Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming) Read Online Free PDF

accelerator.

3
    Duress of the Warlock
    I
    Peter had been in hospitals before, after he stepped on a land mine in a swamp and lost the use of both his legs. And he had spent months and weeks on his back before, peeing in a tube and drinking from a straw, so this was not so bad.
    Of course, he had had the use of his arms back then, so this was worse.
    Peter had been in the stockade before, back before his marriage, when he was young and full of beans and stupid and picked a fight with the corporal on guard. God, that had messed up his record for so many years. One-week confinement in stockade; pack drill and two-week CB after that.
    But then it had been friendlies who had him, not the enemy, so maybe this was much worse. And this was an enemy from some nightmare-land, mumbo-jumbo hell beyond the edge of sanity, who—thanks to the fact that Peter had lost the fight at the old mansion—were about to fry up the Earth with an apple in its mouth, or something. Good going, Peter.
    World about to end. And he was here. There was nothing to do but lie on his back and think about his life.
    That land mine had been defective and poorly placed. It had not had enough punch even to blow his foot off, so he was lucky. Shrapnel broke vertebrae in his spine, so he’d never walk again, so maybe he was not so lucky. Got him shipped back home, so maybe that was lucky. His wife dumped him, so maybe unlucky. But she was a cruel bitch, so maybe lucky. Then his son, Galen, went crazy and went into a coma. Unlucky. Galen woke up again. Lucky. But he woke up even crazier. Unlucky.
    Then things in Peter’s life started taking a turn for the weird. His son turned out not to be crazy after all, but dead. Sort of. His flesh still walked the Earth, possessed by an evil ghost, a wizard from the Dark Ages named Azrael de Gray.
    Galen had never been crazy. His son had been a soldier in a war against the mumbo-jumbo freaks from magic-land, some sort of hell inhabited by shape-changers and rotting corpses and all sorts of shit that’d turn your hair on your balls white. Very unlucky.
    So, he was kinda glad his son had been in his right mind all these years, but it would have been easier on the rest of the world if Galen had been hallucinating, and the things he thought were coming had not been real after all.
    Galen had died in the line of service. He had died a soldier’s death, died still thinking his old man thought he was nuts. Peter had never gotten a chance to talk to him, never gotten a chance to set things straight.
    Because that big Russian fellow, Raven Varovitch, had made a deal with the Devil and killed Galen in order to save the life of his little wife. Wendy was her name. Unlucky for the both of them, because when Peter got out of here, the girl was going to be a widow and the guy was going to be a corpse.
    What hurt is that he’d liked the Russian guy from the moment he’d seen him. Nice guy. And what man wouldn’t kill someone for his wife? If you had a wife worth killing someone for. But when Peter got out of here …
    When who got out of where? Peter was going nowhere. Because his son had been right and magic had been real and monsters had come up out of the sea and stormed the old mansion. And Peter got caught in the cross fire. Of all places, in that spooky old mansion where he had been born and raised. Azrael de Gray had come up out of the night-world with a squad of men and an army of horrors.
    There had been magic weapons hidden in the house all this time, just like his dad had always told him. Wendy found a way to summon the weapons the mansion had been guarding since King Arthur’s time. One of those weapons, the Rod of Mollner, came into Peter’s hands so that he could slay the two giants, Surtvitnir and whatshisname, Argle-bargle. Something like that. But the Rod was cursed. He threw it, and it returned to the hand of the thrower, and the impact paralyzed his arm. The damn thing was meant to be thrown by some Viking god or