“The rest will be in the basement,” Talus said quietly, pointing at the door behind us. “Let’s move in together.”
Tamara and the other two fae crossed the room toward us, holding their weapons carefully as they stepped around the bodies. The nightmare opened her mouth to say something and then let out a surprisingly feminine shriek of surprise as one of the bodies moved and grabbed her ankle.
She opened fire at it, spraying the corpse with garlic-coated bullets. It ignored them, yanking her to the ground as several more of the bodies began to move. Tamara’s shriek turned to silence, and a gout of flame flashed out from her black skin, burning the corpse’s hand to ash.
“Shoot them,” Talus barked, and I obeyed.
All of the corpses were getting up now, moving for the closest person. I emptied a clip almost instantly into the nearest, to no apparent affect beyond the impact of the bullets. The garlic did nothing, and the body kept coming, grabbing the Uzi as I tried to reload.
Another moving corpse grabbed at me, and I let the Uzi go to fend off the grasping hands. Then I had two sets of grasping hands grabbing me with inhuman strength. I struggled, but they were stronger than me. My world shrank down to me and two super-strong, somehow mobile corpses trying to tear me apart.
In a panic, I called faerie flame. Green fire coated my wrists, and the smell of burning meat wafted up as they held on, despite the fire. With a grunt of focused effort, I managed to burn one of the creatures’ hands entirely to ash, and it tottered against the bar, trying to reach me still with its teeth and charred stumps.
The other let go of my arms and went for my throat while I was distracted. I missed stopping it, and its hands closed around my neck with that insane strength. I struggled as it cut off my breathing, and for a moment, I thought it was all over.
Then Talus’s ancient short sword slashed down like an ax, severing both of the creature’s arms with a single strike. A second strike decapitated the creature, and a third cleaved it apart just above the pelvis. Even as the corpse fell apart into pieces, the large bits still struggled to move.
“Go,” Tamara shouted as I looked up. Talus had chopped apart three of the corpses by us, but Tamara, Celine and Frankie stood in the middle of a swarming crowd. They’d abandoned guns now for large knives. It took near-full dismemberment to stop the things. “We’ll hold them,” the nightmare insisted, “Go.”
Talus grabbed my arm and dragged me with him through the door into the basement, pulled it shut behind us just as another pair of corpses slammed into it.
30
“What the hell are those things?” I asked, and felt a warmth on my skin under his hand in answer.
Blood-thralls, his voice said inside my head. Keep quiet; we must let them think we’re all trapped upstairs.
Blood-what? I asked as I followed him down the stairs. I’d never heard of such a thing.
They’re fucking zombies, Talus explained bluntly. Corpses animated by the blood in their veins, powered by the will of a blood mage adept. He paused. Jason, there aren’t supposed to be any blood adepts left. They were supposedly wiped out a decade ago. But nothing less than an adept could raise that many thralls.
So, we have a problem?
We have a problem, he confirmed. You lost your gun; still armed?
I have a pistol. Just one clip, I warned, after checking my ammunition and realizing one of the thralls had managed to tear off my ammo pouch. They’re triple-kill rounds the Queen gave me—garlic, silver, cold iron.
Damn, Talus replied, leading the way slowly down the stairs, keeping quiet and keeping his hand on my arm. Hold on to those unless I tell you to shoot, okay?
What happens if we face something you don’t want me to use them on?
Stay behind me, he instructed, and I groaned as quietly as I could. I’d been afraid of that response.
We reached the bottom of the staircase into the basement, and Talus crept forward, motioning for me to wait behind him. After a moment, he gestured me forward and moved on himself.
The basement was plain concrete. The stairs opened into an empty storage room long devoid of the food and booze it had once held for the bar upstairs. A doorway exited on the north and south sides of the room. Talus investigated the north door for a few moments while I chafed impatiently—every moment we waited was a moment that the people we’d left behind had to fight for their lives against a horde of nearly unkillable zombies.
Talus obviously felt the same way, as he abandoned the north door after a quick inspection and led me to the south door. He listened at it for a moment and then opened the door, covering the hallway beyond with his gun.
He then touched my arm again. North door hasn’t been used, but there are tracks in the dust leading this way. Too much of a mess for me to say how many. Be ready for anything.
I followed him through the door, and we made our way down the hall, listening at each door. We’d passed the first set of doors when a very familiar raised voice echoed down the hallway.
“What is the meaning of this, Madrigal?” the hag Laurie, left hand of the fae lord of Calgary demanded...in the heart of the vampire’s lair.
“I,” a soft, sibilant voice hissed, “was about to ask you the same question. About the fae hit squad that just murdered my children.” The hiss turned to a shriek, and the crack of a hard-delivered slap carried through the door.
“What?” Laurie demanded. “I would have known of such a thing!”
“So you said,” Madrigal, presumably, hissed. “So you promised. You swore you would be able to warn us of any attack by the fae, and yet my children lie dead above us. Half and more of my brood—slaughtered by your brothers!”
“I didn’t know,” the hag said loudly as the whip-crack of Power echoed between the two women we couldn’t see. “I swore I would warn you, and I warned you of every act, every move. Why would I stop now?! Winters would have my head!”
“Winters is not who you should be worried about,” the vampire snarled. “A half dozen greater fae and gentry, led by that fool of a noble, have assaulted my den. My apprentices and children have been slaughtered. Now tell me, you fae bitch, why you should not die with them.”
“I have not failed you yet,” Laurie replied. “Talus must have brought soldiers from outside the city—without telling me. They must suspect something!”
“Well, then maybe I should leave you to them?” Madrigal suggested, her voice suddenly sickly sweet. “A peace offering, maybe—the traitor who sold them out?”
I realized that Talus was about to break through the door, and grabbed his arm. Wait, I told him. We need to know more.
“My thralls have trapped them,” Madrigal continued. “They have murdered my children, but my toys are proving more than they can handle.”
“I did not fail you,” Laurie insisted.
“That does mean I am not thoroughly fucking pissed,” the vampire snapped. “My children are dead, and your kind did it.”
We need Laurie alive, Talus said in my head through the link. One of your rounds won’t kill her but will disable her—I can’t fight her and the adept and any other vampires in the room.
“A few more days, and you will have the right to make more,” Laurie told the vampire. “As a signed member of the new Covenants.”
Can you fight them all? I asked.
New Covenants? Talus queried back, and then shook his head. Not the adept, not if she has any other mages with her.
So, shoot Laurie once and then dump the rest of the clip into whoever she’s talking to?
“Do I suggest that your children are replaceable?” Madrigal said sharply, her voice back to being a sibilant hiss. “Your kind will pay for this murder.”
That’ll work, Talus agreed. The noble took a deep breath and then nodded me toward the door. Now!
With a flick of his wrist and a burst of Power, Talus shattered the door between us and the traitor and vampire. I charged through first, picking up a quick sight picture o
f the room as I raised the Jericho.
Laurie and a dark-haired woman in a rose-pink skirt suit stood in the center of the room, glaring at each other. Three men and two women, two of the men in black robes and the rest in street clothes, stood along the walls, all with bared fangs reacting to the destruction of the door. Another woman who I recognized from Court as a shade—a minor Unseelie fae—stood just behind Laurie, her hand on a concealed weapon.
The room had started life as some sort of storage cellar, but it had been converted to a twisted cross between a chapel, a formal dining room, and a butcher’s workroom. A black stone plinth with an inverted pentacle in wrought gold hanging over it dominated one end of the room, the plinth carved with blood channels clearly visible in dried fluids from the other end of the room.
A heavy oak table, sized to fit over a dozen people, was perpendicular to the room in the middle, between the door and the altar. Madrigal and Laurie stood between us and the table, but Madrigal’s vampire minions were behind it.
Heavy black drapes covered up the concrete walls, giving an impression of dark gothic elegance to the whole affair, with horror added by the pair of freshly bled bodies just barely visible beside the altar.
The entire impression of the room snapped into my mind as I trained the small pistol on Laurie, and flashed into the back of my head as I fired. The hag was barely beginning to react, drawing on her Power, when the mixed silver-and-cold-iron bullet slammed into her gut.
The Power flickering through her only accentuated the effect of the cold iron, and Laurie screamed as the bullet fractured inside her, the bane of our kind seeping into her blood. Her keening wail echoed through the room as Talus followed me into the room.
He took in the same picture as I had, and gestured once. The heavy oak table flew backward, slamming the vampires behind it to the ground as I turned to fire at Madrigal.
My first round missed as the vampire slipped sideways, alerted by the attack on Laurie. While I wasn’t as fast as she was and couldn’t possibly have kept up with her if I’d been trying to fight her hand to hand, I could track across the room faster than she could move. My second and third shots slammed into the blood mage, catching her mid-dodge and throwing her away from me. Light flickered around her as the garlic burned in her blood, but the blood mage controlled the fire, using it to fuel her Power.
My fourth shot missed again, and the fifth slammed into her hip as she paused, gesturing toward me. Power flared in the room, and a dark red mist burst into existence around her hand. The mist flashed out and knocked aside my last three rounds as I emptied the clip.
For a moment, I thought I was dead. The mist started to extend out from her hand as she slashed it toward me, and I had no illusions about my ability to stop that attack. But we both had forgotten about Talus, who had been busy throwing the furniture around.
The mist whipped out toward my face, and the fae noble calmly stepped up to the blood mage from behind her and ran her through with his sword. The mist broke apart, inches from my skin, and Madrigal ripped the blade out as she spun to face Talus.
“You,” she hissed.
“Me,” he agreed calmly—and decapitated her. The mist that had started to flow out from her hands toward him dispersed instantly as the imitation of life that sustained her long-dead corpse fled. Screams of rage echoed through the tiny chamber, and the heavy table Talus had thrown onto the vampires was sent flying back at us.
Apparently, two of the still-living vampires were blood mages as well, and blood-driven telekinesis turned the heavy table into a weapon as it crossed the room. I ducked, hitting the ground as the table’s progress was delayed by bouncing off Laurie’s still-whimpering form with the shiver-worthy sound of bones breaking.
It stopped a yard or so from me, shattering into hundreds of pieces as Talus hit it with an even stronger and less spread-out blast of telekinetic force. The other fae who’d been with Laurie took advantage of my distraction, charging me with a machine pistol identical to the one I’d left somewhere upstairs in the hands of Madrigal’s blood thralls.
Somewhere along the way, conjuring that whip of flame and controlling it had become a lot more instinctual, because I didn’t even consciously think about it before I used it to tear the gun out of her hand in a flash of green faerie flame.
She responded by conjuring shadow out of thin air, a blade of darkness taking form around her arm as she slashed at me. I dodged, rolling to my feet as I moved away from the shadow, feeling a wave of cold as the shadow passed by me.
I flicked the whip of faerie flame at her, trying to wrap it around her as I’d done with the blood mage upstairs. The shade’s shadow blade cut across the line of fire, shattering it into sparks that scattered all around us.
I was left holding about a foot of faerie flame as she came at me again with the shadow. Unthinkingly, I parried her shadow with the fire in my hand, and to my surprise, it worked. The fire broke the shadow apart in the same way the shadow had shattered my fire whip a moment before.
For a few seconds, we slashed back and forth at each other, quickly discovering that neither of us could conjure a blade of our element that the other couldn’t break. She’d strike at me with shadow, and I’d block it with flame, and then I’d return the attack and she’d block mine.
After a several fruitless exchanges, she changed tactics, bounding away from me with the perfect grace of the true fae and throwing a bolt of shadowstuff at me. I almost managed to dodge it, but it clipped me on my shoulder.
The force tossed me backward even as a horrific chill began to rapidly radiate out from the wound. It felt frozen, not cut, and in moments, my left arm was frozen into uselessness. The shade smiled and advanced back toward me, the blade of shadow on her hand darkening as the cold stole my ability to conjure flame.
I’ve never seen a pretty girl look quite so ugly when smiling as the shade did as she advanced on me. Chill shivers tore through my body, dropping me back to my knees as I tried to stand, the cold rippling through me. Her smile was even colder, darkness shrouding her as the Unseelie drew her hand back to finish me off.
Somehow, some way, I reached through the chills wracking my body and touched the fire at my core that fueled my Power. Something inside me clicked, and warmth shot out, radiating through my body, driving the chill from my flesh. The world froze, and I called faerie flame in the same way I had when fighting Sigridsen. My right hand flew out, palm first, to block the strike of her shadowblade.
The gout of green fire that blasted from my palm shattered the shade’s blade and took her hand off at the wrist, cauterizing the wound as it burned its way past. She screamed, and the sound echoed horribly in the small concrete room as she conjured shadow with her other hand and threw it at me.
I stopped the bolt of shadowstuff with another burst of flame. The ball of shadow disappeared within the green-white flames, which continued on to take the Unseelie killer in the upper chest. She was pitched backwards, flying across the room to slam into the concrete wall with a very final impact.
My own opponent defeated, I turned to check on Talus. One of the blood mages and both of the female vampires were down, their unlife cut short by the fae noble’s blade and Power. The remaining blood mage was using tendrils of red mist to manipulate the larger chunks of table. Talus kept dodging the pieces as they rushed at him with lethal force.
The other vampire was adding to the distraction, dodging in and out and the noble’s reach, trying to stab him with a long obsidian dagger. All three of them were very focused on each other as I picked up the shade’s Uzi.
Something warned the blood mage, who was starting to turn his head towards me as I opened fire. Moments later, the tendrils of mist vanished and the remnants of the table crashed to the ground as the Uzi’s slugs ripped apart his head and upper chest.
Without the distraction of the blood mage, the other vampire met Talus’s sword head on as he tried to stab the fae. His headless corpse crumpled on top of the shatt
ered remnants of the table, leaving Talus and me the only people standing in the room.
Laurie whimpered as Talus crossed the room to her, her body crippled by the cold iron in her flesh and blood. From somewhere, he produced a pair of handcuffs and roughly bound her hands together before focusing healing energy into her.
Her whimpers slowly faded, though from the drawn expression on her face, I suspect Talus left more than a little cold iron in her system, weakening her enough she could not possibly be a threat to us.
“Laurie O’Donnell,” he said finally, looking down on her as I slowly walked over to join him. “As a noble of Lord Oberis’s Court, I place you under arrest for betrayal of race and Court and Covenant.”
She was silent as Talus and I dragged her to her feet. The hag stumbled along with us as we retraced our steps out of the basement of the hotel, back up the stairs to the wreckage of the hotel bar.
Bodies and bits of bodies were scattered everywhere. Many of Madrigal’s thralls had been hacked to pieces, but at least half appeared to have simply collapsed when the adept had died. Frankie lay away from them, his clothes and skin having faded to a light brown. His head was twisted at an angle that told a silent but explicit story.
Tamara and Celine stood next to him, Celine kneeling by the green man’s corpse, while Tamara leaned against a wall, carefully tying torn strips of her jacket around several slowly oozing wounds. The nightmare spotted us and Laurie first, and stopped tying her wounds to produce her gun from under her torn jacket.
“What’s she doing here?” the wounded fae demanded.
“She was with the vampires,” Talus said simply. “I will be bringing her to my uncle.”
Tamara nodded sharply, glaring at the hag. “The adept is dead,” she stated. It wasn’t really a question, given the state of the thralls all around us.
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