Foley makes a beeline for the shelving, tossing his chosen book on one of the worktables as he passes by. He scours the shelves with quick up and down motions, rising to his tiptoes to view the options on the upper shelves, then squatting to peruse the stuff on the shelves near the floor. He goes on like this for four or five minutes, occasionally grabbing items: a handful of some sort of plant stems, the dried petals of a purple flower, a stoppered vial containing a clear liquid that has a TOXIC label wrapped around it, a piece of sidewalk chalk, and a few items I can’t identify. When he’s finished, his arms are overloaded, and a few petals slip free and float to the floor as he hurries over to the worktable.
He drops everything on the worktable in a big, messy pile—for some reason, I doubt Erica preps magic with as little tidiness—and digs through a cabinet built into the base of the table until he finds a Bunsen burner with a gas cartridge hooked to the bottom. Setting the burner on the tabletop, he carefully turns the knob for the gas just enough to let a small stream out. Next, he takes two steps back, holds out his hand, and snaps his fingers twice. A small wisp of his sea-green aura whips toward the Bunsen burner, and a fire springs to life before settling into a low, hot flame.
I prop myself against the wall and watch with fascination as Foley goes back and forth between checking the spell book’s instructions and performing the steps. He crushes the petals and plant stems with a pestle and mortar, sets a concoction of liquids, including the toxic one, over the flame in a large beaker, adds a dash of some kind of blue powder here and a few drops of some red extract there. By the end of the sequence, every ingredient he gathered has been used, and the full mixture is brought to a boil. He leaves it over the flame for exactly seven minutes, counting aloud, before cutting the gas and allowing the mixture to cool.
Foley steps away from the beaker and smacks his cheeks a few times, then shakes his head and lets out a silly noise. It’s such a funny scene I can’t help but snort. The vampire starts at the sound and whips his head toward me, a blush crawling up his neck. He was focusing so hard on the spell prep, he must’ve forgotten I was in the room. “Oh, right,” he says, voice thick with embarrassment. “Um, the prep work’s done now. If you’d like me to cast the spell on you too, in case they get some of your blood, I can do that. Just come over here and stand within five feet of the beaker.”
I weigh my options for only a second—better protection is never overkill—and scoot over to the table. Up close, the magic brew smells like the contents of a perfume store’s dumpster, and I have to breathe through my mouth to avoid sneezing half a dozen times. Foley’s sense of smell must be stinging like he’s poured acid up his nostrils, but he only wrinkles his nose as he leans over the beaker to recheck the three-paragraph spell incantation laid out in the book. I guess you eventually get used to the fumes when you practice magic on a regular basis.
Foley mouths the incantation to himself a couple times, and nods. “I got it. Let’s do this.” He claps his hands and closes his eyes, concentrating hard as he draws a large burst of power from his soul. It coalesces around him as a blinding aura, so I cut back to normal vision, reducing it to a mild green glare. Foley holds out his hands, cupping them in the air over the open top of the beaker, and slightly bends his fingers. Finally, he begins to speak in rapid tones, words rolling over his tongue so fast, and with such little hesitation, that I think he must be fluent in the language he’s speaking.
The aura arches out into the beaker, and a moment later, the liquid evaporates into a dense fog that branches out to the left and right and curves toward us. The branches encircle us completely, forming a white, cloud-like ring infused with green threads of Foley’s power. Foley completes the incantation with a sharp, rising note. The ring then dissipates and rolls inward, covering us both in a fine mist. I hold my breath as the acrid stench washes over me, but with a final green flash of power, the smell fades into nothing but a faint echo, and is replaced by the sensation of a feathery weight encapsulating my body.
Foley sucks in a deep breath. “That’s it. Looks like it worked.”
“Only one way to find out.” I wipe my hand across my shirt, checking for damp spots, but my fingers come away dry. “Let’s get out of here and hunker down somewhere at least a mile away. If they find us again, we’ll know the spell failed. If they don’t, we win the day, and we’ll check in to a motel somewhere and stay hidden until Lucian comes to collect you.”
“Sounds good to me.”
I tell Foley to leave the equipment where it is—I can clean up the basement later—but to take the spell book in case we need it again, and together, we hustle upstairs. The spell prep took so long that there’s a significant chance Lizzie’s goons caught our trail before the thing was cast, so I don’t want to linger around Erica’s place any longer than necessary. If her house gets trashed by some rogue vampires, I’m going to have a lot to answer for when she finally blows back into town.
We reach the porch. I slam the door shut behind us and lock it, which, to my relief, reactivates the wards. Reassured the house will be okay, I tuck the key into my pocket, fish around in that same pocket for my truck key, find the truck key, turn around, and—
A giant fireball slams into the side of my truck. The exterior crumples with a high-pitched shriek, and the vehicle flies off the driveway, flipping twice and skidding across Erica’s lawn, tearing the grass from the soil like the skin of a fruit being peeled back, flinging dirt in every direction. I shield my eyes from the rain of debris and ignore the ringing in my ears as I yank my gun from my waistband and aim in the direction the fireball came from. Past a small hedge and a line of trees that separate Erica’s property from the neighbor’s yard stands a group of ten Black Knights.
“Oh, fuck,” I mutter.
Foley turns to face them, ripping his glasses off to showcase his crimson eyes. He again focuses on the leader of the pack, the only noble in the group, and growls, “I should’ve killed you when I had the chance, Caine.”
Despite the fiery remains of my truck hissing and popping in the background, Caine hears what Foley says and replies. But his words are lost to my ears. He raises his arms and smiles like he said something funny. Foley bares his teeth in response and draws out a stream of magic, his aura flaring brightly again.
An alarm goes off in my head, and I grab Foley’s arm before he can do something stupid. “You can’t beat all ten, and I probably can’t beat even one,” I remind him. “We need to make a break for it before they get any closer.”
There’s about fifty feet between us and them. Just enough to give us a tiny head start.
Foley curls his fingers into tight fists and huffs out a swear in Romanian, never taking his furious eyes off Caine as he says, “If I carry you, I won’t be able to run at my top speed. Any sudden shift in direction will break your neck.”
“You got a spell that can fix that problem?”
Foley bites his lip. “Um…”
“Don’t panic. It’ll make your thoughts sloppy,” I say, even though my pounding heart wants to quit its job without two weeks’ notice. “Work through the problem the same way you would if you were taking a test, or studying for one. How can you move a human at top vampire speed without killing them? What can you do to the human to make them more resistant? Create a shield? Or a—”
“Petrification spell,” he blurts out. An ounce of the rage on his face melts away, and is replaced by a spark of interest in whatever bright idea he just came up with. He truly is a scholar at heart. “It’ll freeze you like a statue but won’t hurt you in any way. I can pick you up and move you however fast I need to, and you’ll behave like a solid object instead of like, well, a floppy human being.”
“So you’re going to turn me into a mannequin?” That sounds unappealing. But so does being eviscerated by the crowd of predators slowly creeping toward us.
He shrugs. “Best I can come up with on short notice. But bear in mind that you won’t be able to defend yourself unt
il I release the spell, so if Caine and his henchmen catch us during the sprint—”
“I have faith you’re better at marathons than him.”
Foley frowns. “I’ve never run a marathon.”
“Beginner’s luck then?”
“After all the crap I’ve been through lately, I deserve some luck, so if I can summon some at will, I’m going to invoke it now.” He rapidly whispers several quick lines in yet another unknown language, and his magic wraps around my body.
For a second, I feel like I’m drowning, and I choke on air. Then I’m assaulted by the sensation of being encased in concrete, and panic floods my system. I struggle instinctively, but find I can’t move a muscle. The only things that keep functioning normally are my internal organs. My heart is beating a mile a minute, and my lungs are pumping so irregularly I’ve started to hyperventilate. I feel like I’m about to faint. Which might be for the best.
Because as soon as the spell solidifies me into a human statue, stuck in a weird half-finished motion with my arms at waist level, Foley grabs me like I’m actually a mannequin, tucks me under one arm, spins around on his toes, and leaps all the way across Erica’s yard, over my ruined truck, and through a briar-filled patch of bushes that lets out into a large wooded area. He lands hard and takes off at light speed, moving faster than even Lucian did when he fought the wraiths in that locker room. Top speed for a born vampire. Considerably faster than the turned variety.
My face is pointed outward, away from Foley. I observe trees blurring past us, low branches coming within inches of my face. My eyes start to dry out because I can’t close my lids, the air screaming by like razors, stripping away all the moisture, until the whites start to sting as if I’ve doused them in alcohol.
Foley takes a sharp left turn and speeds up a hill, the g-force so high that my body should snap like a twig. But it doesn’t because Foley’s magic is taking the burden off my bones and muscles. I don’t know how my heart and lungs keep working normally though—if you can call “trying to escape from my chest and find a less suicidal body to inhabit” normal—and I’m not sure I want to know.
Magic is weird.
Foley hits the top of the hill and jumps forward again, covering what must be close to sixty feet in a single bound before his feet slam down and blow an enormous chunk of dirt from the ground, leaving a crater worthy of a meteorite strike. He doesn’t even have to stop to recover from that impact, and a second later, he’s out of the crater and we’re cruising along again, the world whipping by so fast I might as well be in a science fiction show, traveling via hyperspace.
A large, dark smudge flickers by my face, and Foley comes to an abrupt stop, dirt flying forward in a tall wave as the force of his skidding feet tears up the ground. He ducks to evade an arm that chops through the air, reminiscent of a machete swing. The arm hits a tree, and the trunk explodes. Sharp wood chips careen through the air and pierce the surrounding trees. Several zip by my face, and one snags my ear, drawing blood.
Before I regain my bearings and figure out what the hell is happening, Foley tosses me to the side. I land in a patch of tangled brush, unable to move a muscle. But luckily, I’m facing the clearing where Foley stopped.
Caine—who was the dark smudge—lunges for Foley, and Foley lunges back. They meet in the middle, hands on arms, and grapple wildly, a wrestling match for the ages. Caine is so strong, his push drives Foley’s feet six inches into the dirt, but Foley gives as good as he gets and throws his opponent off balance, flinging Caine into a tree. This tree is bigger than the one Caine destroyed with his karate chop, but not by much. It splinters under the impact, and the top half slips off the base and falls on Caine’s head before he can move out of the way. The vampire grunts as several hundred pounds of wood flattens him against the earth. But he doesn’t die.
Of course he doesn’t die. Goddamn vampires.
Foley makes to grab me and resume his sprint, but he stops short, swearing. In my periphery, I catch sight of shadows darting through the woods toward us. The rest of Caine’s goons, the slower, turned vampires, are closing the gap. We’ve lost our head start, and there’s no way to get it back. Vampires can run for hours and hours, they have so much stamina. Now that the whole crew has eyes on us, we won’t be able to lose them again unless we can disable them all like we did in my apartment.
Foley whispers under his breath, and the petrification spell begins to unravel, my body going lax. But it’s not an instant removal—I’m regaining control of my body from the head down—so I can’t hop up and help Foley as the bulk of the crew, six vampires, reach the clearing and pounce on him. Screaming to myself in frustration, I can only watch as Foley unleashes the full breadth of his magic, and born vampire prowess, and gives it his all.
In the moments I lie there, useless, barely able to track the hyper-fast movements of the death squad as they try to land a lethal blow on Foley, I come to understand what it was that made the Knights’ attack on the Parliament so successful. It wasn’t just the element of surprise. Older, more skilled vampires should’ve been able to compensate for that, even if they’d gone decades without combat experience.
The way these vampires move, like they can predict how and when Foley will strike. The way they team up with their comrades to make simultaneous disabling strikes to the extremities, to throw Foley off just enough to force him to expose his weak points. They’re expertly coordinated and well prepared to fight a born vampire. They won the fight in the parliament building because the Black Knights have trained their soldiers specifically to subvert the standard combat strategies employed by noble vampires and other house members.
My god, they’ve been planning a coup since the inception of their organization. It was part of the long game.
The petrification spell wears off at last, and I jump into action. At first, I move subtly, shoving my left hand into my back pocket and slipping on the other five beggar rings I removed from my pack before we reached Erica’s house. Good thing too. My backpack was in the truck when Caine blew it up; everything inside, including Erica’s letter, is nothing but smoldering ash now.
Complete set of rings on, I mentally activate the build command, drawing in the max amount of environmental energy that’ll fit in the small silver bands. I remind myself that the right fire ring is cracked and plan to work around that weakness. But if push comes to shove, I’ll have to sling every ounce of power I can at these bastards, regardless of the risk for overload.
I lift my left hand to my waistband and draw my gun as I take stock of the fight. Two goons down. One permanently, head almost completely severed. The other temporarily, groaning on the ground as his sheared-off legs and arms reattach themselves. The other four are tag-teaming Foley, taking nasty potshots at him. A woman with short blond hair throws a hunting knife at Foley’s head at the same time a burly man kicks toward his chest from the opposite direction. Foley can only dodge one attack. He evades the knife.
The kick drives him into a tree, which almost rips free from the ground. Foley coughs, blood-tinged spit spraying into the air from rib shards shredding his lungs. He wavers, low on oxygen because he can’t breathe, and the four goons close in like wolves about to finish a hunt. The burly man actually licks his lips, flashing his fangs in the process, like he’s planning to eat Foley. And with a nausea-inducing twist in my gut, I realize he may do exactly that.
Historically, vampires end fights with each other by exsanguinating the loser.
I wait, sweat beading on my forehead, until the moment all four goons have turned their backs to me and bunched together in a tight half-circle in front of the tree so Foley can’t escape their final charge. Moving as quietly as possible, I slip out of the underbrush, raise both my hands, and unleash two huge vortexes of fire. There’s only ten feet between me and the little blockade, so by the time the nearest vampire, the blonde, senses the approaching flames, it’s already too late to dodge.
The fire engulfs all four of them, but their w
all formation protects Foley from the brunt of the heat. The flames consume them in a roar, and they scream as their skin burns black and their clothes melt into their muscles. Panicking, they scatter, giving Foley room to breathe. He stumbles away from the tree, arms wrapped around his injured chest, a pained grimace on his face as he rasps, “Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Let’s not keep score,” I say, throwing up a strained smile. “I always end up with a deficit.”
“If you say so.” Foley tries to chuckle, but it comes out as a wheeze. “I think we should get out of here before the remaining three Knights show up. It’s a standard vampire tactic to hold back a few spares in case someone gets knocked out of the fight. They’ll be close enough to hear the…”
The burly goon collapses in front of us, still shrieking even though all his facial features have burned into an unrecognizable mass of pulsating black char.
“Noise,” Foley finishes.
Fighting my gag reflex, I say, “I agree. But if you’re going to petrify me again, can you please do the counter-spell as soon as you—?”
Movement.
On instinct, I lurch to the right to position myself in front of Foley’s back. I bring up my hands just as the fallen tree on top of Caine blasts into the air, and the vampire twists around, broken bones cracking and grinding, and flings himself forward. My brain defaults to beggar magic as a defense, but as Caine careens toward me, and Foley, slowed by his wounds, is still in the process of turning around, I notice that I wrecked all ten rings with that massive fire shot. They’re barely secured to my fingers with so many deep cracks. They can’t hold a charge anymore.
Day Killer (City of Crows Book 5) Page 8