But if I hadn’t, they’d have been right in the middle of it.
Because as the regular mortals fled, what remained was a much smaller crowd. They all just stood their ground as their human shields dispersed. Ghouls, whose faces had grown more gaunt and hungrier as the mortals ran and they began to slide into their true forms. Vampires of House Malvora, mostly men and women with various shades of blond hair and the same pale skin of House Raith. The Renfields, standing solidly exactly as they had been, never moving or changing expression in the pounding rain—their permanently damaged minds every bit as locked into obedience by the power of the Black Court as before.
And sundown came. You couldn’t see it under the glowering storm clouds, but it isn’t a purely physical event. Instead, you could feel ithappen, if you were attuned to the energy. You could feel it like a single toll from some vast bell.
Forms appeared in the darkness, five of them, covered in black clothing, cloaks, hoods. Even from there, I could feel the cold, greasy energy around them, familiar from the battle in the graveyard the previous year.
Black Court elders. Drakul’s personal guard. The ones who had killed my friends in the Wardens. Wild Bill. Yoshimo. Chandler.
The Renfields let out soft, eerie, sighing moans as their masters appeared.
“Right,” I said, quietly, to Bear. “That makes it simpler.”
“You ready for this?” Bear asked.
“Yes,” I said simply.
And she shot me a sudden, ferocious smile.
Then I raised my voice and called out over the battlements, “Okay, you evil bastards. You wanna start trouble in my home? Come and get some.”
Chapter
Fifty-Three
The last time I’d run into the Black Court elders, they’d come at me without a second’s thought—just instant attack, with big and badass sorcery. They were beings with centuries and centuries of power and experience and death and terror behind them.
The coterie had killed two of my friends. Wild Bill and Yoshimo. Drakul had done for Chandler personally.
And between Ramirez and me, we’d killed two of theirs. Didn’t know their names, because they hadn’t taken time for introductions. They hadn’t shown me any respect.
This time they did.
One of them stepped forward and lowered its hood. It had been a female at one time, I thought, though mummified corpses reduce gender considerations to a large degree. It was wearing jewelry that looked like it might have been inspired by ancient Egyptian fashion, definitely somewhere in the Middle East, though historically speaking it was likely an affectation, since Drakul had been a late-fourteenth-century type. I dubbed it Cleopatra anyway. They were doubtless in similar shape.
“Okay, Cleo,” I said. “What you got?”
The vampire’s eyes glittered with pure malevolence and she raised her right hand, sending a bolt of white-hot flame scorching straight at me.
I narrowed my eyes, focused my will upon the castle’s defenses, and otherwise didn’t move a single muscle.
The fire streaked toward me—and stopped cold at the line of the battlements. The runes and sigils there burned brightly for a moment, and a faint impression of a wall of blue light appeared in the air between us, immaterial as a phantom and very much real enough to stop the hostile magic in its tracks. The stones of Merlin’s fortress absorbed the energy as easily as they stopped the wind.
Cleo lowered its hand, black eyes narrowing. Then it spoke, and its voice was as charming as sandpaper on rusted steel. “Malvora.”
I started to say something, and Bear grabbed my collar and jerked me back as a gunshot rang out. I had the flash impression of one of the Malvora moving swiftly, hand extending bearing a long-barreled pistol. Something hissed past my face, close enough to stir some of my hair as I dropped back.
Merlin’s fortress had been designed to be impregnable to supernatural forces. Modern firearms hadn’t really been a factor in its engineering, and while the stone was damned near impregnable, especially while charged with power like it was at the moment, I couldn’t use it to stop bullets from zipping through the air.
“Cover the roof!” someone shouted, and gunfire started ringing out. Bullets zinged through the air and sparked on the castle’s stones.
“Get down!” I shouted to Matias and Fitz. The pair of them hadn’t reacted as swiftly as they should have, but then they weren’t in any direct lines of fire. I was just worried about fragments and weird ricochets. They dropped to a crouch.
Cleo’s voice rasped over the gunfire as she shouted, “Forward!”
“Major General!” I shouted.
Toot-Toot came streaking out of the darkness in a sphere of violet light, bobbing and weaving madly through the air, surrounded by a whirling, dizzying cloud of Little Folk in their own spheres. “My lord!” he piped.
