Siren's Song

by Karen Chance

  Only, unfortunately, it was so damned dark that he couldn’t see much at all!

  Still, it wasn’t hard to figure out where he was. The eyes he was using were flicking everywhere, in a nervous stutter that showed him the familiar tunnels of Stratford HQ. Only they weren’t familiar to the vampire, who had never been here before. Although it wouldn’t have mattered if he had, since they were constantly changing.

  Jonas’s spell, John thought. This must be the night of the recent attack. And, as if it had heard his thoughts, the corridor suddenly leapt up in front of him, going from flat and easily navigable to almost perpendicular, all at once.

  John heard the screams of several of his companions, who went tumbling into the abyss that had just been created behind them. He felt fear clench his heart when, for a moment, he couldn’t get a grip on the crumbly surface of what was now a cliff. He tasted the dust that flooded his mouth as he somehow hung on, even while half a mountainside of dirt and rock fell on his head.

  And just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, the tunnel floor started reversing course, tilting back the other way, and not gently, either. It felt like they were in a roller coaster car that had reached the summit, and was about to take a plunge. One straight down a dizzying drop into darkness.

  One of the mages behind him grabbed the front of John’s coat. He snarled and snapped at the creature—nobody touched him! But to his surprise, the mage snarled back. “Do you want to live?”

  John wanted to live. He grasped the proffered arm and rolled onto something that gave slightly under his weight. And noticed that the man had formed his shields into a bright green pad, one that almost looked like—

  He laughed; he couldn’t help it. He was invading the most dangerous bastion of magic on earth with a bunch of tosspots he barely knew, most of whom were dead now and the rest of which were about to be, including him! And yet he laughed.

  He’d always loved sledding!

  Although it had never been like this.

  The floor finished reversing itself, like the world’s largest see-saw, going from plunging cliff to plunging cliff in little more than the space between one panicked breath and the next. Their companions lost their grip almost instantly, the mages falling past them in bright blue and green shield bubbles, only to be swallowed up by the walls when they got too close. Or to shatter on the rocks that poked up from the tunnel’s floor without warning, or that speared down from above like daggers. Or to die to the corpsmen appearing out of openings in the walls to cut them down.

  The vampires fared slightly better—for a while. But the tunnel soon claimed them, too, undead reflexes being no match for a corridor that seemed to have come alive. Roots shot out to decapitate or snare them, vines wrapped them up like mummies before dragging them into the earth, and always, always, the corpsmen were there, slinging vicious spells and hexes that exploded dirt outward on all sides, making it almost impossible to see anything after a while.

  But he and the mage avoided it all, partly because they were lying low to the ground and thus made a poorer target, and partly because they shot ahead of everyone else on their makeshift sled, like a bullet out of a gun. No, their problem wasn’t the traps but rather the wildly twisting, turning, and falling corridor, not so much a roller coaster now as a winding plummet into darkness.

  But while the corridor could change and morph, it did not seem to be able to disappear altogether.

  Getting close now, the thought echoed through John’s mind. Getting—

  There!

  The two allies, one man and one vampire, threw themselves off the makeshift sled in front of a strangely modern looking door. It was a slab of steel set into a stone wall, but with little in the way of warding. Just a brief flicker of green that the mage sheered away with a word.

  “It’s designed to keep things in, not to keep us out,” he panted, before blasting a hole in the door.

  The klaxons’ strident cry went through the roof, as the two men stepped through the fiery ruin. It was dark inside, and smoky from the mage’s spell. But vampire eyesight managed to make some things out, nonetheless—

  No! John thought, struggling against the vampire’s movements as he started forward, even though he knew that this was all in the past, that he couldn’t influence anything. But the crazed bastard was heading for the panel that controlled the hundreds of stasis pods lining the walls. The ones filled with the most dangerous creatures the Circle had ever encountered.

  The panel went up in a burst of sparks from having the vampire’s fist smashed through it, and smoke billowed out into the room, grayish green and boiling. Although, strangely, it didn’t come from the panel. But from something much farther in, near the back of the long lines of pods.

  “She was captured half a century ago, so it’ll be close,” the mage panted, scanning the nearby vessels.

  The vampire barely noticed. He was almost three hundred years old. He hadn’t had his skin prickle in goosebumps, a human reaction, for centuries. He hadn’t even thought he remembered the sensation.

  He was remembering it now.

  “Damn it, man! Help me! We don’t have much time,” the mage snapped.

  The vampire didn’t reply. There was something coalescing out of that strange smoke. Something hunched over despite the high ceiling of the room, as if it could barely fit. Something . . . they hadn’t expected.

  “Corps!” the mage screamed, half a second before what looked like an entire squad of war mages appeared in the doorway.

  “Good.” The voice rumbled through the room, low and deep and alien, in some horrible way the vampire couldn’t quite define. All alone, it was enough to send his mind descending into panic, and his long dead heart beating in terror. But then he saw the source and his eyes widened, even while the rest of him turned to stone as hard as any Medusa could have wrought.

  Which was appropriate, he thought madly, as a huge body stepped out of the smoke. One with a snake’s head, a mass of weeping sores on its body, and an eruption of tentacles from its back, each as big as a man. And each of which rushed by the frozen vampire to grab a mage.

  “I do so enjoy a blood sacrifice.”

  And then all hell broke loose.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  S omebody slapped John across the face. “War mage!”

  It took him a moment to realize that that had been Zheng’s voice, and that it was Zheng’s hand about to hit him again. He managed to get an arm up to block the blow, if only barely. But it made a relieved grin stretch across the big vampire’s face.

  “About time! Glad you’re all right!”

  John was not all right. His brain felt like it had been lobotomized by a hand mixer, and he didn’t think he could take even one more trip into the past. Not today, and probably not ever.

  And then he remembered what the latest trip had taught him.

  “Fuck!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Zheng told him. “Upsy-daisy.”

  The shock of a huge vampire saying upsy-daisy, on top of the shock of finding out that the demon lord he’d killed all those years ago was somehow alive and probably behind all this, would have been bad enough. But then he looked across the room. “Fuck!”

  A minute ago, there’d been an army attacking John’s shields; now it looked more like an avalanche. One that had bunched up against his protection in a squirming, fighting, snarling mass. That whole half of the chamber was covered in vampire flesh, and not a single one looked remotely sane.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” he slurred, as Zheng pulled him up.

  “The Nèigé,” he spat, talking about the local term for the East Asian Court. “Seems like somebody got off a call for help, after all, before the damned portals went down. Only the senate sent Zhu!”

  “Who?”

  “Marquis Zhu, one of their members. He was the closest, being based just over the border in Guangzhou, along with his army—”

  “And?”

  “And he’s
fighting on the other side!”

  At this point, John wasn’t even surprised.

  “I dodged a couple groups of his guys on the way here,” Zheng added, getting an arm under John’s. “Before I plowed into this one. They were protecting the Corps and attacking the triads.”

  “Then the enthrallment does work on vampires,” John said thickly. “Somebody got to Zhu—”

  “Or he got to somebody.” Zheng’s lip curled. “He’s an opportunist, as slimy as they come. He and I go way back, and most of it wasn’t friendly. Some allies at court told me that he’s been acting strangely—”

  “Or enthralled.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s a traitorous son of a whore. Does it matter?”

  At the moment, not really.

  Especially not when the building started shaking like an earthquake had hit—or like another pillar had gone down. Damn it! John shook off Zheng’s help and got his feet under him—

  Just in time for the roof to cave in.

  That normally wouldn’t have mattered; his shields had handled worse things. But he’d focused most of his energy forward to combat the onslaught, leaving the barrier above him dangerously thin. Because the only thing it was supposed to catch was some leaking rain!

  Instead, it was suddenly struck by a mass of old wooden beams and rafts of glazed ceiling tiles. His shield buckled before he could reinforce it, and then collapsed altogether in cloud of steaming rain that scalded but didn’t stop the army flying at them across the room. For a second, John stared death in the face, whilst pressing against the wall to avoid the falling masonry and desperately trying to reengage his shields.

  He already knew he’d be too late.

  But someone else wasn’t.

  The mirror he’d all but forgotten about erupted in light, almost as blinding as the beam in the tong’s warehouse. Only this time it was silver bright, not sunny yellow, and a mass of glittering streams instead of a single column. They exploded out of every shard and tore across the room, as beautiful as moonlight and as deadly as a thousand glittering spears in the hands of a fey army.

  Because that was what they were, John realized: fey magic, more than he had ever felt at one time. For a second, he stayed frozen in place, staring at the silver beams flooding over him. Beautiful, he thought, feeling his face stretch into an insane smile. Beautiful!

  Maybe the redhead really was a princess.

  But their enemies didn’t seem to appreciate the display. The ethereal beams sliced through mage shields and vampire bodies alike, pausing and then halting the onslaught that boiled up behind them like prisoners behind the metal bars of a cage. Snarling, biting prisoners, John thought, coming back to himself when Zheng grabbed his shoulder.

  “Up! Go up!”

  He was pointing at the collapsed part of the roof, but the biggest hole was too far over to be useful. And the area right above them was a tangled mass of tumbled lumber and fallen tiles. Or it was until John sent it flying into the night, blowing them an escape hatch worthy of the name.

  A torrent of rain blew in, drenching him to the skin, and causing him to lose his footing on the wet boards. That turned out to be a good thing, however, because the army started firing again almost the moment he hit down. They were firing blind, with the dazzling light in their eyes, but they were firing at everything.

  John worked to get a shield up while bullets, knives and spells slammed into the cabinets above him, sending splinters soaring and herbs scattering so thickly that it was like a fragrant rain. Not that there wasn’t plenty of the other kind, too. He couldn’t breathe, he could barely see, and he was about to get his ass shot off!

  And all the while, the little dhampir was bouncing around on the railing, dodging everything and then scaling up the side of a carved support pillar like a damned monkey. Until she suddenly jumped back down, so quickly that John thought she’d been shot for a second. But no.

  She’d done it on purpose, although why he didn’t know since she’d almost been out. “Go!” he yelled, but doubted she heard.

  He could barely hear himself think, much less what Zheng was saying or what Ray, her servant, was screaming at her. Not that it mattered. She ignored them all, and snatched an object out of a ruined cabinet that looked a lot like—

  “You have got to be kidding me!” John yelled.

  She didn’t hear that, either. Maybe because she was back to doing her monkey impression, with something strapped across her back that wasn’t the gun she probably thought it was. John gave up trying to raise a shield and followed her, because they were out of time. He had a new training exercise for the Corps, if he lived long enough to tell anyone, he thought viciously. He grabbed the damned pillar, water slick and splinter filled as it was, while explosions went off all around him, a machete quivered out of the wall in front of him, and Zheng—damn his eyes—pushed on his ass as if to propel him up at rocket speed when he couldn’t even see where he was going thanks to having a waterfall in his face!

  Until, suddenly, he could. John’s head burst through the cascade pouring off the roof, leaving him gasping for breath, spitting and spluttering. And staring around at a world gone mad.

  The pharmacy was tall, with a conical, heavily sloped roof that was even taller. It poked its ancient head over some of the surrounding buildings, enough that John could see a city on fire in all directions. Magical flames of pink, green and purple stretched long fingers toward the heavens, while more prosaic explosions went off in bursts of red and yellow sparks that scattered across the landscape, propelled by winds that roared like a banshee in his ears and clawed at his body, trying to drag him off the disintegrating roof.

  They didn’t succeed, but the rain almost did. The typhoon had hit with full force now, sending waves of water washing down the tiles and spraying in John’s face. Overhead, thunder boomed, and lighting laced the clouds so thickly that he could easily make out the panicked faces all around him.

  And those of the army beneath him. Because it looked like the princess was pooped. Or maybe a stray spell had finally taken out the mirror, John didn’t know. But the lifesaving flood of light from below abruptly cut out, and the sound of the scrabbling hoard drifted upward.

  John glanced down to see a writhing, squirming, inhuman mass swarming up every available handhold, including crawling over each other, in a headlong attempt to reach him. Because he had no doubt whatsoever that he was the target. The others might have flown under the radar on their own, but not with him along.

  Dagon wanted him dead, and he’d sent a literal army to make that happen.

  And, suddenly, John felt the calm of his old friend battle be replaced by the fire of an even older companion, one he’d had all his life, from his very earliest memories.

  “You want me?” he screamed a challenge. “Come and get me!”

  The wind tore the words out of his throat, but not the two grenades he dropped back down the makeshift shaft. They were a Corps’ specialty, using magic to propel the shrapnel further and with more force than any human weapon could hope to do. John had seen them blow holes the size of elephants in reinforced concrete and, in some cases, collapse whole buildings all on their own.

  And they did do something. But there was no volcano of flesh spewing up out of the ruined roof, as he’d half expected. There was barely a hitch in the pursuing horde at all. John didn’t understand—

  Until he saw the first wave emerge, largely unscathed, from underneath shields of their own.

  They were like the one the dhampir had used on him, but emerging from armbands instead of watches. Only about half the creatures seemed to have them—Zhu’s army, John supposed, since they were also in uniform—and they had definitely made a difference. Half the bodies crawling out onto the roof were fine, hunched behind hazy green shields that covered them almost completely, while the other . . .

  John swallowed hard. Even years of combat experience didn’t quite take the edge off of seeing bodies that should have been dead a
dozen times over—with cooked flesh, missing limbs, and in one case, only the lower half of a head—yet still being functional. How much damage vampires could take and remain deadly had always awed him.

  And was about to get him killed, he realized, as one of them grabbed his foot.

  John stomped it in the face, and then did what he should have done already. And sent everything he had into that damned hole. Guns jumped off his belt and out of his coat, already firing; grenades flew into the midst of the horde, causing strange bulges in the well of flesh when they went off, far below; knives chopped and hacked, sending limbs flying; and spell bombs ate away flesh until it looked like the forward rows were skeletons somehow raised from the grave.

  Yet still they came.

  Until Zheng grabbed two of the wounded bodies and stood over the hole, using them like clubs to batter the rest back down. It seemed to work, mainly because of his suit, which was magnifying each blow by the power of all the force pushing against him. The vampires were in essence fighting themselves—for as long as the suit’s power lasted. And for as long as a mage didn’t get close enough to realize what was happening and turn it back against him.

  Since that might not take long, John took the opportunity to scramble up the water slick tiles to the peak of the roof. He pulled the only weapon he had left, namely the damned wand, and thrust it up into the air, as high as he could reach. He got a tug immediately—not surprising considering that he was essentially standing in the middle of a lightning storm. And wild magic loved lightning like children love candy.

  It was everywhere tonight. It threaded through the storm so thickly that it was almost visible to the naked eye. It swirled around him in diaphanous clouds, stroking and caressing, almost like a lover. It suffused the air, causing him to breathe it in with every pull of his lungs, and to let it back out again along with a little of his own power, like a thousand tiny lures.

  All of which were pulling, too.

  John’s hair suddenly went electric, standing up despite the rain pelting down; his flesh broke out in goosebumps; and his body reacted in a way that would have been embarrassing except that he was past that now. He looked up to find the clouds swirling overhead like a maelstrom, the boiling green underbellies laced with jagged lightning that flashed and boomed along with John’s heart, because there was too much magic in the air, far too much. To the point that he wasn’t holding a lure so much as being one himself, his entire body crawling with energy that he fought to use and direct, instead of being consumed by.