against the Dark Ones? What if it was all a trap ?

The unbearable terror returned again, as if some vast, dark bulk were creeping slowly toward his back. But he could see nothing there, no movement in the stark white emptiness of the snow-covered meadow, and could hear no sounds but the hiss of his own breath in his lungs and the hot, too-swift pounding of his heart. The years he'd spent on the fringes of the motorcycle gangs, among the tough guys and would-be tough guys of smog-bound Southern California, had given him a kind of bar-fight courage sufficient for his survival. But the waiting in terror for an unknown danger was different. His every perception, sharpened by wizardry to detect what others found invisible, was keyed to a fever pitch for the warning of danger. And in his heart, he was sure that no warning would save him.

Cold, directionless winds breathed upon him, like the draught from a primordial abyss of darkness which had never seen light. At the touch of it, his heart seemed to lurch, then hammer chokingly. His intelligence screamed at his instinct to run, telling him that, even if he ran, even if he made the half-mite dash through the ice-locked drifts of the buried meadow to the windowless Keep of Dare, they would never let him in. Once the cyclopean doors were sealed at sunset, Keep Law forbade that any should open them before dawn.

So he drew the veils of alien illusion more firmly about him and prayed that they all were right-Lohiro, Ingold, and Thoth-when they said that this kind of spell would guard his body from the inhuman hungers of the Dark.

He could feel the Dark Ones coming closer; he sensed their coming in the change of the air. Close by him a little skiff of snow whirled up, as if stirred by wind, but no wind riffled now in the fur of his collar. In all directions the snowy landscape rolled like a frozen, silver sea; yet from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed movement, a sudden flurry that vanished, as things did in dreams. In the shadows of the trees before him, he thought he saw something shift, though not a branch stirred.