The boar loomed, closer and closer.
Twenty-five yards. The boar was on top of us. We wouldn’t make it.
Jennifer spun toward the pig, baring her teeth. Daniel’s clawed hand closed on her shoulder. He shoved her aside and flung himself at the boar. The werewolf’s claws raked across the pig’s head, gouging the left eye. The boar squealed in mad fury. His tusk caught Daniel in the stomach. The boar shot forward, half-blind, and smashed into the ward. Daniel’s blond head hit the pale glow. The back of his skull exploded, his face still intact, his blue eyes staring straight at us, and then both the werewolf and the boar disintegrated in a flash of blinding white.
Ten yards.
Jennifer screamed a single hoarse howl of pain, ripped straight from her heart.
I sliced Slayer across my forearm, coating the blade with my blood, and rammed the ward, sinking all of my magic into the power word. “Hesaad.” Mine.
Agony ripped through me in a fiery cascade.
The ward shuddered. Veins of pure, intense red shot through the magic barrier. It shattered and the shapeshifters burst through it, smashing into the tower.
I stumbled forward, trying to hold on to reality. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out . . .
Derek ripped the tower’s door off its hinges. A man raised a crossbow, blocking our way. Jennifer lunged at him. The bolt took her in the thigh. She ripped the man’s head off, pulled the bolt out, and bounded inside, where more shooters waited on the stairway.
We climbed the tower, step by step. For the first couple of minutes Jennifer was in front venting her fury, and then she took off into the side corridor raging, and someone else took point. We killed and killed and climbed, and the stairs behind us ran red with blood.
A door loomed ahead. The shapeshifters crashed through it, drunk on blood fumes and anger. People spun to us, a familiar face among them. Shane. I lunged and disemboweled him with one precise strike. He clutched at his stomach, trying to hold the slippery ribbons of his intestines inside. I sliced across his chest and neck and kicked him to the ground. He crashed at my feet, bleeding to death.
The device loomed in front of me, a cylinder of gleaming metal, encrusted with gems and inlaid with glyphs and patterns, spinning magic from its top in feathery glowing strands. A control console rose next to it, bristling with levers. Three gauges, long narrow rectangles half-filled with pale light, glowed above the console.
Around the cylinder, the shapeshifters tore into the Keepers like sharks into baby seals. I pulled Kamen’s instructions from the pocket of my jeans and unfolded them, careful to keep my bloody fingerprints off the text. According to Kamen, shutting down the machine required pushing the levers in a precise sequence. He said it would take anywhere from three to ten minutes. I had no idea how many minutes I had left.
Don’t think about it; just do it.
I pushed the first lever. The gauge on the left turned blue. If it turned bright green, the device would become unstable and we’d all vanish in an explosion of magic. I jerked my hand back.
The gauge glowed with blue, slowly growing lighter and lighter.
Seconds ticked by. Come on. If I ever commissioned a world-destroying device, it would have a two-second shutoff: turn the key and that’s it.
Come on.
The gauge turned white. I pushed the second lever. The third gauge shot into blue-green. I held my breath.
The light shone, holding at the almost-green mark.
Turn white. Turn white, damn you.
Behind me someone snarled.
White. Turn white.
The gauge paled, sliding into pale gray. Good enough.
I pulled the first lever again. All three gauges remained steadily pale.
Third lever.
Second lever.
Third lever again. When this was over, I would screw Kamen’s head off his shoulders like a cap off a beer bottle. First lever.
All three gauges turned green.
Fuck.
The top of the device slid open, magic curving around it like veils of white smoke, nipping at my skin.
Don’t blow up. Just don’t blow up.
The gauges slid into blue. Wait for it.
My hands shook. I clenched them into fists.
Wait for it.
Wait.
Wait.
The gauges turned white. I pushed the final lever.
Nothing.
What the hell?
I had done it right, I’d memorized the instructions, they were in my hand . . . Maybe Kamen had lied. Maybe he wanted the device to activate . . .
Something clanged within the machine. The gauges drained, the glow vanishing. The veils of magic dissipated, dissolving into nothing. The last sparks of power melted from the device and it sat inert, just a hunk of metal, dull and harmless.
I slumped on the floor. Around me shapeshifters moved. Someone threw a body out the window.
We’d won. Somehow we’d won.
My gaze snagged on Shane, sprawled on the floor in the mess of his innards. He stared at me, his eyes wild.
“We won,” I told him.
He glared at me with eyes full of hate.
Behind him Curran loomed in the doorway. He was human and smeared with blood. He stepped over Shane and crouched by me. I put my arms around his neck and we kissed, both covered in gore and neither one caring. We kissed while around us, the soldiers of the Pack tossed the bodies out the windows, stepping over Shane as he lay dying slowly, bleeding his life out, watching his intestines contract and shiver on the floor in front of him.
EPILOGUE
THE KEEPERS WERE DEAD. THE MAGIC ELITE OF Atlanta celebrated, right outside the fallen MSDU headquarters. Food appeared as if out of thin air, bonfires flared here and there, and a couple of Calydonian boars had been carved into chunks for a barbecue. Mages, the People, witches, and shapeshifters reveled in the simple glory of being alive. We all knew that the next morning the alliance would fracture and old rivalries would rear their heads, but for one evening, we celebrated and watched the cops and the MSDU from neighboring cities try to sort out the wreckage. The law enforcement agencies were none too happy with our impromptu cookout, but given that we had just cracked their best fortress like a walnut, they didn’t make any waves.
The Keepers had brought as many of their members as they could muster. The MSDU lost forty people; the rest had been herded into an underground bunker—the Keepers didn’t want to waste the ammunition. The rats found them and let them out. Andrea’s friend didn’t make it.
I wandered past the tables. Smiling faces, lots of food, the hum of excited conversation. Ghastek came walking toward me, carrying a plate. “Humans are fickle creatures,” he said. “Three days ago I bet none of these people would have found a cause to throw a party. Here we are celebrating, when all we’ve done is return things to normal.”
“Nothing like a great tragedy to make you appreciate life,” I told him.
“Indeed. You aren’t celebrating, Kate.”
Hard to celebrate when visions of your kid in a hospital bed keep floating through your head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m thrilled.”
“Rowena came to visit you this morning,” Ghastek said. “Why?”
Ha! “Remember how I asked you to get the information from that navigator who fainted and you blew me off? Go screw yourself.”
I walked away.
A lone figure sat away from the bonfires, hugging her knees. I came closer and saw pale hair. Jennifer. I came to sit by her. She stared straight ahead. I wasn’t sure she even knew I was there.
We sat for a long time, looking out at the base swarming with cops.
“I don’t even have a body to bury,” she said.
“You’ll have his child,” I said.
She rested her hand on her stomach. Her voice was bitter. “And if I am very lucky, I won’t have to kill her.”
“Jennifer!” A woman came up to us. She had Jennifer’s lean
, long body and pale hair. One of her sisters. “Here you are. Come with me. We have a table set up.”
Jennifer didn’t move.
“You need to eat,” the woman said. “You’re eating for two, remember?”
Jennifer rose slowly.
“That’s it,” her sister murmured. “Come on. Let’s take care of that baby.”
She led Jennifer away. I sat alone.
Curran dropped next to me. “Hey.”
It’s hard to jump while sitting down. I still managed. “Why do you sneak up on me like that?”
“It’s funny.”
“It’s not.” I leaned into him and he put his arm around me.
“It’s hilarious. It’s almost as funny as your snoring.”
“I don’t snore.”
He nodded with a wide grin. “It’s a quiet peaceful kind of snoring. Like a small cuddly Tasmanian devil. Kind of cute when sleeping, all claws and teeth when awake.”
“You snore worse. At least I don’t turn into a lion in my sleep.”
“I only did it once.”
“Once was weird enough, thank you.”
He looked at me. “You’re still going through with the Julie thing?”
“Yes. Why do you keep asking me?”
“I keep hoping you’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
He sighed and pulled me closer to him.
“YOUR BLOOD AND ERRA’S BLOOD ARE BASICALLY the same,” Doolittle told me.
I rubbed my eyes. I hadn’t slept much the night before, and I had spent all morning trying to get a sample of shapeshifter blood to respond to my magic. I’d accomplished exactly nothing. The blood sat inert in the small plastic dish. It didn’t help that Curran had insisted on watching me and spent the past three hours sitting in the corner, looking pissed off. There was the aftermath of the Keepers chaos to deal with and shapeshifters returning to the Keep, but no, he put it all on hold so he could sit here and watch me fail.
“The only difference between you and her is the concentration of magic,” Doolittle continued.
She’d had thousands of years to accumulate hers, while I’d barely had a quarter of a century.
“I believe this is getting us nowhere,” Doolittle said. “And don’t be giving me dirty looks, my lady. I didn’t say we should give up.”
“I think we should,” Curran said.
“What we need is an anchor. Something in Julie’s blood that would respond to your magic.” Doolittle took a syringe from the table and let a single drop from the syringe fall into the blood. Foul magic tugged on me.
“Vampire blood.” I felt it, felt the undeath shoot through the blood in the dish.
Doolittle nodded. “Try it now.”
I concentrated and pulled.
I could do this. I should be able to do this.
Sweat broke on my hairline.
The blood rose from the dish about an inch, curling into a globe of red. I held it there and stretched it into a disk. It flowed, obedient and pliant.
“How did you know?” Curran asked.
“Erra has traces of vampirism in her blood sample,” Doolittle said. “Not in a virulent form. It’s a very odd thing, almost like a dormant precursor to the virus itself. Our lady does too, in smaller concentration.”
I let the blood drain into the dish.
“I would venture a guess that most navigators of the dead also possess the same, probably in much, much smaller quantities. When I have some spare time, I want to look at your blood in greater detail.” Doolittle frowned.
“What, we have it, too?” Curran pushed up from the floor.
“It reacts to magic,” Doolittle said. “Perhaps it’s an evolutionary adaption to the world where magic was a constant presence. I would have to run more tests, but for now we must deal with the problem at hand. We need the vampiric vector.”
“Are you telling me I have to infect Julie with vampirism?” This was crazy. Vampirism was irreversible. But then so was Lycos-V.
“I wouldn’t presume to tell you anything,” Doolittle said. “This whole scheme is an exercise in insanity. However, if you persist in this harebrained, ill-advised endeavor, this is the only way for you to mold her blood.”
“How about we just don’t do it,” Curran said.
I took a deep breath. “Can you tell me with absolute certainty that Julie will go loup the moment she wakes up?”
They both answered in unison. “Yes.”
“Then I have to do it,” I told them. “I have no choice.”
THREE DAYS LATER I TRAVELED TO PERFORM THE Arez ritual deep in Sibley Forest. The witches were there, and somehow Grigorii and his brother were there, too. I had never quite gotten to the bottom of how they’d solved their differences, but I decided not to look a gift volhv in the mouth.
We chose a spot on top of a lone quartz boulder, thrusting from the forest floor like a miniature version of Stone Mountain. Kamen operated the device we’d taken at Palmetto. The witches stood around me in a circle, while Julie lay in front of me on a stretcher. Her sedation was wearing off, and muscles and bone bulged and moved under her skin as if they had a mind of their own. Derek and Jezebel stood on both sides of the stretcher, waiting.
Kamen opened the device. Magic spilled from it in a dense cascade of pale glow. The witches strained and then a flood of power hit me, so cold it felt like my muscles froze. It spread through me, flowing from cell to cell, saturating my blood, setting my nerves on fire.
The witches kept feeding me power, more and more and more. The ice turned into agony, shaving at me from the inside, scraping layer after layer from my core.
In the haze of magic Doolittle took a step toward Julie. The syringe in his hand rose. The needle touched her skin and the Immortuus pathogen entered her body.
In a normal victim, it took seven hours for full colonization of the body. Seven hours from the infection to full-blown vampirism. The process was irreversible. We didn’t need seven hours. We just needed one minute for the vampiric blood to fully circulate through Julie’s body.
More magic came. My hands and feet dissolved into pain. Every instinct screamed for me to stop. End it. Just end it and the pain will stop.
Julie’s body began to glow. It beckoned me, like a swamp light, drawing me closer and closer. She kicked and convulsed on her stretcher, muscles and fur bulging.
I was almost there. A little more magic. A little more pain.
A searing blast of magic smashed into me, pushing me over the edge.
Julie snarled. Her restraints snapped and she shot up, her flesh boiling. Grotesque jaws thrust from her face, She stood hunched over, half human, half lynx, but whereas a shapeshifter’s warrior form was streamlined, Julie’s body was a mess of mismatched parts. Her left arm was huge, her right leg had a knee that bent backward. Fur sheathed her stomach, while human skin stained her back in pale patches.
She stared, mesmerized.
I felt the blood sliding through her veins, flowing in a current of tiny particles of magic.
Julie opened her mouth, her monstrous face uncertain.
Derek clamped her in a bear hug and Jezebel sliced her neck, severing the jugular. Blood shot in a pressurized spray and I grabbed it with my power, gathering each precious tiny drop, condensing, turning, spinning it into a globe of brilliant magic.
All sound faded, except the beating of my heart.
I kept pulling it, drawing it out of the container of flesh, until I had taken all of it.
The creature who had owned the blood before me toppled to the ground.
I beckoned the sphere and it floated toward me, settling in the palms of my open hands, so alive, so bursting with magic.
Something was wrong with it. It was corrupted, tainted somehow. But it was so breathtakingly beautiful.
A distant presence tugged on me, coming from impossibly far, stretching toward me across distance or time, I couldn’t tell. It peered inside me, permeating my magic, examini
ng the blood in my hands.
I was supposed to do something with this blood, wasn’t I? Or maybe not. It sat in my palms, so warm and throbbing with power.
The presence watched me. I watched it back.
A thought formed in my head and it wasn’t my own, yet somehow it also was. “Well done.”
At the creature’s body another creature was screaming at me, her face contorted. A third creature stared at me, an expression of pure horror stamped on his face.
Odd, this blood. All wrong. I had to do something with it, but I wasn’t sure what.
I held the blood out to the presence. “It’s dirty.”
“Then you should clean it,” the presence suggested gently.
I had to clean it. Yes, that was it.
“Let your blood flow,” the presence murmured.
I sweated blood. It poured from my pores, bleeding magic.
“Now bind them together,” the presence suggested.
I molded my blood, stretching it in thin filaments to the glowing core of the creature’s blood in my hand, wrapping my magic around it, piercing it, cleansing.
“That’s it. That’s it,” the presence told me. “Excellent. Now return it.”
“It’s mine!”
“You must give it back or the child won’t survive.”
“But it’s mine!”
“No. You only borrowed it. If you keep it, you’ll kill its vessel.”
The creatures were screaming.
I didn’t want to kill anyone.
I held the sphere for another long moment, savoring it, and thrust it back into the creature’s body. It flowed into her, rushing through, filling her collapsed veins and arteries.
The creature didn’t stir.
“You must will her to live,” the presence told me gently. “She needs your help.”
“Mine,” I told the blood. “Obey me. Live. Survive. Obey, obey, obey . . .”
The creature drew a hoarse breath, jerking. The wound on her neck bled. Her body whipped, gripped by spasms. The others lunged to her.
The world careened on its side, went dark, and all was still.
I OPENED MY EYES. CURRAN SAT NEXT TO ME, HIS gray eyes watching me.
Julie . . .
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