A Billowing Gust of Fiery Death
With no thought at all, I bonked Leo on the head with the hilt of the vamp-killer. Hard. Leo fell like a human. Into the rising, flaming cloud of glowing green vapor-based spell that was rising all around me, but wasn’t touching my skin again. Yet. Not through the spelled leathers and with the blob in my hand. “Bruiser, what—?”
But he was kneeling exactly as I’d seen him last, head down and tilted. Staring at Alex. Not moving except for a slow, shallow breath. And he hadn’t reacted to me putting Leo down. So to speak.
I whipped my head and took the working in, Beast-sight making the magics glow in brilliant greens and silvers, now flowing out of the room and into the hallway like a slow-moving, developing flood. Heading for the stairs. Understanding came in an instant.
This spell, whatever it was intended to do, other than burn me to death, make Leo bonkers, and freeze Bruiser, was being carried on flaming green air, a vapor that would pass through my clothes eventually, and burn me alive. And it could pass through all defensive hedge wards where any witch who used the protection would breathe it. Even vamps had to breathe to speak and would inhale the spell, which was likely how Leo got hit. He had breathed in to speak to me. So had Bruiser, who was breathing normally when he dropped into the mist. The spell was multifaceted and multipurpose and I had no idea what all it might do or what it was based on. We were so screwed.
Worse. I had done this. When I stuck my head in the closet, when I touched that spiderweb stuff. I had somehow ignited the green magics. Like det cord, flaming too fast to catch. Like an explosion out of the closet, a billowing gust of fiery death.
A small, rational part of my mind told me that something so sophisticated probably had a dozen possible triggers. But the rest of me wasn’t listening. And the working was still flowing out of the closet. I closed the closet door, but the spell raced through the cracks, barely slowed.
“Jane!” Eli shouted this time, and I heard his feet on the stairs.
Beast flooded me with another shot of adrenaline. “Problem,” I said softly, not wanting my voice to carry to the ballroom. “Spell. Stay put.” Eli halted, but I could smell his tension, a rising tide of violence that had nowhere to go.
I tried again to put the blob away and this time my hand stayed flameless. But as I released my grip, I ripped the flesh off my palm, leaving it clinging to the blob. I made a choked sound of agony. Beast shot painkilling endorphins through me, damping the pain and making me weirdly euphoric, while standing in the middle of a spell with a skinless hand. I rubbed the peeled strip of flesh off the blob and onto my leathers, tucked it all into my pocket, and sheathed the vamp-killer. Pulled a wooden stake with my good hand. Leo was already moving, trying to wake. His body was submerged and encased in green flames. His eyes popped open. Green pupils, face mad with rage.
I staked him. I’d done it before and he had lived. This was only wood, not silver, so I figured he’d be ticked off but would live to undeath again and without the drama of the last time. He went still, his eyes glazed over in what looked like real death. The magics crawled all over him, writhing, trying to wake him.
I spoke again to Eli, loud enough to carry, forcing my voice to be calm and controlled, despite the pain. “Spell activated. Booby trap in the closet. Minor injury to my hand. Made Leo unstable. He’s out of commission. Bruiser is motionless. And—” I took in the second story. The hallway was filling with green gas, low down, heavier than air. “Tell the witches a dark magic spell is on the way down the stairs. To do some magical whammy and put it out, and ward against air.”
“Roger that. Alex?”
“Spell had no effect so far as I can tell. I’ll bring him down.”
I smelled more than heard Eli move down the stairs, a faint change in the potency of the scent patterns. By one arm, I pulled Leo out of the small room and into a bathroom. I rolled him over and into the tub, and double-checked the stake’s placement, midabdomen, where the descending aorta was, in a human. I gave it a little push to secure it and wiped his blood off along my wounded, skinless hand. Residual pain decreased and the oily-looking flesh seemed to grow more opaque in the first hint of healing. I rubbed every drop of the leftover blood into my skin and then wiped off on a fancy, tasseled hand towel and tossed it over the currently dead vamp, hiding the stake.
Leo was strong enough to get free if someone came in and pulled the stake loose, or if the magics in the house made it happen, or if it worked free somehow. I didn’t carry silver handcuffs. Note to self. If I survived this, I’d get me a pair of them. I locked Leo in the small room and wedged a chair under the knob. He could get out of the bathroom easily, but at least I’d hear him do so.
Back in the security room, I bent into the gas, careful to keep my face above it, and rolled Alex up onto my shoulder. I paused to look over the security console, which was now little more than shattered plastic, broken screens, and fried wires, dancing with green flames. So much for knowing what was going on throughout the house. I raced back down the stairs, through the six inches of spell that was flowing down them like a river and pooling at the bottom of the stairway, hearing the sounds of furniture breaking and shouts. I dumped the Kid—still breathing—onto a champagne-toned sofa in the Louis XVI Room at the front of the house; the settee was above the floor enough to have him breathing real air. I rose upright, feeling unexpectedly breathless and a strain in my thigh muscles. I huffed a breath and stepped to the entrance. Brandon stood there, back to the door, staring at nothing with much the same expression as Bruiser wore upstairs. I had a feeling Brian was out of it too. I scanned the wide foyer and up the stairs and back toward the ballroom, taking it all in.
Some smaller part of me was analyzing and adding up the factors: Skinwalker burns. Vamps go crazy. Onorios freeze. Minor witch charms fizzle out. Humans and witches had to be in there somewhere.
Green flaming magics roiled across the floor from the stairs, but also were in free fall through the stairway opening and straight down. It clung to the ceiling and across, to slide down the walls. The spell was growing in speed and in volume, seemingly feeding on itself. Or feeding on the people in the house. Skinwalker burns. Vamps go crazy. Onorios freeze. Humans and witches . . . Yeah. The magics had to be getting their power from somewhere and we were as likely a source as any. I was too tired for the minimal exertion. I had a feeling that we could be used up and left drained. Maybe that was the intent of the spell. Tau had become a senze onore . . . and that might be a psychic and metabolic vampire. She was stealing the life and energy from us all.
I waded through the mist toward the ballroom entrance. The witches were screaming incantations in English, Celtic, French, and Latin, a jumbled auditory mass. The burn of their magic was heated and icy on the skin of my hands and face, a dozen workings flying at the same time, skidding and skipping over the green mist like flat pebbles over a pond. But the spell was still flowing in around my knees, unchecked. My strength was failing, despite Beast shooting me full of the good stuff. But her gifts, even added to my normal skinwalker powers, wouldn’t be enough. Not for long.
I took in the ballroom with a single breath. Beast filled my head and my senses and evaluating as only a predator can, by scent. And she smelled blood. It was spattered in arcs and small pools on the parquet wood floor. The stink of the mixed blood was witchy, human, vamp, Onorio, and Mercy Blade, tasting acrid on my/our tongue as I tried to figure who was hurt. The reek of mixed-species blood bubbled in the green spell as if heated, the stench cooking up a miasma of terror and rising anger in the melee.
Visually the place was a wreck. Tables and chairs had been overturned and scattered. Witches and the human plus-ones were huddled under wards and hedges. Green energies encased ceiling, floors, and walls, licking out and up. I stepped just inside the opening and slid my back against the wall, behind Brian, where he stood, unmoving, a sword pointing at the floor, his face slack. I studied the long room. Locating prey and predators. And I didn’t see attacking witches anywhere. What I saw was vamps fighting.
Grégoire was closest to me, vamped out, whirling like a dervish through the rising magics, his sword keeping a wide swath of room open around him. But he didn’t seem to have any opponents at the moment. Gee DiMercy was bleeding, a smeared trail of evaporating, floral-scented blood leading to his hiding spot under the baby grand piano. I smelled his flesh burning, the stink of singed feathers, and his magics were glowing with some kind of protection, but he couldn’t heal himself and I couldn’t tell how bad he was injured. I had no idea why the green spell burned Gee and me and not the others, but when I got a long vacation I’d try to figure it out.
Beast chuffed at the thought.
Ming, also vamped, had bloodied fangs. She had bitten someone. Not good, if it was a witch or human. She was holding two knives, like short swords. Standing atop a small table in the nook called the Chaperone’s Alcove. She was barefoot now, beneath the scarlet dress, which was hitched into the feathered train.
Evan and Molly were huddled together beneath her hedge 2.0 ward, in the narrow place between the fancy bar and the liquor cabinet behind it. Their heads were, so far, above the rising mist, their hands working their magics, probably trying to use the filter magic Evan had come up with to stop the vapor working from entering. They were safe. Safe-ish. For the moment.
Eli was on the bar, two weapons drawn, one aimed at Grégoire, one on Ming. Neither vamp seemed to have noticed him. His legs weren’t on fire and his leathers weren’t scorched, but he looked tired, as if he’d been in-country for a week with no sleep.
The other witches were protected under various hedge of thorns wards, except for Lachish. She walked toward Grégoire, her hands up, holding a ball of pale golden light. Within it, red motes of power zipped and swirled. She raised her hands as if to throw it at Grégoire.
I shouted, “No! Lachish, they’re spelled by witches!”
She hesitated and I took my chance. From behind, I dove around Brian, pulling the blob, holding it in both hands before me. I threw my entire body at Grégoire’s feet, sliding across the elegant parquet through the spell. Holding my breath. Behind the blob. I didn’t catch fire, the blob protecting me in the Trueblood-Everhart working.
I took Grégoire out like a batter taking out home base. Except that I grabbed his feet as he toppled over me. Pressed the blob against the back of his knee. He landed on my back. All the breath left my body at once in an oof of sound and pain. I closed my lungs down, refusing them the breath they so desperately wanted. Grégoire rolled over me to the floor. His swords clashed once, just missing me. I spun and whipped the blob to Grégoire’s head in a half-roundhouse, half-uppercut move I seldom used except in the dojo as a feint, sparring. I clocked the vamp once on the temple. His head knocked back. With my good hand, I staked him too, midcenter abdomen, nonlethal to such an old vamp. The green magics in his eyes flickered and died. He was out. I’d need two pairs of silver handcuffs.
I rolled to my feet and caught a breath, coughing. I held a hand out to Lachish to keep her from using the spell, but she had already let the heat of it wisp away.
That left Ming. “Eli!” I managed between coughs. “Standard ammo.” I pointed at the table in the alcove. “Take her out!” The report of the nine-mil overrode my last two words. A three-tap. The shots echoed through the house. Ming fell, one hole in her cheek that seemed to enter at an upward angle, two in her heart. The heart shots would be an easy heal. The head shot, if it hit the brain, would take longer.
All around the room, the green flames fell. The vapor dying to little more than an oily film on the floor. And I couldn’t see why, unless the spell had burned itself out. And I didn’t think I’d be so lucky. I coughed and leaned on the bar beside Eli, who was breathing just fine and dandy. I sucked in air and lowered my head between my hands, trying to restore my spent energy.
I turned and rested my bruised back on the bar. Seconds passed. Silence filled the room. A waiting emptiness. Witches watching. Maybe the mist had been intended to kill the vamps, and now that they were technically out of action, it was over.
Lachish stepped back. Slowly the witches began to drop the various wards they were using. Molly dropped her hedge. “Son of a witch on a switch,” she whispered, and shook herself like a wet dog after a long rain. “Here,” she said, handing me two charms, carved from unstained wood. “The bear is for healing, the fish is to deflect violent spell attack.”
“What the . . .,” Evan said. His eyes went wide. Staring behind me.
Without thought, I pivoted. Freeing a vamp-killer and a nine-mil from their holsters. Marlene was dancing on the stairway from the second floor, visible about midway up. She was wearing transparent red harem pants and a flaring silky skirt over them, with a flaring, beaded tunic, and her bare feet drummed on the floor in a four-four rhythm. Marlene Nicaud was inside with the witches. Had been inside all day. No wonder everything had gone to hell in a handbasket.
“She was not here when I cleared the house this morning before the ward was set,” Eli said.
“Obfuscation spells,” I suggested. “Good ones.” Eli cursed softly and I said, “Even money says she was in the closet and I triggered the spell. We might lose the final payment on the witch contract unless we discover a hidden room or something that Amalie didn’t disclose, where the witches hid.”
He chuckled coldly as I returned my weight to my feet and tried to find my balance. “Long as we get away intact, I don’t care about the money, babe.” I heard shincks, and clicks and clacks, metallic and otherwise. The stink of gun oil wafted from him too. He was checking and laying out weapons on the bar top. He had clearly hidden a stash beneath the bar.
“Yeah. Totally, my brother.” I pushed away from the bar and raised my voice. “Lachish. They’re coming. They were upstairs, hidden in the family quarters or a hidden room.” She cursed too, but the words were a spell she was readying.
“Come to think of it,” I said again to Eli, “we may have to exist on PB and J for a while. I may not get paid for Leo’s part either.”
“Why’s that?” Eli asked as if we were playing checkers and not facing death by burning or asphyxiating on magical gas.
“This was my fight to protect Leo—who I staked. His people—one who I staked, and another you shot at my direct order. I think I broke my contract.”
“Dang, babe. That sounds like a great story for the hot tub.”
“We have a hot tub?”
“We survive this, I’m buying us one.”
I chuffed. I had only a few moments before Marlene was in the room with us. I explained the spell to Lachish and she called out orders to her people. Lachish’s witches snapped up personal wards again and took places for a full circle—witches standing shoulder to shoulder, in an actual circle. They began a working that sparked the air blue and purple. It looked aggressive and dangerous. Go, Lachish.
Mixed magics sizzled on the air like burning meat. My left palm, holding the blob, broke open again to leak down my wrist. My hand ached, but I didn’t let go of Evan’s gift. The pain that had been muted by Leo’s blood screamed back, working through the cracks of my fingers where the air touched the burned flesh. If Marlene was here, Tau was close behind. And the spell was stronger now than before. The Nicauds had been scoping out the place and the occupants, a tactical maneuver, similar to the icons in the yard, to see what we had and how we’d use it. They were one step, or maybe three steps, ahead of us all the way.
The red-dressed witch appeared in the doorway. The magics on the air were suddenly so strong they skidded on my damaged skin like hot asphalt and broken glass. Tactical maneuvers . . . Were the Nicauds former military? That wasn’t in the dossiers prepared by the Kid.
As if reading my mind, Eli said, “This isn’t going down like attrition warfare, where success is quantified by enemy killed or disabled, weapons and infrastructure destroyed, and territory occupied. This is going down like a game. A video game.”
“Like the ones we found at the Nicauds’ old house.”
“Yeah. We’ve missed something. Our intel is bad.”
“A game run by a cat,” I said. “Cat and mouse. Play with the mouse. Maybe hurt it a little. Let it go, let it think it was free. Then pounce again.” I knew diddly-squat about video games, but I knew cats. I patted the bar and Eli leaped to the top as I stepped away, across the room, spreading us as targets. Grégoire’s body was now between Eli and the Truebloods and me. Molly, who had been listening to the byplay, nodded at me, looked at her husband, and snapped up her ward, which was a darker tint than before, likely modified on the fly for gaseous spells.
“Options?” Eli asked.
“Not much. We have to keep the spell contained and not let it into the streets. Let’s see what the witches can do. We’re not dying. Yet.”
“You’re worse than Uncle Sam.”
A laugh startled out of me, despite the danger, and I chuckled the words “You wound me.”
Marlene’s dance rhythm mutated, the vibration through the floor, a pounding ethnic beat that had elements of tribal American, African, and island. She moved into the room with balletic grace, the way lava moved. Swirling down a hill, taking everything with it. She was dark-skinned, with a mass of hair that coiled and curled down her back, a turban over her head. Full-lipped, with a broad nose. Wide, glistening eyes. Skin gleaming ruddy in the red magics that spun from her.
She performed a rippling dance step that started at her feet and undulated up her body to her head. A move that was part of the spell, directing it with her will and gestures.
Flames of power flared out from the witch, fire tipped with the pale spring green of her daughter’s workings. Smelling of iron and salt and scorched wood. Everything happened at once, in overlapping segments of time or maybe intersecting segments of my awareness.
Magics and energies slid along my skin. Kissing it. Promising pain unimaginable, except that hadn’t happened. The leathers were spelled against magics, even ones as strong as the green vapor spell. So as long as I kept my clothes on, and I didn’t simply asphyxiate on the gasses, I was good. My partner wasn’t good, however. He was fighting a cough. His skin had gone pale as if he was ready to knock on death’s door.
I tossed him the two charms Molly had given me and instantly he looked better. We shared a nod. Lachish’s huge witch circle at the back of the room was so full of power it was nearly black with the energies.
I clenched the blob. Stupid name, Beast thought. Which made me laugh, a sound more like a frustrated sob. The Nicauds’ spell was growing, stretching, slipping over the working at the back of the ballroom like oil over water, coating it entirely. It was also leaching my own energies as I breathed, feeding the vapor spell.
A human male hiding behind a table in the hallway slumped to the floor with a thump, unbreathing, his energy drained. A busboy racing down the hallway to get away, fell, and tumbled. Crap. That changed everything. The Nicuads were now willing to hurt everyone, human, witches, vamps, me. The only tactic I could think of was to drop the outer wards and evacuate the mansion. Which would take the spell and the fight out into the street and hurt the bystanders and then the first responders.
Run. Hide. Jane is stupid, Beast thought.
Yeah, I thought back.
All this thinking in less than two breaths. My head was swimming. Eli staggered on the bar top.
Already, outside, I heard sirens. Someone, probably one of our sharpshooter teams, had spotted something through the windows and had called police backup and ambulance. But the first responders couldn’t be let in, even if they could get in through the outer house ward. Things in here were beyond unstable. Anything I did might put the victims in greater danger. Flying by the seat of my pants and bashing heads didn’t sound like a good solution to this. I didn’t know what to do.
Eli crouched upright on the bar, still high above the fog, and maneuvered so he was between Marlene and the Truebloods. I fingered the blob, gripping and releasing, the pain in my burned hand easing again. Trying to think. Trying to decide on . . . anything.
Tau entered the room, delicate and tiny, like a tree nymph, with glorious hair, full and curly, standing out as Angie’s did when her magic was high, in a nimbus of power that writhed and snaked. There was an old myth about a woman—a goddess? A demon?—with a head full of snakes. Had she been a double-gened witch, her myth gaining power through the ages into a deity? Tau wore a green dress, a floral watercolor print in emerald, mint, and misty-sage green. She danced like her mother in style, but where her mother moved like molten earth, Tau moved like water, flooding the room with her magics.
As if a dam had broken, the green power of the working boiled up from the floor and walls and raged higher in the room, falling from overhead, from the height of the doorway, rising again on the floor. Filling the ballroom like a deluge, expanding like the sea through a broken dike, flowing through the doorways, down the walls, a waterfall of power that eddied and shifted into whirlpools of rainbows. The vapor magic flowed into the working at the back of the room. Quickly the magics were waist high. A witch inside started to scream and writhe, slapping at her own skin as if bees were stinging her. Lachish’s huge protective ward began to crack.
To the side, Molly whispered, “Carraig,” in the lilting tone of her family’s oldest wards, in Irish Gaelic. Her own ward hardened yet again, but it wasn’t the same power signature as the one Evan had made in the yard. They had little air left. Several of other witches knew a working to keep out air, but not enough of them and the circle at the back thinned. More witches fell inside the ward.
The protective circle fell with a shower of sparks and a sizzle of power that was instantly swept up by the green misty flames.
Doors slammed shut throughout the house, a resounding multidimensional whamwhamwham of sound and vibration. In Beast-sight, the entrance to the ballroom and every doorway leading out, now glowed with black-light magic. Exactly like the magic Angie Baby used. Frustration and fear gathered in my throat, wanting to be screamed out. The Nicauds had just added their own wards to the one the Witch Conclave had created. If I had wanted to escape, I should have done it before now.
The witches broke up and raised smaller wards, in small groups. Or tried to. The green mist began to suck the energy out of them. All but Molly’s ward.
“Molly?”
“Got this,” she said.
“Good to hear.” I lifted my arms. The green magics were up to my chest, and ankle high on Eli. He might not be able to see the magics, but he had deduced how they worked. The flaming pool was now tipped in black, stinging, burning my hands.
Molly pressed her fingers through her ward, toward the dancing witches, saying, “Múchtóir dóiteáin. Múch.”
Marlene staggered. Tau threw out her hand at Molly and said, “Confuto. Retardo.”
Molly’s offensive working exploded in a scattering of scarlet sparks. Molly dropped like the dead. Evan caught her and her reinforced hedge 2.0 brightened over them, glowing red and blue. Half of it was now Evan’s magics. Dang. One more use of magic and he’d be permanently out of the closet. My godchildren would be forevermore in danger.
“Jane,” Eli demanded. “Options.”
“Eli,” I whispered. “Take the shot.”
He fired. But the weapon clicked oddly. Misfire. With his off hand, and a second weapon, Eli took another shot. It too misfired. The spells of the green mist were multilayered and multipurpose. Eli cursed softly and, in a single motion, pulled a knife, throwing at Tau. The whirling blade stopped in the air and fell with a sound of shattering steel.
The Nicauds turned at the sound. Marlene snarled when she saw the broken blade. Ignoring the human on the bar as useless, she looked at me and said some word I didn’t recognize. “Now, my daughter,” she said, and whirled something around her head. In Beast vision it looked like two electric stones tied together with a length of black magic rope, a spelled bolo, one of those things horsemen used to trap horses, if they didn’t care if the horse broke a leg. It whipped through the air. Once . . .
Tau danced to Grégoire on the floor.
Twice . . . The bolo spell whirled.
Marlene aimed her gaze at me.
Someone called my name, the voice broken, full of pain.
Three times . . . Marlene released it. The magical rope slid from her fingers.
“Jump!” I shouted.
Time slowed down, that situational awareness that sometimes gives battle the consistency of taffy. In a single motion, I caught my breath, set the weapons on the bar, and again dove through the fog, sliding under the piano. My hands caught on fire again. My face burned. My hair smoked. But as I slid through the mist and into the blue magics of Gee’s personal protection, the flames on me were snuffed.
The bolo hit the bar, just behind where I had stood, wrapping around it and through it, cutting the antique burled wood into four equal-sized chunks of smoking kindling. At my shout, Eli had leaped and landed on top of the Trueblood’s hardened ward. That was close.
Marlene screamed in fury. Whirled to follow my movement. And threw a second bolo spell at me.
Still sliding across the floor, I bowled into Girrard DiMercy, picking up his slight form as I rolled over my burden and to my feet on the far side of the piano. The bolo was wrapped around nothing but air, about a foot away from my skin. It fell to the floor in a shower of blue as I placed Gee on top of the piano. We were both coughing and full of the stink of burned hair, skin, and feathers. His voice a pale imitation of its usual power, Gee said. “I didn’t know if you would hear me. Not after—”
“I heard.”
Eli jumped back onto the broken bar. And threw another knife at Tau, who ignored him and his broken blade. But trying to buy me some time.
Marlene threw another spell at me. It spat when it hit Gee’s magics and fell. Marlene screamed in fury. With her attention on me, conclave witches were abandoning ship, turning their attention to getting through the black, woven wards on all the doors. It was just occurring to them that they were trapped. Tau hit one with a knockout spell and the woman simply crumpled to the floor. Tau laughed and hit another.
Gee’s face was blistered. Neck and hands raw. Burned before he opened whatever magics he had used to shield himself. Magics that had let me in. Another thing to think about later. His burns weren’t quite as bad as my own, but they were bad enough. There were slashes in his throat. Two fang slashes.
I remembered Ming’s bloody fangs. She had clearly attacked him. He wiped both hands through the blood of his throat and onto me, on my face and my injured hand. The pain instantly eased and beneath the blood I saw actual skin on my palm. “What—?”
Beneath Marlene’s screams, Gee said what I had thought only moments before. “We two are the only ones burned. We two who are goddess born. My blood, a drop of Ming’s blood, and your blood upon the weapon made by your friends.” He closed my healed fist around the blob, which appeared in his bloody fingers, stolen from my pocket as if by prestidigitation. “You are protected now. You must protect the children. Always.” His eyes closed as he slumped on the piano.
I turned back to the ballroom. Marlene’s anger had fueled the green flames all around her. Red fire danced over her body, licking but not burning.
Beyond her, Tau pulled something from her bodice, but her back was to me, and I couldn’t see what it was, except it was small. She said what sounded like “Meus es tu.” And she struck down with her hand. Down onto Grégoire, who still lay on the floor. Magics ballooned out around him like a black flower blooming through the green.
That couldn’t be good.
Tau turned to the witches and pointed at them, accusing. “You didn’t help us when we asked, when we begged.”
Marlene hunched in, her angry screams echoing away. Tears had tracked down her face, leaving black mascara trails in her makeup. In Cajun patois, she said, “You. You di’n’ stop the fanged devils when we show you proof of they evil. You done hid you heads in de sand and let dem take our young, you did. My Antoine, him die because you refuse him help. Now you pay.”
“Now you pay!” Tau echoed. She clapped her hands together twice and said, “Maintenant. Vous tuerez. Assassiner.”
I understood the last word, just as Grégoire stood. He moved the way a marionette did when a puppeteer pulled it upright on its strings. He was still vamped out. There was a peacock pin stuck into his chest, just inches above the stake I’d stuck in him. Grégoire opened his vamped-out eyes. The black of the pupils were filled with green flames. He had a sword in each hand. Face slack. He stared at the wall.
Tau smiled and twirled her fingers.
Grégoire spun and raised his swords to Tau like an offering. She slid her thumbs along the steel. Her blood slicked down across the blades. The vamp staggered toward the Truebloods. One sword lifted above Molly and Evan’s ward.
“Assassiner,” Tau repeated.
Kitssss. Beast reached inside and ripped her claws through the Gray Between.
The world swirled and roared around me. The gray magics erupted out. And then died. I lost my footing as an unfamiliar pain slammed into my chest, stealing my breath. I caught myself on the bar, not sure how I’d gotten there. Not sure what had happened. Except that my chest was aching as if I’d taken a hit. I glanced down and saw a scuff in the scarlet leather jacket. Yeah. Somehow, in the Gray Between, I’d been spell-stabbed. The leather/Dyneema/chain-mail counterspells had protected me.
Eli’s weapons were laid in a row on the bar, like a line of death, but nothing he had on hand had worked. He looked like death warmed over, face greenish, fingers trembling. I grabbed up my vamp-killer and raised it across my body in the Spanish Circle’s cross-guard.
Grégoire spun past me, knocking my clumsy block, sending my blade spinning across the room. His sword circled, a flashy move in preparation to cut Molly’s ward.
The blade fell and sliced through the energies like a hot knife through butter. The magics sizzled and spat and fell.
Lachish dropped her ward for half a second, and threw the orb of magics she had gathered once before. It wasn’t the tightly shaped weapon it had been, but it also wasn’t weak.
It hit Grégoire, cutting like a scissors through his marionette strings. He fell in a heap. The magics slithered like snakes up his body and inside, crawling through the hole in his belly where the stake still rested. I hoped Lachish hadn’t just killed Leo’s boy toy and best fighter, but I also didn’t have time to help him now, because Leo walked back through the door from the stairway. The stake was still in his chest. He too had a brooch in his flesh, pinned through his throat.
“Oh, crap,” I breathed. Leo had been left upstairs, incapacitated. With them . . .
Tau sidled up to him in a four-beat step, step-step-turning-step-step, as if she shared a dance with him. She yanked the stake out of him. Vamp blood splattered and Tau licked the stake. Leo looked at her and laughed.
Okay. Not good.
Ming slid off the small table and onto the floor, standing. Unlike Grégoire and Leo, Ming had no pin. Maybe she didn’t need one. Maybe she had been under the control of Tau for so long that she was biddable just by the pulse of magic. My bringing her as my ace in the hole suddenly looked a lot less brilliant. She walked with the snake-spine-slither of the vamp on the prowl, head swiveling too far to the left and too far to the right. Hunting.
Ming set her eyes on Lachish. Leo set his eyes on Molly. Grégoire mewled, where he lay on the floor, and tried to stand. There was too much magic. That’s what had happened to the Gray Between. I was surrounded by the green mist. It was on my clothes, on my skin, in my hair. It was interfering with everything. And if I couldn’t get to the Gray Between, I couldn’t shift, couldn’t heal, and for certain couldn’t bubble time.
I repocketed the blob and raced to the nearest Onorio. I tore his leather jacket open to find enough blades to run that good-sized butcher shop. I took three, a long sword in my right hand and two in my left, the blades held forward and back, like a helicopter blade. I cut through the bloody blob with all three steel blades, coating the edges with the mixed blood, smeared there by Gee, and with magics. Then I raced to Tau. And I cut her.