"Ghoul," I said, raising my voice to carry through the thick woods. "Show yourself and surrender, and we will bring your body back into the light."
Ritual words to soothe our conscience more than the ghoul's.
A narrow man stepped out from behind the alder, clothed in torn jeans and a ratty t-shirt. Far too little for the biting cold of winter. He perched upon a boulder, hands held out as if he could transform them into claws.
He couldn't, of course. He was little more than a raving pup, hungering for mortal blood that would grant him no sustenance. Only the blood of the nightwalker who made him could calm the ache in his belly.
"This isn't your territory," he hissed.
"Territory?" I laughed. "We are not wolf-packs, ghoul. We do not piss on trees to claim our land. The earth turns so that mortals may walk upon it. You threaten their existence. We exterminate threats to mortals. The lines are simple, and you are very much on the wrong side."
In my ear, Hanna said, "Pack of ten in the scree here. They haven't spotted us yet."
"Take them."
"Engaging."
Cries of alarm and pain erupted from the thick of the forest. The ghoul stiffened, straining his neck as if he could see through the wall of green-black trees to the place where his brethren fell.
"What is your name?" I asked, ignoring the uneasy shifting of the sunstriders behind me. Blood was on the air, thick and tainted with grave dirt. I could smell it as easily as they, but I was older. More able to resist its call.
"Damien," he snapped.
I snorted. "No, I don't think so. You were a Dave, weren't you? Maybe a Daniel? You don't have to die here, tonight. Neither do your friends."
The screaming ratcheted to a crescendo. "Not all of them, anyway."
"You're outnumbered," Dave insisted despite the slowing of the screams. "Your power wanes with the night. She told us. You're the one dying here tonight, bitch."
I sighed and glanced at my claws under the sheen of Luna's light. "Not as much as you'd think. Goodbye, Dave."
He snarled, snapping a hand down to his waistband where he probably had some weapon secreted away—a gun, or a knife. Maybe even something with silver embedded in it, little good it would do him against me.
He died with my claws in his chest, straight to the heart. I could make things quick, when I felt the need. While these ghouls had made their choice, they had been human once. I felt no urge to make them suffer. I let him slump against the moss-slick rock he'd used as a pulpit and flicked the blood from my claws, glancing over my shoulder to those sunstriders who'd followed me.
"Who was she?" Julian asked.
"What?"
"He said 'she told us'."
I blinked. So he had, but I'd already made my decision to kill him, hadn't I? And once the choice was made, I'd stopped listening.
"Shit." I crouched over his body, sniffing the wound close as I could bring my nose without outright shoving it in his chest cavity.
He had the generic scent that came with all ghouls—mortal blood and grave dirt—nothing new or interesting there. A hint of something else lingered, something older. Violets in an attic, the image came to me, charred bone and salt-crust. I'd smelled nothing like it. Not Lucien, nor Ragnar. Another nightwalker had come along and filled the power vacuum left by Ragnar's death while we were busy bickering over our next moves.
I pressed my earpiece and said to the open channel, "Nightwalker on site. Old. Powerful."
"Who?" Roisin demanded.
I grimaced. "I don't know. I don't recognize her scent."
"Fuck," Seamus said.
"Hanna, what's your position?" I asked.
Silence.
"Hanna?"
A howling rose between the trees, a human chorus of triumph, as the sun fled below the horizon.
Sixteen: Hunted
"Hold together," I ordered over the earpiece. A sound almost like laughter accompanied the wind that tore through the trees, throwing my hair into my eyes. I scraped it back, smearing blood across my cheek, and surveyed the area, sniffing the air hard. The knot of ghouls to the west was still in place, but the area near Hanna had grown muddied. Blood of too many types mingled together to sting my nostrils.
"Roisin, converge on Hanna's last known location."
"Going," she said tightly.
"Is she all right?" Julian asked, voice tight.
"I don't know. Come. Destroy anything that gets in our way. No more parley. They've hive-minded."
"What is that?" Eleanor asked.
Exactly what I almost let happen in the library with all of you, I thought, still feeling those minds like bubbles drifting on the very edge of my reach.
"Ghouls can be slaved to a single nightwalker if that nightwalker is stronger than the one that made it. This whole park stinks of nightwalker. For fuck's sake, didn't they teach you any of this?"
Eleanor recoiled from me like a whipped dog. "I was turned in the '80's."
I squinted. "1780? I don't remember you."
"Uh... 1980..."
"For fuck's sake."
I jogged off in the direction Hanna and her two team members had been headed. I wanted nothing more than to reach into my supernatural reservoirs of speed—to blur like the shadows and lash between the trees faster than the winds that carried foul omens, but I couldn't leave these... these children behind.
Julian came up alongside me. "Go. I'll keep us together."
He wanted me to rush ahead, in the way he could not, and save his friend.
"When was the last time you battled a full-blooded nightwalker under the moon?"
He paled and licked his lips. "Well, never, exactly, I mean I was turned after their numbers started dying out but—"
"Stay close." I ordered. He clenched his jaw and nodded, looking over his shoulder as if the shadows would attack. Maybe they would.
Light save us. All of these sunstriders—these children—save Roisin, Alec, and I were too young to have ever faced a nightwalker of any strength, let alone one as old and powerful as the scent of that blood had told me. They hadn't even seen my final battle with Ragnar, they had arrived too late, and Lucien had stayed well out of their way. Babes. They were all babes for the slaughter.
"Roisin," I hissed her name, knowing that only she and the mortals could hear me. Hanna was dead, I just hadn't confirmed it yet. "She's coming for our young. Watch your flanks."
"Always."
A snarl burst from Eleanor's lips seconds before her body hit the ground.
I whirled, reaching for power, muscles thrumming as I called upon the blood-strength. Eleanor lay on her side, a gash across her upper arm leaking blood, the others a Gordian knot of fear around her.
No sign of the nightwalker.
"What happened?" I demanded, pushing my way into the knot to examine Eleanor. Her eyes were massive golden saucers, but her blood was already doing its job and knitting up the cut on her arm.
"I—I don't know. I was following you, and then something hit me."
"Something?" I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet.
"It was, like, grey..."
"Shadow?" I demanded, impatient.
"No. Light and silver like, uh... " She did everything she could not to look at my silver eye.
"Right. Roisin?"
"Here."
"Contact. Come to me, we need to get these children out of here."
"On my way."
"Children?" Julian demanded, aghast. "We're sunstriders, just like you. I know you and I have had our disagreements but—"
"Julian." I ground out his name with so much contempt his mouth snapped shut and he took a step back. "If you don't save this argument for some other time, I swear by all the sun's rays I will let that nightwalker take you. Do you understand?"
He swallowed and nodded.
"Stay together. Tight. Don't watch me, watch your peripheral. I'm with you, you just might not see me. Wait for Roisin, then we'll move."
"
But..." Julian looked pointedly in the direction we had been going. The path to Hanna.
I grabbed both his shoulders and looked hard into his eyes. "She's gone, and I'm so sorry, but now you have to focus on not joining her. She wouldn't want that, would she?"
He nodded, numb. Eleanor gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder. That'd have to do.
"Right." I let him go and stepped back, watching them cluster into a tight circle, backs to each other, claws out. We were too close-quarters in the trees for blades. "I'm here," I assured them. Nervous nods.
"Time to pick on someone your own size," I whispered under my breath.
The power came as easily as drawing water from a full well. Not the power of the sun, no. Such strength would do me little good in the thick of the trees beneath Luna's light. I reached for that other power and prayed that I was right—that day and night were two halves of what our species had been when it had been whole.
A small voice buried deep inside me cried: yes.
The strength of the sun was a heady thing. A warm-drunk feeling of invincibility, of purpose. Luna's power was something else. Something sweet and cloying, like burying your head in a bed of narcissus in full-bloom. But there was an element of wildness to it, of clarity and freedom. I pushed all that aside.
I had passed through the Crucible of Fire. Power was power, the purview of all vampires, and I wouldn't let these children die because I was afraid to touch the night.
"Come," I said to the shadows, then moved so quickly the others would see nothing but a smear of light.
Moving too quickly for mortal—or young vampire—eyes to follow, I saw her. She danced through the frost-bare treetops, her body too light and quick to disturb so much as a patch of lichen. Though she moved too quickly for me to pick out fine details, I did everything I could to memorize her shape, her features, so that Talia could look her up in the guard's annals later.
The nightwalker was petite of frame, with narrow hips and broad, strong shoulders, like a gymnast. A sheet of black hair fell around her face in long waves, her mercurial eyes glinting from beneath a part in the strands.
She saw me. She stopped hard in the trees, a dozen paces from where I'd left the young ones, braced in the fork of a massive oak. Here, further east, the scent of ash tinged the air. I did everything I could to ignore it.
"So it's true," the nightwalker said and stood from her crouch. She wore long layers in various shades of dusty, desaturated purples, her clawed hands decorated with thick silver rings. "The twin-thing hunts the streets of London."
"I'm with them," Roisin said over the earpiece. I could not answer.
"I hunt only your kind, walker."
She sniffed. "Are you so sure? Doesn't your other half beg for more interesting sport?"
"Ask Ragnar what I hunt."
She smiled, revealing narrow and delicately tapered fangs. "I felt his unmaking like a hole punched in the world, leaving a wounded gaping maw in London. I came to heal that wound, Magdalene, for the eldest of his children has ignored that mantle of power."
That she knew my name made my skin crawl, but I took some solace that she did not appear to know Lucien's name, nor his connection to me. "There is no place in London for you. There is no place on this Earth for you."
"Tsk. Things are just starting to get exciting around here, my beauty. Don't you feel it? The watcher?"
She moved. A flash of silver in the night sky, streaking by me, before I could catch up with what was happening. Luna's powers may come when I called them, but my mastery was with the daylight, not this. She shot like an arrow toward the gathering, too fast for the younger sunstriders to see.
But Roisin was not so blind.
Her gun snapped up and she fired, once, the gold-enhanced bullet slamming into the nightwalker's chest, but missing her heart. She snarled and dropped to a crouch so close to the cluster of younger sunstriders she could reach out and touch them. They shied away from her. All save Julian. He lunged, slammed claws-first into the nightwalker, rolling across the deadfall ground.
I hit both a breath later. I grabbed the back of Julian's neck and yanked him free from the tangle, tossing him aside with a little too much strength—he bounced off of a nearby tree, letting out a yelp of surprise and pain.
I got my other hand around the nightwalker's throat and squeezed, bringing the hand that'd thrown Julian around to slam my claws into her chest, her heart.
She pursed her lips in a kiss. "Not so easy as Ragnar." Her throat moved beneath my palm, despite my squeezing, and then she was gone—flecks of silver and night on the wind, the lingering of her violet-laden scent the only thing to convince me I hadn't imagined her all together.
Seventeen: Lines Drawn in Blood and Ash
We had gathered what we could of Hanna's ashes, and the two who had fallen with her, scraping them with our palms into pouches and pockets, anything we could find on short notice, then got the hell out of that park.
Now, the ashes sat out on a table in the library, gathered together in a vase Emeline had produced from the cellar of the estate, and no matter how hard I tried, I could muster up no emotion but anger as I looked upon them. Six. There were six sunstriders left standing in all the world.
"We aren't enough," Julian said quietly.
He stood between Alec and Eleanor, his hands clasped together in front of his hips, his head bowed but his eyes locked on that pile of oblivion. I found out later they had not been lovers, as I suspected, but sire-mates. In sharing a sire—unusual for sunstriders—they had shared a tighter bond than any that could be achieved outside of magic.
"No, we're not," Eleanor agreed. "We didn't stand a chance tonight."
I locked gazes with Roisin across the table. We would have done just fine, if we hadn't had the young ones to protect.
"This is a tragedy," Emeline said in her best parroting-Adelia voice, "but we are a team, made to work together. The nightwalkers tear at each other's throats. That rivalry divides them, lending us strength."
"And where was the opposing nightwalker to harry that woman tonight?" Julian snapped. "Ragnar is dead. Magdalene said that this woman knew as much, that she'd come here to fill that void. And it's not like she has any competition, does she?"
Julian looked at me, his face a storm of rage. "Where is he, then? Where is Lucien? Why is he not harrying this woman moving in on his sire's territory? Because that's how they're supposed to behave, isn't it? Like dogs tearing at one another for a slice of territory?"
I swallowed down an outburst, ignoring the building ache in my chest. I could not think too deeply of this now. I could not give way to sorrow when my people were looking to me for guidance. "Lucien is dying."
Roisin sucked in a breath, looking at me hard. Even Emeline seemed a touch worried.
"How can you be sure?" Emeline asked. "We've had no sightings of him."
"I've scented him," I said slowly, "throughout the city. It's sporadic. But one thing is certain: he's starving himself to death." I did not want to admit that I hadn't yet found him.
"I..." Emeline trailed off. She'd been seconds away from saying I'm sorry. I'd laugh, if I weren't doing everything in my power to put a lid on my emotions.
"Then we need to expand," Julian said, driving us back to his point. Inane as his thought was, I was grateful to talk about something else. "If we had more sunstriders, then we wouldn't have been ambushed like that. We would have stood a chance."
"We are an order of balance," Emeline said with slow patience. "The supernatural presence in this city is already so strong that we've damaged The Accord and attracted the attention of beings beyond our ability to battle. We cannot, for the sake of this planet and the people on it, tip that balance any further."
"Like hell," Julian jabbed a finger at the vase. White china, blue roses. I wondered if Hanna or the others would have liked it. I didn't even know what was popular during their times. I'd have to ask Seamus, maybe he'd have some suggestions for a more appropriate
memorial. "If we're about balance than we need to push the scale back the other way, don't we? Pile more on our side."
DeShawn cleared his throat. "I got a couple members of the Freak Squad who would volunteer. They're tired of playing mop-up to you guys and want the ability to fight back on equal terms. They'd make good soldiers for you, Emeline. I can guarantee it."
"We're not in the business of recruiting," Emeline said.
They fell into the chaos of argument, Emeline and DeShawn and Julian tripping over each other's words as each demanded their way was the right one. Julian wanted to find his own recruits. DeShawn insisted his people were the best suited. Emeline held the line that it would attract more dangerous powers.
I met Roisin's eye. She shook her head. Great. Up to me to be the bearer of bad news. Sometimes I thought it'd be nice to be the solid, silent one of our duo.
"They would all be dead within the week," I said, loud enough to cut through the chatter.
"What?" DeShawn was the first to rally. "Begging your pardon, Mags girl, but my people aren't new to a fight. That's why they'd be perfect—"
I held up a hand. He shut up. I'd have to try that more often.
"The nightwalker tonight was successful in her attack because Roisin and I were held back by the need to protect our younger members." Mouths opened all around me to shout a protest, to assert competency. I shut them all up with a glare. "You are young, and not a one of you has been trained to the extent necessary to stand against a nightwalker of the same age, let alone an ancient one once the sun has set."
"We have to replenish our numbers," Julian protested.
"If we focus on awakening the others..." Alec said, scratching his chin.
Maeve huffed and jabbed a finger at him. "Are you implying I haven't made that my focus? Every second I'm not cleaning up after you twice-baked ninnies I'm teasing at the Venefica's spellwork. I'd like to see you do better."
Alec grimaced. "Sorry."
Julian pressed on doggedly. "Surely replacing... replacing what was lost won't hold us back."
"You would dilute our strength and weaken us," I said. "Roisin and I do not have the time to train you and hunt the nightwalker."
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