High Stakes Trial

by Mindy Klasky

  I wasn’t a vampire. I had to breathe. I fought to sit upright, choking, gasping, trying to gather even half a breath.

  James ignored me, letting his momentum carry him around to the place where I’d crouched only a second before. Richardson was there now, fangs bared, fingers stiffened into battering rams. He howled like a wild thing, clearly crazed by my spilled blood.

  And James fell on his throat.

  James wasn’t Richardson’s lapdog. James hadn’t been defeated. He was a free and independent vampire. He was my free and independent vampire, doing everything in his power to save me, when my death seemed long foregone.

  He didn’t have the right angle to rip open Richardson’s jugular—not with the spin from having thrown me to safety. He opened a shallow gash, though, torn flesh that ran from chin to larynx.

  Richardson bellowed a curse. The pack surged forward, fighting each other for the first chance to draw James’s blood.

  James staggered toward them. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to draw the vampires away from my perch on the altar. He was off-balance, though, after his run at Richardson. He didn’t see the vampire closing from the transept, a man who must have separated from the pack before they ever started their death march down the nave.

  I lowered my head. I tightened my ribs, as if I were lashing on a corset. I sucked in a breath and shouted as loudly as I could, “On your left!”

  James dropped to one knee, stymieing his enraged attacker. Trembling, still trying to manage a full breath, I tried to climb down from the altar to join him, to fight with him.

  “Stay out of this!” he roared at me. At the same time, he landed a kick on the rogue vampire’s chest, sending him flying into the pack.

  Two men took the place of their fallen comrade. From their dazed expressions, I assumed they were the Impressed workers, the ones who’d been staring at computer screens for Sekhmet knew how long.

  James leveled one with a hasty jab to the eyes, two stiffened fingers that sent the creature screaming down the nave. The other hurtled forward without any clear plan of attack. James grabbed his wrist and elbow, twisting hard enough that I heard the cracked ulna from the altar.

  Richardson had recovered now, at least enough to shout directions. He was deploying his men in teams, sending three at a time to attack James. They rolled across the transept in waves, too many and too fast for any one vampire to defeat.

  I had to help. I had to fight. But as a human, I was a hopeless liability. I’d failed at becoming a dragon. That left nothing but reaching toward agriotis, toward the deadly shift I’d sworn never to use again.

  Agriotis? Or death at the fangs of a dozen vampires? I couldn’t let James die, not without trying to save him. To save us.

  I wrapped my fingers over my tattooed insignia. I closed my eyes. I breathed a prayer to Mother Sekhmet, and I shifted.

  I knew in a heartbeat that it hadn’t worked. I didn’t feel the transfer through time, the belly-swooping moment when I moved faster than human eye could see. I didn’t slip into the bloodlust of my goddess.

  I was lost without my insignia. The black designs that Sheut had left on my wrist and around my finger carried no power.

  Another trio of vampires spun away from James, spraying blood and nursing broken limbs. There was a break in the action, a single path visible only to me, from my elevated vantage point.

  “To me!” I called, trusting James to hear. “Follow me!” Even as I shouted, I hurled myself from the altar, sprinting toward St. Mary’s Chapel.

  He tried. He fought like a trapped bear, throwing attackers left and right. He lifted a chest-high vase of flowers and sent it crashing down on an opponent’s head. He brained another with a candlestick. He passed the velvet rope with a pair of vampires wrapped around his legs.

  But for every man he threw aside, three more sprang to take his place. James reached my hand once, but he was ripped away before our fingers could lock. As I stood in the relative safety of the chapel’s iron doorway, James was dragged back to the nave.

  I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t watch him die beneath a tidal wave of vampires. I searched the chapel for a weapon and found nothing but an iron stand for votive candles. It was too heavy to make a decent mace, but the spikes would work some damage before Richardson’s forces took me out.

  I hefted the candle stand and whirled for the doorway. But before I could fight my way to James’s side, everything changed.

  Lights snapped on, hundreds of them, flooding the space with a blinding glare. The transept was awash in white, blocks of marble gleaming.

  At the same time, warriors flooded the nave, screaming ancient battle cries. Sphinxes filled the aisle, scores of them. Some wore hardened leather armor, the ancient battle gear of our people. Others wore modern equipment—Kevlar vests and ballistic helmets, with combat boots laced tight.

  No matter their attire, every sphinx bore weapons. There were spears made of silver. Swords made of silver. Hammers and maces and fine balanced throwing stars, each and every edge glinting with deadly metal.

  One sphinx stood at the front of the army. He wore a Kevlar vest strapped tightly over his blue Oxford-cloth shirt. His khaki pants were neatly creased. His fingers wrapped around an oak stake, a length of polished wood capped with a shining tip of silver.

  Chris found me across the throng. His eyes locked with mine, and he raised his weapon. He nodded once, and then he shouted Mother Sekhmet’s name, leading his force into battle.

  Vampires howled. They wailed in agony as their chests were pierced with silver spears. They screamed as silver swords found bloody sheaths.

  But once the moment of surprise was past, the vampires regrouped. They used the pews to their advantage, guarding their flanks before they leaped at attacking sphinxes.

  A pair of vampires ambushed a sphinx wearing a full suit of boiled leather armor. One gripped his hair, stretching his neck to an impossible angle, and the other lanced his carotid, sending arterial blood spraying. Only as I glimpsed the dead man’s face did I realize it had been Liam, the young guard who had so ably protected the Den’s front door.

  As chaos spread, I searched for James. He’d been dragged half-way to the altar, but he had his feet under himself and he was shaking off an attacker who had straddled his back.

  A sphinx burst down the nave’s right aisle, screaming as he ran. His stork-like legs carried him faster than his fellow soldiers. He used his massive wingspan to slice a silver sword through the air, driving back half a dozen vampires who wisely chose to seek easier prey.

  Ronald Mortenson, leader of the Pride, seemed determined to gain the altar. He dispatched one of James’s attackers. He terrified another into fleeing. Before I could shout anything, before James could, Ronald slashed at James’s waist, barely pausing to pull his bloody blade free.

  James collapsed to his knees. I couldn’t see him above the wooden pews between us.

  Sphinxes were dying. Vampires were dying. Good men and women all, who’d done nothing more than follow a leader into a battle far larger than they.

  I had to do something. Anything. I had to stop this fight before everyone was dead.

  I clutched my right fingers around my left wrist, taking care that my newly tattooed ring crossed over my tattooed bracelet. I touched the obsidian band to my forehead and shouted, Skepsi!

  I lowered my hands to my throat, twisting them to press the tattoos against my voice box. Phoni! I cried.

  I tugged at my blouse and twisted my wrists, contorting my arms to press the tattoos against the flesh over my heart. Pathos!

  My body shattered.

  My spine arched high, scraping against the chapel’s iron gateway. Barely conscious amid the pain of transition, I staggered forward, dragging my feet into the clear.

  Those feet curled in, ripping my shoes to shreds as razor claws emerged. Wings sprouted from my shoulder blades, reducing my blouse to a worthless white flag. The spikes on my tail destroyed my pants.
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  My body echoed with the pain I’d felt when Sheut seared my soul. My form was breaking down, tearing itself asunder. I was rebuilding myself into something new and magnificent and terrible.

  I tossed my head, and I realized my crest had risen. Whiskers curled from my jaw, pulling my lips back from my eyeteeth.

  I raised one hand, intending to feel the limits of my snout, but my fingers had curled into claws. I twisted my wrist, the better to view my knife-like talons, and light cascaded off the scales on my forearm.

  My skin had hardened to armor, a carapace that looked more durable than steel. Each individual scale seemed black, but as I twisted in the blazing overhead lights, I saw glints of lapis blue.

  I planted my hand on the ground, recognizing the rightness of moving on all fours. I lashed my tail for balance, accidentally taking out a pew with my spikes. I surged forward, into the central aisle of the nave.

  The battle had frozen around me. Sphinxes and vampires alike gaped in disbelief. Weapons drooped toward the floor.

  I could smell vampire blood and sphinx blood and bodies that had fouled themselves in death. Stronger than that stench, though, was the rank stink of terror.

  Lowering my head, I unfurled my wings, testing their limits in this glorious stone cavern. Half a dozen imperials bellowed in new terror, sphinxes and vampires alike scrambling for the doors.

  But one sphinx stood his ground.

  Chris.

  My dragon senses measured the fear in his body, the stiffness of his muscles, the wariness of his stance. But his face was tilted up toward mine. And when I looked into his eyes, I saw the essence of his being—his logic, his calm, his trust.

  Slowly, as if he feared spooking me, he raised one hand. He curled his fingers, stretching for a spot I knew was tender, where my crest met my skull.

  If I hadn’t lowered my head for his touch, I never would have seen it: Maurice Richardson, wrapping his fingers around a shard of shattered vase. He raised the porcelain like a dagger and darted forward, shouting to his vampires, “To me, you fools! Rise and fight for me!”

  I thought he was aiming for my heart. He couldn’t harm me. His pottery blade would bounce off my scales like water droplets on a hot skillet. I swiveled my head toward him, opened my mouth, and roared.

  But Richardson wasn’t aiming for my chest. He hurtled past me, arm extended, driving straight for Chris’s throat.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t measure. I simply slipped a latch in my throat, a flap of skin I hadn’t even known I possessed.

  This time, when I roared, fire poured out—a great blue gout of ice, narrow and focused like an acetylene torch. I tracked Richardson for one step, two, and then he burst into flames, clothes exploding with his hair and teeth and flesh.

  His Impressed vampires collapsed as his corpse hit the floor. Each body lay where it fell, regardless of bleeding wounds, of broken bones. I could smell that they were dead before the sphinxes knew. Richardson’s pack would never harry another innocent again.

  But one vampire still lived in the cathedral, a vampire who wasn’t Impressed, who’d been scythed with a sword and burned with silver. A vampire who’d crashed to his knees, from shock or pain or blood loss. A vampire who’d saved my life when all the odds in the world said he’d die for the effort.

  I didn’t know how to reverse my transformation. As a dragon, I had no insignia. I couldn’t offer my thoughts, my voice, my passion.

  But I needed to change. I needed hands. I needed arms. And in the end, it was sufficient to think my way back to my human form.

  This transition was easier. Maybe it didn’t hurt because I was going from a larger body to a smaller one. Or maybe my cells were accustomed to my human shape. Maybe becoming a dragon would become less painful with practice.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t care. Because by the time I opened my human eyes, I could see James fighting to gain his feet between the pews.

  I stumbled toward him, awkward on my narrow human feet. I hadn’t considered how much energy the transition took. Every cell in my body was exhausted. I could barely think enough to move.

  But I had to reach James, had to stand beside him before any sphinx decided to be a hero and finish the job Ronald had begun, eliminating the last of their enemies in the monstrous battle.

  My fingers closed around James’s wrist. His eyes met mine, as dazed and confused as I expected mine were.

  I heard someone move behind me, and a cloud of white settled over my shoulders. Shirt, my stunned brain finally supplied. I was trying to remember how to work buttons, trying to remember what buttons were, when my very human nose recognized Chris’s familiar scent.

  “Sarah,” James croaked. Chris said my name at the exact same moment.

  Before I could answer either of them, a clap of thunder knocked me to my knees.

  37

  The thunder rolled on, longer and louder and lower than any thunderclap I’d ever heard. I thought I felt it in my bones, but then I realized the stones were moving beneath my feet, rising and falling as if they floated on a stormy sea.

  This wasn’t thunder.

  It was an earthquake.

  I thought of Geordie McIntosh, with his tour of the cathedral’s earlier earthquake damage. I pictured towers plummeting to earth and shattering into millions of pebble-sized stones. I considered fleeing to the outdoors, but the ground shook too much; I’d never make it.

  I thought about changing back to a dragon, but I didn’t have the strength.

  Powerful arms closed around me. Broad hands spread over my head, firm and still, as if they could ward off a million pounds of stone. My face was pressed against a wall of pine and snow, against James.

  A sharp crack sounded above the rumble of the earthquake, followed by the sound of a million goblets shattering. I looked up, prepared to see the end.

  I was just in time to catch a cascade of glass and lead, showering onto the cathedral floor. Bits of red and blue and gold caught the brilliant light in the nave as they tumbled to their final resting place.

  The thunder stopped. The ground stilled. A dozen voices cried out, sphinxes checking with each other about who was hurt and who required aid.

  All the windows stood above us—the Te Deum planes of glass, the Space Window, the plywood hole where Lee and Jackson had once reigned. The only window that had shattered was the Civilization Window.

  I moved before anyone else could reach the debris. I waded through the glass and lead, even though my feet were bare.

  The scarab glowed as if it were lit from within. Its blue faience stood out in the spray of stained glass, blazing like a beacon.

  It faded, though, the instant my fingers lifted it from the ground.

  Instantly, I realized the temblor had been sent by Sekhmet and Sheut. My mother and father had worked together to give me a gift. They’d made it possible for me to gather up the Seal, so I could stay true to the promise I’d made the goddess.

  The faience scarab felt heavy for its size. It was warm to the touch, as if it had basked in sunlight for hours. It sent a tingle up my arm, a buzz that centered in my shoulder blades, in the place where I grew wings.

  James reached out to help me cross the sea of glass, concern carved into his face. I couldn’t believe he was standing. In the midst of the melée, I must have misjudged Ronald’s attack. James must have spun away before the silver sword actually hit him.

  “Sarah,” he said, his voice as broken as the Civilization window. His hand reached for me, and I realized all over again that he had protected me from the shattered glass. He had kept me safe.

  “Just a minute,” I said, softening my words with a smile. Before I could see how he’d master his congenital lack of patience, I beckoned to Chris, pulling the sphinx into the privacy of the St. Mary’s chapel.

  I knew the gap between his two front teeth. I knew the quizzical look in his eyes that were more gold than brown. I knew the shape of his collarbones, of the chest he had bared to give
me the literal shirt off his back.

  “It can’t be safe here,” he said, glancing around the chapel. “We have to get everyone outside.”

  “We’re safe enough,” I said. “Until the EBI gets here.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, automatically noting the sphinxes gathering their wounded, stacking the dead. His people thrived on order. They’d minimize the work the EBI had to do to hide our battle from mundanes.

  And the Bureau would be arriving soon. I suspected they’d moved into action the instant I purchased my twenty-seven dollar ticket to tour the cathedral. That seemed like a century ago.

  We had a moment, though. A minute for normal conversation. Chris needed it, before… I wasn’t ready, myself.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked. “What made you bring an army?”

  He thought he didn’t want to talk. He thought other things more important. Reluctantly, he said, “I couldn’t leave things where they were after…” After our fight. “The next day, I hired a pair of griffins to guard you, but by the time they got to your place, you’d already left.”

  “I left that night.” There was no reason to torture him. No reason to tell him about my fight with James.

  “I looked all the places I thought you might be hiding. The whole time I was searching, I kept thinking about what you told me, about Richardson, about that house.”

  I nodded. It took some willpower not to look past Chris, not to see the corpses of the men and women who’d labored there.

  “James said it was in South East. It didn’t take a mastermind to divide up the territory. I sent out sphinxes in teams of two, going block by block. They found Richardson on the fourth night.”

  My lips quirked. Chris’s search had been as orderly as everything else about him. It was like stirring his coffee ten times. Like organizing his pens by color.

  “I posted a lookout on the street,” he said. “The entire Den slept during the day. We knew Richardson could only make his move at night.”