I guess I was supposed to feel insulted or impressed. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” I chanted tunelessly and quietly, as if to myself, except that everyone in the room could hear me. If Frost wanted to be childish, I could do it, too—and do it better.
Stefan turned his head away, and I was pretty sure he laughed.
But no one was laughing when Wulfe dropped in from behind me so I didn’t see him jump, only heard the sound of his feet hitting tile. I turned so I could see him and still keep an eye on Frost.
Vampires scared me. I even had a mental list of the vampires who scare me the most. Some of those were dead. More dead. Not ever moving again. On the very top of the list of the still moving was Wulfe. I didn’t know why, exactly, he was so much worse than other vampires. Maybe it was the way that every time I met him, he seemed to know just exactly how to freak me out. Maybe it was the “nobody home” look in his eyes.
The Wizard looked like he should be worried about how to ask a girl out on his first date, checking the mirror for acne spots, deciding if he should get an ear pierced and if so, how he could hide it from his mom. He wore ripped-up, red Converse basketball shoes, blue jeans, and a thick cable sweater. His hair had been shaved boot-camp short. He held a thick chain that was attached to a metal collar wrapped around the neck of another vampire.
The second vampire was huge. If he’d been standing upright, he would have been the tallest person in the room … the grungy basement. He must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds.
He wasn’t standing upright, though. He was crouched on hands and knees, and he clicked his teeth together in a weird rhythm.
He saw me looking at him—all of the vampires had looked away from him almost immediately. If I had known him when he wasn’t this … monster, I doubt I could have kept my eyes on him, either. He roared at me, then launched himself like a junkyard dog and hit the end of the chain hard.
Physics said that he should have been able to drag Wulfe across the floor. But physics had only a nodding acquaintance with Wulfe. He had no trouble holding the vampire—who must have been Shamus—with one hand. His other rubbed the stubble of his hair, which looked more white than blond in this light.
“Hey, Mercedes,” Wulfe said lightly. “So they succeeded in roping you into this? I’ve always wanted the chance to taste your blood from the source. Walkers have this lovely bouquet. Like daffydowndillies in the spring, my old ma used to say.”
“Wulfe,” said Marsilia. I think she wanted to say something else, but didn’t know exactly what. So she was just quiet, but her quietness had a quality of sorrow to it.
“Don’t be mad, Marsilia,” he said earnestly. “But us badass vampires must stick together, you understand.” He paused. “Maybe not. How about if I put it this way? It grievest me, dear heart. But in sooth, it is for the best, as you will see anon.”
“Five minutes,” said Stefan. “Starting now.”
12
We huddled in our corner. I huddled, anyway. Asil looked faintly bored. Honey never took her eyes off Frost. Hao lurked—which he did very well for such a compact man. Marsilia? Marsilia was all business.
I was going to fight vampires, and my name wasn’t Buffy—I was so screwed.
“Did you see his magic?” Marsilia asked me briskly. “I had Stefan tell you to watch closely.”
“I saw.”
“Your job is to stop him from doing it. Any way you can. Walkers are immune to vampire magic—even vampire magic that has its origins in witchcraft.”
She sounded a lot more confident than I felt.
“You didn’t seem to have much trouble stopping him,” I said.
She grimaced. “Yes. But he wasn’t trying very hard—and he exaggerated his reaction when the magic broke. He’s trying to get me overconfident.” She glanced over her shoulder at Frost, who was talking at Wulfe. Wulfe was watching Marsilia and not paying any attention to Frost that I could see. He noticed I was watching and winked at me.
“It is a tactic that Frost takes,” Hao said. He paused and looked at his hands. They were smudged black, and he had black ash smears on his gold shirt. Marsilia’s black outfit showed no wear and tear. I didn’t bother looking down at myself. My foster mother maintained that I could get dirty in a swimming pool, and getting older hadn’t helped much.
“There were only a few witnesses to his other fights who were willing to talk to me. Some of them were in the same shape Shamus is.” He didn’t look at the collared vampire, but I could feel his attention. “Shamus was a fine guitarist, and he liked Tennyson poems. He could and would quote them by the hour.”
“Why aren’t there other vampires here?” I asked. “He doesn’t have all the seethes under his control, right? Aren’t any of the other powerful vampires trying to stop him? Why are you and Hao the only ones here?”
“Vampires do not work well together—any more than Alphas work well together. And the Masters who are farther east feel Frost is at the limits of what he can control. An illusion Frost has done his best to foster,” Hao answered me.
“And most of them think that Frost’s desire to bring out the vampires and allow them to feed where they will is the best idea they’ve ever heard,” said Marsilia. “Stupid. I hate stupid people.”
“You don’t seem to be in a hurry to plan anything for the fight,” said Asil. “And you have two minutes left.”
Marsilia looked at him—and for a moment I saw lust in her face again.
Hao bowed to Asil. “Marsilia and I have spoken about this much so our plans are already laid. She will take on Frost. I will take both Wulfe and Shamus. Ms. Hauptman’s job is to keep Frost from bespelling either of us. It may be that Frost will be so busy that he has no time for tricks and your … Alpha’s mate can sit on the sidelines and cheer.”
I was going to have to come up with a rank for myself besides Alpha’s mate. In the pack, I was just Mercy—but if ten more people called me the Alpha’s mate, I was going to hit someone. It sounded like a chess move.
“More likely, he has tricks up his sleeves,” said Marsilia. “He knew coming to this that he had failed to kill Mercy.”
“He has a bunch of ghosts trapped here,” I told her. And I remembered Peter brushing Honey’s hair. Ghosts who could manipulate the physical world were few and far between. “They could be a problem.”
“Ghosts are not problems,” said Marsilia dismissively. “They moan and scare silly people.”
“Ghosts who can throw rocks and debris are a problem,” I told her. “And there’s that dead but still-moving-just-fine fae assassin, too. If he animated her, it was because he had a job for her to do. If she is a real zombie, then my understanding of the rules says he can call her to fight with him. Zombies aren’t living creatures, they are animated dead with no willpower or thoughts of their own. A zombie would come under the heading of his ‘power’ right?”
“You take care of the ghosts, then,” said Marsilia. “And keep him from trying to control us. We will do the fighting.”
Hao smiled and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. I’d been wrong. He did smile when he was happy.
“This should be an interesting fight,” he said.
When the fight started, I was about fifteen feet behind the two vampires on my side with orders to stay as far away from the action as possible. My knee hurt, my cheekbone throbbed—and I was as scared as I’ve ever been.
“Dear God,” I murmured earnestly. I’d quit worrying about who could overhear me when I prayed a long time ago. When you live with werewolves, there is no such thing as a private conversation even if you are talking to God. “Please don’t let me end up in a wheelchair again. No broken bones would be a happy bonus, but I’m not expecting you to make up for my stupidity quite so completely.” And then, even more sincerely, I said, “Whatever happens, you don’t let that vampire make it out of here still moving. If he wins, it will be bad news. Any help you can give us will be appreciated. A
men.”
Stefan heard me. He didn’t look, but his mouth softened, and he shook his head.
“Go,” he said, and stepped back against the wall where the spectators had been allowed to watch. He stood next to Asil and Honey, which I had a bare instant to appreciate—if something happened to me, I knew he’d do his best to get the wolves out of here. Not that Asil would need much help.
Vampires are loud when they fight. I don’t know why that took me by surprise. I’ve been in a lot of sparring matches, and they get noisy. Maybe it was because werewolf fights are quieter, the silence imposed by the need to keep hidden. Though people know about the wolves, public fighting is still forbidden.
My job was to watch Frost, and that was what I’d do. The basement was “in,” Hao had explained. I couldn’t go outside the basement without forfeiting my place in the battle. That didn’t mean I’d get out of fighting. It just meant that Stefan would have to kill me. That’s why they had to have a powerful Master of Ceremonies. He would enforce the rules during the fight and declare the winner.
I found a perch on top of a broken section of walls with my back to the outer wall. Probably Frost wouldn’t try anything too soon. Unlike human fights—or even werewolf fights—vampire fights could take a long time. Not breathing, not needing a beating heart meant that a vampire was dangerous long after a werewolf would be unconscious. It takes a great deal of damage to make a vampire lose consciousness.
The soot, disturbed by the violent action of the fighters, flew in a foot-high miasma of blackness. The footing was made worse because only part of the floor was tiled. Not even Marsilia was immune to inconvenient stumbles.
I was very grateful for Asil’s perspicacity in grabbing a coat for me. Once I stopped moving, I quickly grew chilled. Tucking my hands in my pockets, I encountered Zee’s abbreviated magic sword. Tad’s warnings rang in my head, so I had no intention of drawing it under anything but the most dire circumstances. But it gave me something to fiddle with—and that actually helped me focus on something besides how terrified I was.
The action was so quick it was difficult to split my attention, and I was trying to watch Frost. Even so, I caught glimpses of Hao fighting and wished my sensei could see him.
I have to admit that Shamus attracted my attention first. Vampires usually look pretty human. I’ve only seen their true faces, what the monster inside looks like, a couple of times. Once would have been enough, but Shamus wore his monster on the outside.
His eyes glowed—not like a flashlight. It was more like a small Christmas tree light or a Siamese cat’s eyes in the dark if the cat’s eye actually lit up instead of catching and reflecting light. In a cat, it was cool—in a vampire it was just freaky. His lips were pulled back until his face looked as though it had been created to be a canvas to hold fangs and those faintly sparkling eyes. His fingernails lengthened until they were nearly as good a weapon as a werewolf’s claws. There was nothing human left in Shamus at all.
Wulfe had released him from his chain, though the collar was still on. If Shamus wasn’t twice Hao’s weight, he was very near to it. He was fast—and, as promised, utterly ferocious. After Hao hit him once, Shamus was totally intent on reducing Hao to a pile of sludge.
But Hao was never where Shamus thought he was.
“Flow like water,” Sensei Johanson often said, usually in a tone of exasperation. And he came pretty close. But I’d never seen anything like Hao.
Hao flowed like water. Sharp claws passed harmlessly by—and so close that a quarter of an inch more would have had Hao’s skin sliced like a prisoner rolled in razor wire. He twisted, stopped, leaned back, and nothing touched him. It was beautiful.
I was supposed to be watching Frost, I admonished myself sternly. But I kept sneaking glances at Hao.
Then the ghosts came. I knew they were here before I saw them, their presence something the coyote could feel, a prickle down my spine and a tingle on the tip of my nose. I trusted the coyote’s senses, tried to open my vision the way I had before, and took a good look around.
The dead spirits clustered against the wall, as far from the vampires as they could get. Ghosts, like cats (excepting my own Medea), don’t like vampires. They didn’t seem to be doing anything, though I could see the greasy spider-silk magic that tied them to Frost.
Despite the distraction of Hao and the ghosts, I was keeping my eyes on Marsilia and Frost. Who knew that Marsilia was a bruiser—and a trained boxer, from her tidy and agile footwork? Frost had been trained in some sort of hand-to-hand, too. It looked to be a relatively effective if piecemeal style, like the techniques the army teaches its new recruits—a style adjusted for vampiric strength and speed.
Just beyond them was a group of four of Frost’s vampiric audience and with my vision changed because I’d been watching the ghosts, I about fell off my wall.
I couldn’t see souls. Besides, vampires don’t have souls. But something was wrong with Frost’s vampires. Something was twisted and shredded that should have been straight and whole. I looked at my vampire then—at Stefan. He was standing a little in front of Honey, ready to grab her if she gave in to the drive that kept her intent on Frost. I still couldn’t see his soul, but he looked right, just as he always did.
I found Marsilia. And she was different from Frost’s vampires in the same way Stefan was. Hao had said his informant had been broken. I wondered if she would have looked like Frost’s vampires.
But I wasn’t here to check out Frost’s vampires. I was supposed to watch him.
Both Marsilia and Frost were bleeding. Marsilia had found a metal bar somewhere, the kind someone might use to bar a door, and she hit him in the chin with it like Babe Ruth might have hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium.
He flew backward, and when he hit the ground, he fell like a wet washcloth. She pulled the bar back into batting position and watched him. He didn’t move—but vampires don’t need to breathe, and they can hold very, very still.
One of the ghosts of the Cantrip agents drifted closer to Frost. I thought for a moment that it was just chance. Throw a dozen ghosts into even a sizeable basement, and they have to go somewhere, right? There were ghosts drifting aimlessly all over the basement now—though only the one nearest Frost was anywhere near a vampire. The longer I watched them, the easier it was to see the binding Frost had netted them with.
It struck me as odd that in that dark basement, where every surface was blackened from the fire, I had no trouble seeing the web that held the ghosts captive. But the darkness of the net was different than just the lack of light.
The ghost that approached Frost had one of his sticky strings of magic wrapped around his neck, and that string was pulsing. Marsilia had started to relax, her hand on the bar less tense.
I stood up, but it was too late. Frost struck, his jaw hanging at an odd angle, but he moved so fast it was difficult to track. He grabbed the ghost and ate him. Not with his physical mouth. It was as if his body turned into a giant mouth and engulfed the ghost. To my sight, Frost’s body flared—and then he stood up, wiping his own blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. The damage Marsilia had done to him was just gone.
She struck again, but he was faster than he’d been. As if the ghost had more than merely repaired him. He grabbed the bar and ripped it from her hands—and she was the one in retreat.
The fighting had started out loud. Shamus roared and screamed. Bodies make noise when they are flung on the floor. Not just the sound of floor and flesh, but grunts and cracks as bones broke. The metal bar added a new dimension to the noise. There was a rhythm to it as he drove Marsilia back toward me, and I realized he was just playing with her.
I couldn’t help her with him. I had to trust that she was strong enough, good enough to protect herself, because I had another job—there were thirteen more ghosts in the room. And I had to figure out a way to keep Frost from eating them all. One of them was right next to me. I grabbed her by the wrist. My hand started to pass through, bu
t I focused my sight on her and she became more solid, just as Peter had.
“Tell me your name,” I said to her, giving my command that borrowed-from-Adam Alpha wolf push.
“Janet,” she told me, her voice vibrating up my arm.
“Janet,” I told her. “Leave.”
She tried, but Frost’s net held her. Her eyes were terrified. I tried stripping the net from her with my hands, but it didn’t work. She wasn’t pack, so I couldn’t use pack magic to free her.
I pulled Zee’s sword out and invoked its larger form. For Zee and Tad, Hunger had been a black long sword. For me, it turned into a plain-bladed katana with a gaudy red-and-purple hilt.
It didn’t do anything to the net, though I had the feeling that in sunlight, when a vampire’s magic would be at its weakest, it would have been able to eat the magic that bound the ghost. I even tried stabbing her with it. I felt it taste her briefly, and she looked even more terrified, if that were possible. But when I pulled the sword back, she was still there, encased in Frost’s trap. I talked the reluctant sword back into its smaller form and stuck it back in my coat pocket.
The clank, clank, clank of the iron bar stopped suddenly, and I looked up to see it arc over the wall of the basement and safely out of useful range. Marsilia popped her shoulder back into joint without so much as a grimace and reengaged Frost. Without the bar, he was not so overwhelming—but she was still hurt. And then he reached out, almost casually, and ate another ghost. It was quick, and I was too far away to do anything about it—even if I could have figured out how. He smiled at me before he hit Marsilia in her damaged shoulder.
Desperate, I pulled my lamb-and-dog-tag necklace off my neck. Armed by my faith, the symbol of the Lamb of God had defended me against vampires. Maybe it would work against vampiric magic.
“Please, dear Lord,” I said. “Let this work.”
Then I pressed it against the net—which shrank away from the little golden lamb, twisting, curling, and lessening until the ghost stood free. I touched the lamb to her forehead, and said, “Janet. Be at peace.”
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