After a several fruitless exchanges, she changed tactics, bounding away from me with the perfect grace of the true fae and throwing a bolt of shadowstuff at me. I almost managed to dodge it, but it clipped me on my shoulder.
The force tossed me backward even as a horrific chill began to rapidly radiate out from the wound. It felt frozen, not cut, and in moments, my left arm was frozen into uselessness. The shade smiled and advanced back toward me, the blade of shadow on her hand darkening as the cold stole my ability to conjure flame.
I’ve never seen a pretty girl look quite so ugly when smiling as the shade did as she advanced on me. Chill shivers tore through my body, dropping me back to my knees as I tried to stand, the cold rippling through me. Her smile was even colder, darkness shrouding her as the Unseelie drew her hand back to finish me off.
Somehow, some way, I reached through the chills wracking my body and touched the fire at my core that fueled my Power. Something inside me clicked, and warmth shot out, radiating through my body, driving the chill from my flesh. The world froze, and I called faerie flame in the same way I had when fighting Sigridsen. My right hand flew out, palm first, to block the strike of her shadowblade.
The gout of green fire that blasted from my palm shattered the shade’s blade and took her hand off at the wrist, cauterizing the wound as it burned its way past. She screamed, and the sound echoed horribly in the small concrete room as she conjured shadow with her other hand and threw it at me.
I stopped the bolt of shadowstuff with another burst of flame. The ball of shadow disappeared within the green-white flames, which continued on to take the Unseelie killer in the upper chest. She was pitched backwards, flying across the room to slam into the concrete wall with a very final impact.
My own opponent defeated, I turned to check on Talus. One of the blood mages and both of the female vampires were down, their unlife cut short by the fae noble’s blade and Power. The remaining blood mage was using tendrils of red mist to manipulate the larger chunks of table. Talus kept dodging the pieces as they rushed at him with lethal force.
The other vampire was adding to the distraction, dodging in and out and the noble’s reach, trying to stab him with a long obsidian dagger. All three of them were very focused on each other as I picked up the shade’s Uzi.
Something warned the blood mage, who was starting to turn his head towards me as I opened fire. Moments later, the tendrils of mist vanished and the remnants of the table crashed to the ground as the Uzi’s slugs ripped apart his head and upper chest.
Without the distraction of the blood mage, the other vampire met Talus’s sword head on as he tried to stab the fae. His headless corpse crumpled on top of the shattered remnants of the table, leaving Talus and me the only people standing in the room.
LAURIE WHIMPERED as Talus crossed the room to her, her body crippled by the cold iron in her flesh and blood. From somewhere, he produced a pair of handcuffs and roughly bound her hands together before focusing healing energy into her.
Her whimpers slowly faded, though from the drawn expression on her face, I suspect Talus left more than a little cold iron in her system, weakening her enough she could not possibly be a threat to us.
“Laurie O’Donnell,” he said finally, looking down on her as I slowly walked over to join him. “As a noble of Lord Oberis’s Court, I place you under arrest for betrayal of race and Court and Covenant.”
She was silent as Talus and I dragged her to her feet. The hag stumbled along with us as we retraced our steps out of the basement of the hotel, back up the stairs to the wreckage of the hotel bar.
Bodies and bits of bodies were scattered everywhere. Many of Madrigal’s thralls had been hacked to pieces, but at least half appeared to have simply collapsed when the adept had died. Frankie lay away from them, his clothes and skin having faded to a light brown. His head was twisted at an angle that told a silent but explicit story.
Tamara and Celine stood next to him, Celine kneeling by the green man’s corpse, while Tamara leaned against a wall, carefully tying torn strips of her jacket around several slowly oozing wounds. The nightmare spotted us and Laurie first, and stopped tying her wounds to produce her gun from under her torn jacket.
“What’s she doing here?” the wounded fae demanded.
“She was with the vampires,” Talus said simply. “I will be bringing her to my uncle.”
Tamara nodded sharply, glaring at the hag. “The adept is dead,” she stated. It wasn’t really a question, given the state of the thralls all around us.
“She is,” Talus confirmed. “O’Malley and MacDougall?”
“Not sure,” Celine said, rising to her feet from where she’d finished laying Frankie’s jacket over his head. “I tried to call them once the zombies went down—figured that was the end of it. Neither is answering their radio or cellphone.”
For a moment, the idea of the two men we’d left outside as snipers answering their cellphones seemed ridiculous, and then I remembered the headset radio gear some of the team had was of a much cheaper grade than a mortal military team might have. Our cellphones were probably more reliable.
“No one went out by either entrance we saw,” Tamara told Talus, still glaring at Laurie.
“There was an exit in the basement,” I told the two women. “And a ritual chamber of some kind. Probably for these things,” I realized aloud, gesturing at the bodies of the thralls.
“I’ll check on the boys,” Talus said quietly. “Can you walk?” he asked Tamara, who nodded. “You three move Frankie and Laurie out to the street; I don’t want any of us here when someone decides to investigate the gunfire.”
I nodded and took the traitor from him. I’d barely grabbed Laurie’s cuffs before the fae noble slipped out the door. I looked at the two women from our team.
“Can you two carry Frankie?” I asked.
In answer, Celine threw the dead fae’s body over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The ease with which the Fury moved the body suggested that my question was more than a little laughable.
Tamara was clearly unneeded, and she slipped over to stand on the other side of Laurie as I began to guide our prisoner out to the street. The nightmare leaned in to whisper in the hag’s ear, and I only barely caught what she said.
“Talus and Jason may have settled for cuffing your arms,” she said softly, her voice sounding gentle, “but I know you. If you try and run, I will burn your legs off. Get me, bitch?”
Laurie nodded, roughly, still silent as we manhandled her out the door and across the street into a dark alley. Thankfully, it didn’t look like anyone had been close enough to hear the gunshots, and no one saw us moving a prisoner and a body away from the hotel.
The alley was completely empty, though garbage littered the ground, mixed inextricably with snow and mud and ice. Celine took one look at the ground and kept Frankie’s body over her shoulder. I was a little less polite to Laurie, shoving her against the wall and leaving whether she stayed on her feet or not entirely up to her.
At the very least, the death of the two Cunninghams was entirely at her feet. On top of that, her assistance in allowing the vampires to evade the efforts to bring them to justice had allowed dozens of murders to take place—and led quite directly to Tarvers’s murder.
The traitor remained completely silent, though I could feel the cold iron still circulating through her body from my bullet. The sensation of cold iron near me was one I associated with a reason to get the hell out of wherever I was, which probably contributed to my now-violent antipathy to the hag.
We’d been in the alley for a few minutes and the cold was starting to seep past the adrenaline when a shadow came between us and the nearby streetlight. My attempt to go for a gun at that point was the first I realized that I’d left both weapons I’d started the evening with in the hotel.