Then I turned and swept down the stairs.
I got to the bottom of the stairs, rushed down the long hallway to the next set, and went down them. I passed an exhausted Fitz and Matias along the way. Bear was with them, face red, covered in sweat, breathing like a steam engine, but she shoved herself to her feet as if she hadn’t been shot several times a few moments before, took Matias’s shotgun with a nod, and came lumbering along behind us.
We went down the stairs by the gym into the great hall and found it full of thunder and fury.
The gargoyles had gathered by the entry door. Cinnamon was lying in a heap—a literal heap of broken stone—against the back wall, and as I watched I saw Basil in the doorway, wrestling a Black Court vampire and being forced slowly inward, his lion’s face set in an expression of noble determination. Sage tried to step in, only to be struck by a bolt of lightning that snaked through the doorway, driving him back several paces, and a second vampire added its power to the one struggling with Basil, driving the gargoyle back. The others closed in, but they weren’tas physically powerful as Basil. Lightning struck again and again, and the third vampire shoved its way in through the doorway.
Excellent. They were all inside.
“Boys!” I snarled. “Get out of the way!”
The gargoyles flew back and away from the entry door, vanishing into the walls, the floor, as though the stone had been no more substantial than water.
I slammed my open right hand against the wall of Merlin’s fortress as the three corpses whirled toward me, reorienting after the sudden absence of resistance. There was an instant of frozen silence.
“You should have come on a school night,” I said harshly.
And then, at my will, the enchanted, obdurate stone of the second floor, that entire portion of the second floor, tons and tons and tons of rune-etched rock, slammed down more swiftly than a blinking eyelid, like a vast and ancient sledgehammer coming down on three doomed cockroaches.
It was messy as hell.
Black ichor, thick and sticky as tar, sprayed everywhere in a fine mist.
And that was that.
Chapter
Fifty-Five
Cleanup was gonna take a lot of mops.
It cost me about five minutes of pure mental effort and some of Bob’s help to get the stones of the second floor over the entry to the main hall put back. The heavy enchanted stone drifted slowly up into the air and locked back into place as securely as ever. We’d have to reseal it, but I was pretty sure Michael and I could manage it on our own with maybe a long day’s work.
Lara and her folk didn’t come inside, but I made something of a show of going out to them outside the gates, after the fighting was done, the enemy in full retreat, and thanking her in front of her family members. Lara’s sisters took the mind-melted Renfields with them, and I didn’t argue. Once the Black Court got done using their butcher-shop psychomancy on mortals, the victims weren’t coming back. Wizards way better than me had tried to help such victims in the past and failed. And if Ramirez hadn’t done what he’d done to them, they’d have thrown themselves after their fallen masters in psychotic rages. Unless we’d lost, I supposed, in which case the Black Court would have devoured them before moving on—the usual doom of Renfields.
The White Court’s version of hospice care would be kinder than any other fate awaiting them.
Once Toot’s scouts reported that the enemy truly was gone, we brought the residents back up from the basement. Maggie came peltingup the stairs alongside Mouse, flung herself at me, and proceeded to climb me until she had her skinny arms around my neck.
I spent a while hugging her while Mouse pranced happily around us, making huffing sounds of pleasure.
“That was soloud,” Maggie said. “I was scared.”
“Me, too, punkin,” I said quietly.
“You got the bad guys?” she asked.
“They came to mess with my little girl,” I told her. “Wasn’t even close.”
“Did you cheat?” she asked.
“As much as possible,” I said.
“Good,” she replied, and squeezed extra tight.
“Urk,” I said. “Ack.”
She giggled but loosened her grip, and I hugged her some more.
