“We have a duty to avert this,” Ghastek said.
“You’re right. You should send your undead army home and we’ll discuss this like reasonable people.”
Ghastek sighed. “I’m a reactive party to the bloodshed.”
“Ghastek, you’re an intelligent man. You’re standing here wearing ridiculous fatigues and getting ready to assault a place full of families and children with a horde of vampires. Does this seem right to you?”
Ghastek’s face jerked. “The concepts of right or wrong are inconsequential in this case.”
“The concepts of right or wrong are always consequential. It can’t be situational or it’s not right or wrong.”
“I didn’t come here to debate ethical obligations with you,” Ghastek said.
“You opened the door. I just walked through it.”
“You’re harboring a fugitive. Deliver her to our custody.”
A shout made me turn. A man jumped from the wall of the Keep and sprinted to us. Brandon, Jennifer’s pet wolf. Now what? If he did anything to disrupt this, I’d break his neck.
Brandon dashed across the snow and leaped into the circle. He was clutching something in his hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jim snarled.
Brandon dodged him. He opened his fingers and I caught a flash of what he was holding—Jennifer’s water bottle. He ripped the cap off it and hurled the liquid at me.
I moved, but not fast enough. Cold water splashed my right cheek, soaking my hair. Behind me, Ghastek threw his hands up, and what missed me landed on his fingers. The Master of the Dead stared, bewildered, water dripping from hands. His eyes bulged in angry confusion.
Jim moved. His hand closed on Brandon’s wrist and twisted. Brandon dropped to his knees into the snow, his arm wrenched out of its socket.
The whole world had gone nuts on me. I couldn’t even get angry anymore. I’d run out of rage.
“It’s done,” the blond man squeezed out. “I did it for her.”
What the hell? I would kill Jennifer. I would do it myself and save Desandra the trouble.
Jim twisted his arm, bending him into a pretzel. “I’ll just be a minute.”
He grabbed Brandon by his collar and dragged him out of the circle toward the Keep. The gates opened just enough to let a person pass, and Derek and another shapeshifter shot out. Jim shoved Brandon in their direction, turned around, and came back into the circle.
Ghastek finally regained his ability to speak. “How dare you? Is this an insult?”
“Yes,” I told him. “But to me, not to you. My deepest apologies.”
Hugh chuckled.
Derek and the other shapeshifter muscled Brandon back behind the doors.
Ghastek opened his mouth. No words came out. He was obviously struggling to get himself under control.
“I’m very sorry,” I repeated. Now I was apologizing to the man who was threatening to kill me. Here’s hoping my arteries didn’t explode from the pressure.
“This is outrageous.”
“So is dropping loose vampires into the middle of a Conclave meeting.”
Ghastek clamped his mouth shut.
“We will take the accused now,” Rowena said.
The three riders drew closer. Sheriff hats. It had to be Beau.
“And if we give her to you? What then? A lynching? Maybe you’ll burn her at the stake? Last time I checked we at least pretended we were civilized people.”
Ghastek locked his teeth. He kept a pair of chains used in witch trials on the wall of his office. The reminder of witch burnings had hit home.
“She will be given every opportunity to prove her innocence,” Rowena said.
“Yes, she will,” Jim said. “We’re turning her over to human law enforcement.”
Hugh’s face lost its half-smile. Oh no. Did you find half a worm in the apple you just bit?
“That would be extremely unwise,” Ghastek said.
“Why?”
“For one, it exposes both of our factions to public scrutiny,” Rowena said.
“I thought you were all about avoiding bloodshed,” Jim said.
I gave Ghastek my best psycho smile. “I think we could all benefit from a little transparency.”
“You’re fucking up,” Hugh said from his horse.
“Shut the hell up,” I told him. “Nobody’s talking to you.”
“You’re bluffing,” Hugh said. “You won’t find anyone to take her.”
I pointed to the approaching riders.
Ghastek turned to glance over his shoulder. Beau and two deputies, a short compact man with red hair and a Hispanic woman in her forties, were closing in.
“Beau Clayton?” Ghastek dipped his head and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He has no jurisdiction here.”
“Yes he does. Those woods over there are in Milton County.”
Hugh’s eyes turned dark.
“He’s respected and has a high profile,” Ghastek called out. “If you kill him, every law enforcement agency will converge on us.”
Beau was only a few yards away. Six foot six and built like one of the ancient Saxons who swung axes as tall as they were, Beau rode a dappled Percheron cross that stood about eighteen hands tall and looked strong enough to pull a semi. The two deputies rode Tennessee walkers. Three riders, three shotguns. Nothing else.
Beau came to a stop. The vampires stared at him, held in check by the navigators’ minds.
“Alright,” Beau boomed. “I’m Beau Clayton, lawfully elected by the people of Milton County as their sheriff. It’s the duty of my office to faithfully execute all writs, warrants, precepts, and processes directed to me as sheriff of this county. I’m here to execute a warrant.”
The bloodsuckers stared at him.
Hugh’s stare turned calculating. He was thinking about it.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take this person into custody. You are going to turn around and go home. The lynching has been canceled. Move along. There is nothing to see here.”
Hugh’s stallion danced under him.
“Disperse,” Beau repeated.
Hugh reached for his sword.
I raised my hand. The gates of the Keep swung open. Shapeshifters in warrior form waited in rows, filling the courtyard, their fur raised, their fangs bared. I had put every shapeshifter capable of a half-form into the courtyard. Sixty-four people. Only eighteen were combat rated, but from here, it looked like every single one was a render.
“If you assault an officer of law, the Pack will retaliate,” Jim said.
“Your best people are gone,” Ghastek said. “You’re at half-strength at best.”
I nodded. “Yes, most of our young single people have gone to hunt. You’ll be facing parents whose children are in that Keep. Have you ever tried to take a cub from a wolf? You’re welcome to give it a shot.”
Hugh’s hand was on his sword.
I reached for Slayer. Laughter bubbled up. “Go ahead, Hugh. Make my day. I’m really frustrated right now. I need to vent. Please.”
He glared at me.
“You lost,” I told him. “I called your bluff. Take your goons and go home.”
“We have no legal standing to attack a sheriff,” Ghastek said.
“You’ll do what I tell you,” Hugh told him.
“No, he won’t,” I told him. I could tell by Ghastek’s eyes that he was out. Whatever Hugh decided now, I had done my job. I had stopped this war from happening.
A roar rolled through the snowy field, shaking the winter air like a sudden, terrifying clap of thunder. Hugh’s Friesian jerked. The roar cascaded, frothing with menace and fury, awakening some long-forgotten instinct that severed the rational part of the brain from the body and left only three options open: fight, flight, or freeze.
Curran.
The relief drowned me, turning me weightless, and for a short blissful moment I was completely and utterly happy. Curran!
The trees at the
north edge of the field shook as a flock of birds took flight. Curran leaped into the snow. He rose almost eight feet tall in warrior form, a muscled terrifying blend of a man and a predatory cat, sheathed in gray fur and armed with claws the size of my fingers. His head was pure lion. He opened his mouth and roared.
An enormous Kodiak bear emerged from the brush, shaking his big furry body. Next to him a bouda giggled. I’d never been so happy to hear that eerie hair-raising cackle in my entire life.
Shapeshifters poured out of the woods, ten, twenty, more . . . Where did he get them . . . ?
He must’ve gone to the Wood and pulled our people off the hunt. He’d brought an army. Yes!
Curran broke into a run. The shapeshifters followed, raising powdery snow into the air.
“We’re done here.” Ghastek turned to the sea of vampires. “Mission aborted. Bogey to mother.”
The vampires streamed off the field.
I laughed.
Hugh turned his horse, facing me. “I tried to be nice, but I have my limits. You want to be treated like an animal, I’ll treat you like one.”
He opened his mouth. Magic ripped from him like a tidal wave and snapped, catching me. A power word.
The right side of my face turned hot. A pale gold light spiraled around me. Next to me, Ghastek jerked, caught in an identical glowing tornado.
On the wall behind me, Christopher screamed, “Mistress!”
Hugh smirked.
Whatever was happening, he would die before it was over. I dashed to him across the snow, sword out. The light moved with me, streaming around me in bright sunny ribbons. I leaped over the thorns.
Hugh slid off his horse.
Curran sprinted to me, his eyes pure gold.
I struck. Hugh’s blade met mine. He bared his teeth at me.
The tornado of light around me pulsed with red, slicing through Slayer’s blade where it touched Hugh’s sword. The blade snapped in half.
No!
The field, Hugh, and Curran vanished.
13
SOMEONE JERKED THE ground from under my feet. I hurtled through empty air, weightless, my arms transparent. Bricks flashed before me. I was falling through a round shaft. Directly below me a thick metal grate blocked dark water.
I’m going to die.
I hit the grate and passed through it, as if it were air. My body plunged into the water.
Lukewarm. Wet.
My body turned solid. I kicked, surfaced, and stared at half a sword in my hand. Hugh broke my sword. He broke Slayer.
He broke my sword.
I curled into a ball around my saber, plunging into the water. I’d had Slayer since I was five. Voron gave it to me. I had slept with it under my bed almost every night for the past twenty-two years. Slayer was a part of me and now it was broken. Broken in half. It felt like someone had cut my arm off and it just kept hurting and hurting.
I would kill him. It wasn’t an “if.” It was a “when.”
He broke Slayer.
Above me someone else was falling down, through the grate, and into the water. I choked and swam up. A moment later and Ghastek surfaced next to me with a gasp. He splashed around in panic. I gave him room. About ten seconds later, he stopped thrashing and stared at me.
“It was that water. It marked us and made us vulnerable to d’Ambray’s magic.”
“Yes. Hugh must have bribed one of my people. Or blackmailed them. Or threatened.”
It was Jennifer. It had to be, and if that was the case, Hugh wouldn’t have had to threaten very hard. She must’ve sat there with that bottle in her hands and tried to scrape enough courage together to throw it on me. She couldn’t.
This would not break me. My sword might snap, but I couldn’t. I would win. I would get out of here. I would live. I would see the people I loved again.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. I slipped into a quiet, cold calm. Voron’s voice murmured from my memory and I leaned on it like a crutch. “Exits first.”
“Yes. I remember.”
I bent in the water, trying to slide what was left of my sword into the sheath while staying afloat. I missed.
I fucking missed. I hadn’t missed in two decades.
“You were the target,” Ghastek said. “I’m an unfortunate bystander.”
“It looks like that.” I finally managed to slip Slayer’s stump into the sheath.
“Where are we?”
“I have no idea.”
“He knew we would be teleported here. He knew, and he did nothing to stop my teleportation,” Ghastek said.
“It appears d’Ambray believes you’re expendable.”
Ghastek looked at me for a long moment. A muscle in his face jerked. With a guttural snarl, Ghastek punched the water. “That’s it. That’s fucking it!”
Uh-oh. In all the time I’d interacted with Ghastek, he never swore. Ever. The “premier” Master of the Dead was about to throw a tantrum. I braced myself.
“He comes into my city, he throws away my people, he orders me around like I’m his servant and now this? How dare he!”
I sighed. “How dare he!” came out. Could “Does he know who I am?” be far behind?
“I’m not some illiterate he can push around. I won’t be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that fucking Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms.” Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. “Ooo, I’m Hugh d’Ambray, I’m starting a war!”
Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.
“A war I’ve been trying years to avoid. Years!”
He kept saying that.
“Does he think it’s easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can’t understand elementary concepts?”
Good to know where we stood with him.
“I won’t tolerate it. Landon Nez will hear about this.”
Landon Nez was likely in charge of the Masters of the Dead. My father liked to divide his delegated authority. Hugh ran the Iron Dogs, the military branch. Someone had to run the People, the research branch. It was a position with a lot of turnover. Landon Nez must be the latest.
“Troglodyte. Dimwit. Degenerate!” Curses spilled out of Ghastek. “When I get out of here, I’ll throw every vampire at my disposal at him until they drain him dry. Then I’ll cut him to pieces and set his disemboweled body on fire!”
“You may have to get in line.”
He finally remembered I was there. “What?”
“I’ll give you a piece of Hugh to play with when I’m done.”
He didn’t appear to have heard me. “Nobody does that to me! I’ll rip his heart out. Does he know who I am?”
“Okay,” I told him. “Get it all out of your system.”
Ghastek dissolved into a torrent of obscenities.
I turned away. We had to get out of this mess and I had to check the place for the possible exit routes.
The grate above us was a pale color that usually meant the metal contained silver. Above the grate a shaft, about twenty feet across, rose a hundred feet straight up. Blue feylanterns thrust from the walls at regular intervals, illuminating the bricks. Too sheer to climb.
The grate itself consisted of inch-wide bars set in a crisscrossed pattern. Usually grates like this had crossbars that were welded or locked in by swaging, but this one showed no seams at all. It had to have been custom made specifically for this shaft.
The ends of the bars disappeared into the wall. I kicked to propel myself up, stretched, and caught the grate with my fingers. So far so good. I brought my legs up and kicked the grate with all my strength. Not just solid. Immovable. Well, at least the holes between the bars weren’t tiny.
I shrugged off my jacket, stuck one sleeve through the grate, and tied it to the other sleeve. Good enough.
I took a deep breath and dove into the murky water. Not cold, but not especiall
y warm either. Evdokia’s sweater would buy me some time. Wool kept you warm even when wet. I swam down along the wall. Darkness and bricks. No secret passages, no tunnels, no pipes with covers that could be pried loose.
Blood pounded in my ears. I had to turn back or I’d run out of air. I did a one-eighty and kicked for the surface. Above me the liquid sky promised light and air. I kicked harder. My lungs screamed for oxygen.
I broke the surface and gulped down air.
“. . . does he think he is?”
This was a prison cell meant to hold a shapeshifter. The silver in the bars would keep them from screwing with it. The water was too deep to kick off the bottom and try to ram the grate. Even if I somehow managed to pry the bars of the grate loose, which wasn’t bloody likely, the grate would fall on us and its sheer weight would drown us. My mind served a nightmarish view of the grate landing on me and pushing me deep into the dark water. No thanks.
The lanterns just added insult to injury. You could see exactly how hopeless the situation was.
You want to be treated like an animal, I’ll treat you like one. Thanks, Hugh. So glad to know you care.
I could do this. I’d trained all my life for it.
Ghastek had fallen silent.
“I don’t suppose that fancy uniform comes with a flotation device?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“A girl can hope.” I dove down and untied the laces on my left boot. The right boot followed. I surfaced to grab some air.
“What are you doing?” Ghastek asked.
“Lightening the load.” I dove, carefully pulled off my left boot, surfaced, caught the grate, and looped the shoelaces over the bar. I tied a knot and left the boot suspended, then did the same with the right boot. “I’ll get tired in an hour or two and I’ll need the shoes if we get out of here.”
I pulled off my belt, threaded it through the bars, and locked it into a loop. Ghastek raised his eyebrows. I thrust my arm through the loop and held on to the grate. The belt kept me in place without treading water.