The SUVs were goners. They were outside thehedgebut they had cut off and wouldn’t restart. We were positioned just on the inside of thehedge.It was possible that Koun, lying beside me, was true dead, but I didn’t let myself think about that. Leo, dragged over by Tex, was on my other side, undead face to the sky, still staked. Tex stood over us, watching our six at the church to the rear; Jermaine took up a spot midway between us and the transport circle. Neither man had enough cover against death magics. No one did.
Carmine and Fawn took up positions at either side of Tex, twenty feet apart, all three of my security unit between the church and me. Sitting ducks, all of us.
The tac teams Bruiser had brought were scouting everywhere, finding the perimeters of thehedgethat covered the church and the grounds. Molly, Evan, and Eli were sitting in SUVs, only yards away, watching the tac team on comms monitors and my small group, filling my team and me in.
Quint and Bruiser sat down on the sidewalk in front ofme, weapons close to hand, holding up tablets for me to see the same screens our powerless rescuers were watching, two cams from inside the church. More of our teams were on the way, not that it was going to do any good. No one had ever seen or heard of adeath hedge no-way-out of thornsof any size, let alone one this big. They were stuck on that side and I was stuck on this side with Tex, two dogs, a staked Leo, a dead Koun, Brute, and a three-person guard composed of one other awake vamp and two humans. And probably a lot of enemies. And a flying lizard, who tucked its wings, flew through thehedgewithout mishap, darted back in, and landed on the broken clock and bell tower.
Lizard, one.Death hedge, zero.
As far as I could tell, the bad guys, assuming there was an attack force with the witches inside thehedgewith us—had no idea we were out here.
Or maybe they didn’t care.
Or maybe they knew, and they planned on killing us at any moment and serving our roasted bodies up with fava beans and a bottle of Pellissier wine.
The feed from the cameras Alex had accessed from inside the damaged church showed the three witches in the sanctuary. The witch I had landed on in the clan home, and who had dragged me into the transport circle, had been healed. They all looked so sweet, dressed casual—jeans and tees with sneakers—as if they should be sliding trays of cookies out of the oven or pruning roses, not as if they would be duct-taping an unconscious, naked Lachish Dutillett to a six-foot-long altar table. Lachish was breathing, but not moving, not fighting. I didn’t know if she was drugged or spelled, but she was totally vulnerable, and that alone was enough to make me hate the grandmotherly witches.
When Lachish was secure, they walked around the sanctuary, placing things on the floor at equal intervals. I couldn’t tell what they were, but as each witch moved away, the wall near and above each item brightened with a symbol, a common three-tined rune, one even I was familiar with, called Yr. With the three tines upright, it looked a little like a trident and it stood for life or birth.Upside down it stood for death, or it had since one of the World Wars. Yr reversed was also the Peace Symbol from the sixties, but no way did I take it for peace. This was death all the way.
Earlier, I had seen some symbols flash across the walls. Was that reality or in a vision? I wasn’t sure anymore, but either way, I hadn’t had time to recognize them then. Now? This church was being marked with life and death runes, being desecrated. My aching stomach roiled again.
On the screens held by my people on the other side of the death ward, I watched as the runes quickly surrounded the sanctuary. Several death runes appeared over one of the doorways near the altar of the church. There were candles lit in groups of three, here and there, beneath the domed ceiling, inside the damaged room, on ledges, flat surfaces. In the center of the room, a huge five-pointed star, a pentagram, was quickly painted on the floor with black spray paint. They worked fast. Or maybe there was a template beneath the floors, waiting. The long game... Build a black magic circle into the very building? I wasn’t Roman Catholic, but the thought of building on top of such desecration made my bones ache.
Using a stick and a length of string, the three black magic practitioners spray-painted a scarlet circle, the outline touching the points of the star paint, a well-practiced circle, further desecrating the church recently used for worship. It was so easy to turn the holy to the profane, the light to the darker things. So easy. Humans did it all the time. I don’t know why seeing this was so painful, when humans did so much worse to one another.
I knew many practicing witches. Real witches didn’t desecrate the holy, even the holy of another religion, far different from their own. They just didn’t.
Into my earbuds, Alex said, “Mainet.”
On the screen, Mainet walked into the church through the death-runed entrance. A vamp. In a church. Without burning up in a fiery blaze of glory or screaming in pain. Vamps usually paid a big price for entering a church, but maybe the hurricane damage and the desecration taking place had made entering possible. Or maybe Mainet was just that powerful.
I remembered him standing inside HQ walls, on the circular driveway. Arms outspread. Formidable. Commanding. Showing us how powerful he was. This was less dramatic, but far more effective.Holy crap. How was I going to stop this? Stop him?
Ursula maneuvered the marble angel that had once housed the silver key over to the circle. Fiona lit a fire in a brazier in front of the stone angel. The flames flared high.
“Shadows,” Alex said. “On the walls. Are those feathers?”
I studied the walls in the poor-quality video feeds, seeing patterns, shifting and fluttering shadows that deepened in the corners, merging with the mold that dripped down the plaster. “Yeah,” I said. “I think so. Just like last time.”
The shadows of massive wings feathered down the walls, darkening, becoming easier to see. At the front of the church, but far away from the altar, near the formal entrance doors, a shadow of a chained angel appeared, cast by the flickering light from the fire. “Ah crap.Hayyel is manifesting.”
“And Lachish is to be the sacrifice that forces the Dark Queen to act,” Molly said from the street side of thedeath hedge. Her voice was full of horror when she added, “Jane. He expects you to save her. He’ll be waiting on you to try.”
“Yeah. Looks like.”
I yanked on my crown, hoping it would come free so that if someone planned to take it they didn’t have to remove my head first. Nope. It wasn’t coming off.
So here I was, stuck inside ahedge of death, with no way out, and limited magical weapons: the crown, the Glob, the ring Sabina had left for me to find before she was eaten (the one filled with arcenciel blood), a red lizard brooch (ditto on the arcenciel blood), and the two-piece crucifix (more arcenciel blood), a few amulets, and broken stone focals, none of which I was skilled in using. Skilled my ass. I had almost no idea how to control them and the few times I had managed to do something with the Glob andle breloquehad been mostly by luck and willpower. I hadn’t been able to reproduce most of the effects in test situations. I had no way to protect the people I was sworn to protect. Or myself. I was still a littlewoozy after being conveyed through two transport circles and then having a muscular Celtic vamp land on me, enough so that standing was difficult. I made it to my feet anyway, walking along thehedgea ways and back, working on my balance and studying thehedge.
“Jane,” Bruiser said, a warning in his voice.
My sugarlips knew my life philosophy well: Have no skill in fixing something? Take a wild leap and see what happens. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t do anything stupid,” I groused. “I know. Queen and all that.”
“Jane,” Bruiser said, gentleness in his tone, as if he knew what I was thinking.
“I can’t just sit out here and let them kill Lachish and chain an angel.” I looked up to the arcenciels. They were flitting around and around above the dome of thehedge, as if testing its perimeters and trying to see how strong it was. Maybe they could—
Pearl stuck out a single pearly claw and almost touched thehedge. She jerked away and back-winged to a safer distance.
