Roadside Magic Read Online Free PDF

he cared to ascertain, before his nape prickled uneasily. He had left that particular building hurriedly, following Robin’s trail, and it was good that he had.
    Otherwise they might have caught him before he was ready, on another much more modern rooftop in the financial district.
    Jeremiah unfolded, drawing himself up, and if he hadn’tbeen wearing the coat, any onlooker, mortal or otherwise, would have seen the marks on his arms begin to writhe. From the wrist up, running over muscle hardened from years of mortal labor and years before that as the Armormaster of Summer’s Court, ran ink-dark, thorny tendrils. Mortals would mistake them for tribal tattoos, cupping his shoulders with daggered fingers, sending branches down his chest and back. The knotwork, vaguely tribal or vaguely Celtic, shifted with his mood.
    Those who remembered his tenure at Court would have heard the whispers.
A dwarven-inked lance—they crossed him, though, and did not expect him to survive.
    He lived, did the Armormaster, and Finnion’s clan is no more
.
    Jeremiah turned, his workboot soles gripping just enough, and the shadows gathering at the far end of the rooftop showed gleams of pale gold worn at throat, wrist, fingers. Pallid, noseless faces floated on the darkness, sharp, pointed chins and wide, generous cheekbones.
    In certain lights, you might even call a barrow-wight attractive. Right before their sharp silver blades rent your flesh.
    Three he could see, and behind them more tiny glimmers. His nostrils flared slightly, and he caught the crusted salt and wetwood scent of drow. The tinge of heavy, low-burning incense meant not just any of the Lightless, but the Red Clan.
    The Unclean.
    His arms ran with familiar pins and needles. The lance resolved into being, dappled moonlight along its edges, its haft suddenly solid against his palms. Its blade lengthened, the leafshape becoming a wicked almost-curve, thickening near the end. The haft lengthened, too, its tasseled end dripping moonfire—the more distance he could gain, the better. One-against-many on open ground, with a sharp drop to his back, wasn’t the worst situation.
    Unless, of course, there were harpies to flank him. One problem at a time.
    “
Gallow
,” one of the barrow-wights breathed, a rasp of scales against the cold weeping walls of a burrow.
    Jeremiah inhaled, and the lance finished resolving, the blade shimmering with more moonfire before it flushed, its edge a wicked red gleam.
    Cold iron, that most mortal of metals.
    “As you see me, Unwinter filth.” A thin, unamused smile accompanied the words. He’d fallen back into the sidhe way of speaking, with its curious mix of insult and circumlocution. “Either give a name or withdraw.” Pure bravado—the cold weight at his chest, the medallion on its silver chain, was a reminder of just how badly they would want him dead.
    Unwinter’s Horn, wrenched from the extra-jointed, mailed grasp of the lord of the Hunt himself, would earn its bearer a rich reward, presented along with Gallow’s head. You did not send drow and wights to simply
capture
; you sent them when you wished your prey to suffer before he choked his last.
    Chasing Robin, or him? Both?
    Who cared? All that mattered now was the killing. The ice of the Horn and the warmth of Robin’s locket faded against the certainty of combat.
    It was a relief to finally have a clear-cut problem in front of him.
    The lance’s blade whistled, a low, ominous, sweet noise, as one of the drow darted forward. The rasp of blades leaving sheaths—daggers, of course, the drow fought with little else, but the wights had silver sickle-blades, alive with pallid glow and wicked sharp all along their crescent edges. The horn hilts were shaped especially for their strangler’s hands, and if they had survived long enough to earn such blades, they were quick and brutal.
    Perhaps even cunning.
    The lance vibrated in his hands, communicating in its silent, hungry way. The battle