I got painfully to my knees and found that we were losing. Everywhere I looked our people were buried under piles of vampires. Asher and Damain were still standing free, but both were bleeding and Colin and Barnaby were pressing the attack. Richard was completely lost to sight except for one arm gone long with claws. Verne was standing with another werewolf in human form. It was a woman shorter than I was with short dark hair that touched her shoulders, dressed in a thigh-long T-shirt and pants. She looked small beside Verne, but she was the only one of his people still standing. The others were dead or dying on the ground.
My right hand was working again, just stunned not dislocated. Lucky me. I drew a knife from one of the wrist sheaths. It wasn't a blade consecrated to ritual, but it would have to do.
I wanted to whisper to Asher and Damian for them to fly, but it was too far away to whisper, and I didn't know how to talk directly to either of their minds. I did the only thing I could think of, I yelled. I yelled, "Asher, Damian!"
They turned startled faces to me.
I raised the knife so they could see it, and screamed, "Fly, damn it, fly!"
Nikki was almost to the bone circle. I screamed, "Fly!" Asher grabbed Damian's wrist, and I had to turn away before I could see them safe. I had moments to try and make this work. Nikki had a power similar to mine. If she figured out what I was trying to do she'd stop me if she could.
I pressed my hands to the tree trunk and the power breathed through me. It was magic that had been built with death, and that was my speciality. The moment I touched the tree I knew that it wasn't human sacrifice, but that this was where their munin gathered. The spirits of their dead were here in the bones, the tree, the ground. They filled the air with a whispering, tittering, noise that only I could hear.
The lukoi consume their dead, at least part of them, and the eating of their flesh puts them into some sort of ancestral memory. Munin they call them after Odin's raven, Memory. They aren't ghosts, but they are the spirits of the dead, and I was a necromancer. The munin liked me. They eased around me like a cool caress of wind, entwining like phantom cats. I could channel the munin, sort of like a medium at a seance, but more, and worse. The only munin I'd ever channeled had been Raina, the wicked bitch of the east. But when she came, it was like a battering ram. Standing there in the middle of hundreds, thousands of munin, I knew I could open to them. But it would be like opening a door, an invitation. I could wallow in the past, live other lives. It was a whisper of seduction. Raina came like a rapist, an overwhelming force. Not a sharing, but a taking.
However they'd tied their munin to this place it was blood magic, death magic. I cut the palm of my hand and pressed it to the tree. I prayed, and sprinkled blood on the bones at my feet. The circle of power snapped into place with a rush that raised my skin as if it would crawl off my flesh. I invoked the circle. I called the wards. I worshipped, and it was enough.
Shrieks, screams filled the night. The vampires went up in flames. They ran, burning, for the edge of the ward and all who made it across exploded in a rain of burning bits and pieces.
I felt Damian above me, and Asher. None of the vampires left behind tried to do anything but run. Most fell into burning heaps on the ground without taking another step. Anyone under a hundred died where they stood.
The Indian woman had come to stand on the edge of the bone circle. She stared at me while the vampires screamed and died, and the stink of burning flesh and hair was thick enough to choke. Her face showed nothing. She'd rescued the club.
Finally she said, "I should kill you."
I nodded. "Yes, you should, but your allies are dead and your master has flown away. I'd get out while the getting's good, if I were you."
She nodded and threw the club to the ground. "Colin and Barnaby live, and we will see you again, Anita."
"I look forward to it," I said. I was hoping that she wouldn't notice that my back was pressed against the tree, because I wasn't sure I could stand on my own.
Nikki nodded, and started to walk away into the dark, past the tree and the bones. She spoke something then stepped through the ward. When she stepped through, the magic quenched, swallowed back into the earth.
She looked at me from the dark on the other side of the quieted circle. We stared at each other for a long moment, and I knew that if we met again she would kill me if she could. She was Colin's human servant. It was her job.
I slid down the tree until I was sitting in the bones. My legs were too weak to hold me and a fine trembling had started in my hands. I gazed out into the lupanar, gazed out over my handiwork. Some of the bodies still burned, but no vampire moved within the circle. The vampires were dead. All of them.
21
Another fight, another shower. Rotting vampire was not an odor you wanted to wear to bed. My hair was still damp when I called Jean-Claude to fill him in on what we'd done. Okay, on what I'd done.
I told him the shortest version possible. His response, "You did what?"
I repeated it.
Silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn't even hear him breathe.
"Jean-Claude, you still there?"
"I am here, ma petite." He sighed. "You have surprised me once again. I did not see this coming."
"You don't sound happy," I said. "You know the news could be worse. We could all be dead."
"I did not think Colin would be so foolish."
"Live and learn," I said.
"Colin was right to fear you, ma petite."
"I told Colin what would happen if he messed with us. He pushed the button, not me."
"Who are you trying to convince, ma petite, me or yourself?"
I thought about that for a moment. "I don't know."
"Are you admitting you were wrong?" His voice held mild amusement.
"No." I tried to think how to say it. Finally, I said, "We were losing, Jean-Claude. They were going to kill us. I had to do something. I wasn't even sure it would work." I held the phone, and wished that he were here to hold me. I hated the thought that I wanted him like that. That I wanted anyone like that. I hated needing people. They all had a tendency to die on me. But I'd have given a great deal for a pair of comforting arms right at that moment.
"Ma petite, ma petite, what is wrong?"
I motioned Asher over to the phone. "Talk to your second banana. Ask Asher if there were other options. If there were other options, I couldn't see them."
"There is something in your voice, ma petite. Something fragile." He whispered the last word.
I just nodded, and handed the phone to Asher. I walked away from it hugging myself tight. Fragile, he said. Scared, more like. I'd scared myself tonight. Something in the power I released had extinguished the torches around the lupanar. Those of us still standing had moved by the light of burning corpses. It had been a scene right out of Dante's Inferno, and I had done it. The power inside of me had done this thing. Yeah, scared about covered it.