My partner moved into point in a crouched run, in the glow of streetlights reflecting from the snow. The Regal’s entrance was ahead on the corner. Eli was dressed in his cold clothes but I could see him in Beast’s vision, weaponed up like a black-ops mercenary on a limitless budget. Which he was, I realized. Money for this situation was almost unlimited, the constraints on our equipment solely a product of time and the weather. With more timeand opportunity, every bell and whistle known to the military could have been ours. And would be soon, I figured.
I spotted others in the dark. Half the people with us had headsets with multiple oculars or single multifunction oculars: low-light, IR. One guy had a virtual-reality-style headset but with only one ocular, for reasons I didn’t understand until I saw the drone in his hands. He scraped the snow off a patch of blacktop, placed the device with its four rotors and multidirectional cameras in the center and the explosive device mounted underneath, and the drone took off, almost silent in the constant low hum of the distant snow movers.
The air felt warmer than it had, but that thought must have jinxed us because the sky opened up and sleet began to whisper down, then to patter down, then to flood. This was going to make egress slippery. Ten seconds later, the drone came down in a clattering heap of broken rotors and shattered high-impact-plastic body. The pilot acted as if he’d lost his best friend.
Eli glanced to me across the night and I nodded, indicating that I was going ahead with the mission to rescue Edmund. Into comms, he said, “DQ and Shaddock in the center, behind Dumas. Everhart behind the DQ, Trueblood behind her. Kojo at the rear. Kojo, I don’t see you. Kojo you copy?”
“Icopy. I am here.” The words were terse and irritated. Kojo seemed like the type to want to be at the front of the squad, leading the attack, not at the back protecting us all. I glanced around and spotted the warrior, partially concealed behind a snow-blanketed car in the adjacent parking area.
Our current pattern was like a diamond, the center group tightly positioned, the outer, diamond-shaped ring flaring to the side and in front, with shooters at high points on nearby roofs, providing cover.
“Alex,” I asked over the mic. “Does our guest know we’ve arrived for parley?” I’d been convinced not to walk into a hail of weapons fire by surprising a vamp in his lair.
“He’s expecting you.”
“Move out,” Eli said. The sleet began to beat downhard, strafing into my pelt and burrowing in deep where it would either melt and trickle or clump up like small snowballs and chill me.
Hate sleet,Beast thought.
Following Bruiser, I focused on my footing, on getting around the piles of snow left by snowplows, concentrated on the scents in the air: roasted meat, salmon, human blood, the mingled stink of unfamiliar vamps, and the stench of something dead riding high on the air, possibly on top of the hotel. Beast’s puma paws were designed to keep snow from packing in between the toe and center pads. Our half-form paw-feet were more human-shaped, and snow and sleet packed under our toenails with every step.
We entered beneath the arch on the corner, Eli and Thema slipping into the shadows and inside. Bruiser and Shaddock conferred, something about shock value and entertainment value getting us what we wanted. I shook snow out of my pelt. Molly and Evan held hands, Molly’s eyes closed, her lips moving. She was speaking a working, her magics clear and lively, not the dark night of her death magics. Evan was humming, his music a focal no one else might notice. No one, meaning the vamps and their servants inside. Evan was once again putting his witch-in-hiding status on the line, this time for a man he knew only because of me. They should have taken the kids and gone home.
I had to get Ed. Now. Fast. And get my people out.
The main doors opened. I stood straight and tall. Strode into the building and past the reception area. No one was behind the counter. No one alive anyway. Bloody boots stuck out from behind.
We pushed through to the interior. The heat was like a furnace, dry and slightly smoky. “The Dark Queen,” Bruiser announced, his voice echoing as I passed into the main room, “and the Master of the City, Lincoln Shaddock.”
The furniture that was usually placed in the receiving room was pushed back against the walls, leaving the space open. The fireplace was massive, four-sided, centered between four pillars, and everything in the roomwas arranged around it, meaning the vamps standing in a semicircle.
My eyes adjusted to the lights quickly and I slowed as the room opened out, giving me time to take in the tableau, because no way was this unstaged. The humans were sitting on the floor at the feet of the vamps, some bleeding and in chains, others giving the impression of pets with pretty collars around their necks. There were dozens of humans and twelve vamps. Twelve powerful vamps, the entire group except for three wearing pure white. Something moved in the background, a fast blur of darkness with a flash of crimson, behind the vamps and humans. It was gone before I could tell what it was.
Set to the side of the enormous fireplace was a gold throne. A gold-plated throne, rather. It had been constructed of what looked like femur bones and human skulls coated with heavy layers of gold. Shimon was literally sitting on the bones of his enemies.
Just inside the main room, I stopped. The people with me stopped and spread out, Lincoln at my left shoulder, the witches just behind him. The humans with us spread out into the fringes, acquiring firing positions sufficient to avoid hitting us. Our few to Shimon’s bunches.
Ed was lying at the base of the throne, at the feet of his torturer. Ed had been skinned, from his buttocks, up across his scalp, to his forehead. From his hips, up his stomach and chest, to his chin.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t wail. I didn’t attack. I showed my fangs. I extruded my scarlet claws and gripped the Mughal hilt near my waist. I forced a snarl of a smile instead of giving in to the scream that was riding at its heels. Shimon had tortured my heir.My friend.He hadn’t done that by accident, but I didn’t know what the Flayer’s goal was, so I waited, though all I wanted was to attack Shimon and save my primo.
Edmund’s head raised. “The tribal woman comes to call,” he said, sounding unlike himself. Understanding came fast. My primo was still speaking the thoughts of his captor. The vamp was in his head. Shimon was posed, lounging back on the gold, his long black hair flowing overhis chest, a chest that was covered in a chitinous armor, shining and hard. I had seen this before, in Natchez, Mississippi. It was an exoskeleton like that grown by the vamps there, who had undergone mutation and become partially insectile in reaction to too much... too much time magic.Oh crap.I had focused in so intently on the arcenciel time magic and my own timewalking that I had forgotten about witch time circle magic. This magic took multiple witches and a nonstop working circle and large quantities of the iron spike of Golgotha. The witches forced into the time circle had no choice, no way to get free, no way to stop the working. The working killed them, one after another.
Shimon was watching me and must have seen my understanding because he suddenly relaxed, smiling. “Yes. You see what is possible for the Sons of Darkness.” His lips didn’t move with the words, but there was no doubt who was speaking to me through Edmund’s tortured lips. “The magic of time,” he said, in case I misunderstood.
Somewhere he had put witches into a time circle and forced them to work it, and they were dying. They were tools, nothing more. Like his possession and control and torture of Edmund. I’d kill the Flayer of Mithrans for Ed alone.
Hayyel would be tickled pink.
Before I could speak, Lincoln stepped around me. “It is my belief that both of the Sons of Darkness could read. Yet, here you are, in my city, without presenting yourself to me, in di-rectcontradiction of the original Vampira Carta, and the Vampira Carta of the Americas. You owe me fealty, you foul creature.”
“Kill the Dark Queen, give unto me her magical items, and I will depart your shores.”
“Ain’t happenin’,” he said, sounding more mountain man than Blood Master. “I reckon you and me’ll have to battle, then. Once my queen’s done thrashing your butt, expect to meet me on the field of battle at dusk. Of course, that’s assumin’ there’s enough of you left to fight.”
While Shaddock spoke, I had let my snarl fade away into disdainful neutrality. “You will release my primo to me,” I said, sounding bored.
“You will release my brother to me,” Shimon said, sounding bored-er.
