“I knew they were coming, of course,” the Baba Yaga said calmly, like they hadn’t just escaped by the skin of their teeth. “I knew I would make it here in time. But it was pretty damn close.”
“If you knew they were coming,” West said, “then why didn’t you just leave earlier and avoided them completely?”
The Baba Yaga gave him a baleful stare. “And have my own predictions turn out false? It’s not like that would make much of a difference. If that’s how I see it, then that’s how it’s going to be, regardless of what I actually do.”
“You have bullet wounds,” Tala said, horrified.
“Wounds grazed by bullets. There’s a difference. No vital organs affected. I would have predicted that too.”
“Minor injuries aside,” Alex said soberly, “you’re telling me that people from the Royal States were hunting you?”
“Quite a few groups there have now dedicated themselves to stamping out what they call heretical magic. Specifically the toxic ones who thought Abigail Fey demeaned their masculinities.”
“You didn’t sound this angry about the Royal States the last time we met,” Loki noted.
“I’ve just been shot by the worst of their lot, Sun-Wagner. Bear with me.” The Baba Yaga scowled at the bandages Nya was busily wrapping around their arm. They had refused to be admitted into the hospital and had remained at the courtyard, asking only that their wounds be seen to. “Do you really need this much?”
“If you can see the future, then you probably know the answer,” the girl said calmly.
“I’ve come here more than just to ask for sanctuary, Your Majesty. I’m here to warn the rest of you that things are going to get worse.”
“I thought it was against a Baba Yaga’s policies to try and change the future?” Alex asked.
They smiled grimly. “I’m not sure my being here would even change matters. I only saw myself here at the forefront of the upcoming battle. Don’t know why, because you can bet your ass I don’t want to be here. But if the fates have decreed it, then here I will be.”
“The upcoming battle? If you haven’t been watching the news, that battle has already been waging the last couple of days. Are you telling me this doesn’t even constitute a—”
“My lips are sealed on that one,” the Baba Yaga said. “And while I’m here, I ought to look up an old friend of mine. There’s a few things he needs to know too.”
“I’m here, Ilyena,” the Cheshire said, once again popping out from nowhere. He still kept to his human form instead of the cat shape he often preferred, smiling sadly at the seer.
“You look the same as always, Ches,” the Baba Yaga said calmly. “Almost twenty years, it’s been?”
“I wish I’d reached out sooner, but when you’re wanted in several kingdoms, sometimes the matter is taken out of your hands. What are you doing here, Ilyena?”
“Like I said, to ask for sanctuary and warn them about—”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
The Baba Yaga sighed loudly. “All right. I have three reasons for being here. One, sanctuary. Two—look, you all know that I didn’t agree with my predecessor about changing the future. That seeing it unfold doesn’t mean we should do anything about it. But this one—I can understand now why she saved you as a child, Your Majesty. If the future happens the way I saw it, then I don’t know if there’s much hope.”
“Is it that bleak?” Ken asked.
“Nuh-uh. You won’t try to pry the answers out of me again. The Baba Yaga I took over from was fine with sacrificing her powers, but I’m a much more selfish person to give all this up. But I want to be on hand just to—just in case something changes and I can warn you faster.”
“If this is your attempt at pacifying us, then it’s not working.”
“Tough.” The Baba Yaga looked at the Cheshire again. “Are you ready?” they asked.
“I’ve been ready for a very long time. What will be will be.”
“Wait,” Zoe said. “You said you had three reasons.”
“Right.” The Baba Yaga checked her watch. “In five minutes’ time,” they said, “a band of those same assholes chasing me will open a portal directly into the Burn. It will cause another international incident.”
“What?” Alex turned toward Tristan and Lumina, who also looked stunned at the news. “Send word to Keer immediately!” he yelled. “Tell his people to brace themselves. They don’t have to pull their punches, but I want them all taken in alive, do you understand?” He turned back to the Baba Yaga. “You’ve been here close to an hour, and now’s when you choose to spring this on us?”
“I thought it was the perfect time to say it.” The Baba Yaga grinned. Their gaze drifted over to the swordless anvil, ignored it to look further afield—and then froze. “Oh,” they whispered. “Oh.”
“Don’t tell me there’s more,” Tala said warily. Alex had already rushed back inside, Tristan and her mother following. Ken, Zoe, and Nya were following suit.
“No,” the Baba Yaga said. “I think I just realized why I was supposed to be here.”
Tala turned to look around the courtyard, trying to see what the Baba Yaga had. But all she saw was the cleaning staff bustling about and the gardeners working at the hedges.
The men came tearing out of the portal, just as the Baba Yaga had predicted. They were all dressed up in camo gear and night vision goggles despite the daytime and despite the Burn being an open stretch of land where there was nowhere to hide. They sported guns with more personality than they had, and several of them were already firing haphazardly the instant they stepped out.
“Fuck Avalon!” one of them crowed, possibly the gang leader. “Get them all!”
The rest took up the chant, but their bullets did little. A few of the shades were caught in the spray and dissolved, but more avoided the shots. Having been given the few minutes’ heads-up by Alex, the rangers simply parked their shields in front of them and calmly withstood the hail of gunfire.
Back in Avalon command, Alex was swearing. “Those dumbasses are going to get themselves killed, and we’re going to get blamed for it.”
“Let us fight them,” Ken spoke up.
Alex glared at him. “You aren’t even done being in trouble for sneaking off the last time.”
“The news is gonna get wind of it whether we want them to or not. And you know that as soon as Lola Urduja gets their hands on them, she’s gonna be spanking their whiny little asses on live television, and that’s going to be worse than anything we can do.”
“He does have a point,” Zoe conceded.
“You too?”
“They’re going to sensationalize this regardless of what you decide, so we may as well adopt a hard stance,” Loki said. “I agree with Ken. If we don’t, then we’re going to be seeing more of these groups show up unannounced and compromise our operations here.”
Alex considered that. “Very well. Go and beat the crap out of them whenever you’re ready, but please make it quick. Let’s not give the media any more ammunition than they already have.”
They were true to their word. All the Banders had been eager to suit up and port, and only Ryker had been left behind, sulking, because his presence might bring up questions no one had the time to answer.
The men stood no chance against the group of teenagers. Ken simply took Horse and ran rings around them. Their guns were cleanly sliced in half with a few swings of his sword before they had time to respond.
“The Baba Yaga made it sound more serious than it was,” West noted, watching the group of men be carted off into an official Avalon portal, screaming obscenities at them. The rest of the Banders had aided the rangers and the Katipuneros against the nightwalkers, defeating the last wave soon after.
“The Baba Yaga knows it will be more than just this fight,” Loki said. “The Royal States will want compensation from this. They’ll raise a fuss even if they were the attacking party. And with their king still in charge, there’s no telling what he’ll do to retaliate.”
“We’ll be here when they do, then,” Captain Mairead said cheerfully.
Tala turned toward the Burn, which looked even higher now than when she’d been there last. She summoned her agimat again, weaving it once more into a salamanca spell. The results were the same; she could encourage part of the fire to overload itself, letting its powerful magic short itself out, but she wasn’t strong enough to subdue the wall of flames completely. Even the small hole she’d managed to puncture was soon swept away as the rest of the conflagration consumed it.
Above her, the adarna sighed, sensing her frustration.
“I see that your agimat has been growing stronger, hija,” Lola Corazon said gravely, stopping beside her.
“Are you gauging to see if I’m well enough to arrange my marriage with some other noble now that you’ve realized Alex is gay?”
She was expecting her grandmother to be angered by her temerity. Instead, the old woman chuckled. “I would not have forced you if the idea so repelled you, hija. But it would have been the best match for you, objectively speaking.”
It wasn’t an objective assertion if her lola could benefit from having Alex as a grandson-in-law, but Tala decided not to argue further. She felt Lola Corazon summon her own agimat, but it had just as little effect on the Burn as hers had.
Lola Corazon gestured at the adarna. “It is neither male nor female, like the firebird,” she said. “It simply is. We told you nothing about it because we wanted to protect you a little longer. This may sound like lies and schemes to Urduja, who only follows orders and thinks nothing about planning ahead, but the Makilings have survived all these centuries because of our contingency plans. If it sounds mercenary to you, to scheme to ensure that future generations will continue to thrive long after I am gone, then yes. Perhaps that is not the way the young minds of today work, but I will not apologize for doing what I believe is best. Unfortunately, your mother has raised you to become too much like her.”
“Mom raised me well.”
“Yes. Didn’t I already say that?” Lola Corazon took a step farther toward the Burn, frowned into its depths. “Why?” she asked it. “Why focus on these fires when it would be much more to their advantage to attack Maidenkeep itself? Hinahanap ba nila ang—”
“Your Majesty!” It was Zoe, shouting into her comm link. “We’ve got trouble!”
A few of the techmages were already on the scene, going through the bags the terrorist group had brought with them. They were slowly backing away from a complicated-looking device they’d just found in one of the packs.
“The retrieval team isn’t sure what it is yet, but they’re ninety percent certain it’s not an explosive device. They’re requesting Lord Gallagher’s scanner, but we’re going to keep our distance in the meantime.”
“Can you aim your camera and give me an idea of what it looks like?” Dexter asked through Tala’s earpiece. “Yup, just like that. Running it through the sensors here and—oh. Oh crap!”
“Is it going to blow up?”
“No, but it is an electromagnetic pulse that looks like it’s been designed to wipe out any defense barriers within a three-mile radius. Zoe, you have to destroy it as soon as you—”
Zoe was already whipping out her Ogmios before he was done talking, and Tala was already running toward her, pushing her agimat out toward the device, hoping it would absorb any damage it might let out.
But she was still a few seconds too late as the spelltech blitzed into life with some kind of sonic wave that shoved them both backward. Zoe’s whip drove down into the middle of the device, breaking it into two, but the damage was already done. All around them, Tala could hear a sharp high-pitched noise as the magic protecting the place petered out and fell silent.
The command center now sounded like a madhouse coming through her ears. “Get as many of our techs there this instant!” she heard Alex shout. “I want more rangers on hand and everyone they can spare to set up a secondary system—”
There were more crackles around them, this time not from Avalon magic.
Five new portals opened almost simultaneously.
“Shit,” Ken said.
The things that staggered out weren’t shades or even an ogre. They were of a new breed that Tala had never seen before—a hodgepodge of both and more. Some of the creatures had human body parts like hands or legs, but they were attached to something that looked like the shadows of strange beasts. Some actually had faces—creatures’ heads that would not have looked out of place in some medieval bestiary, like carved statues of gargoyles and other fantastical beasts given life.
The last monster to storm out of the portals was an ice dragon.
“Not this one again!” Tala heard Ken say, but he was the first to charge forward, Horse whinnying. The dragon flapped its brittle wings and roared, and a hailstorm erupted from its mouth, covering the ground in ice. Tala heard more shouts through the comm; despite the danger, there were more techmages appearing through Avalon’s own port, carrying or dragging heavy pieces of equipment to restart the barriers and close the rest of the ports. But these new nightwalkers weren’t making things any easier.
Zoe’s whip lashed out again, this time taking hold of one of the strange shadow-human hybrids. Electricity churned through the lash, and the creature seized up as the bolts rebounded into it again and again. The shadows dissolved. Not so much the human parts, which thumped onto the ground sans owner, and the look of horrified revulsion on Zoe’s face said it all.
West was in black hound form, shaking his head back and forth as he ripped through one of them with his teeth, but it was proving much harder to tear through. It was taking more blows from Loki’s staff before they could successfully puncture through the shadows, and Tala was realizing the same thing with her agimat. It took more focus, more strength to force the strange hybrids to implode on themselves with her curse, and she already didn’t have much to spare, even with the adarna singing its heart out.
A group of rangers moved in, clearly from the segen regiment. One soldier punched at the ground with a gloved fist, and spikes rose up, swiftly impaling several shades. Another wielded twin daggers that she used to strike at a different shadow, sending swift jolts of electricity through the latter much like Zoe’s Ogmios could.
Cole and Ken were still actively engaging the ice dragon, as did the Katipuneros, the pirates, and Lola Corazon’s team. Several rangers joined them, fire licking out of their respective weapons as they tried to burn the horrid creature before them. “We need time to power up the Jolly Roger,” Captain Mairead said tersely. Sparks were flying off her, and Tala realized it was her connection to her pirate ship that was causing those fissures of magic. “One good blast from it should do the trick.”
“And how long do we have to wait?” Lola Corazon asked through gritted teeth. The dragon’s tail was lashing out at random, but it encountered an invisible wall every time it tried to hit the old woman, parts of it melting with every attempt.
“Lady, we’re doing the best we can.” Seraphina the pirate still looked as glamorous as ever, and it was impressive to see her run so quickly on her six-inch heels, feathered boa flapping in the wind behind her, to summon her own shadow to deliver a powerful backhand to one of the strange chimera creatures that actually sent it flying.
Horse worried at the dragon’s heels, swiftly rounding it when the dragon turned, giving Ken a chance to slash through the beast’s flank with Kusanagi. The sword cleaved through its side easily, leaving a large angry gash that on any other animal would have been fatal.
The dragon merely growled. It didn’t even seem all that interested in any of them. Its attention returned to the Burn, as if fascinated by its heat. Its icy breath slammed into the fires to no effect. Not even it could douse the flames there.
Cole had snuck up behind it, using its distraction to plunge his own sword into its back. The dragon did rear up at that, forelegs kicking at the air, but Cole persisted. The black opaque smoke that funneled out of Gravekeeper began seeping into the dragon, parts of its scales turning black as it shook its head, befogged, trying to rid itself of its influence.
Cole didn’t notice a blue-tinged arm slowly appearing from within one of the hybrid shadows that was creeping nearer toward him, like the creature itself was a portal. An ice maiden emerged, smiling cruelly, and she wielded an icicle sword in her hands. She raised it over her head, aimed at Cole’s unprotected back.
Tala shouted, running toward them, but knew she couldn’t make it in time.
Not so with Zoe, who threw her Ogmios. It wrapped itself expertly around the ice blade, and the maiden shrieked as more bolts of lightning lanced through her form, forcing her to drop her weapon. Cole had succeeded, if not at taming the dragon completely, at least at keeping it from attacking any further, though the strain was obvious on him.
The ice maiden turned toward Zoe and was hit with an unexpected slap to the face. Another shade—a regular shade, without all the unnerving corporeal body parts attached like the others had—punched her again, though it wasn’t as effective as it had hoped. The ice maiden snatched it up by the scruff of what should have been its neck, staring down at it in surprise.
“What is—” she began and then yelped when the shadow actually bit her. She dropped it, and it scampered away to freedom.
Ken urged Horse faster. The kelpie rode up the dragon’s tail and onto its back, ascending the upper part of its mane toward its head. Horse made one last flying leap, so far up in the air that it looked like it was flying, and Ken jumped off like it was a diving board, his hands on the hilt of his sword as it plunged downward, right at the center of the dragon’s skull.
Ice dragons could shatter into pieces. Tala had seen that happen months ago, when one had literally crashed into a party being held at Avalon by one of Nome’s executives. This one cracked; its head was split in two by the force of Ken’s blow, and then the sword kept moving downward in a straight line, cutting lengthwise through its face, its neck, its upper body. Cole had already moved out of the way, retrieving Gravekeeper and expertly ducking through the falling ice in the seconds it took for him to get clear. There didn’t seem to be anything within the creature but more ice, which splintered into minute fragments as its body toppled, each segment crashing down on either side and breaking into even more pieces when it hit the ground hard.
Horse leaped again and caught Ken on its back before he could fall any farther.
And then Captain Mairead shouted, “Get back! Get back, all of you! We’ve got a blast heading your way, and you’d best vamoose before it finds you!”
No one even needed to ask where the blast was coming from. Tala could see it coming down at them from the sky like a meteorite. Everyone scrambled to get out of the radius, but Mairead proved to be astonishingly accurate when aiming the Jolly Roger. The beam struck at the remains of the ice dragon but also took out most of the hybrids and beast-like monsters nearby, dissolving them under the force of that light. Even the portals had no protection against its force, and Tala watched as four of them folded under its strength, collapsing.
Only one looking glass remained. The ice maiden stared back at them with that same mocking smile before stepping through it, the opening winking out behind her. There was a sudden burst of static and then the hum of familiar magic as Avalon’s defense systems started up, surrounding the area with their barriers once more.
“What happened?” Alex’s worried voice sounded from over the comm. “Are they gone?”
“Tala?” Ryker’s voice came on too. “Are you all right? Is everyone?”
“Another ice dragon.” Tala was still shaken. She’d been hoping she’d seen the last of them, given how they were created. “And these other…things.”
“The good news is that they’re probably not created with living humans, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Ryker said through the link, still sounding grim despite the assurance. “The bad news is that they’re cobbled together from corpse parts. It’s been done before, when the Snow Queen wanted larger armies. It’s darker magic than even she usually uses. That she’s resurrected that art again tells me she might be getting desperate too.”
“She should be,” Zoe said. “We’ve got a lot of the artifacts she needs.” She took a deep breath and accepted Ogmios, which Cole was handing back to her. “Was that it?” she asked him softly. “Once from sword. Was that it?”
Cole looked back down at her, his expression once more unreadable. He pulled her forward slowly until she was wrapped up in his arms. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
Captain Mairead had sagged down, and the rest of her crewmates were attending to her. “That was stunning,” Ken said, drawing nearer to her. “How are you able to control the Jolly Roger like that?”
“The same way your king can control his own version of the Jolly Roger back at your castle,” the pirate said with a drunken-sounding laugh. “Blasts and some standard defenses are all we use it for, so it won’t kill me in the way it’ll kill him—just a month or two of my life to sacrifice every time—and lads if it doesn’t tire me out. You were pretty impressive yourself, m’boy.”
“Was I?” Ken brightened. “Were you impressed too, Rapunzel?”
Another long, annoyed snort from Nya. “I suppose.”
“She supposes,” Ken said happily. “You heard that?”
“You could do it too, ranger,” Captain Mairead said to Loki. “There’s a spark in you, makes you more attuned to the magic. I suspected it, but now I believe it. The Jolly Roger sang when I saw you the first time. If the ranger life isn’t for you, you could always join us.”
“I don’t know.” Loki’s expression was troubled.
“They used a jabberwock to summon an ice dragon the last time,” Nya said. “Are you telling me they’ve gotten hold of another to experiment with?”
“If they did, they didn’t get it from Avalon’s woods,” Tala’s mother volunteered, holstering her arnis sticks behind her. “Every one we’ve found has been sent to the sanctuaries in Iceland and Australia, and all the forests here are tracked to make sure we don’t have another one loose again.”
“Then how did the Snow Queen get her hands on another one of those?”
“She has more OzCorp tech we are still in the dark about,” Lola Corazon muttered, folding her abanico. “The one they made to house the jabberwock was a prototype, remember?”
Lola Urduja glared at her. “You sound far too confident. Why then would she choose to reveal it now? What do you know that we don’t?”
“There are so many things that you are unaware of that it would be difficult to list them all today.” Lola Corazon looked back at the Burn, the same furrowed look on her face. “She wanted to test if she could weaken the barriers around the Burn,” she said. “First it is the device that the foolish men carried with them, and then the ice dragon, but again, why? What lies beyond the Burn that she seems to so desperately want?”