by Wen Spencer
"Oh God in heaven," the Grigori breathed.
Seth closed his eyes and expanded his awareness of the area. Both houses were empty despite the late hour. If he had to guess, the Wickers had taken the entire neighborhood hostage. The driveway for the nursery was actually around the corner on a side street. It consisted of small house, a large barn, and a giant greenhouse. Dozens of people moved about the buildings. He hoped that it was merely one or two powerful witches with a host of puppets. He could be wrong.
In the greenhouse and hidden among the saplings of the nursery were large constructs.
"Decker?" Joshua called quietly.
Seth opened his eyes. The vampire had vanished soundlessly from their side without them noticing. "Shit."
"Where did he go?" Jack whispered.
"It will be all right," Elise said with quiet confidence. "He can be like darkness when he wants."
She was right. Seth could barely pinpoint the vampire drifting through the night. Joshua whimpered quietly with worry.
"He's fine." Seth patted Joshua on the shoulder.
A minute later, Decker returned without a sound. Was he actually floating to be so quiet? The vampire pointed at their black Bentley. "You said that the remaining witch drove a red car like this one?"
"Yes," Elise said.
"It's parked behind the house. You can't see if from the road. The engine is still warm. I can't tell how many witches are here, only that the only ones near to Boston are in this area."
Seth focused on the car in question. It seemed to be another Mulsanne extended wheelbase like the king favored; it was nearly two feet longer than most luxury cars. "He's right. It's a Bentley."
Where was the witch? Jack had described her as a tall brunette wearing a red fox jacket. He scanned the people within the buildings but none seemed to be in a fur coat. He reported what he could pick out. "There's about thirty people there. I can't tell how many are witches. There's massive constructs that haven't been activated with a blood sacrifice yet. I could have spotted them from Boston if they were. I think they're rooks."
"Rooks?" Joshua growled softly.
"Defense constructs. Very big. Very destructive. Very hard to kill. Imagine giant wooden octopus turtles."
"Are you trying to hurt my brain?" Joshua growled louder.
"It's okay." Decker patted Joshua on the head, quieting him. "We'll explain everything. Later."
Jack put a hand on Seth's chest and tried pushing him toward the car. "I am not going to let you go in there. It would be suicide. We're too few to take that many."
Seth steeled himself against letting his anger slip. Joshua knew how to fight but he hadn't been trained to kill. The stress of a violent fight would unleash his wolf. (Joshua was barely in control of it now.) Anyone Joshua bit without killing would become feral. It would be Utica after the marquis died all over again.
"We have an hour, at most, before I will not be able to function," Decker added. "Whatever we decide, we must do so quickly."
Ocean bordered Seth's territory to the east and south. The only people he could call for help other than the Thane was the Viscount of Burlington and Marquis of Albany. The baron did not have wolves to spare and Albany had already lost too much to the Wickers.
He didn't want Isaiah meeting Joshua. In the confusion of pitched battle, it would be too easy for Isaiah to kill Seth's newfound brother.
"Please, Seth," Jack begged.
"Fine," Seth said. "We'll fall back and call Isaiah. Let's take Decker home. I can keep watch on the Wickers now that I know where they are."
37: Elise
"The king always said," Cabot said from the shadows. "That if we needed to fight a Grigori, never to do it during the daylight, when they had time to prepare."
After dropping Decker and Joshua safely in Cambridge, they'd driven back to Milton. Seth had directed Elise to a secluded area within the Blue Hills Reservation to wait for the arrival of the Thane. An ancient stone observation tower loomed over the parking lot and picnic shelter.
Elise had followed a trail deeper into the woods to find a clearing so she could pray. She spent the hours in prayer that full vestment needed. As the power had settled upon her, she'd grown aware that Cabot waited at the edge of the glade. Still. Silent. Watching. Learning the truth about her. Wrapped in the quiet strength of the Lord, she could calmly recognize it was the same as when she had forced herself to watch him change shape. To acknowledge his inhumanity.
She rose from her kneeling position, feeling feather light. Her daggers gleamed like captured stars within her hands. The power flared out around her as radiant ethereal wings. "The Wolf King speaks with the voice of experience. The Thanes are here?"
"Not yet."
Elise loved the calmness of full vestment. The world no longer chafed at her, she could see the law and order of God in all the chaos. The universe was clear, bright, and sharp to a razor's edge. She was a wondrous, cutting weapon within it. She'd been put into place to cut out the disorder that evil wrought.
Glorious as she felt, it scared her slightly. It would be so easy to lose herself. She'd been given valium once in ER while they set her broken arm. (She refused to let them put her under; it was far too frightening to be unconscious around so many strangers.) The drug had given her the same peaceful feeling. She recognized then how addictive vestment could be. There were others that retreated fully into the power. When she'd met them after her epiphany, it was terrifying to realize how empty they seemed beyond the holiness.
Cabot gazed at her with wide eyes, seemingly caught between awe and concern. "Is it like my wolf? Where you're never sure where you end and it starts?"
"The wolf is yours and yours alone. I have no claim on this power. I can only open myself to it and allow it to enter."
"With us, that is how ferals are made."
"Your Source is life, which is chaos in nature. It grows where it will, where it can. You can't give it control and expect anything but chaos. Holiness is order. It is laws put upon life so it does not destroy itself by its chaos. Cancer is when the chaos turns the body against itself. Law keeps all in check, even if it is by means of destruction."
"You are the destruction."
"Yes, the Virtues and the Powers." Dominions like Clarice were touched by God but hadn't taken their vows. They chose not to open themselves to God's power. In most cases, the risk of being overwhelmed was too great.
Virtues were detectives, living among humans, seeking out evil and surgically destroying it. Powers sterilized an area, leaving it to God to winnow out the good and evil. Elise deemed the situation too delicate to call in a Power and Clarice had agreed with her. A Power might kill the Thanes despite the political mess it would cause. The decision left her without backup from her family.
"I've never had to fight a Rook before," Cabot said. "I don't think any of the others have either. Seth says that Rooks are specifically meant as defense against wolves."
"Yes. They can deal out massive damage and are highly resistant to your bite. I will be able to withstand some of their attacks but not all four of them at once. You will need to keep the others off me as I go for the kill shot on one."
He drifted closer. "I will protect you."
She thought he might stop out of the reach of her gleaming daggers. Instead he slowly moved within her personal space. The vestment made her hyperaware of the heat of his body. The supernatural strength within his tall form. His breath against her upturned face.
"What are you doing?" she whispered.
"I'm letting my wolf know you completely," he murmured.
They drifted together without her being aware that she'd moved. With the calmness that came with vestment, she could see the angelic perfection in his face despite all its roughness. The symmetry of its lines. The rich gold of his eyes.
To her relief, he still took her breath away with his rugged looks. Since the vestment protected her from all glamour magic, it was Cabot alone that made her heart race.
He leaned closer to kiss her.
There was a loud snap of static electricity and a visible spark that flew between them as their lips nearly touched.
She burst out laughing. "Sorry. That's a drawback to vestment; I'm carrying a serious positive charge. In training, my cousins and I would play tag and zap each other."
He grinned. "A kiss would be worth a little pain." But then his grin vanished and he turned his head, listening. "That's the Porsche's engine. Isaiah should have been here hours ago. He must have waited until someone brought him the second set of keys from the Castle."
The moment was gone, which was probably for the better.
* * *
There were five Thanes with the king's son. They'd expected four. The fifth was the Chinese-Canadian Felix Leung who apologized for the "kerfuffle." (He didn't explain further, leaving Elise clueless as to what exactly was a kerfuffle. He might have been alluding to how long it took the Thanes to arrive.) They'd arrived in three cars. Isaiah alone in the Porsche Boxster. The five others were divided between two black Bentleys. They were all dressed for a business meeting in black suits and polished dressed shoes.
With the knowledge of Cabot's true breeding, Elise couldn't help but eye the men for evidence of further intermixing with the angelic line. Isaiah had struck her as a handsome man on their first meeting. Now that she looked for the signs, she found them. Isaiah had the telltale symmetry of features and the eye color normally only achieved with colored contacts. Was Alexander purposefully breeding his wolves to the angelic bloodlines in secret? Was that why Gavril Grigori had nothing to do with raising Anton Cabot; Gavril didn't know that he had a son?
"Have you heard from the king?" Seth sat on the hood of Elise's Jeep as if it was a throne. They'd talked at length on how to handle the incoming Thanes. Step one was to see if Isaiah had been more successful at reaching his father than Seth.
Isaiah snarled at the question. "Bishop called me to remind me that your safety took priority over everything else. I told him that I couldn't be expected to babysit you if you keep running away."
The fact Isaiah was in the Boston area was evidence that his answer hadn't gone over well.
"The Wickers that killed Samuels are here," Seth said. "I'll go back to the Castle once they're no longer in my territory."
Cabot had managed to get Seth to agree to this earlier once he pointed out that Seth would be blind to the witches outside of Boston. Cabot promised to go with his cousin to New York at that point, eliminating all the reasons for Seth could have for not returning with the exception of Joshua. Elise suspected if they didn't kill the Wickers in this battle, Seth would drag his brother off to safety. The promise, though, was to be a carrot for Isaiah.
"So all we have to do is tear a few heads off and you'll be a good little puppy and do what the king commanded of you?" Isaiah looked at Elise meaningfully. He was implying that he'd kill her.
Cabot growled but didn't shift his position.
"You're to cooperate with the Grigori," Seth said coldly. "You'll need to work together to kill the Wickers' constructs."
"We need her with seven Thanes here?" Thane Silva sneered. He included Cabot in the count.
"A Rook killed four Thanes in 1871 outside of Chicago," Elise said. "A surviving Thane destroyed the Rook by setting it on fire and running. The entire city went up in flames. There are four Rooks within the greenhouse."
Elise carefully kept out of range of the Thanes. She trusted Cabot to protect her back but he needed time to react. "There's thirty people inside. We've killed five Wickers. We know that one was in Belgrade as of Friday but we haven't been able to track him. We think there's a witch named Dahlia here; her car is behind the house. She's a tall, middle-aged brunette that posed as the mother of the witch that killed Samuels. She's the right age to be the mother of the warlock that attacked me but it's possible that there's a third witch someplace. The rest of the humans are most likely puppets."
Isaiah growled with annoyance. "How do we know any of the coven are here? It could be all puppets. This is obviously a trap designed to kill werewolves. The Wickers could have put all the puppets on script, armed with silver. Why should we fight it at all?"
"The puppets don't have guns," Seth stated calmly. "I checked."
"Wickers usually don't arm puppets if they expect to lose control of them," Elise said. "A silver bullet is just as deadly to a witch. Rooks take a great deal of focus to control; if the Wickers activate the constructs, they'll have to release some or all of the puppets without a suggestion in place. Something as counter to self-preservation as fighting werewolves would take hours to put into place. After the horrors that the Wickers subject their puppets to, they will seem the more dangerous monster to their captives."
"The Rooks aren't activated?" Leung asked.
"It's a trap without teeth at the moment," Elise said. "But it would only need a knife stroke to set them in motion. We'll be blind to who the witches are until the blood sacrifices start."
"This isn't our fight," Silva growled. "The Grigori should just handle it."
That brought Seth off the Jeep in a roar of anger. "They killed Samuels! They butchered him like an animal. They murdered Albany! They nearly killed Cabot. They've sent a huntsman after the newborn that Samuels made. How is this not our fight?"
"The puppy is right; it is our fight," Isaiah agreed using the most derogatory term he could for the prince. He pointed at Seth. "But you are not to be part of it."
"I will not fight unless provoked," Seth half-promised to stay out of harm's way. "You'll be without your phones as wolves. I need to stay close so I can warn you of danger."
Elise could tell that the wolves hated the idea as much as she did. They'd discussed strategy prior to the Thanes' arrival. She and Cabot couldn't sway the young prince. Isaiah glanced at Cabot as if expecting him to object. Cabot shook his head.
"Whatever," Isaiah said. "I always hated Boston anyhow."
The gibe landed. Seth winced as he recognized the truth of the taunt. If Seth was killed, the city would vanish under a wave of monsters. "I'll be careful."
"It would be better if you weren't even here," Leung said. "A trap for werewolves in your territory? Who do you think it's for, eh? The Thanes? No. You. Traps don't always work the way you think. These Rooks might be here just to distract all those who would protect you."
The prince looked anywhere but at his cousin. "We all recognize that it's a trap. I'm the only one that can see all the pieces and anything that the Wickers might add to it once you attack."
They'd looped around and around this before the Thane had arrived. They couldn't risk the prince, but at the same time, their success depended heavily on his ability to see everything in his territory. As a compromise, they'd worked out a way for him to stay out of the fighting and still communicate with them.
"The longer we wait, the more chances there are that they'll realize we're here." Isaiah took off his suit jacket. The Thanes followed his lead and started to strip. It was an education on how the werewolves were as perfect in body as Grigori were in beauty. The men were all equally muscular; the only real difference was height and color of their skin.
A minute later, they were all large gray wolves, nearly indistinguishable from each other. Cabot stood apart, black as ink.
"Let's do this." Isaiah bounded away. The other wolves followed.
"Stick to the plan!" Seth called after them.
Cabot paused at the edge of the parking lot to make sure that Elise was coming.
Only the calmness of her vestment let her race after them despite her reservations about the other Thanes. The nursery was a half-mile away through the wooded park and across paved back road. Several acres of saplings surrounded the buildings that made up the florist's greenhouse, separate storefronts, equipment shed and joint business offices. A large gravel parking lot backed the buildings. The red Bentley sat nose against the large century-old barn, hidden from the main road.
As they reached the parking lot, her Jeep's horn blasted twice.
"They've activated a rook," Cabot growled.
"We must have tripped an alarm." Elise spotted a surveillance camera mounted on a light pole. "Damn it, I hate tech savvy witches."
"Stick to the plan," Cabot called.
Isaiah forged ahead. "Find the witches. Kill them. They should be easier to find now; they'll be covered with blood."
"We were to fight as a team!" Cabot shouted after the king's son.
The giant construct came smashing through the wall of the greenhouse. It was a twenty-foot-tall wooden Frankenstein's monster of plants joined together by magic. The wickers had hollowed a massive oak tree, studded it with flails and filled the cavity with woven climbing rose vines. At the very center would be the sacrifice, pulled into the oak by the roses even as his heart gave its last flutter of life. That fist-sized muscle remained the only vulnerable point of the construct despite the fact that the human was no longer alive.
"Here comes another one!" Cabot shouted a warning as they charged the first.
"Leave this one to me." Elise drew her daggers. "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer!"
The vines whipped toward her as she charged the rook, too many and too fast to dodge. They tore at her flesh as they attempted to bind her. They withered as they were coated with her blood.
"My God, my strength, in whom I will trust." She dodged the spiked heads of the flails as they swung at her. She heard Cabot snarling as he fought the incoming rook, protecting her back. "My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised; so shall I be saved from my enemies."
She slammed blades into the heart of the rook, one foot apart. "Amen!"
Her daggers flared to unbearable whiteness. She carved the compound of two equilateral triangles, one with each dagger, creating the Seal of Solomon hexagram. She felt her vestment swell with power in the presence of the holy symbol. It flooded over her and into the rook, funneled by the blades. The massive construct shuddered, brilliance leaking out of every crack, as God's might filled its hollowed center.