“Dammit,” I said, looking up the steps toward the temple at their summit. Shadows moved inside. “Dammit!” I looked around me wildly and suddenly felt a hand grasp mine, where I clutched my staff.
Murphy shook my hand until I looked at her. “Sanya and I will stay here,” she said, panting. “We’ll hold them until you get Maggie.”
I looked down the slope of the pyramid. Hundreds of the Red Court were coming up, and they were tearing free of their flesh masks now, revealing the monsters beneath. Hold them? It would be suicide. The Swords gave their wielders immense power against things out of nightmares, but it didn’t make them superhuman. Murphy and Sanya had both been fighting for twenty minutes—and there is no aerobic exercise that compares with the physical demands of combat. Both of them were breathing hard, growing tired.
Suicide.
But I needed to get up there.
“Dresden,” Martin called. “Come on!”
I hadn’t even realized he was shaking me, trying to get me up the stairs.
I guess I was getting pretty tired, too.
I narrowed my focus to Martin, to the stairs up, and tried to ignore the burning in my arms, my legs, my chest. I drew in a sharp breath, and it was like inhaling sudden cool, clean wind. I thought I heard someone whispering to me, something in a tongue I didn’t understand—but I knew my queen’s voice. I became aware that a cloud of white mist and vapor was gathering around me as I continued, a little faster, the humid air of the Yucatán boiling around the frost that had formed on my armor.
Then the cold washed away the hot fatigue, and I felt the ice flowing into me, implacable, merciless, relentless. My legs began to churn like the pistons of an engine. Suddenly one step per stride simply wasn’t enough, and I started flying up them two at a time, rapidly leaving Martin behind.
I reached the top and a half-breed jaguar warrior flung himself toward me. I snarled, batted his sword aside with mine, and lashed out with one foot, landing a stomping kick in the center of his chest.
His sternum cracked audibly, and he flew backward as if rammed by a truck. He hit the stone wall behind him hard enough to shake dust from the roof overhead, and crumpled like a broken toy. Which was exactly the kind of power the Winter Knight was supposed to have, and as I watched the poor idiot drop, I felt nothing but satisfaction.
The square temple had four doorways, one on each side, and in the one to my immediate right a vampire torn free of its flesh mask appeared, a jaguar skin still draped over its shoulders. It clutched an obsidian knife in its hand—the Red King’s dagger. It was the vamp he’d dispatched to kill Maggie.
“Fog of war, huh?” I asked him, and felt myself smiling. “Buddy, did you ever walk through the wrong door at the wrong time.”
Its eyes flicked to the floor to my left for an instant, and I looked, too. Maggie crouched there, directly between the altar and the door on my left, chained and shivering, huddling low to the ground as if hoping to be overlooked.
“Go on,” I said, looking back at the vampire. I bounced the sword in my hand lightly. White mist poured off the blade. So did a few snow-flakes. “Go for it, tough guy. Take one step toward that girl and see what happens.”
The door opposite me suddenly darkened.
The Red King and no fewer than four of his Lords stood there, gold masks shining, throwing back weird reflections from the dazzling array of flickering lights and fires in the darkness outside.
His face twisted with rage, and his will and the wills of the Lords behind him fell upon me like blows from individual sledgehammers. I staggered, planted my mentor’s staff firmly on the stone floor, and barely kept myself from being driven to the ground.
“Now,” the Red King said, his voice strangled with fury. “Put that little bitch on the altar.”
One of the Lords stepped forward and bent down to seize the child by her hair. Maggie screamed.
“No!” I shouted.
The Red King went to the altar and kicked the corpse of the dead woman from it. “Mortal,” he spat. “Still so certain that his will matters. But you are nothing. A wisp. A shadow. Here and then gone. Forgotten. It is fated. It is the way of the universe.” He jerked the ritual knife from the hands of the warrior and glared at me, his true nature writhing and twisting beneath his skin. The Lord dragged the shackled, screaming child to the altar, and the Red King’s black eyes gleamed.
“This is your only role, mortal,” he said, “your only grace, the only thing you are truly meant to do.” He stared at Maggie and bared his teeth, all long fangs, slaver running out of his mouth and down over his chin. “Die.”
Chapter 48
The Red King raised the knife over my daughter, and she let out a quavering little scream, a helpless, hopeless wail of terror and despair—and as hard as I fought with the new strength given me by Queen Mab, with the protection granted by my godmother’s armor, I could not do a damned thing about it.
I didn’t have to.
White light erupted over the altar from no visible source, and the Red King let out a scream. The shackles of his will vanished, even as his right hand, the one holding the stone knife, leapt off of his arm and went spinning through the air. It fell to the stone floor, still clutched hard around the leather-wrapped hilt of the knife, and the obsidian blade shattered like a dropped dish.
I let out a shout as I felt the Red King’s will slip off of me. The others still held me in place, but I suddenly knew that I could move, knew that I could fight. As the Red King reeled back screaming, I lifted a hand, snarled, “Fuego!” and sent a wash of fire to my right, engulfing the jaguar warrior who still stood a couple of feet inside the doorway. He tried to flee, and only wound up screaming and falling down the deadly steep steps of the pyramid while the soulfire lacing my spell found his flesh and set it aflame.
I whirled back to the Lords facing me from the far side of the altar. I couldn’t have risked throwing destructive energy at them with my daughter lying on the altar between us, and I’d had no choice but to take out the immediate threat of the warrior so that I could focus on the Lords and the Red King—otherwise it would have been relatively simple for him to come over and cut my throat while I was engaged by the vampire elite.
But two could play at that game—and my physical backup was a hell of a lot better than theirs.
I drew in my own will and lifted my borrowed staff—and as I did four more beings in golden masks entered the temple.
Where did all these yo-yos come from?
“Hold the wizard!” snarled the Red King, and the pressure of hostile minds upon me abruptly doubled. My left arm shook and the staff I held in it slowly sank down. My right arm just ran out of gas, as if the muscles in it had become totally exhausted, and the tip of the sword clinked as it hit the stone floor.
The Red King rose, and stared for a moment at the altar and at the column of shimmering light over it. As he did, his freaking hand began to writhe like a spider—and a second later, it flipped itself over and began to crawl back over toward him. The king just stood there, staring at the light. I tried to fight my way out of the mass of dark will directed against me. The light could only be Susan, veiled behind the Leanansidhe’s handiwork and wielding Amoracchius. I mean, how many invisible sources of holy light interested in protecting my daughter could there be running around Chichén Itzá? She hadn’t attacked yet, instead standing over Maggie—I wanted to scream at her to take him, that it was her only chance. If she didn’t, the Red King and his Lords could take her out almost as swiftly and easily as I had the jaguar warrior.