Blood Prophecy (43 page)

Lucy

We ran over the rocky terrain, heading around to the far end of the Blood Moon camp into a grove of red pine. There was nothing but dead needles and snow on the ground, no bushes or undergrowth to hide us as we raced against the wind and right into a clutch of
Hel-Blar.
What was the plural for
Hel-Blar
anyway? Pack? Nest? Murder.

Definitely murder.

These weren’t even the ones Aidan had just released. They wore no collars, no leashes. They’d been drawn by the smell of spilled blood.

“Climb up that tree.” Connor tossed Christabel up onto a low branch and spun back around, a stake in each hand. The
Hel-Blar
clacked their jaws, saliva dripping off their fangs. “When you reach the satellite give a holler.”

“I’ll give a holler when I crash out of this tree and onto your head from fifty feet up,” she muttered. I knew why she was muttering, I was doing the same thing as I climbed up after her to distract myself from the height, the adrenaline swimming through me, the sounds of jaws clacking at Nicholas and Connor, and people dying in the near distance.

“Being a vampire seemed like a lot more fun in those books you used to read,” she said to me as I pulled myself up onto a wide, sturdy branch below her. “And it’s probably not a good sign that all I can think about it is Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’: ‘Theirs was not to question why, theirs was but to do and die.’ ”

I shook my head. “Connor’s right, your taste in poetry has gotten downright depressing.”

On the ground, Connor dodged a clawing grab, swinging up onto a branch just long enough to swing back down, stomping hard. His boot crushed a
Hel-Blar
’s shoulder, cracking his bones. He howled, stumbling. Connor kicked him onto the stake he’d left sticking out of the ground.

“Who could have guessed smart geeky boys were so hot?” Christabel flashed me a conspiratorial grin. She wrinkled her nose. “Being a vampire and hanging out with you again is clearly a bad influence. I’m thinking how hot Connor is when we might all die horribly before the sun comes up.”

“Keep calm and carry on,” I said cheerfully.

“Isn’t that from World War II London when the bombs were falling?”

“I stand by the comparison.”

I glanced at the feral blue monsters currently attacking our
boyfriends. “Good point.” She climbed faster, until she reached the small satellite. “Got it,” she yelled down.

“Okay, flick on the switches behind the dish, on the left,” Connor called up, then grunted when he tried to avoid a bite and hit the tree hard enough that we nearly lost our perches.

We clung to the trunk, swearing. “Are you okay?” Christa asked.

“Fine,” he replied, sounding pissed. The
Hel-Blar
went to dust at his feet. “It’ll take a few minutes to boot up before we can recalibrate it. Just hang on.”

Once the satellite had little red lights popping up, he had me connect his laptop, which was in my backpack. Considering he’d had to fix my laptop one of the first times I’d met him because I’d accidentally pressed a button I didn’t even know existed, I thought he was being rather optimistic. He gave me a bunch of letters and backslashes to type in. The screen garbled at me, but when I read him what I saw he seemed satisfied. Until I got the blue screen of death. Even I knew what that meant.

“It’s frozen,” I called down.

“Turn it off and on again.”

“I tried that already.”

He climbed up to my branch. “Keep watch,” he said to me as we attached nose plugs over our nostrils. I started to climb back down, to be closer to Nicholas. He couldn’t fight off all those
Hel-Blar
by himself, no matter how kick-ass he was lately.

Connor opened his laptop and slipped straight into computer geek mode. He muttered words that made no sense to me, the same way Christabel muttered nineteenth-century poetry.

From my vantage point I could see a fresh wave of
Hel-Blar
arriving. Even on a purely moonless, starless night, I would have seen them. That many
Hel-Blar
were hard to miss. “Incoming!”

They swarmed around us, running to the battle. A few passed right underneath us and I had a fleeting hope that they’d all keep running by and Nicholas could scurry up the tree to safety. The last few found the ashes of their brothers coating the roots and screeched in fury. Half a dozen surrounded our tree and began to climb up. Nicholas did his best to stop them, grabbing their clothing and yanking them off even as he defended himself from fangs and fetid breath.

Christabel frowned down at me when I started to move. “Where are you going?”

“I have to help Nicholas.”

She pulled out of her bag a handful of the Hypnos-pepper eggs that Uncle Geoffrey duplicated from a mixture I’d stolen from school. Stakes and swords weren’t much use to her, but she could throw these like rotten eggs on Halloween night, if she had to.

She had to.

She lowered her backpack with the rest of her stash to me. I put my arms through the straps, wearing it over my chest for easy access. “Nic, heads up!” I tossed an extra pair at him when he looked up. “Connor,” I said, throwing my first egg. I was glad I was only halfway up the tree. Any higher and I would have been dizzy with vertigo by now. “You might want to hurry up.”

He glanced down, swore, and started to type faster. “I just have to wait for this to bounce to Chloe and her files. Chloe’s trying to activate Hope’s cell phone’s GPS tag. Now we just have to combine the codes and IPs with the GPS system. ”

I wasn’t really listening, I was too busy trying to toss eggs at the
Hel-Blar
without also tossing myself. I wrapped my ankle around a branch and leaned as far forward as I could. Cayenne pepper and Hypnos exploded. Above me, Christabel did the same.

“Go to sleep!” I shouted as the powder sank into their pores and drifted up their nostrils and down their throats. Two
Hel-Blar
tumbled out of the tree, arms and legs still curled as if they were climbing. Branches splintered as they fell. I kept throwing, as hard as I could. I kept them off Nicholas as he kicked them into the bushes.

By the time Connor gave a triumphant hoot,
Hel-Blar
littered the ground like dead cockroaches, hands and feet sticking up.

“Gotcha,” Connor said, grimly satisfied. He reached for his phone, dialing quickly as he clambered down to mid-tree level, behind Christabel. “Bruno,” he said. “Phase Two is complete, and Logan sent word that Phase Three is also done.” I couldn’t hear Bruno’s exact words but the smug triumph was clearly audible. Connor was equally smug when he added, “And now I have Hope’s exact location.”

Chapter 41

Solange

I couldn’t find my brothers.

There were too many bodies and too many battles and too much blood. I couldn’t even hear Quinn’s mad battle laugh over the noise. The
Hel-Blar
had finally found us. And though we’d been right about them forcing the hunters and the vampires to split their focus, the results were chaotic.

Somehow Mom spotted Kieran and me the moment we stepped off the ladders leading down from the platforms. There was a gash on her arm where something sharp had sliced through her sleeve and then her skin. Her eyes flared so pale, they were like frozen water. I didn’t know where the rest of my family was, except for Aunt Ruby, who was hunched over one of the dead hunters, collecting treasures from his pockets. She considered anything shiny a treasure; coin, knife, safety pin. She moved on to rifle through the discarded clothing of a dusted vampire.

Mom kissed my forehead and then pivoted, dragging her dagger across the throat of a
Hel-Blar.
He gurgled as she finished him off with the stake in her other hand. “Take cover,” she ordered me, spinning away again, her braid lifting behind her.

She left a trail of ashes ending in an unconscious Huntsman. He’d tried to stake her and she’d backhanded him into a tree. The Huntsmen had figured out that we were trying not to kill them. They had no such qualms.

And then the Host caught sight of my mother and me fighting together and they went as mad with bloodlust as any
Hel-Blar
I’d ever seen.

The sight of so many familiar brown tunics, all painted with Montmartre’s crest, made me freeze for a moment.

A moment too long.

I knew better. I’d trained for hours the way most girls spent hours reading books or shopping at the mall or learning to play the piano. I knew how to riposte and parry with a fencing foil, how to throw daggers and axes, how to execute a proper roundhouse kick. But in that second, all I could see was Montmartre as he’d grabbed me and the feel of the tiara as I’d shoved it through his chest.

The rest of his warriors, still loyal to his memory and the torch of blood vengeance, closed around us like a fist. They moved with military precision.

Luckily, so did Kieran.

Chapter 42

Lucy

We ran all the way to the platforms, trailing jaw-clacking
Hel-Blar.

There was so much adrenaline coursing through me, I felt sick. “This was a better idea in theory.” I panted, even though between Nicholas on one side and Christabel on the other, my feet barely touched the ground.

Nicholas managed to find an actual rope ladder, not just a rope with knots for handholds. Connor went up first so he could hang down and lift us up when we got within reach. I followed Christabel. Nicholas stayed on the ground, a long dagger in one hand and a stake in the other. He broke into a run when we were too far up the tree to stop him, drawing the
Hel-Blar
off our scent.

“Damn it,” Connor said, practically tossing me up on the platform. “Why does he keep doing that?”

I raced across the platforms, keeping my eye on Nicholas, willing him to stop running so I could cover him properly with my bow. Connor dropped back down to the ground, darting after his brother. Christabel and I kept going, leaping over the broken boards and skirting small fires. I choked on smoke, eyes tearing.

It wasn’t long before we were back on the edge of the battle and the
Hel-Blar
abandoned us in favor of the fallen wounded, who were bleeding in the snow. Nicholas and Connor went for the nearest ladder, pulling it up behind them once they’d reached a platform. We ran until we found Chloe sitting on the rough planks, rubbing the back of her neck. She was hunched over her laptop. Jenna had lashed herself to a branch by her waist. She straddled it, feet dangling on either side. I had to duck under her boots. These platforms must have been used by the Moon Guard because there were rails and makeshift roofs, baskets of food, and a jug of water. I took a long drink, only now realizing how thirsty I was.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Jenna just grunted and loosed another arrow. Chloe was slightly wild-eyed. “I much prefer computer hacking to actual hacking,” she said. “I’m sending Hope’s coordinates to Hart,” she added to Connor.

“And Hunter?” I asked, peering over the side.

Hunter still hadn’t moved away from her grandfather’s body. She was defending it with grim precision, her blond ponytail swinging behind her. Quinn stayed at her side, dispatching a
Hel-Blar
and knocking aside a hunter with the same blow. Jenna shot another arrow, taking out a
Hel-Blar
who strayed too close to them. I reached
for my own arrows, nocking one to the bowstring even as I widened my stance for better balance.

I searched for Solange, finally spotting her at the edge of the clearing with Kieran and Helena, all surrounded by Host vampires. Nicholas saw them too.

“Stay here,” he ordered as I shot an arrow through two Host, turning them both to dust. “Please,” he added desperately. Since I was better able to help from up here, I didn’t argue. He kissed me quickly, fiercely, and then he was gone over the railing. He landed nimbly and I covered him as he crossed the battlefield toward Solange.

Having a Drake for a boyfriend and one for a best friend was a full-time job.