“We’ve been living in a bad horror movie for almost eight years.”
He dropped one eyebrow. “Huh. I guess you have a point.”
We looped around the floor until we found the elevators and situated ourselves against the wall across from them. A pair of nearby windows conveniently pointed in the direction of Barlow Bank, and we peered through their dirty glass, at the hulking brick form of the bank shrouded in smoke, anxiously waiting for the show to begin. Any second now, the sídhe would—
A shockwave blasted past the office.
The windows shattered, launching a wave of glass down the hall. Most of the shards bounced harmlessly off my spelled jacket, but a few slipped by my raised arm and nicked my face. Drake, who had no protective clothing, hissed as the shards pelted his upper body, but none were large enough to deal him any serious damage.
We weathered the glass rain until the last of it finally settled in a glittering pool on the soggy old carpet. Then we climbed to our feet and rushed to the empty windows.
The shockwave had ridden outward from a powerful force blast that carried Orlagh’s magic signature, and it had cleared the neighborhood of smoke four blocks in every direction, revealing the old bank in all its faded glory. The entire front wall of the main room had been jettisoned inward, crushing whatever unfortunates had been standing in its way. And Orlagh, nothing but a flittering phantom in the night, was now tearing through the ground floor, launching spells left and right. Vampires sprang from the shadows to try and slow her down, but most of them had no magic, and even with their frightening speed, they weren’t a match for her.
Four heads went rolling. Three bodies were ripped to pieces. And two more were crushed flat under giant blocks of ice that swung into existence from nowhere and rammed the vampires like a speeding train.
When all was said and done, Orlagh alone remained standing on the expansive marble floor. But Pam did not lie among the fallen. As I’d predicted, she’d fled up the stairs the moment Orlagh barged through the entrance. Any moment now, Pam would emerge from that narrow door on the rooftop and come face to face with Eamon Boyle, who was already perched in the darkness beneath an exhaust fan, ready and waiting to pounce on his prey.
Drake whistled. “That’s a lot of property damage just to catch one vampire.”
“What’s one building added to the hundreds that have already been destroyed?”
He shot me a curious look. “You know, as much as you go on about protecting your city, you don’t seem too broken up about its current status as an apocalyptic bonfire.”
“I don’t?”
“No, you seem kind of indifferent, to be honest.”
I closed my eyes, and on a deep exhale, tore down the thin veneer of stoicism that separated the faerie logic now driving my decisions from the deadly blizzard that had been raging inside my soul since I’d first witnessed Abarta’s slaughterhouse in the ruins of Maige Itha. When I opened my eyes again and met Drake’s inquisitive gaze with one that displayed my feelings, true and raw and unadulterated, all the pain and all the fury and all the promise of total vengeance for the injustice that had been dealt against me and mine, Drake recoiled in shock and stumbled off into a support column.
“Holy fuck, that’s scary,” he breathed out. “I feel like I just stepped into an ice bath.”
“Question my sincerity again,” I said, “and I might actually treat you to one.”
“Sorry.” He grimaced. “Didn’t mean to insult you.”
I made a noncommittal sound.
“Can you, uh, put the scary faerie eyes away now?”
“I can try.” I nudged the rage away from the surface of my mind. It didn’t want to go, not with the view of the burning city so neatly framed by the windowsill in front of me, not with the threat of more death and destruction at Vianu’s hands hanging over the city like a Sword of Damocles, nothing but a fraying rope holding it aloft. But it moved at my command, that primal fury, because on some level, its almost sentient nature recognized that if I allowed myself to be distracted by the anguish of what was currently happening, I wouldn’t be able to prevail over my enemies and save the future.
I blinked a few times and gave Drake another look. “Better?”
His taut shoulders relaxed. “Much.”
Returning my attention to the bank, I found that I’d missed the apprehension of Pam. Boyle had left the roof with the vampire woman in his grasp and met up with Orlagh, who’d come up the stairs after her. They were wrangling with Pam’s flailing limbs, each fist and foot strong enough to punch through steel, while the other sídhe soldiers were circling the bank’s exterior like sharks, waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
But if more vamps were close enough to respond to the commotion, they were too intimidated by the presence of six sídhe to make a move, because no one came to Pam’s aid. Orlagh and Boyle hauled her down the street, shuffled into the office building through the back service entrance, and burst through the stairwell door next to the elevators a couple minutes later.
Hopping to attention, Drake and I led the pair, plus their writhing package, to the dentist’s office. I picked a room at random and stood aside while Orlagh magically bound Pam to the dental chair and Boyle pressed the tip of his sword to the vampire’s forehead, threatening to run it through her brain if she so much as twitched.
Pam was panting like a vexed animal, fangs bared, crazed eyes darting this way and that. They eventually landed on Drake, who was huddled in the corner, prompting her to spit out, “Traitor! Your father will kill you for this.”
Drake snorted. “My father was going to kill me anyway, lady. Get a clue.”
“We don’t have time for idle chitchat,” Orlagh said. “Whelan?”
I stepped up to the chair, unsheathing Fragarach.
Pam let out a choked laugh. “What, threatening me with one sword isn’t enough?”
“This isn’t a threat.” I pressed the tip of the sword against the tender flesh of her throat. “It’s a certainty.”
“What kind of cryptic faerie bullshit is…?” Her manic eyes widened as the initial pulse of Fragarach’s magic rumbled through her bones. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Asking you a simple question.” I directed the sword’s spells to form a shell around the vampire’s mind, and from this shell, a hundred million tiny spikes of energy, like needles, drove themselves into the virtual matter of her essence. This process didn’t hurt exactly, but there was something distinctly uncomfortable about it, like an itch whose source you couldn’t pinpoint. You felt a keen sense of violation resonating through your being that grew stronger every time someone prompted you for an answer, and so nagging that, if you tried to hold your tongue, it could make you vomit.
I leaned close to Pam’s snarling face and asked, “Where is Vianu planning to cast the second part of the summoning ritual for the Wild Hunt?”
Pam’s lips parted of their own accord to give the answer, but she bit her tongue to stop herself from speaking. Blood dribbled through her teeth and ran down her chin, diluting the cold sweat that had already sprung from her skin, giving her pale complexion a ghostly sheen.
She thrashed in the chair, nearly ripping the entire apparatus out of the floor and causing Boyle’s poised sword to slice her forehead wide open. Her eyes bulged more and more for each second she withheld her response, until they looked ready to pop right out of her skull. And after forty-five seconds of resistance, she began to violently gag, over and over until I was sure she would spew all the stolen blood from her stomach.
She didn’t.
Instead, she blurted out the answer: “The dog park where the central market used to be.”
I pulled the sword from her throat, and she let out a deep, gulping breath of relief.
“Thank you for your help,” I said blithely.
Then I sliced off her head.
It hit the floor with a dull thud and rolled off into Drake’s corner.
He kicked it
away in disgust. “I guess that means we’re done here?”
“You guess right.” I ran both sides of Fragarach’s blade along the vampire corpse’s pants leg, cleaning off the blood.
“How far is the old market from here?” Orlagh asked.
“About three miles northeast.” I sheathed Fragarach and yanked from my belt a yellow walkie-talkie. “A short trip if we travel by whirlwind again.”
“I’ll handle our transit this time,” Boyle said to Orlagh as he sheathed his own blade. “You spent a lot of energy neutralizing the vampires in the bank. You should rest until the primary battle begins so you can recoup some of that loss before we face the elder in direct combat. It will not be an easy fight, even if he is preoccupied with the summoning ritual.”
“I agree.” She flashed a hand signal to the rest of the soldiers, who’d now gathered in the main hall outside the dentist’s office. “We need to strategically ration our power expenditures from this point on, until all vampire operatives have been eliminated. Given the number of fights currently underway across the city, we could be mopping up the remnants of Vianu’s forces until midnight.”
“Assuming the city is still standing at midnight,” Drake muttered.
“It will be, as long as we don’t waste the time we have left to stop the vampire lord.” She moved back into the reception area, signaling for us to follow. “How much time do you estimate that is, Whelan?”
“Roughly thirty minutes, based on when Abarta’s spell went off in Maige Itha.”
“Not a whole lot of time to plan a major offensive,” Boyle grumbled.
“We’ll be cutting it close to the wire.” Orlagh yanked the glass door of the office so hard that it shattered entirely and crashed to the floor in a thousand pieces. She tossed the door handle aside and added, “But we’ll make do.”
Boyle hopped over the pile of glass as he tailed her into the hall. “Should we recall the rest of the team?”
“No,” she replied, directing the other four soldiers to head back to the roof via the stairwell. “If we pull the others off their city details, the dullahan will be left to fight the vampires without sídhe support, and they’ll suffer much heavier losses, among themselves and civilians. There’s no point in saving the city from the Hunt if we’re just going to let the vampires burn it all down and kill thousands of people anyway.”
Boyle grunted. “We could call in more support from Tír na nÓg.”
“They’ll take too long to get here,” Orlagh and I spoke over each other. I paused and let her continue, “The bureaucratic wheel of the Unseelie Army moves too slowly between worlds. By the time a backup contingent is dispatched to Earth, this will all be over.”
Boyle swore in a rural fae dialect. “I greatly dislike fighting in this realm.”
“You’re not the only one,” I said. “War on Earth yields far too much devastation.”
On that grim note, we filed into the stairwell, trudged back up to the roof, and rejoined the rest of the soldiers. As Boyle barked out the long invocation for another whirlwind spell, I switched on the walkie-talkie and passed the news about the old market on to Indira, who had hung back at HQ to help shape what remained of our numbers into a functional fighting force.
The static over the feed was loud, the signal bogged down with too many spells to prevent enemy interference, but Indira got the gist of my message. She replied that everyone would be on the march to the park in two minutes or less.
Based on the quickest route from HQ to the market, I picked a good rendezvous point five blocks from the southwestern corner of the dog park and relayed the location to both Indira and Boyle. Then, wishing Indira luck, I turned the walkie off again, secured it to my belt, and scooted closer to the rest of my group.
The interwoven air currents created by Boyle’s spell picked up speed and tightened around us. They formed a strong, spherical vortex that, at first, lifted us gently from the rooftop—before it flung us high into the sky as if we’d been shot from a cannon.
Boyle was not quite as good at this spell as Orlagh.
Despite the turbulent ride, however, the whirlwind deposited us at the correct stop: on the rooftop of a townhouse near the intersection of Marlowe and Petunia, the designated rendezvous point. We arrived well ahead of the Watchdog forces, as planned, giving us a chance to scout the park in advance and learn just how dire this situation had become. To that end, Orlagh and I broke off from the rest of the group, leaving Boyle to position the other soldiers in strategic places along the street so they could handle any vamps who emerged from the park and attempted to attack the Watchdogs en route.
Orlagh and I jogged along the rooftops, jumping the gaps over smoky alleys, until we reached a fire-damaged apartment complex that bordered the edge of the dog park. Because there were no longer any structures in the park that one could set fire to, the street-level haze was much thinner than it was elsewhere. Which allowed Orlagh and I, half-hidden behind a cracked chimney stack, to observe Vianu’s summoning circle and all the defenses he’d erected to dissuade any sabotage attempts.
If I hadn’t already hated Vianu with a passion, this would have been the tipping point:
The summoning circle was nearly identical to the one Abarta had drawn in Maige Itha, but Vianu had “streamlined” the sacrifice ritual by having the unfortunate humans literally line up in front of a metal morgue table that had been commandeered for use as a makeshift altar. Two vampires policed the line, and if any human tried to make a run for it, or refused to step closer to their gruesome fate, one of the vamps would grab the person by the neck, smack them hard enough to break teeth, and force them forward. And as if all of that wasn’t horrible enough, when Vianu finished butchering each sacrifice, he tossed their broken corpse onto a pile not five feet away from the front of the line.
The blood of the dead had soaked the ground beneath the feet of those soon to die.
And that was only the beginning of the nightmare. The far worse end lay beyond the summoning circle.
Encompassing the circle was a stunningly powerful ward array that stretched thirty feet in all directions, its lines and symbols glowing an ominous red. Scattered across this vast, complex array were fifty-two circles of bare ground, and inside each circle sat a person who was bound in place with spelled manacles that had been pinned to the earth with long metal spikes.
In one cluster of circles sat Connolly and his entourage, including Aileen, all of them black and blue and bloody from where the vampires had pummeled half the life out of them. And they weren’t healing from those wounds either, because their manacles were made of iron. The cuffs were steadily eating through their wrists, burning their flesh and souls alike, disrupting their healing factors, and causing them so much pain that most of them had passed out.
In another cluster of circles sat Saoirse, Commissioner Tinsley, Captain Drew…dozens of high-ranking employees of the Kinsale PD, the fire department, and all the other emergency service organizations. While they weren’t being actively harmed like the fae, they were still in terrible shape:
Broken bones stuck out from torn skin. Dislocated jaws hung loose, mouths drooling red-tinged saliva. Dark bruises blossomed across every exposed inch of skin. And more than one had a bloodstained neck, the telltale sign of a vampire feeding. Saoirse was counted among that number.
In the third and final cluster sat people garbed in nice clothes and fine jewelry, decorated with minor injuries and tearstained cheeks. I only recognized a few of their faces, but those identities told me the whole story. These were Kinsale’s rich industrialists, the business leaders who’d been supporting the bulk of the city’s commerce for the last eight years.
The vampires had raided their homes in Rosewood, terrorized their dinner parties, ripped them away from their gold-trimmed dining tables, and herded them like cattle to the park to play a role that none could play better: the rich hostages whose deaths would wreak socioeconomic havoc.
The ward array was a boo
by trap imprisoning nearly every person vital to this city’s existence. And if we disturbed the array in any way at any time, every last one of those people would burn alive.
Chapter Thirty-One
I walked the road to Vianu’s endgame alone. Like I had walked every road as a stretch scavenger. Like I had walked into Pettigrew half a year ago with no concept of what deadly pests crawled among its shadows.
Crushing the detritus of an aging apocalypse beneath my boots. Ignoring the scents of decay and desperation that still lingered in the air almost a decade after humanity had fallen. Basking in the persistent touch of winter that whispered to the nature I fought so hard to deny. Pretending that the world was on the road to real recovery even as the actual roads crumbled under my weight.
For seven years, I had been an ignorant, petulant child, and willfully so. But the last seven months had taught me a lesson. And now it was time for me to show the great Lord Vianu just what I had learned.
The summoning circle lay where the heart of Kinsale’s central market had once been, and I approached it like I had approached the market so many times, with a casual gait and a chip on my shoulder. For each yard closer I drew to the circle, another vampire dropped from the top of a tree or popped up from behind a scraggly bush to menace me, but none of them attacked.
I knew why. Vianu had staked a claim on my life for the embarrassment I’d dealt him in Pettigrew. He wouldn’t be satisfied with my death unless he had the pleasure of killing me with his own two hands, or via a scheme of his own design that inflicted maximum torment on my psyche.
Since the bomb plot hadn’t burned me to ash, and the backup portal trap he’d set in conjunction with Abarta had failed to end me too, he now had the chance to default to the first option. The option that allowed him to savor my suffering up close and personal. So he’d ordered his minions to stand aside, to let me pass, to let me waltz right on up to the edge of the ward array that I couldn’t penetrate without sacrificing fifty-two people, one of which was my dearest friend.
What Dawn Demands Page 27