Okay. The invocation was done.
“He’s coming,” Erra said.
In the distance the trees fell. Five huge shaggy forms burst out of the forest, their massive tusks wrapped in metal. Behind them vampires galloped with their odd jerky gait, followed by human troops.
“Are those fucking mammoths?” Desandra asked.
“Yes.” Enormous, colossal mammoths, bigger than any reconstructions I had seen. Where the hell did my father get mammoths?
Desandra’s eyes lit up. “Kate, get off the tower, so I can get down there. I’ve never killed a mammoth.”
“Christopher?” I asked.
He leaned back. Blood-red wings snapped open from his back.
“Whoa.” Desandra backed away.
Christopher picked me up and leapt off the tower. We glided and turned right. I craned my neck. The ground gave under the leading mammoth, and the massive beast collapsed into a hidden trench. A chorus of eerie cackles filled the air. Jim had put boudas into the trenches.
Christopher’s eyes turned blood-red.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“The battlefield is calling.” His voice wasn’t his own.
“Can you hold on for a little while longer?”
“I’ll try.”
We swung toward a large oak. Christopher plunged down and landed, setting me down next to Barabas and Julie. Barabas looked like he’d jumped out of some D&D book featuring thieves and assassins. He wore leather armor and carried a sharp knife. A dark rag covered the bottom part of his face. Above it, his eyes were blood-red with demonic horizontal pupils. Julie stood holding the reins of our horses. She would be riding a roan mare. We all agreed that Peanut was much too beloved to take into battle. I would be riding Hugh’s mean Friesian. No horse on this battlefield would stand up to him.
Around me a sea of vampires waited, each bloodsucker crouching, perfectly still like a statue, a stripe of bright green running down their spines.
Christopher closed his wings around him and walked off, pacing, gripping his left forearm with his right hand so hard, his fingers turned the flesh completely white. Barabas walked over to him. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught Barabas’s voice, soothing, calming . . .
A battle horn roared.
I ran up to the oak and climbed up the rope ladder Jim’s people had conveniently left in place for me and clambered to the wooden platform at the top. Next to me a vampire crouched.
“Ghastek?”
“Of course,” Ghastek’s dry voice said from the vampire mouth. “Did you expect Santa Claus?”
I gave him my hard stare and turned to the field. We were in the woods on the south side. The Keep was a little to the left of me, and my father’s advancing forces were to the right. Somewhere to my far right, Curran and his forces waited. I had kissed him this morning and didn’t want to let go.
A battle raged less than half a mile from us, across the open ground. Two mammoths made it past the trenches and battered the Keep walls while waves of my father’s troops splashed against it. Vampires swarmed up the stones and shapeshifters met them among the parapets. The fortress held.
No sign of my father.
“Erra?” I said softly.
She appeared next to me.
“I cannot tell you how disturbing this is,” Ghastek said.
“You’re telling me. You know she killed my favorite mule?”
“You killed me,” Erra said. “I think we’re even.”
My father wouldn’t commit to the field until he was reasonably certain of a victory. And that wouldn’t happen until the Keep’s front door was kicked in.
The bodies of shapeshifters fell from the wall. Argh.
“Your lion built it too well,” Erra told me.
“Yes, everything is my fault.”
“What’s going on with Steed?” Ghastek asked.
“He’s having difficulty with bloodlust.”
“It is really him?”
“Yes.”
“Life moves in mysterious ways,” Ghastek said.
Blood smeared the gray stones of the Keep, as the mammoths threw themselves against it again and again. The left side of the wall trembled, rocked, like a rotten tooth ready to come out, and collapsed. My father’s troops flooded into the gap and broke like a wave on shapeshifter claws and teeth.
Come on.
Bodies flew. People screamed.
Come on, Father. Come to the slaughter.
Minutes ticked by.
More bodies.
A new line of troops spilled onto the field and in its center a shiny chariot sped, drawn by horned horses.
“Is your father riding a gold chariot?” Ghastek asked.
“He’s a product of his times. It’s what he grew up with.”
“There is nothing wrong with a gold chariot,” Erra said. “It’s meant to be symbolic.”
We watched the line of troops advance, gaining ground against the isolated clumps of shapeshifters. Slowly Jim’s forces retreated to the Keep.
Not yet.
The trenches emptied as boudas scrambled toward the Keep. Jim’s forces broke and ran for the safety of the walls, leaving their dead on the battlefield.
Now.
I looked down. “Now, Christopher!”
He shot into the air, spinning as he rose. Barabas waved at me and sprinted through the woods, heading east to where Curran’s forces waited.
The trees across from us, on the other side of the battlefield and to the right, turned black. Dark magic gathered there, cold and terrible. The trees rustled and a gigantic black dragon head emerged from the trees. My father raised his hand. Golden light poured from it, shielding the troops directly around him.
Aspid slithered across the field. Roman rode atop his head, feet anchored, his arms opened wide. A black crown rested on his hair. Behind him black smoke stretched like an impossibly long mantle. A wall of black flames, thirty feet tall and twenty feet wide, cut the field in two in the dragon’s wake.
I scrambled off the tree. Two vampires stepped forward, spread a sheet of clear plastic on the ground, and knelt on it. I felt the navigators let go and grabbed their minds. The bloodsuckers opened their throats in unison and I crushed their minds as they bled out.
I sliced my arm, let my blood mix with that of the undead, and felt it catch on fire with my power. The red spiraled up my legs, climbing higher, over my thighs, over my waist, forming armor. It felt clunky.
“Awful,” Erra said. “You are an embarrassment. Stand still.”
My aunt circled me, words of a long-forgotten language falling from her mouth. It felt like forever, but it took only seconds. When I looked down at myself, I wore blood armor. My aunt stopped in front of me and rested her ghostly fingers under my chin.
“Go and free yourself from your father.”
“I will,” I told her.
I swung onto the Friesian. He pawed the ground, his nostrils flaring. Julie was already on her mare, her eyes wild and scared.
“Raise the banner.”
She raised the flag, and the green standard of In-Shinar fluttered above us.
I let the stallion go. He tore out of the woods at a gallop. We burst into the open. The wall of black flames rose to the right of us, and within it monstrous mouths and claws writhed, grabbing any who strayed too close and tearing into their bodies. We had cut my father’s forces in half. I was on the Keep side of the flame wall, and Curran and his mercs, the Order, and Jim’s reserve were on the other.
More vampires poured from the other side of the woods. Roland’s troops still pressed their attack on the Keep, not realizing what was happening.
Above the Keep Christopher dived from between the clouds, his wings opened wide, like a fallen angel. He opened his mouth and scream
ed.
The mass of troops churned, as hundreds of men and creatures tried to flee in unison, away from the Keep and toward the smoke. Christopher screamed again and again, his shriek gripping my spine with an icy hand even from this distance. The offensive broke apart. People fled. Christopher swooped down, grasped a writhing body, and flew up, burying his fangs in the man’s neck.
We tore into the retreating troops. I swung Sarrat, slicing, severing necks and backs. Around me vampires swarmed without a sound, silent, merciless, slaughtering everything in their path.
The field was chaos. Men, beasts, shapeshifters, and animals clashed, screaming, snarling, and ripping at each other. The air smelled like blood. Harpies dived through the sky. One aimed for me and a winged form shot out from the clouds and sliced it in half with a flaming sword. Teddy Jo. I didn’t think he’d come.
A vampire headed for me. Not one of ours. I rode it down. The stallion stomped on the undead, and I finished it, crushing its skull with my magic. Across the field, green and bare undead crashed against each other, fighting silent duels.
A massive beast shaped like a leopard but twice that size leapt at me. The impact of its weight took me off the horse. Claws scraped my blood armor. I thrust Sarrat between its ribs, twisted, heaved it off me, and rolled to my feet.
A ring of fighters waited for me.
They charged me and I danced. It was a beautiful dance, of blood and steel and severed life. My breathing evened out. The world was crystal clear, the sounds crisp, the colors vivid. Everything I tried worked. Every strike found its target. Every thrust pierced a body. They cut and slashed, but I didn’t wait for them. I kept cutting, losing myself in the simple rhythm.
They’d come here to kill me. They died instead. Corpses piled up at my feet. My aunt was laughing. And then they broke and ran.
I looked up. The wall of black flames was thinning. I could almost see through it.
“Retreat!” I screamed. “Retreat now!”
The green-striped vampires fled from the field toward the Keep. Once the wall went down, my father would be able to reach them. The bloodsuckers would die by the dozens and so would the navigators piloting them.
I turned. The black smoke had dissipated. The entire front of my father’s army was gone. Mammoths lay like burial mounds of fur. Bodies, vampire and human, sprawled on the grass.
Most of the remaining army gathered around my father, forming a mass of bodies. I saw Curran roaring, enormous, demonic, tearing into monsters left and right. The mercs followed in his wake.
My father froze in his chariot, his face bloodless. One moment he had a vanguard and now it was all gone. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking to the left. I turned my head and saw the sea of green-and-blue banners the bloodsuckers had left thrust into the dirt as they retreated.
“Glory to In-Shinar!”
The hair on the back of my neck rose.
I spun around.
Julie sat on her horse, holding my banner. Her voice rolled, charged with power. “Glory to In-Shinar!”
The air screamed as the first blast from Andrea’s sorcerous ballistae tore through it. The green missiles shrieked over my head and pounded the front of my father’s remaining force. Bodies flew, burning with magic fire. Andrea’s ace in the hole.
My father raised his hands. A sphere of light appeared in front of him, shielding the troops. The missiles crashed into it, their magic splashing over the light and falling down, powerless.
My father brought his hands together. The corpse of the mammoth about two hundred yards to the left of me shuddered. Magic built within it, spilling out as thin green smoke. I reached for the magic around me and froze it, but the green smoke thickened. Whatever he was doing couldn’t be blocked by the land’s defenses. I started toward it, climbing over bodies.
The carcass burst. Three creatures emerged, clad in tattered rags. A foul magic wrapped around them. I had felt many fucked-up things over the years, but this . . . this felt like death. Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn and run the other way.
“Plaguewalkers,” my aunt snarled in my ear.
“Shapeshifters are resistant to disease.”
“Not this disease.”
I ran, scrambling over the bodies.
The plaguewalkers started toward the Keep.
A ballista missile smashed into the middle of the three and exploded. They kept walking. Shit. Magic didn’t do anything. They had to be physically cut down.
Shapeshifters burst from the hole in the Keep wall. The first shapeshifter, a lean wolf in warrior form, reached the leading plaguewalker. Ten feet from it, the wolf collapsed, clawing at his face. Another shapeshifter, another fall.
Where the hell was my stupid horse?
The plaguewalkers moved forward. Arrows flew from the Keep and sank into the plaguewalkers, but they kept going. They would keep walking, just like that, until they walked straight into the Keep.
A huge Kodiak bear charged through the shapeshifter ranks. The leading plaguewalker raised his hand.
I heard Curran roar.
Lesions split Mahon’s hide. He kept running, too fast, too massive to stop. Pus slid from the wounds, falling to the ground.
I was running as fast as I could.
The bear tore into the plaguewalkers. The massive paw crushed the first one’s skull.
All of Mahon’s fur was gone now. Pus drenched his sides. The great bear of Atlanta spun and slapped the second plaguewalker’s head. The creature’s skull cracked, like a broken egg.
The third plaguewalker raised his hands. A stream of foul magic poured from it. The flesh on Mahon’s sides rotted away. Bone gaped through the holes. Oh my God.
The bear threw himself onto the last creature and missed, collapsing. I lunged between the plaguewalker and Mahon. The creature stared at me, its eyes glowing green dots on a rotting face.
I sliced. The plaguewalker flitted away, as if made of air.
The blood armor on my hands turned black. Bits of it began to chip away.
I thrust Sarrat into the plaguewalker’s chest and withdrew. Foul slime dripped off the blade. The creature seemed no worse for wear. I wasn’t doing enough damage.
Curran landed atop the plaguewalker and locked his hands on the creature’s shoulders. The plaguewalker shrieked. Curran’s hands blistered. He roared and tore the creature in half. The pieces of the plaguewalker’s body went flying.
The first corpse was re-forming.
“Curran!” I screamed, pointing with my sword.
He spun around. The first plaguewalker was rising like a zombie from a horror movie.
A white tiger landed next to us. Dali opened her mouth and roared. Magic emanated from her, sliding over me like an icy burst of clear water. The pieces of the plaguewalkers rose up, melting as if the air itself consumed them.
She purified them. Wow.
I dropped to the ground by Mahon. The Bear shrank into a man. The skin on his torso was missing. His hands and face were a mess of boils. Oh God. Oh my God.
Curran, still in warrior form, knelt and cradled the dying man.
Mahon saw him. His lips shook. He struggled to say something.
“Best . . . son. Best . . . could ever have.”
“Shut up,” Curran told him. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Best . . .” Mahon whispered.
Nasrin knelt by Mahon, chanting.
Curran rose. His gaze fixed on my father’s chariot.
My father had to die.
“We take the shot!” I yelled at him.
He glared at me, his eyes pure gold.
“I’m on my land. I’m strongest here. We can end this now!”
A pale light slid over his body. He fell on all fours, growing larger. All traces of humanity vanished. Only lion remained, the biggest
lion I had ever seen, woven from bone, flesh, and magic. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t an animal. He was a force, a creature, a thing that was beyond the understanding of nature’s human stepchildren.
I grabbed Curran’s mane and vaulted onto his back. He didn’t even notice. He charged across the battlefield toward the chariot and my father in it. We burst into the melee like a cannonball. He tore and bit. I sliced and cut, and we forced our way through the bodies, through the flesh and blood, closer and closer to my father.
He turned around.
He saw us coming.
Our gazes met.
Curran leapt, sailing above the mass of people. I raised Sarrat. We would end this here.
My father saw the promise of death in my eyes. In that fleeting instant he understood I knew we were bound and I didn’t care.
We landed in an empty chariot. My father had vanished.
Curran roared. I clamped my hands over my ears as the chariot beneath me shook.
He leapt off the chariot and raged across the battlefield and I raged with him until there was nobody left to kill.
EPILOGUE
“WHAT IS IN this flower crown?” Fiona sniffed the air.
“Smells odd, doesn’t it?” Andrea said.
“Good things,” Evdokia told her.
“She will thank us later.” Sienna winked at me.
I stood in a huge tent set up in the Five Hundred Acre wood, while Fiona, Andrea, and Julie put the final touches on my wedding outfit. The night had fallen, the magic was in full swing, and the tent was lit by bright golden globes Roman had found somewhere and set up. The light was warm and cheerful, the tent smelled of honeysuckle, and all my friends were here. For some odd reason I felt completely terrified.
The three witches of the Witch Oracle had come in to bring a flower crown woven of beautiful white flowers that looked like tiny tulips with pointed petals, and never left. Dali had come in for something and never left either. Desandra brought fruit and parked herself in the corner. Adora sat quietly by the entrance. I had a feeling she had decided to guard it. Martina, Ascanio’s mother, was munching on some pastries next to her.
The flap of the tent opened and Martha came in, followed by George.