Free Death's Mistress by Karen Chance Page A

like just where it was. We’d all given up the fight long ago and used either the kitchen or back entrance.
    But someone was headed in the front door.
    Or make that some thing .

Chapter Six
    The large windows in front of the house showed a yard blurred and streaked by sheeting rain. But I’d been wrong about it being natural. I watched with perfect shock emptying my mind as the droplets just outside the overhang of the roof began to bend, to congeal, to protrude to form the image of a man’s head.
    The outline was sharp, etched precisely against the dark street. It was crystalline clear except for the drops leeching off the roof, which were stained with tar. They eased down the phantom face, giving it the appearance of the weathering on an old statue. They didn’t do anything to make it less impressive.
    Or less terrifying.
    Water dripping down the face and neck thickened, slowly forming a set of powerful shoulders, muscled arms and a strong torso. The figure itself was quicksilvered with moonlight, but I could still see the yard beyond it—the pale outline of the driveway, the dark brushstrokes of the trees, the glimmer of falling rain. Behind it, the thunderheads were mounting, higher and darker, the lightning that played inside them making them more beautiful and more ominous.
    I cursed softly. I hate unfamiliar magic. The known kind is bad enough, with mages inventing new ways to kill me all the time. But at least I have a halfway-decent chance of using my own store of magical mayhem to counter it. Any I’ve never seen before always makes my head hurt.
    “What the hell is that?” I whispered.
    “Manlíkan.” Gessa clutched a small battle-ax, like a child’s toy, in both hands. “Light Fey make.”
    “But what is it?”
    Her small face scrunched up as she fought to find the words. She was a relatively new arrival, and her English was a work in progress. But since my troll vocabulary stood at roughly twelve words, half of them curses, it was going to have to do.
    “Svarestri control elements. Use power.” She stuck the ax under her arm and made a weird sort of motion with her hands. “Make warrior.”
    “Make warrior out of what?”
    “Power. Elements.” She did the same sort of wrapping motion, and I swallowed, hoping I was misunderstanding her. But I didn’t think so.
    The cascade had dripped lower, solidifying into a firm backside, muscular legs and feet that left watery prints on the hall floor as it came inside. The figure had glided through the wards as if they didn’t exist. They were obviously reading it as water, and therefore considered it harmless.
    “They wrap their power around an element and form a doppelgänger out of it?” I whispered.
    Gessa just looked at me.
    “A double? They make a double?”
    She nodded. “Make warrior.”
    Wonderful.
    Cold, halogen white headlights crept across the floor from some neighbor arriving home later than usual. The pattern of leaded glass in the front door stretched to engulf the creature, highlighting the almost transparent body. It was amazingly detailed, the lights picking out the muscles in the thing’s chest, the crease at his elbow, the dip of his naval—and the pale face, utterly cold and ominously silent as it gazed around.
    The light on the floor narrowed to a wedge and slid up the wall as the car passed down the street, leaving the hall in shadows and me with a problem. I’d never seen anything remotely like that thing. Worse, I didn’t know how to kill it.
    I decided some experimentation was in order, pulled a gun and pumped half a dozen rounds into the thing. The sound was deafening in the silent house, and the smell acrid. But that was the only way I knew I’d fired. The bullets tore through the insubstantial body like rocks through a pond, exiting the other side to embed themselves in the wall of the foyer. The creature looked up, those eerie colorless eyes tracking across the ceiling until they met mine.
    So much for that