by Emma Savant
Not far away, a vampire grappled with Blaze, whose glamour had already faded and whose spiky blonde hair was a beacon in the dim light. The vampire’s teeth were just inches from her neck, and the muscles of her bare arms rippled as she fought his superhuman strength. I inched toward them and pulled a stake from the holster at my hip. The vampire’s teeth grazed Blaze’s neck, and I lunged forward and drove the wood into his back.
He screamed and collapsed. Blaze squinted but couldn’t see through my glamour.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I got you.”
The lines around her eyes faded as she recognized my voice, and then we were both on the floor gathering up any piece of the destroyed throne that might serve as a weapon. I shoved the shards into my holster and stood when another vampire approached.
This one was younger than most, with hair the same russet as Alec’s, which gave my heart a little pang I had to ignore. I stayed in a crouch while the vampire raced toward Blaze. She tripped over my invisible form and splayed on the ground. I grabbed a huge splinter off the floor and drove it into her back.
“We’re a good team,” Blaze said and jumped up and tackled a vamp I hadn’t even seen coming.
I turned back to the rest of the throne room and dove into the melee.
The heat of battle was something I could never have described. Instincts took over rational behavior. Any guilt or hesitation I might have felt dissolved beneath the roaring in my ears. I leaped and lunged and stabbed, wielding dagger in one hand and stake in another, leaving a trail of bodies behind me.
I had been trained for this.
I had been born for this.
And here, in the middle of the frenzy of blood and chaos, I would not be found wanting.
Glamours dropped all around me. I felt mine slip away, and my hand shimmered into view as I plunged my dagger into the heart of a gray-haired vampire whose face held the waxy look of unnatural age. His eyes flashed, and he snarled at the impact. I swapped the dagger for a stake, and the fury in his eyes dulled. He fell to the floor.
Hands wrapped around my neck and yanked me backward. I elbowed the attacker in the face and spun around.
“Invader,” the vampire snarled through pointed teeth.
“Kidnapper.”
I blocked her next blow and brought my knee to her gut. The impact slowed her for only a moment before her icy fingers closed around my throat again. The edges of my vision clouded with red, and then the vamp stiffened and collapsed. Rowan stood in her place.
“You okay?”
“I’m good,” I said, and the battle began again.
My sisters waged war at my side, and with their glamours disappearing the room seemed fuller than it had been before, with vampires and witches and enormous werewolves locked in a frantic, wild dance full of blows and screams and howls. One of Grandma’s garlic bombs exploded in the center of the room in a burst of smoke and magic, and the vampires nearest the smoke coughed and stumbled. My eyes watered from the sharp fumes, and I let the pain drive me on.
A gunshot cracked through the air. I dropped to the floor on instinct, then leaped onto my hands and knees and scanned the room.
We’d brought guns, but no Dagger would use them in here. No matter how good of shots we were, the chance of misfiring and hitting one of our own was too high. The guns were for other parts of the mansion, for hallways and rooms where the distance between combatants were greater and the risk of hitting an ally was low.
I spotted the gunman across the room. He raised his weapon again. The gun fired, and a werewolf yelped and fell to the floor.
He shouldn’t have fallen. The bullet had hit the werewolf’s shoulder. The wound was nowhere near vital organs, and the wolf was huge; a shot like that should have been the kind of injury he could fight through. I caught Rose’s eye from across the room, and she ran toward the fallen werewolf as another Wildwood attacked the vampire and tried to wrestle the gun from him.
Rose crouched at the werewolf’s side and dug her fingers into his blood-matted fur. A moment of digging, and her hand rose, a glinting red pellet in her hand.
I couldn’t hear her over the noise but I could read her lips. “Silver bullets,” she said, and my stomach dropped.
Of course they’d known the Wildwoods might return. Of course they’d prepared.
“The vamps have silver bullets,” I called over the din to the nearest werewolf.
He snapped his jaws and swung his enormous head toward the nearest enemy. I darted across the room, shouting the phrase over and over. The gunman was already dead, but he wouldn’t be alone.
We were wasting time. We had to find the children and get out.
“Get everyone out of here,” I shouted to Cerise as I skidded past her. “Vamps have guns, and those windows up there connect to hallways. We’re fish in a barrel.”
She scanned the high latticed windows and gave me a sharp nod.
“Shields overhead!” she shouted. She cast a protective spell over her own head and ran back into the fray, shouting at the others to clear the room and evacuate.
I slowed and approached the open double doors. My enemies had firearms, and that made the door a funnel for bullets. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, Mom had always said, and so I took a deep breath and inched cautiously to the edge of the opening. In one quick move, I turned sharply around the door’s edge to keep the foyer’s wall to my back.
The vampires in here were well in hand: Roux and two of the Wildwoods were handily dispatching every enemy who approached. Roux’s face was streaked with blood she hadn’t noticed. She spun and stabbed, a tornado between the two hulking wolves. I hugged the wall and made my way into the nearest hallway.
Cate was just around the first corner in human form. She grabbed me by the shoulders and backed me into an alcove that shielded us from the rest of the corridor.
“We found the kids.”
39
“They’re in the basement, just like we thought,” Cate said in a fast undertone. “Stairs off the kitchen, that way.” She jerked her head down the hall. “Vamps know we’re there and kids are in the line of fire.”
I pushed her back out of the alcove. “Gather everyone you can.”
She nodded sharply and ran the way I’d come, shifting as she went. One instant her feet were on the ground; the next, her giant front paw touched down. Her tail whipped around the corner before I took off. I had a gun of my own and managed to shoot several vamps with the bullets Saffron had blessed the night before.
The undead just kept coming, jumping out of rooms and crawling from the ceiling in uncountable numbers. There were more of them than last time I’d been here, or maybe it just seemed like there were more when every one of them was an obstacle standing between me and the children.
The closer I got, the easier it was to track down the kitchen from the noise. The hallway outside the room was thick with vamps and snarling werewolves. I threw a shimmering shield up around my body and ran through the crush of combatants. There were too many vamps here, outnumbering the werewolves three to one, but the Wildwoods had the situation covered. A vampire screamed for help and I turned to where she was looking. Another vamp with a gun had arrived behind me. I dropped my shield for an instant and pushed all the magic I could gather into my hands, then shot a ball of fire toward the vamp. It hit him; he burst into flames and dropped the weapon.
Rowan was right behind me, and she grabbed the vampire’s gun and had it pointed at the nearest adversary before I could blink.
I ran through the bleak kitchen, giving the room only enough attention to note the granite countertop dripping with blood in the center. A doorway stood open on the far side, with flashes of white light illuminating the staircase beyond it in bursts.
I threw my shield back up and ducked onto the top of the stairwell. An instant later, a bolt of lightning crackled against my shield. I flinched at the impact but focused on pulling the energy in through my shield and into myself as
a reserve for the next spell I might have to throw.
“Sorry!” Poppy called. “Thought you were one of the cannibal undead.”
“Easy mistake to make.”
She stepped aside and positioned herself to attack whoever came through next. Past her, the stairs were blocked by two bodies, one vampire and one werewolf and familiar. Alec’s jaw clamped down on a vampire’s chest, and he threw the vamp like a rag doll up the stairs. I plunged a stake into the monster’s heart before he could stand up again, and met Alec’s giant yellow eye.
“I need through.”
He squeezed himself against the wall, and I shoved my way past his wiry fur and to the other side. Once behind me, he snarled as another lightning bolt crackled.
The stairs opened straight onto a long, grim corridor with metal-barred cells on either side. The only vampires here were dead, and Mom, Grandma, and Cherry were moving quickly along the cells, unlocking the doors with a combination of magic and force.
“Is this the only way out?” I jogged down to where Mom was wrestling with a lock. Three little gnome boys huddled by the far wall, staring at us with huge eyes.
“Stupid doors have bolt charms on them.” She gritted her teeth and shot a thread of gold light at the keyhole. “Didn’t think Sienna was bright enough to cast those.”
“She’s evil, not stupid.”
Mom gave the lock a final yank, and the whole cell door shattered apart. The children shielded themselves from the flying particles of metal, and Mom and I rushed in and crouched next to the kids.
“Are you hurt?” I said to the smallest of the boys.
He shook his head silently, but the child next to him grabbed the first boy’s arm and held it up to show me a plastic bandage on the inside of his elbow.
“He got milked yesterday,” he said.
Milked. The word turned my stomach.
Mom told the kids to stay quietly in their cell until she came for them, then walked me out of their hearing range.
“Yes, there’s only one way out,” she said quietly. “They didn’t want to make it easy to escape.”
“If we can get them to the kitchen, we can get them out through a window.”
“No windows,” Mom said. “No good place to blow through the walls, either. Our best bet is to take them through the front door.”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s the closest,” she said. “Most of these kids can run out a door on their own. If we have to lift them through windows it’s going to slow us down, and every second counts.”
She was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
I got to work on the next lock. An explosion shook the house upstairs, and Alec snarled as he tore into another of the vampires. It was difficult to work quickly; the locking charms Sienna had put in place were tricky to dislodge, and it took a savvy combination of force and magic to knock the spells loose. It took a while to open the cages and make sure the children were all right. There were at least fifty of them, probably more.
They were all small and represented at least a dozen different races. There were Humdrums and witchlings and faeries and gnomes and even a pixie who couldn’t have been more than three or four. I’d expected to hear screams or crying, but they were terrified into silence. They obeyed our instructions as best as they could, but not one seemed willing to risk so much as moving without being told.
Grandma called us to the edge of the room for a quiet council. We were down to so few choices that we didn’t need to discuss. Grandma whispered her thoughts, we exchanged a few significant looks at the children and the dreary prison around us, and we agreed on a plan.
I didn’t know if it was a good plan. I didn’t know if it was a sensible plan. But it was the only one we had.
Alec didn’t respond when I stood behind him and shouted, so I grabbed his wiry tail and gave it a quick yank. He tensed and pressed himself into the wall again, enough that he could peek through the tiny gap he’d created at me. I caught Poppy’s attention, and she threw up a shield and darted down the stairs toward us.
“We’ve got the kids,” I said. “How’s it looking up there?”
“We’re working on it, but it’s going to be a while.”
“The longer we take, the more of us get killed in this fight,” I said. “And the sooner we get a kid out to that line, the sooner the wrath of the Faerie Queen can descend on this place.”
“You’re not going to get a kid out alive,” Poppy said. “There are still too many of them.”
“We will if we work together. I need the Wildwoods to create a barrier while we Daggers form a line. If half of us shield the kids and the other half blast a way out of here, we just might have a shot.”
Poppy spun around and fired off a spell. A vampire I hadn’t even heard coming shrieked and fell back from the doorway at the top of the stairs.
Her face scrunched up with worry. “It’s worth a try,” she finally said, although she didn’t sound any more certain than I was.
I pushed past Alec, and his thick hair tickled my face. I brushed away the resulting itch.
“I’ll round everyone up,” I said. “Can you explain it to people when they get here?”
Poppy nodded.
I turned to Alec. “Don’t let anyone get past you.”
He snarled, which I took to be confirmation.
I grabbed the necklace at my throat and sent a quick message to the rest of the Daggers. Meet at the stairs off the kitchen, we have a plan. Tell the wolves. The necklace flared with heat as my sisters responded, but the heat wasn’t as sudden or as strong as I would have liked. It was as if some of their voices were weak—weak, or missing.
I shoved the thought away and ran up the stairs to hunt down the scattered Wildwoods.
40
Our forces moved from all over the castle to the kitchen, the individual members of our army coming together like a single organism being guided by one thought. We grouped in the kitchen, and the vampires followed.
When I could, I slammed the kitchen door shut against the swarm and locked it. They threw themselves at the door from the other side. We had only moments. I turned to face my troops.
“The Stiletto is in the basement with the kids,” I said. “Our mission is to protect those children and get them from here to the front door to the edge of the property. Rowan, hand up.”
Rowan raised her hand high. Behind me, the door rattled with the force of the vampires’ blows.
“Everyone standing behind Rowan, you’re on protection. You form a shell around those children and you shield them with everything you’ve got—weapons, bodies, magic. Everyone in front of Rowan, you’re on offense. It’s mostly hallway between us and the front door, so we need to fill that passage with a river that drowns these vamps. We leapfrog: You see who’s already fighting ahead of you and you jump past them. Kill your vampire, leapfrog to the next. We clear?”
A sea of nods and thumbs-up gestures met me. Their faces were streaked with blood and mottled with bruises, and every last witch and werewolf stared back at me with fury and determination in their eyes.
“Form a guard around the children,” I shouted, and the crowd behind Rowan shuffled and arranged themselves, a dozen individuals all doing their part.
I turned and stepped back from the door, raised a hand, and blasted it open.
The vampires poured in, and we responded. I tackled the vampire nearest me, punched him, felt him rake his sharp claws down my face, and managed to stake him in the heart. Then I looked ahead to the next vamp who wasn’t already at the mercy of a witch’s dagger or werewolf’s fangs and went for that one, too.
Brendan’s heavy body jumped ahead of me. He plowed past the vampires in the hall. I couldn’t tell what he was doing until a gunshot rang out, and I traced the sound back to a tall vampire woman with a familiar face. She’d been at Sienna’s side in the throne room the last time we’d been here. She was the one with the resounding voice who seemed to be som
ewhere in Sienna’s chain of command, and she had a silver-barreled pistol pointed directly at Brendan.
The first bullet had missed, but the second wouldn’t. My heart skipped a beat, and I jolted forwards to rescue him, but he was on the woman in a single leap. He tore into her with a growl that stood my hair on end. When she had stopped twitching, he crushed the gun with an enormous paw and raked his claws down the nearest doorframe, splintering the molding away from the wall.
Before I could reach him with a stake, Brendan shifted back to human form. He yanked a piece of molding the rest of the way off and plunged it into the vampire’s heart. Then he turned to me. His eyes were still yellow and wild, and I could see the wolf in the human when he bared his teeth and growled.
“We need to get ahead,” he said. “Make sure there are no traps. Make sure the others can fight their way through.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
Behind me, a werewolf yelped.
“And I you,” he said. The last word turned into a howl as he shifted back to his lupine form.
I moved ahead, walking quickly but taking in my surroundings, noting anything odd or out of place. I didn’t sense traps, but there were plenty of doors—doors that led to side rooms, side rooms that might hold vampires. I cleared the rooms on the way, kicking open doors, throwing flashes of light into each darkened space, and scanning for enemies. I nabbed one this way, but most of the vamps along my path were already dead.
There were Wildwoods lying on the ground, too, and Daggers. Robin was curled up by a wall with her eyes closed. My heart ached with a sudden, sharp pain I didn’t have time to indulge in. I shoved the emotion down and moved on.
I kicked open the final door in the hallway and lit the room in a burst of white. The light reflected back to me in the form of glowing red pupils set into a pale face. I reached for a light switch, but my hand couldn’t find anything but smooth wall. It didn’t matter; the vampire charged at me. His weight slammed into my body, and I stumbled back into the hall.
