We were going southeast, toward Panthersville. The city slid under us, so tiny it seemed unreal. How the hell did people get into planes on a regular basis before the Shift? I did a lot of things well. Heights and flying weren’t among them.
“Would you like me to fly lower?” Christopher asked.
“No.”
What I would have liked was Rowena, safe and sound. I felt as if I were trying to outrun a giant rolling boulder while more boulders fell on me from every side. Whatever was holding me together was wearing thin, and when it broke, there would be hell to pay.
I just had to find Rowena. I had to find her alive, not in a vat of boiling people . . .
The spark of magic was almost directly under us.
“We’re here,” I told Christopher.
His great red wings folded. He went into a dive. Wind tore at me. I shut my eyes.
We swooped and miraculously stopped falling. I opened one eye. Christopher stood in a pasture, holding me. A copse of magnolia trees, their thick branches twisting up, waited in front of us, the boundary of my territory just yards away, beyond the tree line.
Christopher set me down, carefully.
The pasture lay quiet. Insects chirped. Birds sang in the branches, some trilling melody. The heat of summer streamed from a sky so beautifully blue, it almost hurt to look at. The weak “glow” of Rowena’s magic was right in front of me. I pulled Sarrat out of its sheath and walked forward, under the dense canopy.
The sound of someone’s hoarse breathing echoed through the woods, creepy enough to give me nightmares.
A massive tree spread its branches before me. A bloody chain was wrapped around the trunk.
I moved forward, carefully, one foot over the other, circling the tree.
Step. Another step.
The back of the trunk came into view. A dead vampire sagged against the loop of the chain, a massive pike thrust through his heart. Next to it, held in place by the loops of the same chain, a yeddimur sagged against the trunk. Blood stained the fur on its sides where it must’ve tried to gnaw itself free of the chain. Above them, a single word was clawed into the bark. Kings.
“Kings?” Christopher frowned.
I turned in the direction the bloodsucker would’ve looked if it were still alive. It made sense.
Two vampires tore out of the woods and galloped across the pasture, both so old, no sign of upright locomotion remained. They ran on all fours, grotesque ugly creatures, so warped nobody would’ve guessed they’d started out as human. Their sunblock, a deep crimson, looked like fresh blood.
“She isn’t here,” the undead said in unison in Ghastek’s voice, his words sharp enough to cut.
“What’s Rowena’s effective range?”
“Four point six seven miles.”
I pushed through the vegetation to the other side.
“Kate!” he snapped.
The underbrush ended. We stood on the apex of a low hill, fields and woods rolling to the horizon. A column of black smoke stabbed at the sky due southeast.
“Kings Row,” I told Ghastek.
The distant roar of water engines came from the northwest—Curran and the mercs were catching up.
Ghastek’s bloodsuckers streaked down the hill. Christopher took a running start, swept me up, and flew into the sky.
KING’S ROW, POPULATION around a thousand, was born from the remnants of a fracturing Decatur. Most of the people gave up trying to fight nature fueled by magic steroids and pulled into the city proper, but a few neighborhoods remained, turning into small towns: Chapel Hill, Sterling Forest, and Kings Row. They set up their own post offices and water and guard towers and held on to their land.
Christopher circled the settlement. Kings Row was no more. Nothing remained except for a charred ruin. Black ash hid the ground. Smoke billowed from half a dozen places, greasy and acrid, joining together into a single massive cloud above. Here and there remnants of the fire smoldered, red veins in the black crust. With a fire, some structures would’ve been left standing: fireplaces, brick walls, ruined appliances, burned-out cars . . . There was nothing. Not even the outline of the streets. Only black ash.
He’d taken a thousand people. I didn’t know if they’d died in the fire or if he’d kidnapped them, but they were gone and Neig was to blame.
No more. I needed to get my hands on him now.
And what would I do when I did? I didn’t even know if a blood ward would hold against that.
Christopher took another turn. Something shone through the smoke, a smudged orange glow.
“There!” I pointed, but he had already seen it. We dropped through the smoke and landed on the ash. Heat scoured my face.
A twelve-foot-tall pillar rose in the middle of the ravaged field, a translucent column dusted with ash. Within it, an orange glowing liquid flowed. Glass, I realized. The pillar was glass, its outer crust solid, but inside it was molten.
Christopher made a choking sound.
I looked up.
There was a human being in the pillar.
Oh dear God.
The body was encased in glass up to the shoulders. The head and neck were free, smudged with soot, all the hair burned off, but the body itself floated, submerged in the molten glass. It wasn’t burned. The molten glass should’ve boiled the flesh off the bones, but I could see pale legs dangling in the glowing liquid.
What the bloody fuck?
The head opened its eyes.
Still alive. How?
The dry cracked lips moved. “He . . .”
Ghastek’s vampires slid to a stop next to me and froze.
“He . . .” the person in the glass said. “Help.”
Rowena.
Every hair on my arms stood on end.
I concentrated on the pillar, pulling magic inside me to shine at it like a light. I couldn’t see it the way Julie did, but I felt the veins of glowing power twisting into the pillar in a complicated web. Inside, Rowena was coated in it as if she wore a skintight bodysuit. The web cradled her, winding through every inch of the pillar. The whole thing was bound together. Shit.
Ghastek’s left vamp charged to the glass column.
“No!” I yelled.
It turned to me.
“If you break the glass, she’ll burn to death.”
“Are you sure?” Ghastek asked, his voice clipped.
“Yes.”
A Jeep rounded the bend of the road. Julie and Derek jumped out and ran toward us.
“Can we drain it from the bottom?” Christopher asked.
“She’s wrapped in a spell. It’s clinging to her like a second skin. The skin is connected to the pillar. We break any part of it, she’ll die instantly.”
The vampire spun around. “Get her out of there.” Ghastek’s voice vibrated with steel. “Kate!”
“Quiet.”
If we broke the pillar, she died. If we tried to lift her out of it, she died. If tech hit, she died.
Vampires dashed out of the woods on the northern edge of the town. The People catching up with Ghastek.
Julie reached me, looked up at the pillar, and clamped her hand over her mouth.
What do I do?
The awful sound of groaning wood rolled through the air. I turned. On the south side, the trees shuddered. Green branches twisted and dropped. Something had snapped the decades-old pines like toothpicks.
Something huge. The druid carving flashed before me. I pulled Sarrat from its sheath.
“Form on In-Shinar!” Ghastek snapped.
The undead lined up into a wedge behind me.
An oak split, spun on its trunk, and plummeted down. A massive snout emerged into the light, six feet across. An enormous head followed, shaggy with brown fur. Two curved tusks big enough to skewer a car flanked the snout, followed by three pairs of shorter tusks. Short spiked horns protruded from the beast’s skull.