Magic Binds (37 page)

F
IVE DAYS LATER
I stood on top of the Keep's main tower. The sun rose above the horizon, its first rays banishing the twilight. Clear, crystalline blue sky spread above me. The woods around the Keep stood still. Birds sang. It was so peaceful.

Almost a week had passed since Jim's attack on my father's tower. The first magic wave came and went without any action from my father, but last night magic hit hard and Jim's scouts reported a large force heading our way. This was it.

Somewhere within those woods, Curran and the bulk of our forces hid.

Christopher waited next to me. Behind me the seven Masters of the Dead stood, each with a single vampire parked by their feet like a mutated hairless cat. Jim put renders all around us with Desandra in the lead. We wouldn't be able to enter the main Keep, but he understood what was about to happen. If my father attacked with his magic and if I blocked that attack—which was a pretty big “if” at this point—people had to see it. The Masters of the Dead had to see it.

The Keep below us swarmed with shapeshifters. Jim was front and center, Dali next to him.

Jim had shared intelligence from his scouts. My father couldn't pull the entire Golden Legion together on short notice, but he had put together a force of over two hundred undead, enough to decimate an army five times that size. He'd kept human reserves in Virginia, something none of us knew about, and they had arrived last night. Together with his mages, the Pack scouts estimated that he was fielding almost three thousand combatants.

Jim had called for a complete mobilization. Everyone older than eighteen would fight. Anyone above sixteen could volunteer. He ended up with around six hundred troops. We brought one hundred twenty vampires to the fight. Ghastek had gotten every journeyman with half a hint of talent and put them on the field. He stood next to me now, the skin on his face too tight.

We were outnumbered and outgunned, several times to one.

“Wondering if you shouldn't have rolled the dice?” I asked.

“No. It's too late.”

A red light claimed the horizon, glowing like a second sunrise. Wolves fled from the woods and sprinted to the safety of the Keep.

“It begins,” my aunt said in my ear.

If I failed, everything was over.

In the distance trees collapsed as if torn aside by an invisible tornado half a mile wide. Smoke billowed, white and thick, and lightning crackled within it. My father was coming.

“Take and hold,” Erra's voice whispered.

“Hey, Kate? You're nobody's bitch,” Desandra said.

Behind me, one of the navigators drew a tense breath.

The smoke was almost to the boundary. My father's fury loomed, a magic storm devouring all before it.

I felt every drop of life within the land I claimed. It was enough to make you go mad.

The storm rolled across the land, swallowing the distance in hungry gulps. A hundred yards.

Eighty.

Sixty.

A sound like the roar of a distant waterfall rolled through the land.

Forty.

Take . . .

Twenty.

Below me in the Keep, the shapeshifters stood frozen.

The trees before the boundary collapsed, snapped like toothpicks, and were sucked into the storm.

And hold!

Magic shifted like a mountain that somehow moved. It wasn't an isolated stream or a burst. The entirety of the magic around us changed somehow, and everyone felt it.

My father's storm splashed against an invisible boundary and stopped. Smoke billowed. Lightning struck, licking at the boundary with glowing snake tongues. The storm didn't move.

It pushed.

I held.

The storm melted into nothing.

Ghastek laughed.

I released the magic.

The ground trembled.

Hold.

The budding earthquake died.

A ball of fire appeared in the sky. It hurtled toward us, an enraged inferno of red and yellow, threatening to demolish everything in its path.

Hold.

The impact shook me. The fireball evaporated in midair.

Ghastek grinned at me. “My queen, you have inspired me greatly. I shall now go and do what the Legatus does.”

“Don't strain anything,” I told him.

“I won't.”

The vampire picked him up, grasped a metal pole on the side of the tower, and slid down. The other Masters of the Dead followed suit. Pillman lingered.

“Yes?” I asked him.

“I . . .” he faltered.

I let the magic suffuse me. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” he said.

“I'm always afraid,” I told him. “Before every battle. Use the fear. It will make you sharp.”

He nodded, and his vampire took him off the tower.

“You're starting to scare me,” Desandra said.

“That's one off the bucket list.” I took a deep breath and yelled at the top of my lungs. “Chernobog! Living darkness, father of monsters, I ask for your aid in battle. I invoke your name. Lend us your power. Those who are afraid, let them pray to you and hear their prayers.”

Okay. The invocation was done.

“He's coming,” Erra said.

In the distance the trees fell. Five huge shaggy forms burst out of the forest, their massive tusks wrapped in metal. Behind them vampires galloped with their odd jerky gait, followed by human troops.

“Are those fucking mammoths?” Desandra asked.

“Yes.” Enormous, colossal mammoths, bigger than any reconstructions I had seen. Where the hell did my father get mammoths?

Desandra's eyes lit up. “Kate, get off the tower, so I can get down there. I've never killed a mammoth.”

“Christopher?” I asked.

He leaned back. Blood-red wings snapped open from his back.

“Whoa.” Desandra backed away.

Christopher picked me up and leapt off the tower. We glided and turned right. I craned my neck. The ground gave under the leading mammoth, and the massive beast collapsed into a hidden trench. A chorus of eerie cackles filled the air. Jim had put boudas into the trenches.

Christopher's eyes turned blood-red.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“The battlefield is calling.” His voice wasn't his own.

“Can you hold on for a little while longer?”

“I'll try.”

We swung toward a large oak. Christopher plunged down and landed, setting me down next to Barabas and Julie. Barabas looked like he'd jumped out of some D&D book featuring thieves and assassins. He wore leather armor and carried a sharp knife. A dark rag covered the bottom part of his face. Above it, his eyes were blood-red with demonic horizontal pupils. Julie stood holding the reins of our horses. She would be riding a roan mare. We all agreed that Peanut was much too beloved to take into battle. I would be riding Hugh's mean Friesian. No horse on this battlefield would stand up to him.

Around me a sea of vampires waited, each bloodsucker crouching, perfectly still like a statue, a stripe of bright green running down their spines.

Christopher closed his wings around him and walked off, pacing, gripping his left forearm with his right hand so hard, his fingers turned the flesh completely white. Barabas walked over to him. I couldn't tell what was being said, but I caught Barabas's voice, soothing, calming . . .

A battle horn roared.

I ran up to the oak and climbed up the rope ladder Jim's people had conveniently left in place for me and clambered to the wooden platform at the top. Next to me a vampire crouched.

“Ghastek?”

“Of course,” Ghastek's dry voice said from the vampire mouth. “Did you expect Santa Claus?”

I gave him my hard stare and turned to the field. We were in the woods on the south side. The Keep was a little to the left of me, and my father's
advancing forces were to the right. Somewhere to my far right, Curran and his forces waited. I had kissed him this morning and didn't want to let go.

A battle raged less than half a mile from us, across the open ground. Two mammoths made it past the trenches and battered the Keep walls while waves of my father's troops splashed against it. Vampires swarmed up the stones and shapeshifters met them among the parapets. The fortress held.

No sign of my father.

“Erra?” I said softly.

She appeared next to me.

“I cannot tell you how disturbing this is,” Ghastek said.

“You're telling me. You know she killed my favorite mule?”

“You killed me,” Erra said. “I think we're even.”

My father wouldn't commit to the field until he was reasonably certain of a victory. And that wouldn't happen until the Keep's front door was kicked in.

The bodies of shapeshifters fell from the wall. Argh.

“Your lion built it too well,” Erra told me.

“Yes, everything is my fault.”

“What's going on with Steed?” Ghastek asked.

“He's having difficulty with bloodlust.”

“It is really him?”

“Yes.”

“Life moves in mysterious ways,” Ghastek said.

Blood smeared the gray stones of the Keep, as the mammoths threw themselves against it again and again. The left side of the wall trembled, rocked, like a rotten tooth ready to come out, and collapsed. My father's troops flooded into the gap and broke like a wave on shapeshifter claws and teeth.

Come on.

Bodies flew. People screamed.

Come on, Father. Come to the slaughter.

Minutes ticked by.

More bodies.

A new line of troops spilled onto the field and in its center a shiny chariot sped, drawn by horned horses.

“Is your father riding a gold chariot?” Ghastek asked.

“He's a product of his times. It's what he grew up with.”

“There is nothing wrong with a gold chariot,” Erra said. “It's meant to be symbolic.”

We watched the line of troops advance, gaining ground against the isolated clumps of shapeshifters. Slowly Jim's forces retreated to the Keep.

Not yet.

The trenches emptied as boudas scrambled toward the Keep. Jim's forces broke and ran for the safety of the walls, leaving their dead on the battlefield.

Now.

I looked down. “Now, Christopher!”

He shot into the air, spinning as he rose. Barabas waved at me and sprinted through the woods, heading east to where Curran's forces waited.

The trees across from us, on the other side of the battlefield and to the right, turned black. Dark magic gathered there, cold and terrible. The trees rustled and a gigantic black dragon head emerged from the trees. My father raised his hand. Golden light poured from it, shielding the troops directly around him.

Aspid slithered across the field. Roman rode atop his head, feet anchored, his arms opened wide. A black crown rested on his hair. Behind him black smoke stretched like an impossibly long mantle. A wall of black flames, thirty feet tall and twenty feet wide, cut the field in two in the dragon's wake.

I scrambled off the tree. Two vampires stepped forward, spread a sheet of clear plastic on the ground, and knelt on it. I felt the navigators let go and grabbed their minds. The bloodsuckers opened their throats in unison and I crushed their minds as they bled out.

I sliced my arm, let my blood mix with that of the undead, and felt it catch on fire with my power. The red spiraled up my legs, climbing higher, over my thighs, over my waist, forming armor. It felt clunky.

“Awful,” Erra said. “You are an embarrassment. Stand still.”

My aunt circled me, words of a long-forgotten language falling from her mouth. It felt like forever, but it took only seconds. When I looked down at myself, I wore blood armor. My aunt stopped in front of me and rested her ghostly fingers under my chin.

“Go and free yourself from your father.”

“I will,” I told her.

I swung onto the Friesian. He pawed the ground, his nostrils flaring. Julie was already on her mare, her eyes wild and scared.

“Raise the banner.”

She raised the flag, and the green standard of In-Shinar fluttered above us.

I let the stallion go. He tore out of the woods at a gallop. We burst into the open. The wall of black flames rose to the right of us, and within it monstrous mouths and claws writhed, grabbing any who strayed too close and tearing into their bodies. We had cut my father's forces in half. I was on the Keep side of the flame wall, and Curran and his mercs, the Order, and Jim's reserve were on the other.

More vampires poured from the other side of the woods. Roland's troops still pressed their attack on the Keep, not realizing what was happening.

Above the Keep Christopher dived from between the clouds, his wings opened wide, like a fallen angel. He opened his mouth and screamed.

The mass of troops churned, as hundreds of men and creatures tried to flee in unison, away from the Keep and toward the smoke. Christopher screamed again and again, his shriek gripping my spine with an icy hand even from this distance. The offensive broke apart. People fled. Christopher swooped down, grasped a writhing body, and flew up, burying his fangs in the man's neck.

We tore into the retreating troops. I swung Sarrat, slicing, severing necks and backs. Around me vampires swarmed without a sound, silent, merciless, slaughtering everything in their path.

The field was chaos. Men, beasts, shapeshifters, and animals clashed, screaming, snarling, and ripping at each other. The air smelled like blood.
Harpies dived through the sky. One aimed for me and a winged form shot out from the clouds and sliced it in half with a flaming sword. Teddy Jo. I didn't think he'd come.

A vampire headed for me. Not one of ours. I rode it down. The stallion stomped on the undead, and I finished it, crushing its skull with my magic. Across the field, green and bare undead crashed against each other, fighting silent duels.

A massive beast shaped like a leopard but twice that size leapt at me. The impact of its weight took me off the horse. Claws scraped my blood armor. I thrust Sarrat between its ribs, twisted, heaved it off me, and rolled to my feet.