhere she did look let their broken forms tease at the corners of her eyes.

Lightning and gunfire erupted again, reminding her sharply that she had a weapon of her own to use. She flung her hands up, as dramatic a gesture as Dafydd used, and threw familiar words at the nightwings: “I exorcise thee, unholy spirit, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

The black-winged creatures nearest to her flinched, then surged forward, swarming her. Kelly screamed again as Lara went down beneath a rush of nightwings, too astonished for fear. She knew nothing about fighting: it was an instinct for survival that straight-armed a fist into one of the monster’s throats. That had more effect than the exorcism had. The thing fell back, clawing and coughing as if it were a mortal beast instead of a magical horror.

“Your world!” Dafydd bellowed, and light blew through the words, illuminating their meaning to far beyond their simple content.

In his world, calling on the trinity of her faith was a spell of significant power: the godless Barrow-lands were vulnerable to it. In hers, a world of many gods and faiths, the simple exorcism she’d called on was only the beginning of a ritual that could banish demons. “But I don’t know the longer version!”

Dafydd was there, cutting through nightwings with a blade of electricity in one hand and offering help up with the other. Lara seized his hand and flew to her feet. For the space of a breath they were nose to nose, and Dafydd’s voice was quiet under the screams of monsters and mortals alike: “Call on the heart of your magic. Nightwings fail before the light.”

“I don’t know how,” Lara whispered, but he was gone, pulling lightning from the air and wielding it with faultless precision. It had to exhaust him, Lara realized abruptly: his magic wasn’t natural to her world, forcing him to fight against the same faith and laws that had weakened her attempted exorcism.

But the nightwings still drew power from the Barrow-lands, its magic feeding their strength as much as the bleak riders on their backs pushing them forward. Lara could see it in scatter-shot glimpses, truth ringing short sharp chimes in her head.

The heart of her magic was the music of truth. She had wished, earlier, for a way to couch harsh words in softening song, and it suddenly seemed a viable path. She dropped to her knees—making herself a smaller target, putting herself in a position of prayer—and began to sing, a thin weak version of the only song she could think of.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me …” In the space of a breath Lara whispered, “Kelly, I need help. I need faith.”

Kelly’s screams broke off, replaced by astonishment. “You know I don’t believe in God.”

Forget God! Lara wanted to shout. Believe in me! But there was no time: she sang the next words, still struggling to put power behind them. “I once was lost, but now am found …”

Big hands folded over hers. Lara’s eyes popped open and Dickon gave her an embarrassed smile. His baritone, though, was deep and powerful, lending strength to Lara’s voice as they sang, “… was blind, but now I see.”

The nightwings etched into brilliant white light, coming vividly clear in Lara’s gaze. They were warped: that was the impression of riders she’d glimpsed. The creatures she’d encountered in the Barrow-lands were sleek killing machines: these leeched back to the breach between the worlds, as if the Barrow-lands pulled them back. They became more ephemeral the farther they were from the split, though the leaders still struck with vicious, painful attacks.