“Mama!”
“Mamamamamama!!”
I whirled in time to see Lincoln Shaddock, Master of the City of Asheville and BBQ chef extraordinaire, catch both witch kids and swing them up in his arms. He carried the screaming children back inside and shut the door.
The gonging grew in sound, a painful cadence. I caught Big Evan’s eyes. Tapped my ear. He gave a truncated nod that was mostly just beard bumping on his chest like a half dozen red squirrels hanging on his jaw, flicking their tails. Evan changed out the Pan flute for a long, thick reed instrument and blew a note I could hear over the noise. The magic moved across the air, a heavy, cottony texture to it. The gonging sound decreased.
Into my earbud, Alex said, “I see two approaching combatants. They... Damn. They have an outclan witch priestess. She’s in robes like Sabina. And she’s glowing even on the camera feed. Like she’s leaking power.”
“Where?” Eli asked.
“Front door is clock heart facing twelve. She’s at twelve, about halfway down the hill. She’s under ahedge of thornsthat looks like it’s made of blood, it’s so thick. The ringing attack on the ward seems to be starting from near the same place.”
His voice strained, Edmund said, “This outclan. White robes or black?”
“Black.”
“Aurelia Flamma Scintilla,” Ed breathed. “Not her given name. Not her surname. But her chosen name.”
In my earbud, Alex said, “Diving into the files for intel.”
“Copy,” I said into my mic. “Ed?”
“Yes, my queen,” he said, almost too softly to hear beneath the awful gonging attack on the ward.
“Tell me everything you know about Aurelia.”
“What I know is gossip gleaned while I was back on the continent,” Edmund said. “She grew up in a tiny village outside of Rome in the late 1800s. She eschewed magic as evil and dedicated herself to the church. She was a cloistered nun until her convent was destroyed one night by a young rogue. Three of her sisters died. She killed the vampire, embraced her magic, and has spent the years since destroying Mithrans.”
“How many years?”
“Roughly one hundred and fifty in her quest to kill us all, though she is not a Mithran, not a Naturaleza, and not a blood-servant.”
“Then what is she?” Eli asked, checking his weapons. “What is she doing here?”
“Aurelia is asenza onore. A dark form of an Onorio, and an outclan priestess,” Edmund said. “Flamma Scintilla meansflame spark, and she has a unique gift. Pyrokinesis. She is a Firestarter, a very dangerous one. I did not know she was in the States. And I find it difficult to believe that she is working for the Flayer. She hates vampires. She has no master, and only drinks from the Mithrans she kills.”
“Unless the Flayer has something on her or has someone she loves.” I thought about the fire at the NOLA vamp graveyard, the stones themselves burning. “Does Sabina know her?”
“Yes. They hate each other. And Aurelia is a far more powerful worker of magic than Sabina. Or George. Or Grégoire’s boys. Perhaps stronger than them all put together. If they hope to drain her, they would have to work together.”
“The timeline for the fires in NOLA. Is it possible she started them and still got here?”
“Barely. But yes,” Ed said.
The last time we ran into asenza onore, Gee had rubbedthe blob into my hand as if that did something mystical. He said we two were the only ones burned by thesenza onorespells, as we were the only goddess-born present. So did that make me more susceptible tosenza onorespells? A little more uncertainty in my life was really freaking great. “So why is she here, tonight, with a master vamp?”
Ed’s voice was right behind me. “I do not know, my queen. She was not with him while he was... flaying me for his use.”
I turned to him, his scars visible even in the uncertain light. “Because she was in New Orleans burning the vamp graveyard?”
Thoughts flashed behind Ed’s eyes. “Sabina?”
“Don’t know. She was trying to get away the last time she contacted us. But if she’s burned she’ll need to drink and regenerate.”
Alex said, “According to cams, there are twenty fangheads surrounding the property, plus the leader, for a total of twenty-one. The outclan. And four humans. That’s the ones I can see, and they just suddenly showed up on the screens.”
“How did they get so close?” Eli asked.
