I leaned against the side of the sleigh and yanked my rapier free, wondering how I was going to manage that and the prism if we stumbled into danger.
A narrow goat track led up the side of the cliff. I slid several times, and was only saved from falling by the thick clusters of fir growing along the path.
When we reached the top of the cliff, Tony said, “What’s that?” in a sharp voice.
Alarm spiked through me as I peered around for what—bears? Vampires? But what had caught his eye neither lived nor moved.
He dropped down beyond a huge boulder and ran about twenty feet along a rain-carved gully between wooded slopes. “Look here.” His voice was low, husky with emotion I couldn’t define as he flashed the sword point up. “I think you’d better see this.”
I was going to need at least one hand for this climb. I tucked the prism into my coat pocket and carefully worked my way down, using Tony’s footprints to step in, and the rapier as a bendy sort of cane. When I stopped beside him, I stared in puzzlement at the odd tangle of twisted, corroded metal sticking up from a tangle of holly and trees.
“What is that?”
Tony pointed over our heads to a large rust-spotted apparatus with German World War II insignia partly visible.
“That is half the fuselage and tail of a Junker Ju 88—an early one,” Tony said. “I will wager my life that Grandfather Armandros is in that wreck.”
“I thought he was shot down. By the Russians,” I said in amazement.
“I thought so, too. Maybe he was. Have to get Gilles’ friends up here, but in the meantime, I think we can assume that he crashed right here.” Tony looked around, then said, “The plane smashed into the side of that cliff, but look—there’s the remains of an old stone path. I think the plane crashed into the entrance to a cave. If that was Esplumoir, there’s is no getting in.”
Conversationally, Armandros said: “Esplumoir,” from directly behind us.
I jumped, nearly dropping the prism. Tony whirled around.
Armandros lounged against an enormous cracked rock, his military jacket rumpled and open, the cigarette smoke rising from his fingers. He was about thirty feet up the slope.
Tony stared silently at the ghost and then said, “Look.” He pointed at the snow around Armandros.
Footprints. Lots of them—old and new, judging from the softened contours of snow in some, and the sharpness of others. Footprints, but no vehicles of any kind.
“Vampires,” I whispered. “Who else would hang around here? Look at that crack in the stone behind him. Do you think that might be the vampire portal?”
We gazed at the gash in the rock, raw and sharp-edged. It reminded me of the crevasses that would open up after a sizable earthquake. Maybe it was only the its raggedness, implying a violent blast or temblor of some kind, but it seemed to exude evil.
We both looked westward. The sun was slipping dangerously low, a finger’s breadth from touching the top of the mountain ridge on the far side of the valley.
Footsteps chuffed on the trail above us. Niklos called, “Anton?”
“We think we found something,” Tony called. “Everyone on watch, but ready to bolt.”
“Bon,” Niklos said, squinting westward, rifle under his armpit, sword in his free hand.
“The ghost is gone,” I said.
“For you, too?” Tony gestured mockingly at me in invitation. “Then I’d say we’ve reached the right place. Lead on.”
“This is new for me, too.” I got a grip on my shivering nerves. “Let’s try going into that crevasse as far as we can, and then sing the Wreath Song.”
We scrambled up to the cracked rock. I avoided stepping in any of those footprints, though I knew it was stupid. As soon as we reached the cracked rock, which was about twenty feet high, I paused and held up the prism.
There was definitely a cave beyond. We couldn’t see anything; we stopped inside the relative safety of the light slanting down to highlight the rough rock near the opening.
I cleared my throat and determinedly began to sing in my nonmusical voice, stumbling where I didn’t know the words. After a few bars, Tony joined in.
The prism came to light in my hands, an eye-watering radiance of the multi-hued colors fluorescing in its depths.
And so we stood there inside the bone-numbing cold of that fissure, breathing air that smelled of mold and rot, and sang the Wreath Song. It was a simple song, easy to pick up. I began singing it in round, a counterpoint to Tony’s voice. I don’t know why. But it seemed to work, because by the third round the prism coruscated in rainbow fulgence, flashes of green, blue, crimson, violet, flame-orange, sun-yellow—
And when I finished the third repetition of the song, the light vanished, like it had been snapped off.
Tony hustled to finish his verse with more speed than art. Then, “The light is gone. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” I shook the prism, as if it had moving parts. “It did that on its own. I will bet anything that this thing is now just a cave. I think the portal’s shut.”
Tony cursed softly under his breath as he scanned the rocks, the snow, the deepening sapphire sky. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Not that I want to argue, but wouldn’t this be the place to make a new treaty with the vampires?” I asked as we bolted out of that crevasse like the vampires were already after us. “Oh. Wait. We need that Rose and Thorn thing, right?”
“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “But even more, we need a good defensive position at our back, because I don’t know what’s going to happen, not with so many of them around. We’re going to ride like hell for the Eyrie.”
“We won’t make it by sunset.”
“Run!” was his answer.
Back up the slope, a horrible journey. I slid and smashed into him twice, the first time knocking him flat into a holly bush, which scratched his face and the gap between his gloves and his sleeve. The second time, I nearly tumbled over a cliff, and I almost lost the rapier when I crashed into a lichen-covered plinth. He caught me, hauled me up. There was no hint of sparkle between us. For the first time it was like being with a cousin.
Was it that easy to cure an unwanted attraction? No, came the inevitable inner voice. It’ll be back.
Yeah, but I knew what to do about it.
When we got halfway up the path, from below us came a thin cry, almost like tears, or mad laughter. It was so creepy that I zoomed back up the rest of the trail, jet-fueled by adrenaline, Tony cursing in Russian behind me.
“Go, go, go!” Tony yelled as we galumphed through the snow to our waiting sled.
Tony slammed the weapons into the rack and vaulted into the seat, me scrambling behind him. He didn’t even wipe the trickle of blood off his face from where he’d nearly fallen off the cliff, just took up the reins. The animals were restless, the whites of their eyes visible as they looked around. They didn’t need urging to take off at top speed, in spite of the steep hill.
Half an hour later we reached the shrine that marked the crossroad. Tony raised his arm in the halt signal, and the rest of the sleighs pulled up. He stood on the seat, one foot propped on the rein rail, his shotgun resting against his knee. “We’re going to run for the Eyrie. Time to mount the torches,” he said. “The bloodsuckers know that we shut their portal. We’ll expect attack as soon as they have full dark. Load with shot, but fix bayonets and have your swords ready, in case they do something to the gunpowder. Remember, we’re unlikely to kill them, so aim low—blast their legs, blast their heads if your aim is good. Slow them down.”
He paused, and the sleigh defenders gave him nods or raised hands signifying agreement.
Tony went on. “They’ll probably go for the animals first, to crash the sleighs. They want us alive. Our blood is no use to them if we’re dead. So I want someone riding each of the lead pairs, torch in one hand, shotgun in the other.”
I added, “Make sure it’s someone with charms. If you can get your c
harm near the torch, so the light reflects in it, that might help.”
They gave me silent looks, then shifted their attention back to Tony as he used his shotgun to choose the sleighs that would lead the way. “Designate your drivers. Everyone else, load up.”
The people joked and laughed, the sharp laugh of impending action. I noticed that Niklos had two shotguns and two rifles—he checked each one of them, making double sure they were loaded as his team traded positions. Again, he was taking the rear. His team all faced backward, clearly expecting attack from behind. I considered that, my scalp crawling. Nobody had ever said the vampires had vehicles of any kind, or weapons, which meant they had to be fast as well as deadly.
Tony turned to me. “All right, my beau sabreur.” He flashed a challenging grin. “Can you handle a shotgun?”
“I could probably fire one, but I don’t know how to aim. Or to load.”
“Then you drive, and I’ll do the shooting.”
I swallowed. “Better give me some pointers.”
“Try it now. This is a good team.” He explained a few basics as he handed the reins to me.
They were unexpectedly heavy. As the animals began to move, my muscles braced to the max.
“Loosen up, or you’ll lose your grip. Keep some tension, but don’t pull back unless you want them to stop. It’s mostly intuitive.”
The biggest trouble I had as we got going was gauging how much pressure was needed for maneuvering. The vectors were not like driving a car, or maybe it was like driving a car that had a twenty-foot hood stretching out in front, and runners instead of wheels.
Once the leader pair of sleighs took the lead, all I had to do was follow them. As the sky turned indigo and began to show stars between the silhouettes of tall trees, the torchlight lit Tony’s grim profile from below. The only sounds were the continuous whish of runners over snow and the muffled beat of hooves.
After a time, just as I began to relax incrementally into the rhythm, Tony said abruptly, “What are you going to do if my sister is alive?”
I was so startled I cast him a quick look—and felt the animals shift. The sleigh fishtailed. I steadied the reins, wondering why he asked that now, with the vampire threat hanging somewhere in the darkness ahead. It was difficult to see his face, which was a profile in the uneven torchlight, marked by black lines where the holly had scratched him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you ask? Do you think Ruli is at the Eyrie?”
“It makes more sense than anything else. Something happened. Marzio ends up at the bottom of the ravine. Ruli runs away. Except if Alec did Marzio, then why did Magda tell us that she drove Marzio to the border?”
“If Ruli ran away from that accident, then she must have had wings, because how else would she get all the way from the western mountains to here—without anyone seeing her, ever? Especially if she won’t drive in—”
His hand came up sharply, and I bit off the word snow.
For about two heartbeats he was still, then ink-black shapes swarmed out of the darkness, their silence terrifying.
“Keep the reins steady.” Tony stood up again, one foot on the seat, the other propped on the rein rail as he fired into the middle of the shapes.
I jumped at the noise, and the sleigh fish-tailed again. I felt the corresponding tension in the animals, but they galloped on and the sleigh straightened out as behind us, flashes of torchlight and gunfire up and down the line caused the shapes to fade back with an eruption of shrieks.
I was just beginning to think we were going to make it when an animal screamed. Riders shouted and cursed, and the vampires rushed forward again, this time with that terrifying hissing and bat-squeal.
Ten, twelve times Tony rapidly reloaded and fired, as did the rest of the sleigh crews. A horrible shriek was followed by a crash—one of the sleighs.
“Niklos!” Tony roared.
“On it!”
I dared one quick glance back, my heart crowding my throat. I was in time to see Niklos’s team reach out to clasp the arms of two people and haul them bodily into the last sleigh as the others fired into the blackness that was crowding up around that sleigh. The woman on the lead animal laid about with her torch, fire streaming off in whirling sparks.
One of the rescued people had cut the traces to the fallen sleigh. Three of the animals righted themselves, one of them bleeding from long rake marks down a flank. The blood gleamed, ruby red, as the animal raced after the others into the darkness.
Three of the people from the overturned sleigh were missing. One of the animals had been slain.
We raced on . . . straight into what felt like a fog bank. Only the air was clear. Tony started cussing violently, and flung the rifle into the rack behind us.
All down the line came a sinister silence.
“Weapons won’t fire,” he said tightly, and swung the sword in a figure eight, loosening his arm. “They’ve got full dark now. They’re going to rush us, and it’s going to be hand to hand.”
What he didn’t say was, there are too many of them to fight off. And no convenient secret tunnels at hand for a fast escape.
What could I do? I remembered the prism light from the portal.
I had no idea if it would work, but I was going to try. I wrapped the reins around one forearm and thrust my free hand into my pocket. I pulled up the prism and reached mentally with frantic energy for that amazing light.
And there it was, incandescing, nearly strobing with full-spectrum effulgence.
It hit the vampires like a shock wave. They gave those horrible thin screams and hisses, then faded back to a prudent distance.
“I don’t know how you did that.” Tony grabbed the reins. “But it was a very good idea.”
Now I could hold the prism above my head with both hands, my eyes dazzled to blindness. But I didn’t need to see. I could hear the things running alongside us, keeping well out of the nimbus; I whiffed that moldy deep-freeze stink that made my shoulder blades crawl.
My arms began to ache as we raced up Devil’s Mountain in tight formation. Somewhere, someone began to sing a strange, skipping minor key melody in Russian as we wound our way up toward the Eyrie through the darkness.
I squinted, my eyes tearing. I blinked away the moisture, my cheeks cold, and held the light higher above my head. I began to catch glimpses of things as we passed a shrine, a signpost—Tony scanning ceaselessly—we whizzed over the top of a small rise, and silhouettes converged, torches held high. I gasped, but they were ordinary people, the ones Tony had ordered as reinforcements.
They streamed on either side of us, footsteps churning up snow, and bore down on the cloud of vampires in our wake, roaring in fury.
That is, they rushed the vamps—but though they waved swords, axes, and sharpened farm implements that reflected blood-red in the torchlight, within moments there was nothing to attack. The vamps had scattered.
We rode on, leaving the villagers guarding the road behind us. We glided and bumped through several more hamlets, each enormous with bonfires in the central square, the ruddily lit shapes of burly inhabitants on guard, scythes and hoes and ancient flintlocks or swords or spears at hand. The glitter of crystals in every single window we passed made it clear that the Devil’s Mountain people had no trouble with magic, even if their duke did. Or, maybe, once did.
The castle appeared at last, glimpsed between crags, every window lit. Now I understood why they kept the bazillion lights on. We slowed after racing through the mighty gates into a churned-up yard.
I lowered my aching arms and breathed out a sigh as a tall, slim figure loped gracefully toward us, her corn-silk hair a golden halo in the firelight.
“Find the portal?” Phaedra asked.
“Closed.” Tony jumped down from the sleigh. “Let’s go inside. I haven’t been able to feel my toes for hours.”
Only then did I realize my feet were numb as well. I climbed out of the sleigh as castle people swarmed about, taking care of t
he animals. Crunch, crunch—memory added its own whiplash. There was the jeep, and Reithermann died right there . . . Kilber was probably hiding behind that corbel on the rock wall, hidden by the hanging leaves on that nowbare tree, when he threw the knife that buried in Tony’s shoulder.
Waves of exhaustion wrung me down, making my head feel like it was floating somewhere above my body. I followed the other two through the same stone archway where Tony had once carried me, a pistol pressed to my temple. We took an abrupt turn into a part of the castle I hadn’t seen.
“Phaedra,” Tony said. “Battle report?”
“What battle?” Phaedra flung her hands up in disgust. “Wasted the entire day drawing up strategy and tactics—got hundreds of volunteers—just to walk around all night waving weapons at each other under the pretty lights in almost every window and hanging from every arch, tree, and gargoyle. Not a vampire in sight. In Riev this morning, Dmitros passed on the order for everyone to stay in except the Vigilzhi tonight. I couldn’t stand another day cooped up indoors without knowing what was going on. I came up here in case they attack the castle.”
“About that,” Tony said. “No. First, where’s Danilov?”
“Disappeared with Honoré and Gilles. Won’t set foot in your house until the rest of the family agrees to your plan.”
“Plan?” I asked.
Tony shrugged as if it didn’t matter, and said to me, “The other day, while you were at the inn getting ready, I went home and proposed that the entire family sit down together with Honoré. No one hiding diamonds or crystals, just some questions and answers. Mother took to her bed, saying that my implied accusation was worse than a vampire attack—Robert roared and stamped—everyone else galloped to the moral high ground. So I asked Jerzy and Percy to guard the house, had Madame Tullée pack up the last of New Year’s dinner, and you know the rest.”
Phaedra’s indifference at the mention of “Madame Tullée” made it clear that that secret was still intact—making me wonder just how many secrets the von Mecklundburgs were keeping from one another.
Phaedra’s thoughts paralleled mine. “Now I’m beginning to think that someone wants us at each other’s throats.”