And then he died, smiling and patting her hand.
Quinn slid to her side in the snow.
That’s when the first wave of Hel-Blar hit.
Chapter 37
Solange
I was floating over the battle, pale and transparent as mist.
For a long, sickening, horrifying moment, I thought I was back in Viola’s spirit castle.
“No,” I said, frantically. “Absolutely not.”
I had to get out of here. I couldn’t be trapped like this again, not now, while I could see my family below fighting for their lives. They glowed faintly blue. I shook my head, as if that would make everything normal again.
“I really can’t be crazy right now,” I moaned out loud.
“Merde, Solange, what are you doing here?”
Isabeau’s voice startled me so thoroughly I hollered, and jerked back violently, spinning like cotton candy at a carnival booth. I came to a dizzying stop while Isabeau floated next to me, frowning delicately.
I flapped my hands at her. “Help me!”
Her eyes were fierce as wolf’s eyes. “Where is your body, Solange?”
“Kieran and I were on one of the platforms,” I said, trying to remember. I squinted at the strange, black-and-white, overexposed photograph of the camp below us. People and vampires glowed like superimposed colorful fireflies. “There!” I pointed, trying to see through the leaves. I could just make out the gold flare of Kieran’s aura outlining his body as he stood over me, where I was sprawled unconscious at his feet.
“I have got to stop doing that,” I muttered.
“Bien.” Isabeau looked relieved. “But this is still most unusual. The energy I put into your spirit cord when you were trapped in the castle must still be linking us.” She looked briefly curious. “You and Logan are both naturals at dreamwalking.”
“That’s great,” I said evenly, trying not to panic. “What the hell is dreamwalking? And how do I stop?”
“Just recline into your body as if it were a bed.”
I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. I drifted up a few more feet before Isabeau told me to stare at my body and think of heavy things like ship anchors and mountains. Then she shoved me. The feel of her ghostly hand touching my ghostly shoulder was cold and unpleasant and strangely jelly-like.
I reached the top branches of the tree when she yanked me back up. I shivered, cold to my bones.
“Non,” she said sharply, changing her mind. “I am sensing too much strange magic around us. Stay close.” She lifted one of the amulets around her neck. It was round and metallic, the kind people keep perfume in. The same kind I’d kept Madame Veronique’s blood in on a chain around my neck before my birthday. She pulled a long thin thread of white glittering light out of it and looped it around our wrists, where she’d tied the ribbon while she exorcised me. “I cannot wait. The spell must be done now. You will have to come with me.”
“Are you calling up that mystical fog you used the night Mom killed Montmartre and Magda killed Greyhaven?”
She shook her head. “It would only put your humans at a disadvantage.”
Molten silver dripped from tree branches around us, gathering in puddles in the snow. “What is that?” I asked.
“Blood,” Isabeau replied.
Suddenly it was easy to feel the violence below seep into the air, making my spirit vision murky. I shuddered.
“Isabeau.”
I heard Logan’s voice clearly, even though he was whispering in Isabeau’s ear. “Hope is hiding in a pile of boulders southwest of the camp entrance.”
We drifted farther away from the safety of my body, searching through the auras. The boulders glowed with a yellowish-green light.
“Hope,” Isabeau said, sounding satisfied. There were six or seven guards around her position but they couldn’t see us.
Someone else did.
Something magical focused onto Isabeau. The feel of it bled off her onto me, like poisoned molasses, sticky and toxic.
“The Host,” she said darkly, clenching her jaw as she worked to repel it. The magic she was fighting prickled uncomfortably through me, but it wasn’t having the same effect on me as it clearly had on her. She went particularly pale, as if she were made entirely of silver and shadows. She was in pain.
Montmartre used magic against me in the past, and apparently his men were still using it. They hated me for helping to kill Montmartre. And they hated the Hounds, almost as much as the Hounds hated them. They hated Isabeau most of all, particularly for helping to defeat both Montmartre and his first lieutenant Greyhaven.
They’d known she would be here.
Because this spell clearly had only one target.
And it wasn’t my family.
It wasn’t even me.
It was Isabeau.
Chapter 38
Lucy
“Nicholas!” Connor grabbed his arm and nearly got decapitated before Nicholas realized who it was. “We need backup. Now. Because if this works, we won’t be safe anywhere.” He paused, frowning at Quinn, who looked up at his twin with his fangs extended. Hunter crouched over her grandfather, in shock.
Connor took a step forward, but Quinn shook his head. “Go,” he mouthed.
“Wait for me!” I scrambled after Nicholas and Connor and they turned as one. Nicholas didn’t even look back, he just put his arm out behind him so I could grab his hand. He towed me around bloody skirmishes, his firm grip a comforting anchor. I tried not to notice the smell of blood, the moans of pain, the red staining the snow.
We raced between the trees, circling around to the edge of the camp and then up into the mountains. By the time Connor had taken us to one of the caves, my lungs burned and my calf muscles were tight as bowstrings. Inside the damp cave, Christabel was arguing with Saga and Aidan.
And clearly getting nowhere.
“We don’t owe you,” Saga fumed. “Aidan saved you, you ungrateful wretch.”
“If he hadn’t kidnapped me, he wouldn’t have had to save me!” Christabel yelled back.
Saga didn’t even look our way, but the dagger she threw would have caught me right in the stomach if Connor hadn’t reached out to grab it, even as Nicholas tackled me to the cold ground. I landed hard, my breath knocked right out of my already strained lungs. Nicholas turned his head to glare, his eyes a deadly silver.
“That’s my cousin!” Christabel shouted.
I coughed painfully as Nicholas eased off me.
“Oh, Lucy, I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching down to help me up. Her grip nearly broke my fingers. When I squeaked, she winced. “Sorry! I keep forgetting I’m like the Incredible Hulk.”
Nicholas stayed between me and Saga. She didn’t looked particularly sorry, mostly amused. Aidan just looked tired.
“You brought a human to our home uninvited?” Saga asked, her red hair like fire down her back. “You ought to know the consequences.”
“My family,” Christabel snapped.
“We’re your family now.” Saga shrugged.
“Then act like it,” she shot back smugly.
“I thought we’d been through this already,” Aidan interjected, trying to sound reasonable. They both bared their fangs at him.
“If you want to be part of vampire society so badly,” Connor said, “then be a part of it. Especially now that it needs your help.”
“And where were the lot of you when we needed help?” Saga scoffed.
Now that daggers weren’t being thrown at me, I couldn’t help but glance around curiously. The cave was full of pelts and weapons and the usual coolers of blood bags. Saga and Aidan were both so pale, even more than Christabel. They were nearly translucent, the blue of their veins like gasoline trails. Saga wore rolled-up jeans and a silvery breastplate. Aidan had a bear-tooth amulet around his neck that my father would love. His hair was straight and black, and he was distractingly handsome. My heart must have sped up because Nicholas nudged me with his elbow. I tried to look i
nnocent.
Christabel narrowed her eyes. “Fine,” she said smoothly. “Then let me quote your precious Ann Bonny.” Saga was nothing if not a pirate at heart. “If you would have fought like a man you needn’t die like a dog.”
“Nice,” Connor approved quietly.
“I looked it up,” she admitted. That was pure Christabel. She’d be speaking in rhyming couplets any second now.
“I’m not dying for your precious camp,” Saga said. “We have too much left to accomplish when this is over. But I like your sister well enough.”
“You do?” Connor looked startled. Frankly, so was I. After Viola, Solange wasn’t exactly winning any popularity contests.
“She broke the crown into pieces and gave us our due,” Saga explained, as if we were dumb. “Of course I like her. So for that reason, we’ll give you a few of our pets,” she offered finally. “And the wild ones will find you soon enough, if they haven’t already” She shook her head at us. “You’re barking mad, you are.”
Aidan slipped away to give the order to release some of the Hel-Blar. They screeched and howled, sending shivers up my spine. There was something deeply unsettling about watching them scurry and scuttle down the mountainside.
“Now what?” Christabel asked. “I’m not exactly trained for battle.”
“Got a poem for this?” Connor teased her. “Not ‘The Highwayman,’ ” he added. “I finally read it to the end. She kills herself to warn her lover off a trap.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It’s romantic.”
He laughed. She poked him but she was smiling too. No one saw the soft girl under her tough girl quite like Connor did. And no one saw the tough guy under the geek like she did. I was happy for them both, despite the circumstances.
“I hate that I’m a liability to you guys,” she said. “I should stay up here, shouldn’t I? I’ll only hold you back.”
“To be honest, I’d feel better if you were safely up here,” he admitted. “But between my mom and Lucy I’d have been terrified to suggest it.”
“Hey,” I said. Then I glanced at Nicholas. “And don’t get any ideas.”
Christabel sighed. “I can’t see how I can help down there.” She slid him a glance. “You could stay with me.”
“How about I find us one of the better hidden satellites,” he suggested. “We can all go together and if we’re lucky, no one will even notice us.”
Do I even have to say it?
We were totally noticed.
Chapter 39
Solange
Isabeau’s shields glowed brightly, deflecting the sinister ooze of tainted magic as it tried to slip around us like ropes.
“Isabeau!” Logan shouted. Back on the ground our bodies must be reacting just as our spirits were.
Isabeau closed her eyes and I imagined her pulling energy from the earth and the trees and even the snow drifting slowly down. She used it to form a sword, sharper and more lethal than any forged in the physical world. It glowed like fire. She hacked at the muddy ropes as they tried to drain us. They were insidious and clever. I was exhausted before I’d even realized what they were doing. Everything looked dimmer.
As Isabeau I sliced through them, they fell apart into black smoke, and reformed in the shape of Greyhaven’s face. He smiled at her. I hissed at him, knowing he’d been the one to turn Isabeau into a vampire, leaving her buried in a coffin for hundreds of years.
“Non,” she said as the magic slipped through our barriers. For a moment I saw what she saw and felt what she felt: the weight of the earth over her head, pale roots easing slowly down through the wooden slats of the coffin. The footsteps of mourners passing the graveyard. The smell of the flowers they left to rot under the headstones. The struggle to stave off the madness that licked at her, the hunger burning her into a hollow, papery husk. The blackness when she’d passed out inside the coffin, blessedly cool and numb.
Her spirit body flickered like a candle in a gust of wind.
“Isabeau,” Logan called again, more frantically.
“Non,” she moaned again. The sword in her hand flared.
I knew she wouldn’t break the spell, not yet. Despite the fact that I felt as haggard and gray as she looked, she still needed to do the spell. She wouldn’t let the Host win.
And she certainly wouldn’t let Greyhaven win.
She pushed back, until light shot out of her tattoos, out of her amulets, and finally, out of her aura.
It touched me like rain, washing away the dark magic as if it were mud sticking to my skin.
“Logan once told me to survive Greyhaven,” she said, suddenly sounding like my mother, fierce and deadly. She brought her sword down through Greyhaven’s face and the smoke dissipated, hissing as if it felt pain. The last of the muddy tendrils fell away completely. My spirit cord flared briefly, painfully.
Isabeau lifted the leg bone of what must have been a truly huge dog. It was painted with runes and swirls and hung with crystals. It was an echo of a real talisman, one reserved for Shamankas and their handmaidens; I’d seen something similar when Kala had used magic to help me see the prophecy. It was so deeply imbued with magic that the moment Isabeau snapped it in half, the dried marrow exploded into a cloud of glitter.
“Vérité,” she whispered in her native French tongue. “Vérité,” she said again, shaking the magic off the bone over Hope’s head until it covered her like dandelion pollen. “Vérité,” she repeated for the last time.
Hope frowned suddenly, shaking her head as if an insect had crawled into her ear.
“C’est fini.” Isabeau smiled and drifted away, taking me with her.
“Okay, what just happened?” I asked. “I assume you didn’t do all that just to make her itchy?”
Isabeau didn’t answer. She was too busy scowling down at the Hel-Blar scurrying through the camp, clacking their jaws. One of them stopped to lick the dried blood off the splintered ruins of the post and the chains coiled like dead snakes. I could also see the outcropping jutting over the long feast table where Logan stood over Isabeau’s body with his sword, looking pale. Charlemagne sat behind her head.
“It’s time,” she said, snapping the ribbon of light that bound our wrists. “You must return to your body. Do not linger.”
I shivered, feeling odd. “Don’t worry.” The pull of the silver cord was making me nauseated as it tugged my spirit back home. I followed the trail, passing through pine boughs and branches, to the platform where Kieran was crouched by my side, looking frantic. I reclined into my body, the way Isabeau told me. My eyes snapped open.
Kieran jerked back, slipped, and fell on his butt. I blinked again, feeling the cold boards under my back, the snow seeping into my clothes, the warmth emanating off Kieran’s body.
“You scared the hell out of me,” he said hoarsely, as he got to his feet. “Again.” He offered me his hand to help me up and I shot up so quickly I ended up pressed against his chest. The sounds of the bloody battle beneath us receded for one moment. And then one of Lucy’s classmates darted past, jostling us.
“What the hell happened?” Kieran asked, stepping back but not letting go of me completely.
“Magic,” I replied. “Isabeau this time, so I’m okay. And she worked a spell on Hope, so it was worth it.” I finally stepped away from him, feeling the cold wind snake between us. His scent of cedar and mint clung to me. “But there are Hel-Blar down there now. So I should go.”
“We should go,” he corrected me.
Chapter 40
Lucy
We ran over the rocky terrain, heading around to the far end of the Blood Moon camp into a grove of red pine. There was nothing but dead needles and snow on the ground, no bushes or undergrowth to hide us as we raced against the wind and right into a clutch of Hel-Blar. What was the plural for Hel-Blar anyway? Pack? Nest? Murder.
Definitely murder.
These weren’t even the ones Aidan had just released. They wore no collars, no leashes. They’d been dra
wn by the smell of spilled blood.
“Climb up that tree.” Connor tossed Christabel up onto a low branch and spun back around, a stake in each hand. The Hel-Blar clacked their jaws, saliva dripping off their fangs. “When you reach the satellite give a holler.”
“I’ll give a holler when I crash out of this tree and onto your head from fifty feet up,” she muttered. I knew why she was muttering, I was doing the same thing as I climbed up after her to distract myself from the height, the adrenaline swimming through me, the sounds of jaws clacking at Nicholas and Connor, and people dying in the near distance.
“Being a vampire seemed like a lot more fun in those books you used to read,” she said to me as I pulled myself up onto a wide, sturdy branch below her. “And it’s probably not a good sign that all I can think about it is Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’: ‘Theirs was not to question why, theirs was but to do and die.’ ”
I shook my head. “Connor’s right, your taste in poetry has gotten downright depressing.”
On the ground, Connor dodged a clawing grab, swinging up onto a branch just long enough to swing back down, stomping hard. His boot crushed a Hel-Blar’s shoulder, cracking his bones. He howled, stumbling. Connor kicked him onto the stake he’d left sticking out of the ground.
“Who could have guessed smart geeky boys were so hot?” Christabel flashed me a conspiratorial grin. She wrinkled her nose. “Being a vampire and hanging out with you again is clearly a bad influence. I’m thinking how hot Connor is when we might all die horribly before the sun comes up.”
“Keep calm and carry on,” I said cheerfully.
“Isn’t that from World War II London when the bombs were falling?”
“I stand by the comparison.”
I glanced at the feral blue monsters currently attacking our boyfriends. “Good point.” She climbed faster, until she reached the small satellite. “Got it,” she yelled down.
“Okay, flick on the switches behind the dish, on the left,” Connor called up, then grunted when he tried to avoid a bite and hit the tree hard enough that we nearly lost our perches.
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