“Winters is not who you should be worried about,” the vampire snarled. “A half dozen greater fae and gentry, led by that fool of a noble, have assaulted my den. My apprentices and children have been slaughtered. Now tell me, you fae bitch, why you should not die with them.”
“I have not failed you yet,” Laurie replied. “Talus must have brought soldiers from outside the city—without telling me. They must suspect something!”
“Well, then maybe I should leave you to them?” Madrigal suggested, her voice suddenly sickly sweet. “A peace offering, maybe—the traitor who sold them out?”
I realized that Talus was about to break through the door, and grabbed his arm. Wait, I told him. We need to know more.
“My thralls have trapped them,” Madrigal continued. “They have murdered my children, but my toys are proving more than they can handle.”
“I did not fail you,” Laurie insisted.
“That does mean I am not thoroughly fucking pissed,” the vampire snapped. “My children are dead, and your kind did it.”
We need Laurie alive, Talus said in my head through the link. One of your rounds won’t kill her but will disable her—I can’t fight her and the adept and any other vampires in the room.
“A few more days, and you will have the right to make more,” Laurie told the vampire. “As a signed member of the new Covenants.”
Can you fight them all? I asked.
New Covenants? Talus queried back, and then shook his head. Not the adept, not if she has any other mages with her.
So, shoot Laurie once and then dump the rest of the clip into whoever she’s talking to?
“Do I suggest that your children are replaceable?” Madrigal said sharply, her voice back to being a sibilant hiss. “Your kind will pay for this murder.”
That’ll work, Talus agreed. The noble took a deep breath and then nodded me toward the door. Now!
With a flick of his wrist and a burst of Power, Talus shattered the door between us and the traitor and vampire. I charged through first, picking up a quick sight picture of the room as I raised the Jericho.
Laurie and a dark-haired woman in a rose-pink skirt suit stood in the center of the room, glaring at each other. Three men and two women, two of the men in black robes and the rest in street clothes, stood along the walls, all with bared fangs reacting to the destruction of the door. Another woman who I recognized from Court as a shade—a minor Unseelie fae—stood just behind Laurie, her hand on a concealed weapon.
The room had started life as some sort of storage cellar, but it had been converted to a twisted cross between a chapel, a formal dining room, and a butcher’s workroom. A black stone plinth with an inverted pentacle in wrought gold hanging over it dominated one end of the room, the plinth carved with blood channels clearly visible in dried fluids from the other end of the room.
A heavy oak table, sized to fit over a dozen people, was perpendicular to the room in the middle, between the door and the altar. Madrigal and Laurie stood between us and the table, but Madrigal’s vampire minions were behind it.
Heavy black drapes covered up the concrete walls, giving an impression of dark gothic elegance to the whole affair, with horror added by the pair of freshly bled bodies just barely visible beside the altar.
The entire impression of the room snapped into my mind as I trained the small pistol on Laurie, and flashed into the back of my head as I fired. The hag was barely beginning to react, drawing on her Power, when the mixed silver-and-cold-iron bullet slammed into her gut.
The Power flickering through her only accentuated the effect of the cold iron, and Laurie screamed as the bullet fractured inside her, the bane of our kind seeping into her blood. Her keening wail echoed through the room as Talus followed me into the room.
He took in the same picture as I had, and gestured once. The heavy oak table flew backward, slamming the vampires behind it to the ground as I turned to fire at Madrigal.
My first round missed as the vampire slipped sideways, alerted by the attack on Laurie. While I wasn’t as fast as she was and couldn’t possibly have kept up with her if I’d been trying to fight her hand to hand, I could track across the room faster than she could move. My second and third shots slammed into the blood mage, catching her mid-dodge and throwing her away from me. Light flickered around her as the garlic burned in her blood, but the blood mage controlled the fire, using it to fuel her Power.
My fourth shot missed again, and the fifth slammed into her hip as she paused, gesturing toward me. Power flared in the room, and a dark red mist burst into existence around her hand. The mist flashed out and knocked aside my last three rounds as I emptied the clip.
For a moment, I thought I was dead. The mist started to extend out from her hand as she slashed it toward me, and I had no illusions about my ability to stop that attack. But we both had forgotten about Talus, who had been busy throwing the furniture around.
The mist whipped out toward my face, and the fae noble calmly stepped up to the blood mage from behind her and ran her through with his sword. The mist broke apart, inches from my skin, and Madrigal ripped the blade out as she spun to face Talus.
“You,” she hissed.
“Me,” he agreed calmly—and decapitated her. The mist that had started to flow out from her hands toward him dispersed instantly as the imitation of life that sustained her long-dead corpse fled. Screams of rage echoed through the tiny chamber, and the heavy table Talus had thrown onto the vampires was sent flying back at us.
Apparently, two of the still-living vampires were blood mages as well, and blood-driven telekinesis turned the heavy table into a weapon as it crossed the room. I ducked, hitting the ground as the table’s progress was delayed by bouncing off Laurie’s still-whimpering form with the shiver-worthy sound of bones breaking.
It stopped a yard or so from me, shattering into hundreds of pieces as Talus hit it with an even stronger and less spread-out blast of telekinetic force. The other fae who’d been with Laurie took advantage of my distraction, charging me with a machine pistol identical to the one I’d left somewhere upstairs in the hands of Madrigal’s blood thralls.
Somewhere along the way, conjuring that whip of flame and controlling it had become a lot more instinctual, because I didn’t even consciously think about it before I used it to tear the gun out of her hand in a flash of green faerie flame.
She responded by conjuring shadow out of thin air, a blade of darkness taking form around her arm as she slashed at me. I dodged, rolling to my feet as I moved away from the shadow, feeling a wave of cold as the shadow passed by me.
I flicked the whip of faerie flame at her, trying to wrap it around her as I’d done with the blood mage upstairs. The shade’s shadow blade cut across the line of fire, shattering it into sparks that scattered all around us.
I was left holding about a foot of faerie flame as she came at me again with the shadow. Unthinkingly, I parried her shadow with the fire in my hand, and to my surprise, it worked. The fire broke the shadow apart in the same way the shadow had shattered my fire whip a moment before.
For a few seconds, we slashed back and forth at each other, quickly discovering that neither of us could conjure a blade of our element that the other couldn’t break. She’d strike at me with shadow, and I’d block it with flame, and then I’d return the attack and she’d block mine.