"Everything," Maeve said and stopped in her tracks, casting me a wary glance. "She looked at you, when she said everything. The cure, we know. What else? What was forbidden you before... oh. I see. She wants you to use the nightwalker, now."
The nightwalker. Hearing him described as such was a lead weight around my heart, but Maeve was not wrong, and so I kept my voice as even as I could. "I have already asked. He will not help. I do not know why."
"Perhaps he fears his own control," Roisin said. "He fled before we battled, but we would have, if he had lingered."
"We do not want a nightwalker with the power of Mr. Dubois in control of all that Lenora's made." DeShawn said. "I know he saved Emeline, but if he's not sure he can make them kneel for the cure, then we can't risk it."
"Oh!" Maeve said and clapped. "It's not Lucien, of course not, Emeline wouldn't risk that. She was talking about you, dear."
She jabbed a finger at me. I blinked. "What about me?"
"Your eye." She tapped her temple. "The silver one. You've got their power, don't you? And you passed the trial, so you're bound to humanity, and you're older than Lucien—begging your pardon—it stands to reason you could leash them, too."
A keen awareness of all the sunstrider minds washed over me, bright flames burning at a distance from my own, but reachable. I had but to stretch out my mind to snag them in tendrils of netted thought, drag them to heel, force them to do my bidding. The temptation rose in my chest, heady and pressing, until I let out a soft breath of agony and looked away, unable to meet the eye of anyone in that room, knowing what I was capable of, if only the siren of temptation sung a little sweeter.
But these few had knelt to me when I was fresh from the crucible, and our blood was closer in kin than any other's. We can, all of us, compel the younger of our order—but it is a gross thing, a violation avoided at all costs. Could I do it, to those I shared no bond with? How could I have ever asked such a thing of Lucien?
Roisin's hand brushed my hair and I startled, flicking my gaze up to meet hers. My anchor.
"The mortals didn't ask to be ghouls," she said. "You would be freeing them, once their blood ran clean."
"I will try," I said, loud enough for all to hear, though I didn't look away from Roisin.
"Good," Maeve said. Her jewelry chimed as she clapped again. "We return to the high rise, then. Talia, get us a roster. As many people at the high rise as we can spare without leaving the estate unprotected. We'll start with the freshest ghouls we can find to better test the idea."
Seamus sprung to his feet and rubbed his hands together. "I'll have Padhi prepare as much of the cure as he can on short notice."
"We need to grab a few weaker ones to start," Alec said. "And, forgive me, but they won't come out if you're too near, Mags. Some of us 'children' will prove useful, I think. We can bait them, and then you can take control. Once they're under your thrall, DeShawn and his people can move in with the cure and get them into the vans."
"Bait?" I frowned, not liking the sound of that.
Julian grinned fiercely. "They're just ghouls. We'll be fine, and you won't be far."
I wanted to remind him that the situation had been similar at the park, but the words dissolved to ash on my lips. An energy pervaded the house of the Sun Guard, electric and bright as the dawn. Hope. While these people had bent under abject despair only a few hours ago, they now moved with fresh and vibrant energy. I could not bring myself to tear the rug from beneath them with my paranoia.
Thirty-two: The Proving Ground
I paced tight circles in the back of DeShawn's van while we followed the young sunstriders back to the high rise. A day and a night had passed, the sun was sinking on this second day since the party, and still the area was a ghost town.
DeShawn's people did their work well, and official tape and barriers kept back anyone who would come snooping, but no mortals strayed near. Curiosity was powerful, but the harrowing presence of nightwalker—even just the stain of so much of their blood mixed in wine—was enough to raise mortal hackles and warn the most committed of busybodies away.
Yet it was not completely abandoned. The closer we drew to that battered building, the heavier the scent of nightwalker on the air. Not just the wine that Roisin had spilled, but the fresher tang of young nightwalker and ghoul both. Without their maker to command them, they'd wandered back to this place, drawn by the lingering, stale scent of their mistress.
"Would you please sit down," Seamus said, glancing up from one of the bench seats in the back. "It's eerie how the bumps in the road don't even phase you."
"I can't even look at her when she does that without getting nauseous," Talia said, then blushed. "Sorry."
I stopped pacing. "There are far more ghouls out there than we expected."
"Are they clustering?" DeShawn called from the front seat.
"No. They're scattered, wary of each other. Lenora didn't think through what it would mean to enthrall so many so quickly. I doubt she's contacted the ghouls lingering here. Some..." I wrinkled my nose. "Some might be young turns, neophyte walkers. I can't be sure, everything's confused."
"I'll tell the crew, get them to draw a few off to the side so we don't get the whole pack coming down," DeShawn said, then dropped his voice to speak into his radio.
It should be enough, I knew, but restlessness threaded through me. I pressed the earpiece. "Maeve, is anything unusual?"
"I see what you mean," she muttered at me from the other van. "It feels like a trap, doesn't it? But that's just the blood around. There's no magic here. Lenora learned from Ragnar, it seems, and hasn't so much as enchanted a single stick since she arrived in London. I'd love to know how the little snake got through my wards without so much as a cantrip for luck, but I don't sense a bloody thing."
"Scented three alone up near the cargo entrance," Julian said over the channel. "Going to attempt to bait."
I muted my earpiece. "DeShawn, get me close."
"Already on it."
DeShawn parked the van near enough to Julian and Eleanor for me to sense them, but not so close that the ghouls in the area would pick up my scent. It pained me to wait, but I stood still as the dead. While the others listened to the quiet, casual chatter of the two young sunstriders through their earpieces, I stretched my senses, reaching not only for the flames of their minds, but for any hint of the ghouls or nightwalkers who stalked the area.
I found them, and in doing so was not certain if I felt disappointment or hope. It was our plan, yes, but yet some part of me had clung to the idea that it would fail—that I was too different from those creatures of Luna's blessing to find their minds.
Their minds were wispy things, distant and fluttering, but undeniably present. While the minds of the sunstriders burned hot as irons in my psychic mind, those of the nightwalkers—or at least their ghouls—appeared as thin, silvery smoke, so insubstantial I almost missed them. They prickled my senses. A slight taste of being wrong accompanied them, but I attributed that to their being of mostly mortal blood.
Eleanor lured them closer. I could sense her flame, hot and comforting as a bonfire, circling the area, pretending to shift through rubble. The wisps of smoke approached.
I tensed instinctively, caught an eye roll from Seamus, but ignored him. The draw of the oath had long since left me, but I still didn't like using our young ones as bait, even if it was only for a few ghouls.
Three ghouls approached them, and I dropped my focus on their minds, paying attention only to the subtle sounds of shifting debris as they closed in tight on Julian and Eleanor. They didn't know what they were, those ghouls, but they sensed their enemy like a moth loves the flame, and closed in.
The battle was quick and decisive. Eleanor pounded on the van's sliding door three times and Seamus yanked it open. Eleanor had one flailing ghoul by the back of the neck, a scrawny man decked out in black leather who no doubt had come sniffing around the party and drank too much, all unknowing, while Julian wrestle
d two strong women beneath both arms, his face pinched with the effort.
"Fucking feisty," he hissed.
"Quickly," Eleanor urged him.
She tossed the man into the van and he landed hard on his side, rolling. The van shuddered under the impact. Seamus cursed and grabbed the zip ties DeShawn had provided for restraints, fumbling to get them around the wrists of the struggling man.
One of the women bit Julian's arm and he hissed, flinching just enough to give her room to escape, but she was too riled up for that. The woman howled and kicked him hard in the crotch, her thumbs lunging for his eyes.
I let out a low, rumbling growl.
The ghouls turned still as stone, eyes huge, frozen in place as a rabbit when the hawk's shadow passes too near. I didn't like doing it, but these three were mortal still, and prone to the fear a vampire of any kind can send straight down into the earth, as if spiking them in place. Even Seamus shuddered.
"Quickly," I repeated Eleanor's order.
Julian shook himself and dragged the women into the van before they could recover. I slammed the door shut and threw the lock while the others put the zip ties in place.
"We're not here to harm you," Eleanor in gentle tones, as if speaking to an infant. "We want to help."
"This is illegal!" One of the woman snarled and scooted back across the van's floor, rocking it. "My dad's a cop, you're all in some serious fucking shit."
"Not illegal tonight," DeShawn drawled from the front seat and half turned, flipping his badge out for them to see.
The woman's eyes narrowed. "Fake."
DeShawn shook his head. "I really don't feel like arguing this. Mags, get on with it, will you?"
The thin man's head almost turned all the way around to glare at me. "Magdalene. That's you. I can smell you. The night mother comes to punish you."
It was my turn to roll my eyes. "Is that what Lenora's calling herself now? So very dramatic. She's got you all on her hook, but we want to get you off so you can think for yourselves again. Be still."
They hissed as a group, disconcerting in chorus, and flinched away from me. Fine. Let them scorn me, I didn't need them to like me. I wasn't sure I was going to like myself very much, after this.
"Should I start the cure?" Seamus asked, reaching for the thin roll of vials and syringes Padhi had given him before we left.
I shook my head. "No. I have to try my test, first. Otherwise these are just the first of our attrition."
He nodded, grim, and sat back down on the bench, his hands folded between his knees. I wondered what he thought—what he sensed—as I reached my mind out, seeking first the familiar flames, then the shivering wisps of smoke. A light shudder ran through Seamus, and he looked away, focusing his gaze on the ground.
So sensitive to magic, even the deep magic of the blood. Maeve had yet to untangle the mystery of his strength, and for a moment I feared it was a poor choice to have brought him here, but this wasn't the flavor of magic he and Maeve toyed with. This was older, deeper. Born in the womb of the world of blood and duty and hurt.
The thought of pain made those curls of smoke a little more substantial. I closed my eyes, shutting out the distractions of the cramped van, ignoring the threats spilling from the lips of the ghouls, ignoring DeShawn and Julian and Eleanor's annoyed rebukes. Sound didn't matter. Touch didn't matter. All that mattered was those gentle curls of smoke.
A flash of a memory—smoke billowing from Gustave's tent—I pushed it away. This was not true smoke, only a visual representation of a part of a mind controlled by another hand.
I reached for the nearest and it slipped through my fingers, shivering and reforming further away. It wasn't real smoke, it couldn't slip away like that. In this mental space, I was not a being, not a humanoid creature with fingers to slip through. Again. Try again.
My mental senses stretched. Distantly, I heard Seamus shift against his bench, but I had grasped the truth and held to it as tightly as I dared.
Those wisps were mine. Just as the flames felt like phantom limbs, those curls of smoke should be as easily accessible. They were just so small, so fragile, the taint of the ghoul fresh and fleeting. I had to push harder.
Their urge to rend the sunstriders around them washed through me, minds that tasted of bitter poison, and I pushed that compulsion down, grasped harder, harder, forcing through the hatred of my kind until they would be forced to recognize me as their elder, their master, despite the differences of our blood.
Some of the commotion in the van broke through my trance.
"What the—" Seamus shouted and scrambled back.
Julian and Eleanor cursed. The ghouls howled in protest. Though my eyes were closed, I could hear them thrashing against their bonds, kicking and screaming. The smoke curls thickened in my mind, and with this increased substantiality I grabbed for them again, pushing down, subsuming.
I caught their thoughts, then. Wild, terror-stricken. Raw fear grating against my nerves. The trashing grew in intensity.
"We've got to push the cure, they're going mad," Julian said.
"Right," Seamus said shakily. Metal rattled as he unrolled the sheath of syringes.
I could tame them. I had them already, I had only to push the fear away and focus on them to get them to calm down, but they wouldn't be still. Their minds thrashed with all the power of their bodies, worms beneath my grasp. This would work. It had to work. They had to be made calm to take the cure, for their sake, and all of London's.
I threw everything I had into that final push, not understanding what I was doing, not exactly, but focusing all my strength and will upon them being calm, serene, languid with peace. It was like willing my body to heal faster, or stopping the beat of my heart—a reflex.
The smoke wisped from my mind.
Despair welled within me. I began to open my eyes to admit defeat, but the thrashing had stopped. All was silent. A held breath, a feather perched on the edge of a knife blade.
A single howl escaped the man, low and dreadful, the hollow, hunting bellow of a wolf in the night. A shiver raced up my spine and their smoke-wisps came back to my mind, whole and swirling, but not alone.
No, not at all alone.
The ash-tendrils of hundreds popped into being within my mind. Lenora's ghouls who had scattered around the building, across the city. Old ones and new, their tendrils varying in thickness based on how much blood they'd taken, I thought. And not a one of them under my control. All danced free. All had sensed me.
The man's hunting howl was no longer alone.
Across London, the ghouls of Lenora's blood cried out in indignity and hatred and rage. I gasped from the pressure of that attention, a swell of pain mounting in my mind until I had to open my eyes, strip my attention away from them. Our three captured ghouls stared at me with red eyes, mouths split with rictus snarls.
"Push the cure," I breathed, trying to hide the shudder that shook me to the core. "They cannot be enthralled, not by me."
Julian looked at me with wary, golden eyes as he worked with Eleanor to hold the ghouls down while Seamus pushed the needles into their flesh. I wanted to help, but I couldn't bring myself to touch the ghouls. The very thought made me feel unclean, as if I'd picked up a peach and found it rotten, my fingertips bursting through too-soft skin.
Once the cure had been administered, the ghouls drifted into sleep.
"Padhi put a sedative in the mix," Seamus said with forced casualness. His hands shook as he rolled up the package. "What happened?"
"Her oath is too strong," Julian said before I could come up with my own theory. "It's the trial, isn't it? Your oath is stronger than all of ours."
"I don't know what it is," I said quietly, keenly aware of the three bodies on the floor in their drug-induced stupor. Before I had thought of them as phantom limbs. Now, they felt gangrenous. "The harder I pushed, the more they raged."
"Okay," Seamus said. "Okay. That's good information. We'll tell Maeve and—"
The van rocked, pitching all but the sunstriders onto their backsides.
"Incoming," DeShawn called over his shoulder. "What the fuck did you do, Mags? We got five pissed-off ghouls out there and they're—"
The van rocked again. This time, we could all hear the meaty thump of a body hurling itself against the metal doors.
"They're fucking throwing themselves at us!"
Hundreds. They were mortals, but there were hundreds, maybe thousands. This had always been a numbers game.
"There will be more," I said gravely, helping Seamus to steady himself. "We have to get out of here. Retreat, everyone, to the estate."
"Don't have to tell me twice," DeShawn said, and gave the order over the radio even as he got the van in gear and peeled out onto the main road. Snarls of rage followed us.
"Fuckers still got mortal legs," DeShawn said, laughing. "Can't chase us!"
I sensed them seconds before DeShawn saw them. A gathering of ghouls, easily a dozen deep, lined the main road, blocking our path with their bodies. The brakes screamed as DeShawn slammed on them, coming to a shuddering stop just a few yards from the front line.
"Fucking zombies," DeShawn hissed to himself and wrenched on the wheel, heading down a side route.
"Don't—" I warned, but he had already wedged us into the alley, where another ten ghouls waited at the end. The dozens howled in triumph as they flooded up behind us.
The van rocked, and above the screeching of the ghouls was the steady thump-thump of bodies throwing themselves, over and over again, at the van.
Thirty-three: The Fixer
Ghouls spilled across the hood of the van, reaching for the windows, digging soft mortal fingers into handles and seams and any other place that looked likely to give.
"I can't run these people over," DeShawn ground out. "They're not turned, right? Their eyes are bloodshot but—fuck—" The van rocked violently, nearly tipping. A rock smashed into the window, throwing spider web cracks across the glass.
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