Author Archives: Emrys

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The vampire didn’t burst into flame at the touch of the sunlight, sadly. Nothing that dramatic.

 

But suddenly Kyra’s struggles actually meant something. Crippled, in pain, unable to coordinate or direct her efforts to their best effect, she could still actually break Katrin’s grip. She fell to the ground a moment later, collapsing and whining in pain as her weight fell on her shattered leg.

 

Before any of the vampires could react, Daniell darted forward and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, her teeth set on Kyra’s neck. Kyra was larger by a considerable margin, but that didn’t necessarily mean as much to a werewolf; Daniell was easily able to drag the larger werewolf back to our position.

 

Meanwhile, the other vampires were edging away and hissing, an odd, eerie sound when multiplied across so many mouths. Apparently sunlight wasn’t instantly lethal to vampires, as I’d always suspected, but they still didn’t seem to want to be in it.

 

Which, in turn, made it exactly where I wanted to be.

 

I charged forward, straight at Katrin. She looked at me the whole time, still with that broad, mad smile. She had plenty of time to dodge, to escape, or fight back, but she didn’t even try. She just stood there and smiled as Tyrfing came around in a broad arc, reflecting the sunlight so brightly that it almost seemed to be giving off a brilliant light itself.

 

I heard shouts of surprise and pain from the periphery of the room as Katrin fell, as that beam of reflected sunlight swept through the darkness which still lingered at the edges of the room. I roared, brandishing Tyrfing in front of me, trying to buy time for the others to catch up.

 

It didn’t take more than a few seconds for them to realize what had just happened and start moving forward to join me in the pool of sunlight. The vampires caught on moments later and pounced on them, trying to bring them down before they could.

 

But they were disorganized, still off balance from the way things had changed in the last few moments. And the people they were attacking were ready for it. It was a close call, but in the end everyone made it into the light.

 

We quickly shifted into a defensive position again. Kyra was at the center—not even a werewolf could keep fighting on that leg—with the mages and soldiers around her. The outer ring consisted of me, Aiko, the jötnar, the other werewolves, and the shapeshifters.

 

The vampires were recovering now, but it was too late; they’d already lost the critical advantages which had made this fight so one-sided. They threw themselves at us, but now we were in a good position to defend ourselves, and they didn’t have the leadership to organize or coordinate their attack effectively.

 

I found myself fighting between Aiko and Ryan. She was holding her blade in both hands, warding off attacks. She couldn’t really kill a vampire with it, not even in the weakened state these ones were in, but she could keep them at bay, slashing at them when they got too close. She focused on crippling rather than killing, taking off limbs when they overextended.

 

Ryan, on the other hand, was holding a crucifix in one hand and a gun in the other, presenting both of them against the vampires. It was hard to shoot accurately in the chaos, the press of the fight, but he was good at it. He made it work.

 

He wasn’t the only one holding a religious symbol. A couple of the mages had various objects held high, a mix of crosses and more interesting, unusual choices. One woman had a dagger held high that shone with something a little bit more than reflected sunlight; vampires hesitated throughout that entire quadrant of the circle, and actively flinched away from the light. The man next to her was presenting a pipe, of all things. Another man had an actual scroll in his hands, and was chanting something in what sounded like Hebrew. It would not have surprised me to see someone pull out a pasta strainer and start reciting from the Loose Canon.

 

The nonhumans had their own symbols held high, as well. Anna’s collar had a large cross hanging from it. Vigdis had a silver chain in her hand, with a pendant in the shape of a wolf’s head. Appropriate for a shapeshifter, I supposed, and it might explain something of why she had signed up with me to begin with. It had never occurred to me that she might view the Fenris Wolf in a religious light, but it wasn’t that strange for a jotun, I supposed. Kyi had the runes tattooed on her arms, hands, and collarbone prominently displayed, and I knew that they had a religious connotation to them. Even Unna was holding a seashell overhead with an attitude that made it more than just an object.

 

For my part, I held nothing but Tyrfing. Appropriate enough in a way, I supposed. Certainly it would be reasonable to assume from my actions that I worshipped the sword.

 

The vampires attacked, but there was no real strength, no authority to it. They were slowed and weakened by the sun, by the wide array of holy symbols presented against them. I didn’t know much about vampires beyond the most practical level, I didn’t know why symbols of faith were such a hindrance to them, but they were.

 

I cut them down as fast as they came, having to consciously hold back to keep from advancing and breaking the defensive line. Ryan was shooting them, not able to kill them, but wounding, pushing them away. Anna and Daniell and Matthew were all able to trip them up and pull them down, keeping them still until one of the housecarls could finish the job. Similarly, Chuck was a force unto himself. A vampire was not stronger than a magically enhanced polar bear, not in the sunlight. A casual swat from him was enough to fling a vampire across the room, or tear its head from its shoulders outright.

 

Protected behind that wall of flesh, the mages were able to focus in relative safety. Some, too exhausted to use their magic, or lacking abilities that were applicable here, had to rely on other methods to make themselves useful. These mages focused on presenting the symbols of their various beliefs, or used the tools I’d provided, bombarding the vampires with holy water, with prayer beads and heads of garlic. Others were still able to contribute more directly, blasting the enemy with electricity or force, setting them on fire and locking them in place. The woman with the dagger just removed pieces of them before turning her attention back to the ceiling, widening the gap and letting in more light from the setting sun.

 

The soldiers were less useful here. Their weapons weren’t as effective, overall. But they also had the holy symbols and objects, and they did have some weapons that worked. They threw flashbangs into the crowd, further disorienting and debilitating them. Bullets weren’t particularly useful, but they did at least weaken and slow the vampires, leaving them more open to attacks that could actually hurt them. One of the gangsters threw a grenade that burst into incredibly intense flames, setting several vampires on fire. It was across the room from me, and I still felt the heat for the few seconds it was burning.

 

It only took moments before the vampires turned to run. But there were only two exits from the room. One was the hole in the roof, which led to an environment almost as hostile as what they were leaving. The other was the door we’d come in through, and it was there that the vampires ran.

 

They were brought up short when Unna gestured with that shell and crooned gently. The holy water on the ground swirled and then rushed over to the door, flowing up off the ground to form a thin barrier. One of the vampires tentatively reached through it, only to stop, apparently unable to move through it. I wasn’t sure whether it was that the aversion to the holy water was that strong, or if it was Unna’s doing, or if one of the mages was doing something.

 

The end result was the same. All of the vampires were crowded together for a moment, backed against the wall.

 

A hail of bullets, spells, grenades, and holy water rained down on them, and ended my war with Katrin once and for all.

---

 

“Neutral ground,” I said, walking into the shopping mall. “This is your idea of neutral ground.”

 

Newton smirked at me. I couldn’t see him, since this meeting was just the two of us, and I was guessing he was wearing the mask anyway, but I was confident he was smirking. “It’s neutral,” he said. “Unless you’re going to accuse me of owning it.”

 

“It’s public,” I said sourly. “Any moron could walk in and overhear this.”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “Consider it an incentive not to do something stupid. You pick a fight here and people get hurt.”

 

“We agreed to a truce,” I reminded him. “Until the discussion was over.”

 

“That’s fine,” he said. “I get it, you know, you’re old-school. Whatever. I’ll take my security my way.”

 

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Under any other circumstances, something that close to an accusation that I would break a truce would require a response. Jötnar took that sort of thing seriously, and allowing it to pass uncontested was as good as an admission.

 

But there were mitigating factors. I thought I could get away with letting this one slide without comment.

 

“I don’t like you,” I said. “I don’t like what you stand for. I don’t like what you do. But I’m trying to be as fair as possible. So I’m going to give you one chance here. Stop the nonsense, stop picking fights with me, and swear that you’ll follow my rules and support me against outside threats. You do that, and I’ll leave you be. One chance, and once chance only.”

 

“Like hell,” he said, with a clearly audible sneer. “You’re a scared little bitch. We both know you can’t back it up. If you could take us on you’d have done it already.”

 

“Okay.”

 

He hesitated, obviously thrown by that. “Okay? That’s it?”

 

“Yep,” I said. “I don’t think we have anything else to discuss. Do you?”

 

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, I guess we don’t.”

 

I nodded, and pushed the button on the remote control I was holding in my cloak pocket. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that two lights would have turned on the moment I pressed it.

 

A few seconds later, I hear two almost-simultaneous cracks of gunfire as Aiko and Kyi pulled their respective triggers.

 

Newton never had a chance to scream. I couldn’t see, but I could feel the motion in the air as various things were propelled out of his body by the impact. One of the bullets had hit him in the head, while the other struck dead-center in his chest.

 

A force mage could stop bullets. But you had to know about the bullet to raise a shield against it. There were ways around it, of course. This tactic would never have worked against someone like Alexander, or even most of the Watchers I’d met.

 

But Newton was a cocksure, arrogant man. It had never occurred to him just how rapidly he could die.

 

Once again, I found myself oddly grateful for blindness. It meant that I couldn’t see exactly what I’d just been splattered with, although I could imagine it well enough. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t the first time I’d stood close enough to someone to be covered in blood and brains and chunks of organs when they got shot.

 

There was a half-beat of silence before people began running away and screaming. I ignored that, focusing on the handful of other people I could feel.

 

The people who were running towards the scene.

 

I picked one at random and turned to face them. “You,” I said, pointing. “I’ll give you one chance, and one chance only.”

 

They froze, head turned towards the corpse of their former leader. It didn’t take long for them to get the message. “I swear,” they said, with audible reluctance. “I’ll follow the rules.”

 

I pointed at each of the rest in turn. None of them refused to swear the oath.

 

“Okay,” I said, once that was done with. “Now get out.”

I waited for them to leave, then turned and walked the other way. Herjolfr rose from his seat on the bench nearby and fell in beside me before I’d taken ten steps. Aiko and Kyi would meet us outside, where Kjaran should already have the car running.

 

“You know,” the skald said to me, “that people will say this was a violation of truce. They’ll call you an oathbreaker.”

 

I smiled a little inside my helmet. “The truce was explicitly limited to the duration of the discussion,” I said. “With no leeway afterwards. And you heard me tell him that the discussion was over. It isn’t my fault that he failed to realize what happened.”

 

“True,” he agreed. “But people will question it.”

 

“That’s why I had you here to witness it,” I told him. “You’re a skald. Your word is trusted, even if you are my housecarl. If you tell them that it was properly done, that I didn’t break the oath, then they’ll believe you.” I paused. “Unless you’re saying that you question the validity of my actions.”

 

He made an interested noise. “No,” he said slowly. “I can’t find anything in your actions that violates the terms of your truce. Although I do recall that you made an oath to Shadow, and several of the other independent mages, that you would treat them fairly and mercifully in your power. When they swore fealty to you last night, you made that oath.”

 

“I was very fair,” I said calmly. “I offered him a chance to avoid his fate, and told him in advance that it was his one and only chance. And death is merciful.”

 

“Is it?”

 

“Sure,” I said. “Some prisoners in Italy actually lobbied for the death penalty, because life imprisonment was too cruel. And I made his death as quick and painless as possible.”

 

“A coup de main is not the same as a coup de grâce,” he said dryly. “But I take your point.” We walked in silence for several seconds. “Your actions were within the bounds of the acceptable,” he said at last. “But they will be noted. Your reputation is already fearsome, jarl. What you have done today will make it more so.”

 

“Fearsome is good,” I said quietly as we stepped out into the morning sunlight. “Fearsome means nobody causes trouble.”

 

“Perhaps. I only ask that you take care, jarl. Oderint dum metuant is a fine idea, but Accius was a playwright, not a politician. It worked rather less well when Caligula put it into practice.”

 

I stopped and turned to face him. “Okay,” I said. “What is with the Latin? Do you have something against English?”

 

“When I was young, if you did not speak Latin, you might as well not speak,” he said, a little stiffly. “Norse could carry you through the north, but if you went south, or east, Latin was the only language that truly mattered. The words may be old, my jarl, but the ideas are timeless.” For a second I was worried that I’d actually offended him, but his next sentence was much more relaxed. “And it is the nature of a skald to make allusions to great thinkers of the past,” he said. “The preservation of wisdom is a great task.”

 

“Fair enough,” I said, continuing towards the car. “But for the record, I’m aiming for Machiavelli here, not Caligula. Keep in mind that the people I’m applying these fearsome tactics to are already pretty hated themselves. Nobody much is going to miss Newton.”

 

“You have a point,” he said. “Just take care. You are walking a narrow path, jarl, and a misstep could end in tragedy. As could a push.” For a moment I thought he was going to say something else, but then Aiko and Kyi reached us, and he fell silent.

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Someone had taken Kyra, without any noise or struggle, and without anyone noticing, from the middle of the group, with three members of her pack right next to her.

 

That shouldn’t have been possible. There were so many ways that shouldn’t have been possible.

 

Apparently, someone didn’t care so much about that.

 

I cursed under my breath as we moved on to the final branch of the hallway, moving faster now. Attacking in the daytime, starting off by demolishing the building, it had all been intended to limit the danger. But I’d known that there was nothing I could do that would actually eliminate it.

 

In a fight like this, there were casualties. There was no way around it.

 

That didn’t make it any easier to face when it struck so close to home.

 

Down the last hallway, a little longer than the other two. I was walking faster now, the people behind me almost running to keep up. The world seemed to fade and blur around me, warping in the corner of my eye. I felt disconnected, almost more an observer than a participant in my own actions. I became aware of a discordant, staccato laughter, and realized it was my own.

 

Inside the door, a vampire fell from the ceiling towards me with hands outstretched, curled into claws. Almost before I was aware of its presence Tyrfing cleared the sheath and leapt through the air towards it. It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of stroke, the slash perfectly timed and aimed.

 

The vampire hit the ground in two sizes of roughly equal size, and I kept walking at the same pace, not even breaking stride. I became aware, in a distant and detached sort of way, that the people following me were hanging back a little now, watching me. There was no meaning attached to the thought, no reaction. It was just an observation.

 

Next door, another slab of oak. I didn’t bother cutting it this time. I just slammed one booted foot into it. The door cracked; the second kick snapped it in half and I kept walking, pushing it out of my way.

 

The next room was another large dormitory, though the beds were unoccupied. Instead the room was filled with more of the twisted shapes that had formed the first wave when we assaulted the house. Some of them looked human, others were based on canine chassis. This close I could see the madness in their eyes, the same look in the eyes of men and dogs. Their bodies were warped and twisted, and their minds were even worse, broken in ways that went past fixing.

 

They threw themselves at me in a wave, scrabbling and kicking each other out of the way to be first. It was like watching a swarm of ants, any semblance of the individual subsumed into the horde.

 

As they got closer to me, they started to slip and stumble, their footing uncertain on the ice around me. I ignored it, cutting them down mercilessly as I kept walking forward. I didn’t bother aiming my slashes to target vital areas, didn’t bother with precision or care. I just cut in broad strokes, dropping several of the creatures to the ground with each stroke. A dog-thing bit my leg and clung there, its teeth scratching at my armor. I ignored it utterly, continuing to walk forward, the same as I ignored all of the twisted creatures that were outside of my immediate reach on the way across the room. They were beneath my notice.

 

Behind me, I heard gunfire, raised voices, screaming. I smelled smoke, firearm propellant, blood, strange magics that I couldn’t recognize or place. I kept moving, one foot in front of the other.

 

Another door, this one heavy steel locked into the surrounding walls, sunk into the floor. It was less a door than a wall, something meant to be closed once and never reopened. I considered it as I approached, and paused before it, though it made me feel strange, restless and frustrated.

 

It was more difficult to cut through than wood, actually presenting a certain amount of resistance to the cutting edge. But Tyrfing cut through it all the same, carving the steel the way a lesser blade might cut pine. Three strokes made a rough, ragged triangle in the wall. I kicked the section I’d cut out and it fell through, slamming against the floor.

 

Step through, ducking slightly. It felt better again now that I was moving, the restlessness fading. There was an acrid smell in the air now, somewhere between smoke and sulfuric acid. The next room was larger, more open. The ceiling was higher, almost twenty feet above my head. I tried to decide whether there was a hill overhead or I had been descending as I walked. I couldn’t remember, couldn’t focus, and a moment later the question faded.

 

There were vampires in the room, quite a few of them. The lurked in the shadows by the edges of the room, clung to the ceiling. Had we taken too long, so that the sun set outside? Or were all of these vampires strong enough to be up and active during the day?

 

The question really didn’t matter. Regardless, I was outnumbered, and the things outnumbering me were each killing machines unto themselves.

 

That didn’t really matter either. My attention was reserved primarily for the vampire in the middle of the room.

 

Katrin looked much the same as usual, tall and blonde, dressed all in black. A faint, twisted smile danced around the edges of her lips. It was an expression of amusement, in a sense, but there was a taint in it, something twisted and broken. There was an element of despair to it, a bleakness that went far beyond mere sorrow.

 

She held Kyra casually in her arms. One arm snaked between her legs to her abdomen, holding her back against the vampire’s chest. The other wrapped across her chest, holding her foreleg to the side. She had her hand jammed into the werewolf’s mouth, deep enough to be profoundly uncomfortable, muzzling, gagging, and choking her all at once. Katrin was bleeding where the teeth had cut her hand and arm, but didn’t seem to care, or even notice.

 

Kyra was still moving, struggling, but there wasn’t much she could do. Her spine was twisted sideways, two of her limbs were pulled out of alignment almost to the point of dislocation, and with how far the vampire had her arm shoved down her mouth, it would be a struggle to breathe, to keep from vomiting. In that position, held by someone vastly stronger than she was, all she could do was squirm feebly.

 

“Good evening, jarl,” Katrin said. Her voice was dry and rasping, a mockery of human speech. “How good of you to join us.”

 

“What do you want?” I asked quietly. My voice sounded more alien than hers, in a very different way. It was slurred, hard to understand, and there were overtones to it that didn’t belong in speech, sounds of snarls and growls, howls and barks, and above it all the endless scream of a raging storm.

 

She smiled, a fixed expression without any humor to it, showing teeth that were considerably longer than they’d ever been when I saw her smile in the past. “Mind your manners, my dear jarl,” she said. “Lest I grow offended. Or have you no care for your friends’ lives these days?”

 

“If you were going to kill her you’d have done it already,” I said. The storm had quieted now, a whisper rather than a scream, but still there was the hint of danger, the promise of a slow, freezing death. “Which means there’s a reason you haven’t. So, again, what do you want?”

 

The vampire looked at me for a moment. Then, faster than a snake striking, her hand shifted, sliding from Kyra’s abdomen down to her ankle. She seized it and twisted, pulling.

 

Bones snapped and crunched, twisting. I could see Kyra’s hind leg breaking under the strain, bones splitting in long spiral fractures, joints popping. Her hip dislocated, visibly distending to the side. She writhed, bucking hard against the vampire’s grip, but couldn’t move her arm so much as an inch. I could see her sides, her abdomen heaving as she threw up, chewing on the vampire’s arm reflexively, and still Katrin didn’t so much as flinch.

 

“She can heal that,” Katrin said. Her voice was still flat and dead, utterly lacking in any emotion. “Eventually. But how well will she fare if I keep pulling, do you think?” She smiled again, and it was maybe the single creepiest expression I’d ever seen. There was an absence there more terrifying than any amount of rage could ever be. “Werewolves can’t heal amputations, can they?”

 

I bit back my first response, and forced myself to stand still. “Good evening, Katrin,” I said instead. My voice was choked, and I was almost shaking with rage, but I managed it. “I’m pleased that we finally have a chance to catch up.”

 

“Ah,” she said. “As always you learn quickly.” She moved her hand back to Kyra’s torso, leaving the broken leg to dangle, and pulled her other arm out of the werewolf’s mouth, resting it under her chin instead. The limb dripped with blood, saliva, and vomit, but Katrin didn’t seem to care about that either.

 

Kyra whined quietly, as much of an expression of pain as she could manage right now. I looked at her for a long moment, then met Katrin’s eyes. “You know what this means,” I said. “Everything else, it was business. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing personal there. But this is…it crosses a line.”

 

“Yes,” she said simply. “I fully expect you to kill me for it someday. Maybe even today. But I’m hoping we can have a conversation first.”

 

“Why?” I demanded. “Why are you doing this? What the fuck are you getting out of this?”

 

“Ah,” she said. “Manners, remember?”

 

I gritted my teeth. “My apologies,” I said, my voice a growl now, almost unrecognizable. “But I would greatly appreciate an answer to my question.”

 

“In due time, I expect that you’ll receive one,” she said. “But right now, I want to talk about you. What next? That, right there, is the question you need to ask yourself. What next? What do you want more than anything else in the world? What would you do anything, sacrifice anything, to make happen?”

 

“Right now, I mostly want you to let my friend go,” I said.

 

Katrin sighed. “Do your ambitions extend no further than that?” she asked. “No further than the moment? Is this the life you want for yourself? This half-life, always struggling without ever accomplishing anything meaningful, living at the whim of another? Do you aim no higher than this?”

 

“I really find it difficult to focus on long term ambitions with this going on right in front of me,” I said.

 

“Stop trying to change the subject,” Katrin said. Her voice showed a hint of emotion now, touched with just the faintest trace of frustration. “These questions are important. Answer them.”

 

I took a deep breath and let it out. My hands were clenched, I noticed. “I don’t really know,” I said. “You asked what I would sacrifice anything for. That’s a loaded question. I know what anything can mean, and that’s not a commitment to make lightly.”

 

“Quite true,” Katrina agreed. “But that lack of dedication, of commitment, it’s holding you back. You could be so much more than you are. You could be a force to dwarf anything I’ve ever done. But you hold back. You refuse to really commit.”

 

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “What’s the purpose?”

 

“I want you to think about it,” she said. “That’s what’s holding you back, you see. It’s not a lack of power. It’s a lack of vision. You could be so much more, but you refuse to really see. You’re trapped by the immediate, never making it past reaction to what’s in front of you. How can you expect to get what you want if you never look further than the day after tomorrow?”

 

“It’s hard to look to the future when the present is more than I can stand,” I said. “That’s not a change of topic, by the way. It’s a relevant answer to your question. Recently it feels like just living day-to-day is the only way I can take the pressure. Things are bad, and they’re getting worse, and when I think about the future I can’t see it getting better. And everything I try to do, every time I try to fix things, I end up just making it worse.”

 

“Exactly!” she said. Again, there was a hint of emotion to that dead voice, but this time it was excitement, not exasperation. “But the reason for that, the reason nothing seems to work, is precisely that your focus is so stubbornly on the immediate and obvious. Right now, for example, you’re fixated on this moment, this situation. Tell me, jarl, who is to blame for what is happening right now?”

 

“Well,” I said dryly, “given that you’re the one doing this, that would seem to be the obvious answer.”

 

“Oh, granted the immediate responsibility is mine,” she said. “That’s a given. I know what I am. I won’t deny that I’m a monster. I won’t say that I haven’t earned your hate. I deserve to die, no question about that. But think about it. How do you think I got to be a monster? I wasn’t born this way, I can tell you that. I was a vampire for twenty years before I could kill someone and not feel terrible about it.”

 

“It’s still a choice,” I said. “You could always have gone a different route.”

 

I didn’t sound convinced, though, not even to myself. There was no conviction in my voice. I’d seen too many times when the only choices were bad ones.

 

“Perhaps,” Katrin said. “But even so, do you truly imagine that the blame falls on me alone? Do you think that no one, in all these years, had the chance to prevent me from becoming a monster? That no one could have acted to prevent this from coming to pass?” She smiled again. “I think not. Res ipsa loquitur, jarl. The guilt is there. How many people had to stand by to allow this to happen? How many people chose to allow it, because it was easier than the alternative?”

 

“Plenty,” I said. “But only one chose to actually do it.”

 

She snorted. “That’s an illusion,” she said, almost gently. “The idea that you can point to a person and say that they are wholly responsible for their own actions. The idea that a single person is responsible for anything. It’s a lie that we tell ourselves because it’s more comfortable than the truth. The idea that the world is black and white, that there are good men and evil men and you can parcel out guilt without getting your own hands dirty is a myth.”

 

“I’ve had some doubts about good and evil,” I said quietly. “I’ve had reason to question whether there are any real absolutes. But when I see something like this, it settles that question for me. You can’t do the things you’re doing and tell me that there’s no such thing as evil.”

 

“Oh, I don’t deny that evil exists,” she said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that genuine good and genuine evil are real. My contention is that you’ll never find the one without the other. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And that, my dear jarl, is why you have found no success with your efforts. It is a lack of vision.”

 

I took a deep breath and let it out. I no longer had that disconnected feeling, I noticed. I no longer felt like an observer. I must have caught my metaphorical breath, somewhere along the way.

 

I was acutely aware of my surroundings. There were so many pieces in play. The people I had brought with me were close behind me, just inside the door. The vampires lurked in the darkness all around, in front, above, to the sides. All were silent, watching as though Katrin and I were actors on a stage, all else forgotten.

 

The situation was ugly. I couldn’t so much as move without Katrin maiming or killing Kyra, and the stalemate could only last so long. Sooner or later the tension would break, and when it did, unless it broke in exactly the right way, one of my best friends was going to die. All the rest of us might, too, but Kyra definitely would.

 

Oddly enough, I found myself thinking about what Katrin was saying. It was important, I thought, although not quite in the way she meant it.

 

Vision. That was what was lacking. I had to look past my surroundings, past the immediate.

 

I thought about pieces again. This was a bit like chess, when I thought about it. Both sides controlled certain pieces. This wasn’t a fight between vampires and vampire hunters, not really. It was a fight between me and Katrin. Everyone else here was…more a playing piece than an actual player.

 

In that context, vision was simple. My pieces were surrounded, probably outnumbered. They weren’t in a position where I could use their abilities for all they were worth. Katrin’s pieces had better position, and they were more powerful, on the whole. Many of my pieces were pawns, whereas all of hers were rooks or queens. And to top it off, Katrin herself was in a position to take a piece that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

 

Seen through that lens, it was easy to observe that the game was lost. My position was cramped, and obviously unsound. Katrin had the advantage in both position and material. The only way I could even aim for a draw would be if she messed up badly, and even then it would Pyrrhic in nature, requiring me to make sacrifices I couldn’t afford in the long term.

 

So. The game wasn’t winnable. That clarified things completely. It meant that what I had to think about now was how I could change the nature of the game.

 

And then I saw it. Bizarrely enough, it was Katrin’s own words that gave me the hint I needed. It was about vision.

 

Or more specifically, the lack of vision.

 

“You know,” I said, quietly slipping my hands into my cloak. I doubted she’d notice, not while I was talking. “You know, the funny thing is that you aren’t wrong. You aren’t wrong about people being responsible, and you aren’t wrong about me. About me lacking vision. But you are mistaken on one topic, I think.”

 

“Oh? And what would that be?”

 

“You said that the only way to accomplish your goals was to focus on them,” I said. “To focus on them entirely, to the exclusion of everything else. But that’s not right. If you focus that tightly, you’re really giving yourself tunnel vision. You’re making yourself blind to everything outside of your obsession.”

 

And then I pulled out what I’d been carrying, and threw it at the ceiling.

 

One of the objects was a grenade, plain and simple. A modified grenade, a special model, but still basically just an explosive. The other was a glass sphere with a spark of blue light captured within it.

 

The glass was reinforced, and it would take a great deal to break it. Normally I primed those stored spells with blood before using them, removing the protections, but this time I hadn’t had the chance. I would just have to hope that the grenade would be enough to do the job.

 

The two objects reached the apex of their arc together and started to fall before the grenade went off. It was shockingly loud, in the relative silence of the room. A concussion grenade this time, rather than fragmentation; I didn’t want to deal with shrapnel in this environment.

 

For a second I thought even that hadn’t been enough. Then I saw a flicker of blue light expanding out, and grinned.

 

Kinetic force poured out from the broken sphere, pushing everything away. Where it hit air, the effect was minimal, almost nonexistent. Somewhere along the lines of a stiff breeze.

 

But the stone of the ceiling was less flexible, less able to move without damage. It started to break, cracks appearing, damage done by the grenade being exacerbated by the magic. Chunks of rock started falling.

 

For a moment I thought even that wouldn’t be enough, and I’d just signed all of our death warrants. Then one of the mages, an independent I knew nothing about, raised one hand and started blasting at it with what looked like greyish lightning. Another, the woman who was apparently their unofficial leader, was exercising her will as well, although it wasn’t nearly so visible. All I knew about that was that I smelled magic, and then there were parts of the ceiling that were just missing.

 

The hole was small at first, just a pinprick. Then more magic started tearing at the edges of that hole, and Aiko threw another grenade.

 

Katrin looked up, and I was close enough to see her expression when she realized what was happening. I’d expected horror, or wrath, but instead I saw a broad, beatific smile, maybe the first real smile I’d ever seen from her, as the sunlight fell on her face.

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It took a certain amount of work to convince the Wild Hunt to let the cub and his friends go. Not as much as I expected it to. The Hunt was already predisposed to leave him be, out of respect. It was in their nature to respect a predator, and he had adequately shown himself to be a predator this night.

 

People had always had a tendency to describe me as a leader of the Wild Hunt, or even a ruler of it. It amused me how badly they misunderstood it, how thoroughly they failed to grasp the basic concept of the Wild Hunt. It wasn’t something you could rule. You could lead only in the sense that the head of a spear leads the shaft. The Wild Hunt was made to be an entity unto itself, not to be subservient to the will of another.

 

It’s always made perfect sense to me. Which itself made sense, I supposed. My nature had always had something in common with that of the Hunt. It likely helped that I’d had the chance to discuss the topic with its creator. Or perhaps progenitor would be the more accurate way to phrase it; no concept as sterile as creation could be truly applicable to the Wild Hunt. But he had given me an understanding of what he made, at the same time as I had learned many other things.

 

I looked around, and saw the hole in the world, waiting to be pushed into being. As always, I saw it in only one eye; the second had been taken long ago.

 

I pressed against the weakness in the world as I rode forward, opening the hole. It led to a Way, one of the paths the gods had carved through the face of reality, tying their creation together. Slower than a direct portal, but simpler to use, requiring less power, and a great deal safer.

 

I didn’t look back to check whether the Wild Hunt was following as I entered the Way. It was a matter of confidence. Act as though no one could possibly question you, and no one will. Show weakness, show doubt, show even a moment’s hesitation and the mask shatters, the illusion of control gone in a heartbeat.

 

The Way was a short one, crossing a short distance between worlds that had a great deal in common. Through my other eye, I could see the magics holding it together, woven into the backbone of the world, as immutable as reality itself. You could as easily turn back time as argue with that magic. You could more easily tear the fabric of reality itself than pull the two worlds apart with this holding them together.

 

To someone else, that might have been a comforting thought. Having seen what happened when someone actually did, I found it less so.

 

Back in the lands of the fae, I turned and looked at my Wild Hunt. I could see each of them, and I could see the power that tied them together and made them a Hunt rather than just a group of hunters. It was as indestructible as the Way, though for an entirely different reason, almost the polar opposite. The Wild Hunt was so amorphous, so ill-defined and unstructured, that it couldn’t really be damaged. It took power from its lack of definition, rather than from being a definition.

 

“This night’s hunt is ended,” I said.

 

Towards the back, one of the Sidhe spoke up. “We have not hunted anything,” she said.

 

I turned my head to look at her, and she flinched away. Most people did when they met my gaze, though it had nothing to their reaction when they truly saw my face. Even with the blindfold, even with the power I’d woven into the blindfold, they could still sense the void that lay behind.

 

One eye taken long ago, in punishment for a crime so abstract that nothing mortal could really comprehend it. One eye given, in exchange for a greater sight.

 

“This night’s hunt is ended,” I said again. This time there were no objections.

 

I had lost something tonight. Something intangible, almost indefinable, but something that any fae, or anyone who had ever felt the touch of the Wild Hunt, would understand. It wasn’t precisely reputation, or honor, or prestige, or respect, although it incorporated elements of all of those things. You could touch the edges of it with the Roman concept of auctoritas, or the Chinese concept of guanxi, but neither one fully grasped the meaning.

 

What it meant in an immediate sense was that the next time I called the Wild Hunt, fewer hunters would come to my call. If I asked a favor, people would be more likely to make an excuse not to do it. If I gave advice, they would feel more free to ignore it.

 

In general, it meant that my words carried less weight.

 

On a larger scale, looking beyond the immediate consequence, it meant that the balance of power had shifted. It was a subtle thing, almost invisible to those not associated with the Wild Hunt already, but what had happened today would have consequences. Power had shifted away from me, in the great, intricate, infinitely complex game.

 

And on the greatest scale, it meant that the wheel had begun to turn. It was slow, quiet, so subtle that very few would have known it was happening at all, but I had a greater sight. I knew what this presaged, what it meant.

 

Fortune’s wheel had treated me kindly for a very long time, but now it had begun to pull me down. Slowly but surely, I would be brought low, crushed, and forgotten, as so many had before me.

 

I felt no great emotion at the thought. There was no anger, no anxiety, no dread, no sense of betrayal. I could recognize logically that a person might feel this way, I could even conceptualize what it might be like to feel these things, but that was all. The feelings themselves weren’t there.

 

It was not in my nature to feel anything. Mortals lived and died, and the world did not grieve their passing. Immortals came into being, were raised, and were cast down, and the world continued to turn.

 

One day even that would pass. The world itself would collapse, subsumed back into the chaos which had once given it birth. The end was already there, written into the structure of reality for those with the eyes to see. The world wound down to its ending, slowly but inexorably.

 

There was no emotion at the thought. There was no concern. It was not in my nature.

 

The distinction between a blessing and a curse has always been so very, very fine.

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The house burned hot and fast. When a section looked like it was dying out, the housecarls chucked a little more gasoline into the area, and the two fire mages focused their attentions on it.

 

I tried to ignore the fact that I could hear screaming coming from inside the fire. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. I’d known that the explosion couldn’t have killed everything, and I’d known that not everyone would have gotten out either to flee or attack. There would be people trapped inside where the exits were blocked, people who were crippled by their injuries, people who were just too scared to move.

 

I’d known all of that. And I’d given the order to burn it anyway.

 

It was the same problem I’d run into when attacking vampires before. I knew that not everyone in there deserved to burn. I knew that some of them were completely innocent victims.

 

But I also knew that some were monsters. Even the humans might be a risk I couldn’t afford. I knew that some of them willingly made themselves victims of the vampires for one reason or another. At worst, they collaborated with them, actively assisting them in hunting and killing other people.

 

And I had no way to tell the one group from the other. Not really. I could hope to catch them in a lie, but there was no guarantee it would work. I could try to quarantine them all, innocent and guilty, but I wasn’t sure what kind of quarantine measures I might need to take, and it would be a serious risk to try and search the house to take them in safely.

 

So I’d given the order to burn it. And them.

 

I stood and watched in grim silence as the screams slowly died out, until the only sound was the crackling of the flames. Anna seemed distinctly uncomfortable by my side; on the other side, Aiko showed no such signs of discomfort.

 

As for Jimmy and the other fire mage, they both looked dispassionate, caught up in the effort of their magic. A third mage had figured out what they were doing and walked up beside them. From what I could smell of his magic, and what I could feel in the air around me, he was directing the wind to keep a constant stream of fresh air flowing into the blaze. Smart; that would keep the fire healthy, keep it burning bright and hot.

 

Soon, the wreckage began to collapse further into itself. Key structural elements had been eaten away by the flames, and what was left was falling into pieces, being consumed by fire.

 

Jimmy paused and glanced back at me, apparently wondering whether they were done. I said nothing, gave no indication that I’d noticed, and he turned back to the fire, stoking it higher. All three of them were getting visibly tired, and I doubted they’d be good for much after this, but that was all right. I had plenty of metaphorical firepower without needing the literal stuff.

 

In the end, it took closer to twenty-five minutes than fifteen for me to be satisfied. There were still handful of timbers smoldering, sticking up from the ashes like the bones of a beached whale from the sand, but the house itself was gone.

 

It had been a tightly controlled demolition, I noted with some satisfaction. There had been a little bit of property damage from the explosion, and a few buildings were scarred by the fire, but nothing that would require a large amount of reconstruction.

 

“Good work,” I said, walking briskly up to the group of arsonists. “Now put it out.” I stumbled over my own feet when Anna looked away and left me blind, and she hurried to catch up to me. I hadn’t actually told any of the werewolves what was going on with my vision, but I was pretty sure they’d all noticed.

 

“Put it out?” Jimmy asked me, turning and staring. He was swaying on his feet a little, and I thought he’d pushed himself just about to the limit. It was gratifying, in a way, to know that he’d exerted himself that much to make something I wanted happen. I mean, it was probably more that he liked burning things than any actual obedience, but still.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re moving through there. Don’t tell me you can’t put fires out?”

 

He flushed and looked away. “I never really practiced that,” he muttered.

 

The other fire mage rolled his eyes and closed one hand into a fist. The fires died out in a few seconds, even the coals turning from red to black. “There you go,” he said.

 

“Great,” I said. “You three coming with or staying out here?”

 

“I think we could all use a chance to rest before another fight,” the same man said.

 

“No time,” I said. “Wait out here with anyone else who isn’t coming.”

 

I turned, and saw that the housecarls had already started to gather by the edge of the ash field, holding their weapons and smiling eagerly. I supposed that in a lot of ways they’d been waiting for this day as long as I had. They were the first on the scene, but others were already starting to join them there. The shapeshifters were there, the werewolves, Unna. The lieutenant was standing a short distance away with a dozen soldiers, and the leader of Pellegrini’s gangsters had a similar number of his own people.

 

“Okay,” I said, as much to myself as the mages. “It’s time. Let’s go.”

---

 

I led the way through the ashes, drawing on the jotun in me to bring the temperature down. The fire was out, but things were still hot. I cooled it down a little, and the housecarls following in a broad arc behind me cooled it down further, until it was almost comfortable by the time the rest got there.

 

As we walked, I catalogued what forces I still had available. There was me, obviously, and Aiko was there as well. All seven of the housecarls with me were still in shape to fight, as were all four werewolves. The three shapeshifters were the only members of the Inquisition who were still ready to fight, but there were five independent mages still standing, and they looked ready for blood. The lieutenant and the gangsters, after some rather tense and awkward discussion, had settled on bringing four men each and leaving the rest to guard the wounded and make sure nobody followed us down.

 

A sizable force, at least by my standards. I was honestly more concerned that we’d be getting in each other’s way than anything. Not much that I could do about it, though; I couldn’t exactly tell people that they weren’t welcome, not without losing a lot of goodwill.

 

The entrance to the basement was easy to find, although I suspected it hadn’t been when the house was still standing. The hole in the ground was large enough to drive a car through, the trapdoor little more than a memory.

 

The stairs leading down were marble, cracked and crazed by the heat. I doubted any traps would have survived that, if there had even been any traps to begin, but I went first just in case. I was probably the toughest person here by a considerable margin.

 

And besides, it fit the image.

 

Downstairs, I was surprised at how spacious it was. The hallway was wide enough to walk four abreast with enough space to move. I was still leading, with Aiko and Anna beside me. After that came the housecarls, then the soldiers, the mages, the gangsters, and the werewolves and shapeshifters bringing up the rear.

 

Theoretically, the formation would give the mages the most possible time to hit back before an attacker reached them. It wasn’t perfect—I was concerned about being attacked from above, or below, or the sides—but it was the best I could do on short notice.

 

And short notice was what we had. At most, it would be an hour before it ceased to be unambiguously daytime. If we were still down here when that happened, if we hadn’t killed the vampires yet, I wouldn’t lay money on any of us getting out alive.

 

The hallway was maybe forty feet long, all marble, unlit. Several people started digging for flashlights once we were out of the light, but one of the mages beat them to it, producing a golden light bright enough to hurt my eyes a little.

 

At the end of the hallway it forked, one path continuing straight while another split off to either side. The light didn’t show the end of any of the three paths.

 

“We should split up,” the lieutenant said behind me. “Send a group to clear each direction.”

 

I snorted. “Have you never watched a horror movie?” I asked. “We stick together and check each path in order. Follow me.”

 

Nobody argued, and I led us down the left-hand path first. I walked about fifty feet before stopping in front of a heavy oak door. It was locked, and not just casually. I counted two combination pad locks and three deadbolts, and I was guessing it was also barred from the inside.

 

“I can probably get that open,” someone said behind me.

 

I ignored them, summoning and drawing Tyrfing instead. It took three swings to cut through all the locks, and another two to get rid of the hinges, at which point the only thing keeping the door standing was inertia. I sheathed the sword and stepped up, pushing the door up and back. It slammed to the ground with an almost deafening crash.

 

“Or you could do that,” the person acknowledged.

 

I was grinning as I stepped inside.

 

That grin faded as soon as I was inside the room. It looked a lot like the last room I’d seen where vampires hid from the day. There were some beds scattered around, each of which had a single occupant. The vampires looked more dead than asleep.

 

There was one obvious difference, though. There was another person in the room, a girl sitting by the opposite wall. She looked human, maybe eighteen to twenty, dirty and disheveled, dressed in something like a hospital gown. She had a heavy steel collar around her neck, which in turn connected to a heavy steel chain that was bolted to the wall. From where she was chained, she couldn’t reach the door, or any of the beds.

 

“Oh, thank God,” she said breathlessly when I stepped in. “Let me out, please!”

 

“Don’t go near her,” I said, ignoring her and walking up to one of the beds. There were fifteen of them in this room alone.

 

Fifteen more vampires. Bloody hell, I’d underestimated Katrin’s forces.

 

“What?” the lieutenant asked. “We can’t leave her like that. Johnson, Pepper, go get her out of that thing.” Two of the soldiers started forward.

 

“Don’t go near her,” I said again. Tyrfing came down and took the first vampire’s head off. Around me, Aiko and the housecarls were moving through the room, going to the other beds.

 

The soldiers ignored me, walking up to the woman. One of them reached out towards her neck, apparently to try and get the collar off.

 

I was watching the whole thing, and it was still hard to say quite what had happened. One moment, she was just sitting there motionless while the man reached for her neck.

 

The next, she had her hand around his wrist, pulling him forward. He stumbled towards her and she stood, one hand wrapping around the man’s head, pulling him down to meet her as she rose.

 

It still looked almost innocent. It could have passed for a kiss, with the mouth just a little lower than just usual, on the bottom corner of the soldier’s jaw rather than his mouth. It could have, and likely it did to the other soldier, who stepped forward and reached out to separate them.

 

She reached out and caught him as well, grabbing the front of his vest. Then she lifted her head from the other man’s neck, and it became horribly apparent what had actually been happening. Her mouth was stained crimson, and more blood poured from the bite in his neck when she moved her mouth away. He crumpled to the ground without her holding him up, and lay on the ground in a heap.

 

The other soldier panicked and tried to push her away. He might as well have been pushing the wall for all the good it did him. She picked him up and swung him into the wall easily, although he must have been twice her size. She pinned him there against the wall with her hand on his throat as she leaned in and whispered something in his ear.

 

She dropped him a moment later. He collapsed to the ground, and even at this distance I could see that his throat was crushed. A rapid enough tracheotomy could conceivably save him, I supposed, but I doubted the opportunity would arise.

 

“Not very polite,” I said, watching her carefully. “Killing the people who wanted to let you out.”

 

She smiled, showing very red teeth. “They disobeyed an order,” she said sweetly. “That must be punished.”

 

I shook my head. “No. Don’t try to put this off on me. You were going to kill them whether I’d said anything or not.”

 

“Yes,” she admitted. “But that does not change the truth of what I said.”

 

I nodded. “Fair enough. So why are you in here? I’m guessing you’re fae, and I can’t imagine one of the fae would be wearing that collar willingly. But if you wanted out, you could have just let them unlock that collar.”

 

“Or maybe I couldn’t,” she said with a coy smile.

 

“Maybe not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you could tell me the exact terms of the oath you swore?”

 

The smile got a little wider, until she was showing white teeth behind the bloody ones. “Oh, someone’s clever,” she said. “I swore that I would protect these vampires as they slept, keep them safe in their refuge from the sun’s rays.”

 

I glanced around, and saw that all of the vampires were already done for. The housecarls had made quick, efficient work of it. “It seems to me that they’re rather beyond any protection you can offer,” I said. “Which means that your oath is completed.”

 

“Clever, clever,” she said happily. “I always find it so delightful when a human takes the time to think before he speaks.”

 

I didn’t bother correcting her on the human bit, mostly because I was pretty sure she already knew. The way she’d phrased that had pretty clearly been meant to imply that I was human without stating it. She was doing me a favor, in a way, keeping my secrets from the actual humans present, while also subtly threatening me with the possibility that she could stop keeping those secrets.

 

Or maybe I was just reading too much into it. But considering that this was one of the fae, I didn’t think that was terribly likely.

 

“I’m going to come over there and let you out now,” I said. “If you try to cause problems for me while I do, I swear that you’ll regret it.”

 

“I’ll be good this time,” she said. “Promise.”

 

I walked over, ignoring the people staring on me, and hoping that none of them would notice that Anna was still following at my heel and put two and two together.

 

It was a forlorn hope. I’d just put my hands on the collar when the fae gripped them and leaned forward a little to whisper in my ear. “Someone’s eyes don’t shine half so bright as they ought to,” she said, so quietly that I doubted Anna could understand her with lycanthropic hearing from five feet away. “Would the puppy like me to fix them for him? I could give him a new pair, if he liked.”

 

“I’ll keep my own,” I said, just as quietly. “I have it on excellent authority that this is a temporary condition.” I started probing the collar, looking for the lock. It only took a few seconds to find it, and a couple more to open it with a twist of hardened air. I could damn near have picked the thing with my fingers, it was so clumsy. She’d been kept bound by her own word, not the lock.

 

She looked at me with a disappointed moue on her face as the collar fell to the floor beside her. “Very well,” she murmured. “I’ll simply have to find another way to repay you, then. Goodbye for now, dear puppy.”

 

She stalked to the door, and her posture, her movements were so confident that everyone got out of her way without even quite seeming to realize what they’d done.

 

I bent down to look at the soldiers, and confirmed that they were both quite dead. A moment later someone else stepped up beside me. I glanced up, expecting to see Aiko there, but it was the lieutenant.

 

Not that I could see that. It was a reflex to look up, an instinct, the same as it had been a reflex to bend down to look at the soldiers. In both cases, the actual visual was coming from Anna.

 

“How’d you know what was going to happen?” he asked me quietly.

 

“I didn’t,” I said, straightening and turning to the door. “I hadn’t even really looked at her. My priority was making sure that none of the vampires were going to wake up. This is a war,” I said to the lieutenant, not looking back. “And it’s one where you don’t know the enemy, and you don’t know the rules. Keep ignoring the people who do, and those two won’t be the last people you lose today.”

 

The next hallway we checked was the one directly across from us. It was basically a mirror image of the first, and we treated it the same way. There was no fae chained to the wall this time, but that didn’t make me feel any less suspicious.

 

That suspicion turned out to be justified. We’d killed two vampires when suddenly one of them got up and threw itself at us. It killed three of the gangsters and threw Ryan into the wall hard enough to break bones before the woman the independent mages had chosen as their representative earlier got to it.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of magic she threw at it. It was something exotic, a more abstract sort of magic. But there wasn’t much vampire left when she was finished with it.

 

I kept watch as the housecarls finished the job. I was breathing hard, though I hadn’t had time to actually get involved the fight. In a way, that was what made it so stressful—what made every fight with a vampire so terrifying. They were just so fast. They could kill people before I could even react.

 

That one could have killed people I knew and cared about rather than gangsters I hadn’t even met, and there wouldn’t have been much I could do about it.

 

No wonder I was feeling a bit stressed by it.

 

As we got ready to move on to the third branch of the hallway, I glanced over the group, then paused. The headcount was off.

 

I looked again, and again after that, with an increasing sense of desperation, but my first impression had been correct. At some point during that last fight, Kyra had disappeared.

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At first the difference between the latest arrival and the previous monstrosities wasn’t obvious. It looked a great deal like the humanoid monsters, bipedal and generally human in shape, but with a twistedness to its body and a speed to its movement that no human could match. No one really noticed it at first. They were too busy with the creatures that had already reached us, keeping things under control.

 

But I noticed. I was watching the wreckage more than the fight, for this specific reason.

 

“Watch out!” I shouted. “Vampire incoming!”

 

Apparently said vampire heard me, because it stopped pretending to be even remotely close to human. It had been maybe a hundred and fifty feet when I shouted, far enough away to give us a comfortable amount of time before it reached us at its current pace.

 

It covered that distance in all of three seconds, and jumped over our front line entirely, landing somewhere behind our entire group.

 

I spun to face it, reaching for weapons and snarling curses.

 

I was just in time to see it land, a few feet behind the ranks of gunmen. They’d heard my warning, and some of them managed to turn and start shooting before it could move from where it landed.

 

It didn’t seem to matter. The vampire rushed forward into their midst, and I thought most of them missed, unable to compensate for the sheer speed with which the thing moved. The handful of rounds that did hit it didn’t have a noticeable effect. Gaping holes appeared in its flesh, but it didn’t slow, didn’t even seem inconvenienced by the damage.

 

The same could not be said for the gunmen. The vampire moved forward into their midst, laying about itself with all four limbs as it ran forward, and every blow sent a person sprawling, if not flying. It wasn’t using a weapon, but I couldn’t really think of anything that would have helped it anyway. As fast as it was moving, a gun would have just gotten in the way, slowed it down. As hard as it hit, a knife or sword would have just slowed it down for no reason.

 

Within a handful of seconds, it had cleared a large area around itself. Gangsters and soldiers, it didn’t seem to make a difference; everything it hit went down, and the ones that were standing back up weren’t doing so quickly.

 

And then it stopped, and looked at me. I’d gotten to within the area it had cleared for itself, and I was holding Tyrfing.

 

“Ah,” it said. “And the jarl stands for himself at last. It took you long enough.”

 

I didn’t say a word, just threw myself at it, slashing straight for its center of mass. It tried to dodge out of the way, but I’d aimed where I did for a reason. It had to move half its body sideways to avoid the sword.

 

Normally, it could probably have done it. Normally.

 

But it was still broad daylight out here. While this vamp was apparently old and powerful enough to function in the sunlight, I had no doubt that it was functioning at less than its best. It was barely faster than I was, where before when I’d fought vampires they’d left me so far behind that it wasn’t even close to being a fight.

 

The end result was that it dodged the worst of the blow. I didn’t cut it in half, the way I would have liked to.

 

But it lost its right arm from the elbow down, and I cut halfway through its thigh on that side as well. Blood gushed out of its body momentarily from the stump, before slowing to a trickle. It took another few steps to the side, stumbling a little, and then stopped and stared at me.

 

I lifted the sword to a ready position and smiled at it behind my helmet. The vamp hesitated only a moment before rushing forward again, one hand snapping out at my face.

 

I dodged aside, only to realize at the last moment that it hadn’t been aiming for me.

 

It snatched the raven off my shoulder, and crushed it between its fingers in a heartbeat.

 

Instantly, I was blind again, and reeling from the pain I felt transmitted from the raven’s mind in the last instants of its life. I scrambled for other ways to piece together an image of my surroundings, focusing my magic to find another animal to look through, or enough awareness of air currents to track motion.

 

The pain made me slow and clumsy. I hadn’t gotten anything together when I felt a heavy impact to my abdomen. It didn’t penetrate the armor, but it picked me up and threw me backward. I landed hard on something soft.

 

I laid there for a few seconds, getting my head in gear and figuring out how to see. After a couple of seconds I managed to get a solid connection to the werewolves.

 

It gave me an odd, kaleidoscopic view of the battle. I was connected to the pack, rather than any individual, and the difference was incredible. I was simultaneously processing input from Kyra, Anna, Ryan, and Daniell, and they were all looking in different directions. I’d never have been able to manage it if I hadn’t been practicing handling multiple inputs, information from multiple animals at once, and even as it was it was a little dizzying.

 

Ryan was still watching the battle below. He’d been one of the ranged combatants this time around, using his submachine gun, and he had the ingrained discipline to keep to his role even when there was a fight with a vampire raging behind him.

 

Through his eyes, I could see that the mass of ghouls and monsters was still contained. They weren’t being shot nearly as much now that most of the soldiers and gangsters were down, but the barrage of gunfire had done enough to slow them down and weaken them that the housecarls could keep things under control. Some of them were injured, but I didn’t think any were down entirely.

 

Kyra, on the other hand, was in the thick of things, fighting beside the jötnar. In the moment I made contact, she was biting a ghoul’s shin. She bit down hard enough to crack the bone, then twisted, pulling the bone to pieces. When she let go her teeth pulled chunks of flesh loose, and the ghoul had barely been free for half a second when she lunged upward, catching it a little higher on the leg. She repeated the process three more times over the next couple seconds, pulling the monster down and leaving its leg as little more than shredded meat.

 

I didn’t see as much from her angle. But I did gain a renewed appreciation for what a werewolf was capable of in a melee.

 

Next was Anna. She’d been hanging back a little, taking a breather, at the moment that the vampire had attacked, and as a result she’d been free to turn and watch. At the moment she was mostly watching me, so I could see myself from the outside. It was a little strange, but it let me figure out where I was. I’d landed a short distance away from where I’d been standing, on top of a pair of downed gangsters. It was hard to say whether they were alive or dead at a distance and I didn’t have time to check myself, but they weren’t moving.

 

And last of the werewolves was Daniell. Like Anna, she’d been watching what happened behind the lines, but her focus was more on the vampire than me. She was running up to it now, running even faster than it had. Smart choice, given that she was one of the very few people quick enough to pose a meaningful threat to it.

 

I was still trying to stand when she jumped on it, biting and tearing. It tried to swat her away with its remaining arm, but she twisted aside with almost unbelievable agility, falling to the ground and then lunging forward again. She caught its already-wounded leg and bit deeply, tearing away another large chunk of meat.

 

Apparently the vampire had had enough of that, because it jumped again, a freakish fifteen-foot-high leap that carried it right over Daniell’s head.

 

The werewolf spun just in time to watch it come down in the midst of the mages. Once again, it didn’t hesitate a moment before lashing out. It caught the independent mage who’d been providing the force magic with its sole remaining hand and ripped his throat open to the spine, then swung its fist into the side of Doug’s head hard enough to cave the man’s skull in.

 

The force mage was dying, obviously and rapidly. But his face was locked in an expression of grim determination, something almost frightening to behold, and he was still standing. He threw his magic at the vampire, and I could smell it from here, disinfectant touched with the scents of blood and death. He landed only a glancing blow, I was pretty sure, but it still smashed the monster to the ground hard. The next hit visibly shattered most of its bones.

 

Some part of me was aware that this was magic on a scale I’d seldom seen. His attacks on the ghouls had been powerful, but nothing like this, and he should have been getting tired, not building up steam. He was using blood magic, had to be, throwing his life behind his magic. Made sense, I supposed; he was dying anyway.

 

The rest of me was too busy staring at Doug as he crumpled to the ground. I’d never been too close to him; he was nice, and a genuinely good person, while I could claim neither. But I’d gotten to know him fairly well while we were working together, and I’d liked the big guy. He was a decent sort.

 

And now he was dead, as fast as that. That kind of brain damage was the sort of thing that killed almost instantly, and there wasn’t anything much I could do about it. Not even magic was going to fix this. He was gone.

 

The force mage let out a final gasp and then collapsed. He’d bought some time with his life, but the vampire was still moving. Even with most of its bones broken, it was still trying to stand.

 

Mac was the next closest mage. She watched the force mage die. She spent a long moment staring at Doug, or rather at Doug’s corpse.

 

And then I saw something I’d never expected to see.

 

I saw Mac use her magic offensively.

 

She stretched out one hand towards the vampire, her mouth set in a hard line. A gentle white light glowed around her hand, twining between her fingers like streamers of luminescent cloud. I smelled her magic as well as I started to jog towards the scene—I wasn’t quite up to running just yet, not without risking an embarrassing fall.

 

There was something odd about it, though. The normally mild scent of her magic was touched with something darker this time, something very much akin to blood.

 

In fact, it smelled uncomfortably similar to the tone that had been in the force mage’s magic in the instants before he died. It smelled an awful lot like blood magic.

 

The vampire slowed dramatically. It was still moving, but there was less purpose to it now, less focus. It started to stand, then slipped and fell again.

 

I was moving as quickly as I could, but Aiko was closer, faster on her feet, and not blind. She reached the vampire before I was even close, and thrust her katana squarely through its neck.

 

It collapsed back to the ground as she severed the spinal cord. A moment later she pulled the blade out and thrust again, stabbing it through the heart this time.

 

It took only a few seconds for the last of the ghouls to be mopped up. A handful of the jötnar were injured, none of them seriously. The werewolves and shapeshifters were untouched by the battle, to all appearances.

 

I took the time to decapitate the vampire completely, and doused the body in holy water just to be careful.

 

Lieutenant Delaney found me there. Anna was standing beside me, providing me with eyes. She turned to watch as he got close. I didn’t bother. I didn’t need to with her watching him, and this would help my image.

 

“That was a vampire?” he asked quietly, watching me.

 

“Yep,” I said, dumping the last of the holy water on the body. I couldn’t have said whether it was working, but it probably didn’t matter. It was decapitated, and the heart was completely destroyed and removed. That was enough to kill even a vampire.

 

“Are they always that tough?”

 

I snorted. “Usually they’re a hell of a lot worse than that,” I said dryly. “That’s why we’re doing this in the daytime. It makes it easy.”

 

He stared. “Jesus motherfucking Christ,” he said. “That thing killed half my men. That was it being easy?”

 

“Yep,” I said. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it was. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are some people I need to talk to. Preparations to make.” I started walking away.

 

“Preparations for what?” he asked, hurrying to keep up.

 

I didn’t glance back, although Anna did, giving me a look at him anyway. “You didn’t think this was over, did you?” I asked. “We’re going to finish the job. I’ll understand if you don’t want to participate any more.”

 

He paused, then nodded. “There are more of those things here,” he said. “This city won’t be safe until they’re dead.”

 

“Good,” I said. “Glad to have you with us. Go and take care of your people, get ready. We’ll be going in in about fifteen minutes.”

 

He left, and we kept walking. Aiko found us within a few moments, and we walked up to the mages together.

 

They were gathered in a clump around the bodies of Doug and the force mage. It looked like half of them were in mourning, and the other half were pissed.

 

I was pleased to see that second group. It was selfish of me, maybe, but I couldn’t help but think that pissed was good. I could use pissed.

 

“Hey,” I said. “Who here’s good with fire?”

 

Jimmy raised his hand without looking away from Doug. A moment later, so did another mage, one of the independents.

 

“Good,” I said. “Come with me.” I walked away without waiting for an answer.

 

At the wreckage of the house, the housecarls were dousing things in accelerant under Kyi’s direction, while the werewolves stood guard. They carried jugs of gasoline and kerosene from the cars and splashed them generously on the building. Kjaran set a crate on the ground and then started pulling out water balloons full of gasoline and holy water. He tossed them onto the wreckage in places that the housecarls couldn’t get, or threw them through windows.

 

“We’re going to torch the building,” I said needlessly. “I want you two to make sure it burns fast, and it burns completely. In fifteen minutes, I don’t want there to be anything here but ashes. Are we clear?”

 

Jimmy nodded, a wide pyromaniac’s grin on his face. After a moment, the independent mage followed suit.

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The scene outside the building was a madhouse by the time I got there. There were jötnar running around, a group of werewolves loitering next to a selkie, some mages. To say that it was chaotic would be a spectacular understatement.

 

I looked for an island of sanity in the midst of the madness, and found it in the form of Kyi. The housecarl was standing on the sidelines, watching. I walked up, and she turned to face me, nodding. “Jarl,” she said. “Why is there a raven on your shoulder?”

 

“Not your problem,” I said. “Situation?”

 

“We’re getting into position for the assault,” she said. “We’ve got most of the stuff you asked for distributed.”

 

“What’s missing?” I asked, frowning.

 

“Garlic.”

 

My frown deepened, and I pulled my cell phone out, dialing Tindr. “Garlic,” I snapped the second he answered. “Where is it?”

 

“I’m sorry, jarl,” he replied. “I couldn’t—”

 

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t want excuses. I want garlic. Make it happen and get it here now.” I hung up before he could say anything else. “Okay,” I said to Kyi. “That’s in the works. How many people do we have here?”

 

“For housecarls there’s me, Vigdis, Kjaran, Herjolfr, Thraslaug, Brandulfr, and Nóttolfr. All of the Inquisition mages are here, and the independent factions sent another eight between them. Four werewolves and a selkie.”

 

“Good,” I said. “Any word from Pellegrini or Frishberg?”

 

Kyi hesitated. “Maybe,” she said. “There are some humans over there that wanted to talk to you. I didn’t want to make any deals or anything without you, so they’re still waiting.” She pointed.

 

“Good,” I said. “Keep getting everything ready, and look for someone to be showing up with garlic. I’m going to go talk to them.”

 

“Does garlic even do anything to vampires?” Aiko wondered as we walked.

 

“Beats me,” I said. “But I want every advantage I can get. Garlic’s cheap.”

 

We passed in front of the Inquisition mages first. There weren’t as many as there used to be. All three shapeshifters had survived, oddly enough, which gave me a hawk, a bear, and a wolf. Jimmy provided very literal firepower, and while Doug’s control of plants and plant products was unlikely to be terribly useful here, he had some valuable secondary abilities. Aubrey probably couldn’t affect a vampire directly, given how alien and inhuman their mental functions were, but he could keep track of people and maybe handle communications in a pinch. Even Mac was there, to my surprise. I was certain that she wasn’t going to be going inside, but as field medics went, we could do a lot worse.

 

I didn’t stop or say anything to them. There were problems that could be fixed, and there were problems that couldn’t. My issues with the Inquisition were the second kind. Talking was more likely to make things worse than better, and I couldn’t afford that right now.

 

Next was the werewolves. Here I did stop, taking a hard look at them. It had occurred to me that a certain sort of person might try to slip an infiltrator in among this group, with the assumption that people wouldn’t be able to tell one werewolf in fur from another. But I recognized all of them. Kyra was wearing the heavy, custom-made armor I’d given her for her last birthday, giving her a grim, intimidating look. Daniell was smaller and leaner, built for quickness rather than strength, and Anna was somewhere in between. Ryan, back on two feet, and Unna rounded out the group.

 

“Status?” I asked.

 

“Ready when you are, sir,” Ryan. said. I noticed with some amusement that he’d fallen right back into old habits. His posture could have been the picture in a military textbook describing attention, and he was calling me sir again.

 

“You’ve got holy water?” I asked.

 

“Yes, sir,” Ryan said, touching the squirt gun on one hip, then the water balloons on the other. They looked a little comical next to a submachine gun and a handful of fragmentation grenades, respectively, but Ryan didn’t seem at all awkward about it. Unna just smiled, showing small, sharp teeth, and nodded. The motion was a quick bob, something that made me think of a bird more than a human.

 

“Good,” I said. “Be ready.”

 

Anna fell in on my left side as we walked away, butting her head against my thigh as we walked. It felt good, in an odd way. It wasn’t the same as having Snowflake there, but I’d gotten used to having Aiko on one side and a canine on the other in situations like this one. Going back to that was strangely comforting.

 

Next up was the independent faction. If you could even call it that; they were standing together, but it wasn’t the same as the other groups. There was none of that sense of solidarity. There was a subtle but noticeable distance between them, a sense of distrust bordering on barely-hidden hostility.

 

“Status?” I asked them.

 

“We’re ready,” one of them asked. He was shorter than I was, and stocky, but there was a solidity about him. I couldn’t phrase it any better than that, couldn’t even put my finger on what it was. It was just that I looked at him and got the impression that he was sturdy, like there just wasn’t a whole lot that would really phase him.

 

“How many of you have fought vampires before?” I asked.

 

There were eight mages there. Seven hands went up, and the only one who didn’t raise his hand still looked perfectly confident. He might not have fought vampires, but I was guessing he’d done his share of fighting and then some.

 

It was kind of nice to have some people who really knew what they were doing there. Eight mages who knew what they were fighting and how to deal with it was a significant force, and this group smelled considerably stronger than the Inquisition, overall.

 

“Good,” I said. “Be ready. We’re making final preparations for the assault now.”

 

Which, finally, left only the humans. There were two groups, both at a distance from the preparations going on around the building, although they were maintaining a distance from each other. There was definitely no kind of trust between them, judging by the way they treated each other. Both groups were gathered around vehicles, but the vehicles in question didn’t have much in common. One was a fleet of anonymous black SUVs, while the other consisted of military-style jeeps.

 

I went for the SUVs first. A guy in black body armor was lounging against one of them. He didn’t have any visible weapons, but I was confident he was carrying something where it couldn’t easily be seen.

 

He wasn’t the only one there, but his posture suggested that he was the leader, and that impression was reinforced when he waved at me. So he was the one I walked up to.

 

“Nice dog,” he said casually.

 

Anna bristled, hackles raising. I rested one hand on her head, reminding her of where she was, and watched the man in armor. He was looking at Anna, but there was no fear or surprise in his cool, flat grey eyes.

 

“You know better than that,” I said, fully confident that I was right. “Next time you go fishing for a reaction from a werewolf, there are probably smarter ways to go about it than that.”

 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. His voice was just as casual as before, blank and dispassionate in the same way his eyes were.

 

“Why are you here?” I asked, not making an effort to sound polite or friendly.

 

“Mr. Pellegrini felt you could use some assistance,” he said.

 

“You’re here to help with the assault?” I asked.

 

He smiled. It didn’t touch his eyes at all. “That would be illegal. But I’m sure some of us are prepared to defend ourselves in the case of an attack. That would only be reasonable, with how dangerous the roads are recently.”

 

“I expect you to follow my orders while you’re here,” I said. “You and all your people. Clear?”

 

“Crystal,” he drawled. “We’ll follow your orders right up until they contradict our instructions from Mr. Pellegrini.”

 

“Fair enough,” I said. “You see the woman over there? Tattoos, carrying a compound bow, telling people what to do? Go tell her I sent you to pick up armaments.”

 

“We’ve got our own stuff,” he said. “No worries.”

 

I stared at him for a long, quiet moment. “That wasn’t a request,” I said. “Now get over there.”

 

He stiffened and glared at me for a moment, then nodded.

 

I went to the next group.

 

This one had a much different vibe to it, much more organized and formal. There were groups of people standing together by each of the vehicles. They talked quietly to each other, moved around a little, but they stayed in their groups, and they were obviously ready to move at a moment’s notice. They were all wearing identical uniforms, carrying identical rifles.

 

They looked uncomfortably military. I hadn’t really dealt with the military before.

 

I didn’t have to look for the person in charge here. The hierarchy was pretty obvious, and if it hadn’t been, I’d still have known when he walked over to meet me as I approached. He was young, maybe early twenties, with blond hair shaved close to his head and blueish eyes.

 

“Who are you?” I asked, stopping a short distance away.

 

“Second Lieutenant William Delaney,” he said, saluting. Literally saluting. “Platoon leader, Tenth Special Forces Group.”

 

I bit back a sigh, and resisted the urge to rub my forehead. It wouldn’t do any good anyway, given that I was wearing a helmet. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

 

“Sir, it is our understanding that you are preparing to lead an assault upon a fortified enemy location. I have been assigned to support you.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “And why exactly is the Army supporting me over her?”

 

“Sir, I am not privy to that information.”

 

“Oh, come off it,” I said wearily. “You might not have been there for the meeting, but you know the gist of what they decided. Give.”

 

“If I had to guess, sir? You don’t have the authority to do what you’re doing, but at least there will still be a city when you’re done.”

 

I nodded. “Fair enough,” I said. “How much support, exactly?”

 

“Anything within reason, sir.”

 

“Cool,” I said, eyeing the building we were here to assault. It was a big, old house, the sort that probably dated back a hundred and fifty years or more. It had been remodeled a few times since then, but the basic structure was the same. “I don’t suppose you have any explosives?”

---

 

About half an hour later, I was standing a little less than two hundred feet away, surrounded by a small group of very, very scary people. Each of the major groups involved in the assault had a person there to coordinate things. Kyi was representing the housecarls, and Kyra was there for the werewolves. Those two were the closest to me, literally and metaphorically.

 

The rest were a little further away. Pellegrini’s chief thug and Lieutenant Delaney were standing on opposite sides of the group, very carefully ignoring each other. Aubrey was there for the Inquisition, more because he didn’t have a place in the thick of things and I could tolerate his presence reasonably well than because he had any kind of leadership role. The independent mages, after considerable discussion, had settled on a tall, slender woman I didn’t know as their representative.

 

Aiko was there as well, as was Anna. But that was different. They were with me, not just acting as liaisons.

“The evacuation is complete?” I asked. “We’re sure?”

 

“Absolutely, jarl,” Kyi said.

 

“Good. Everyone is equipped and briefed on their role?”

 

There was a chorus of responses from that, all of which were some flavor of affirmative.

 

“Good,” I said again. “Lieutenant, I believe that’s your cue.”

 

He nodded and lifted a radio to his mouth, muttering into it. I didn’t bother trying to parse what he was saying. I didn’t know military jargon, and all that really mattered was that he was giving the order to begin.

 

A few seconds later, the explosives went off.

 

This was nothing like the last time we’d blown up a vampire’s lair. Those had been demolition explosives repurposed as weapons, and they’d been deployed with the intention of damaging the building rather than destroying it.

 

These were military-grade, and they’d been set out by someone who knew what they were doing with the specific intent of leveling the place. It was a whole different ballgame.

 

Two hundred feet away, the noise was still something painful. I had to make a considerable effort to keep the raven on my shoulder, acting as my eyes, when it wanted to fly away from the blast.

 

The effect on the house, though, was considerably more pronounced. It shattered, and the whole thing started to collapse in on itself in a cloud of dust and smoke.

 

“Be ready,” I said quietly. Well, quietly compared to the explosion, anyway. “It isn’t over.”

 

For several long seconds, nothing happened, and I almost thought it really was going to be that easy.

 

Then monsters started pouring out of the wreckage. Some of them looked like humans, at least superficially. But they didn’t move like humans, not in the slightest. They picked up timbers that must have weighed fifty or a hundred pounds and tossed them aside like nothing, just flicked them out of the way. Behind them came creatures that instead mocked dogs, but too large, too fast, and apparently unfazed by the building being blown up around them. After them came ghouls.

 

Most of the creatures were injured, some of them grievously. But they didn’t seem to care, didn’t hesitate, showed no signs of pain.

 

I had to admit, I was impressed by how smooth the reaction was. I’d expected Pellegrini’s men and the soldiers to hesitate, unable to deal with something so far outside of their comfort zone. And, to a certain extent, they did.

 

But after only a few seconds, they lifted weapons and started shooting.

 

There were about forty soldiers, and a comparable number of gangsters. Most of them were using automatic weapons, and while they were firing in short, controlled bursts, it still translated to a whole lot of bullets flying downrange.

 

But they’d gotten the orders I passed on. They shot long past the point where they would have stopped if they were shooting at humans. They shot until they were out of ammo, and then they started reloading to shoot some more.

 

It did some good. Some of the creatures, mostly those in the leading ranks, fell and didn’t stand back up. They were tough and they didn’t feel pain, but there was a certain degree of damage where that didn’t matter anymore. Once enough muscles and bones have been destroyed, you can’t stand up, period.

 

I wasn’t sure how many of them were actually dead, of course. The ghouls could probably recover given the opportunity, and if the other creatures were comparably sturdy the gunfire might have barely killed any of them. But it slowed them down, and it took some of them out of the fight. That was worth something.

 

But they couldn’t keep up constant fire. They had to reload. And these things were crazy enough to just keep charging right through the bullets, running towards us at full speed even as their fellows fell to the ground around them.

 

It only took a short time for them to reach us.

 

Our front line consisted of the housecarls, with the werewolves and shapeshifters mixed in for support. As the enemy got closer Kyra and Anna ran down to join in, providing a bit of much-needed bulk to the line.

 

There was a big part of me that wanted to do the same. I could contribute, maybe more than anyone else right now. This was the kind of fight that I excelled at.

 

But I was more valuable here, watching and coordinating, and waiting in case something nastier came out of the ruins of the house next.

 

They reached our front line, and the jötnar went to work, cutting them down and pushing them back. They’d heard my orders as well, and they followed them, focusing on defense more than doing lots of damage. They pushed the attackers away, picked them up and threw them bodily backwards. Here and there an axe or sword connected and took off limbs or heads. Decapitation was enough to finish most of them, but hard to manage. Taking off limbs didn’t put them down, and the wounds didn’t bleed nearly as much as they should, but once a creature had lost two or three they weren’t nearly as much of a threat.

 

Again, tactics had to be adapted based on the enemy’s capabilities. With foes like this, you had to assume that they’d keep fighting no matter what you did. Bleeding wounds, painful wounds, scary wounds, these things didn’t mean anything. You had to either kill them quickly or else just focus on making it so they weren’t physically capable of continuing the fight.

 

Where the fighting got particularly intense, or the enemy looked like they might break through, a werewolf or a shapeshifter was quick to jump in, tearing the creatures to pieces and throwing them away. They were the shock troops, not as good on defense, but when they hit back it was devastating. I’d expected Kris to play more of a scouting role, but I’d been forgetting just how much she’d practiced with her abilities. She got right into the thick of things, tearing at warped men and dogs with massive claws, knocking ghouls over and tossing them around.

 

And the whole while, the soldiers and gangsters kept right on shooting. They had to be more careful now, keeping their shots well away from the front, but still did plenty of damage. More and more creatures were falling now.

 

Then one of the mages stepped in, lashing out with raw invisible force. These blasts did more damage than anything yet, shattering creatures and tossing them through the air, leaving them lying on the ground like broken toys. One of them hit a ghouls straight-on, and the thing flew into the air. It didn’t land for a solid thirty seconds, and when it did it splattered.

 

All things considered, we were doing almost ridiculously well. We’d weathered their initial assault without a single casualty, and we’d almost wiped them out. And that wasn’t even considering how many of them we’d killed with the first explosion, taking the house down. I had a strong suspicion that the reason everything we were fighting was so tough was because anything else hadn’t made it through the demolition.

 

And then, just like I’d guessed, something nastier came out.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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I opened my eyes and caught my breath.

 

Always, the dreams are the same. Fire and blood, death and screaming. A moment caught in time so very long ago. I had seen many more since that time, but the first wound cut the deepest. So it always goes.

 

I stood up and dressed myself, my motions rote and mechanical. A simple grey kimono with a delicate floral pattern embroidered in black and white. Comfortable, casual, not suitable for leaving my home, but perfectly appropriate otherwise.

 

Having dressed, I went to the shrine. Set in a small room to the side, where visitors seldom had cause to inquire what lay behind that door, it was a relatively small and humble shrine. A wooden torii, made from a naturally crimson padauk, stood just inside the door. At the other side of the room was a simple wooden altar.

 

I took the bowl of inarizushi from the stand by the door and walked to the altar. I cooked the inarizushi before I went to sleep, the same as I do each night, so that now I could place it on the altar as a fresh offering, the same as I do each morning. On either side of the bowl a wooden fox statue seemed to watch with sightless eyes as I placed the fried tofu between them. One statue held a fox cub in its mouth, while the other rested one paw upon a carved jewel.

 

As I did each morning, I touched my own jewel, set in a fine golden chain around my neck. It brimmed with power, vibrating gently against my fingertips. There was a shimmer to the stone that had nothing to do with reflected light, although in the daylight it was barely noticeable.

 

Not all kitsune keep a star ball, although it is traditional. Many younger kitsune don’t. It takes a great deal of effort to create one, and though it does make one stronger, it also comes with a dependence that many of the younger generations prefer to avoid. There are many, many stories of kitsune investing too much of themselves in their star balls and dying from the loss of them.

 

Reassured once again that I was in no danger of this fate, I knelt before the altar and began to pray, as I did each morning. The same position, the same prayer. Let my family be at peace by your side, I prayed. Let my daughter come home to me someday. Let me be cleansed of sorrow and of anger. A simple prayer, but heartfelt. The best sort of prayer, I felt.

 

There was a part of me that wondered whether there was a purpose to it. I hadn’t spoken to my deity in nearly three hundred years. No one had spoken to Inari in that time, nor had anyone an idea what had happened to the kami. I still felt lost and alone, lacking guidance in a world where I needed it more than ever.

 

But the inarizushi was still gone from the bowl each day.

 

After I had finished that, I stood and adjusted my kimono, making sure that it was neat, and then walked out of the shrine and down the stairs into the public area of my home. Every motion was precise and graceful, turned into a ritual by thousands and thousands of repetitions.

 

Ritual, tradition, and routine were the cornerstones of my life. They were a refuge when a thousand years of life pressed too heavy on my mind, and I could not help seeing fire and death in my mind’s eye.

 

In the kitchen Katsunaga was almost finished making breakfast, as he usually was by the time I arrived. He’s too restless to sleep long or deeply, and he’s made a point of cooking for me ever since he realized he could irk me by doing so.

 

In truth, I no longer objected to it, though it would be more in keeping with tradition for me to do the work. Katsunaga was much better at it than I.

 

“Good morning, dear,” he said in English as I entered the room. “Any word from our absent lord and master?”

 

“No more than ever,” I replied in the language of my youth. It was Japanese, or more accurately a distant ancestor of modern Japanese. Very few people understand it these days. Even Katsunaga had needed several months of practice to become comfortable with some of the antiquities of the language.

 

“Pity,” he said, with obvious and genuine disappointment. It isn’t obvious to a casual observer, and it took me nearly twenty years to realize, but Katsunaga was as devout a follower of Inari as I was. He simply didn’t feel the need to discuss it. He lived his devotion every day, playing the role the kami had given us as kitsune.

 

I had always suspected that he was responsible for the disappearance of my offering each day. I had no intention of asking him, though. Even a false hope was preferable to true despair.

 

“It is what it is,” I said, stepping past him to grab a bowl of food. It was a simple meal, fried tofu and udon with a koikuchi soy sauce. Very traditional, with none of the modernizations or foreign influences he often introduced to his cooking.

 

“True,” he sighed, taking a bowl for himself and following me out to the dining room. “But I still hope that things will change one day.”

 

“I know,” I said, setting my bowl on the table and returning to the kitchen for tea.

 

He caught my hand as I set his cup in front of him. “Don’t lose hope,” he said seriously. “I don’t want to see that happen to you. Things will get better again.”

 

“I know, love,” I said, sitting on the floor across from him and reaching for my bowl.

 

I did love him, for all our differences. I had dallied with humans in my youth, as many young kitsune did. It wasn’t hard to see why. They were so vibrant and full of life, burning brightly in the night. And, like all my kin did eventually, I learned that such dalliances can only end in tragedy. Our natures are too different.

 

This was better.

 

I ate my breakfast with, if not great joy, at least contentment. Thoughts of death and fire were far from my mind.

---

 

Later, I was sitting at a table folding an origami crane. It was a simple task, rote and repetitive, something I had done ten thousand times or more.

 

It was another shield against dark thoughts, essentially. My people had needed to know about what was happening in Russia, as it was now growing serious enough to present a serious threat to the lands we had traditionally protected. I had agreed, since there were so few other kitsune capable of gathering information from the area without losing their lives.

 

I had gone, and seen what there was to see, and reported it back to my cousins and peers. There were so few of us left from the old days. I had outlived so many of the kitsune I knew in my youth, and so many others had gone their own ways over the years, that there were now hardly any left. But I had shared what I knew with those who remained, as well as my elders and a handful of gifted younglings. They would spread the word further, ensuring everyone knew what was to be done if the problem couldn’t be resolved soon.

 

It was a necessary task, and one that I didn’t regret. But now I couldn’t get the images I’d seen out of my mind. There had been bodies, burned and crushed, torn limb from limb or simply dead with no signs of how they came to be so. So many bodies. Fires had smoldered in many places, even in areas where the fighting had ceased hours or days earlier, hiding the moon behind a pall of smoke.

 

It was far, far too close to remembering what had happened to my own family. Thus the origami. Anything, to give me a refuge from those memories.

 

Katsunaga knocked on the door, stepping inside a moment later. “I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I know you’re busy, but I think you’ll want to see this.”

 

I made two more folds, then set the completed crane on the table by the others. “What is it?” I asked, turning in my chair to look at him.

 

He handed me a plain white envelope of the sort that had become the standard among humans in recent years. “Aiko replied to one of your messages,” he said.

 

I stared. I almost asked whether this was his idea of a joke, but no. He wouldn’t do that. Not after the first time.

 

Eventually, I reached out and took the envelope. It was only through great discipline that I kept my fingers from shaking as I opened it and pulled the piece of paper out from inside.

 

It was a simple note, with no great meaning to the words. But it was in her handwriting, and she called me Mother.

 

I pressed my lips tightly together, returned the note to the envelope, and stood up.

 

“What are you doing?” Katsunaga asked, hurrying to follow me as I left.

 

“What do you think?” I asked, more snappishly than I usually would have. “I’m going to see our daughter. Something’s gone very wrong.”

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I never would have guessed it, but in an odd way, I was actually grateful to be blind. I’d picked up a stray cat on the way to the hospital, and I could have been looking through her eyes, but I wasn’t even doing that. It was easier to be blind.

 

Blind meant I couldn’t see Snowflake lying in a hospital bed like she was dying.

 

“She woke up earlier,” the attendant said. “Not for long, but she was awake.”

 

“Is that a good sign?”

 

There was a brief hesitation. “I think so?” he said. “I mean, I think it would be a good sign for a human. But I’m not a veterinarian, so I don’t have much experience with animals. I mean, I don’t really have much experience at all, but what I do have is with people.”

 

That phrasing annoyed me, but it wasn’t worth following up on. “You haven’t been a nurse long, then?” I asked. I wasn’t much good at small talk, typically, but at the moment I’d have done almost anything for a distraction.

 

“Eight months,” he admitted. “But you learn fast.”

 

“I’d imagine.” I thought for a moment, weighing and debating various options, and then came to a decision. “Get out, please,” I said.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Get out of this room,” I repeated. “Far enough away that you can’t hear anything going on in here. Go get lunch or something.”

 

“Why?” His tone was just a little belligerent, like he was offended that I would think that he was willing to abandon his patient.

 

“Because I told you to,” I said, with as much patience as I could muster. “And I’m thinking you’ve heard enough stories about me that you know better than to ignore me. Now hurry up.”

 

There was no reply, but I heard footsteps moving away, followed by the quiet click of the door closing. It was a perfectly normal sound, but context gave it an ominous sense of finality.

 

I dropped into the cat’s mind now, looking around. This was in part to check whether there was anyone else hiding quietly in the room, and in part because I really didn’t want to be blind for this if it worked, and mostly because it meant that I could put off the next part for a few more seconds.

 

Empty. There was nothing in the hospital room except for me, Snowflake, and a whole lot of medical equipment. She didn’t have quite so many tubes and monitors hooked up as the last time I’d seen her. That was a good sign, I was hoping.

 

It just wasn’t good enough.

 

“Loki,” I said. “Loki Lie-Crafter, Loki Sky-Traveler, Loki Laufeyjarson, I summon you.”

 

There was a long, pregnant pause. Then a voice behind me said, “Howdy. What can I do for ya?”

 

A voice. Not Loki’s voice, unless he’d changed it considerably.

 

I turned around slowly, managing not to jump or show other signs of surprise. I turned to face him more to maintain my image than anything, since I really didn’t need to. I’d already gotten a look at things through the stray cat’s eyes.

 

The being in the room looked like a man. He had sharp features, darkly tanned skin, and a broad, gap-toothed grin. He was wearing a black cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and a worn, battered leather jacket.

 

“Coyote,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

 

“You tell me,” he said. “Seein’ as you’re the one that called.”

 

“Not you.”

 

“Nope,” he agreed. “But Loki’s all tied up just now. He’s in a meetin’ with some of our peers to talk about whether he went too far with his little speech. So I figured I’d step in and see what it is you wanted, since he can’t.”

 

I frowned, thinking. Coyote had always, in my few interactions with him, come across as an easygoing, pleasant guy. But there was no way that was genuine, not with how old and powerful he was. If he was here, he wanted something.

 

But it was the only game in town, so I shrugged. “I was hoping I could get an answer from him,” I said. “As per our arrangement.”

 

“I don’t recall bein’ a part of this arrangement,” Coyote said. “But I hear you’ve done all right by the employee I sent your way. So go ahead and ask your question. Maybe I can help you out.”

 

“At what cost?”

 

He grinned a little wider. “Well, now, I reckon that’s going to depend on what you’re asking, don’t you? Come on, ask. We both know you’re gonna.”

 

I sighed. “What should I do to help her?” I asked, pointing at Snowflake. My aim was off by a few feet at least, but I figured he’d get the idea. “And don’t you dare say I should kill her or something like that. I’m not in the mood.”

 

Coyote shut his mouth, looking disappointed. “Well, shoot,” he said. “If you know the answer, why’d you ask?” He stood and looked at her for a moment, tapping one finger against his mouth. “I suppose I can handle this for you,” he said. “But you’ll owe me for this one, kid. You’ll owe me a favor, and when I come calling you don’t get to argue. Fair?”

 

It wasn’t remotely fair. Owing someone an unspecified favor of their choosing was maybe the single worst position to be in, in a bargaining sense. It was a situation I normally avoided like the plague.

 

But for Snowflake, it was worth it.

 

“Fair,” I said.

 

“I thought you’d agree with me,” he said. “Get the dog and let’s go.”

 

I disconnected Snowflake from the various machines, as carefully as I could, and picked her up. She didn’t stir, not even a little bit. I had the cat jump up onto my shoulder as I did, and then the three of us turned back to Coyote.

 

He was standing next to an Otherside portal, looking bored. “You ready yet?” he asked. If he was feeling any strain from holding the portal open, it didn’t show in his voice or posture.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Where are we going?”

 

“Where we need to be,” he said. “After you, please.”

 

I grimaced and stepped through.

 

Unexpectedly, the experience sucked. A lot. I didn’t pass out, the way I used to, but I felt a similar wave of nausea, and developed an instant headache. I staggered on the other side, almost tripping.

 

What the hell? I thought, trying to figure out what was different about it, why I should suffer this time, when for quite a while now crossing through a portal hadn’t been unpleasant at all.

 

And then I realized I was blind again, and it became clear. I pulled my mind out of the cat’s, and the feeling went away entirely. Of course. I’d figured out a way to get around the blindness, but now it was just making things worse. It was the same as the dilemma I’d noticed when I first woke up. I had the choice, it was just that both choices were terrible.

 

I could really get to hate the fae.

 

“What do you want?” a female voice snapped. “I mean I’m right in the middle of my lunch right now and now I have you here and bloody hell does that dog have a catheter? And that cat just started throwing up on my goddamn floor, do you have any idea how long it took me to get that floor clean?”

 

I paused. I couldn’t see to confirm it, but there was something about this that was…familiar.

 

“You’ll deal,” Coyote said. “These two have work for you. On my tab.”

 

“I hate having to deal with him,” the female said. I presumed that meant Coyote was gone. “Hey, wait. I know you. You’re the one came in a while ago with a kitsune. Poison, right? That was a fucking awful night.”

 

“I remember,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a rush here.”

 

“Well let’s take a look at this since apparently now I’m a veterinarian, really wish someone had fucking told me that because you know it really isn’t my area of expertise. Well, hurry up now, put her on the slab. Can’t do a whole hell of a lot just standing here can I?”

 

I hesitated, but there wasn’t much of a way around it. “I’m actually blind right now,” I said. I really hope it’s just right now, at least, I thought grimly.

 

“Oh of course you are, because this day just wasn’t bad enough already. I suppose you want me to take care of that in addition to everything the dog needs done?”

 

“That’d be nice,” I admitted. “But it’s a lower priority right now.”

 

She snorted rudely. “Well you’re on Coyote’s tab, and I don’t mind saying that I’m just as pleased to charge him through the nose so let’s go ahead and see what we can do while you’re here. But for now I need to take a look at the dog so come here.”

 

She grabbed my arm roughly, pulling me forward. I jerked away instinctively, caught by surprise, but her grip was surprisingly strong, and I didn’t even come close to shaking her off.

 

She tugged me on until I walked into the heavy stone slab she used as an operating table, and caught me when I lost my balance at that. I set Snowflake down carefully and backed away, giving her room to work.

 

“Condition’s stable,” she said after a minute or so. “Don’t know how she’d have done on her own, but I figure I can get her back to shape almost perfectly. Maybe a little brain damage but I’ll have to take a closer look to see for sure on that one and it’s going to take some time. Now get over here so I can see what’s going on with your eyes.”

 

I started to move, but before I could she’d grabbed me again and started pulling me to the side. I stumbled once or twice, but she caught me and held me up easily, despite being maybe half my size at the most.

 

“Okay,” she said. “Now lie down on the slab and let me take this cat, not very hygienic but I suppose that isn’t such a problem for you and I can always just splash some disinfectant in your eyes after we’re done, you’re a tough guy so you can take it.”

 

She snatched the limp weight of the cat off my shoulder, and I felt around for the slab before easing myself onto it. It was hard, and I suspected it would have felt cold to anyone else.

 

“All right,” she said, talking to herself more than me now. “Pull off the helmet, pull of the blindfold, and what do we have here?” My helmet hit the floor with a metallic clunk, and I felt her start to prod at my eyes. Her fingers, through the latex gloves, were uncomfortably warm, almost hot. I didn’t open them, and she didn’t try to make me. “Interesting bruising here,” she mused. “And a rather odd coloration. How did this happen?”

 

“I saw what’s under Blind Keith’s blindfold,” I said.

 

“Fascinating. What’s he look like?”

 

“I don’t remember.”

 

She sighed. “Of course not. I’m going to open your eyes now. Try not to do anything stupid.”

 

She pulled my eyelids up, and once again, the world just sort of…went away. I was drifting, without any real anchor, and I had no idea what was going on. That went on for several seconds as she poked at my eyes. I was aware that I should have found that unpleasant, but I couldn’t actually connect that to a feeling of discomfort.

 

A few seconds later, she let me go. “Well,” she said, “the good news is I’m pretty sure this is temporary. The bad news is that it’s going to take some time.”

 

“How much time?” I asked.

 

I could feel her fingers pull away from my face and then return as she shrugged. “Hard to say. A few months, maybe? Probably less than a year.”

 

“Months,” I said, with a sinking feeling. “I really can’t afford for this to last for months.”

 

She shrugged again. “I don’t know what to tell you. I mean I can maybe do something to speed it up but this specific curse isn’t one that I’m familiar with so I can’t say for sure what will happen. I’m like seventy percent sure it will speed things up at least a little, so it maybe takes a few weeks instead of months, but the other thirty percent I have no idea what happens. Maybe it cures you instantly, or maybe it makes this permanent.”

 

I debated for a few seconds, then sighed. As usual, I was borrowing against tomorrow to pay my dues today. But if I didn’t live through the next few months, which might well be the case if I were blind at a key moment, this might as well be permanent.

 

“Do it,” I said.

 

“Cool,” she said. “I mean it’s up to you and everything, but I really kinda want to see what happens.” She disappeared, returning several seconds later. “This will hurt,” she said, reaching for my face again.

 

I didn’t fight as she peeled my eyelids back again, taping them against my forehead. Then she dumped something onto my face.

 

It hurt. More specifically, it hurt the way I imagined having battery acid dumped straight into your eyes might hurt. And then it got worse. The battery acid was boiling now.

 

I screamed, and kept screaming until I lost consciousness.

---

 

Waking up was easier than I’d expected. Harder in some ways—I couldn’t blink, and that made it feel rather strange—but easier in others. Quicker, if nothing else. I didn’t need to think to remember where I was, or how I’d gotten there.

 

“How’d it work?” I asked, sitting up. I reached out and found the cat a moment later, giving me enough vision to determine that the doctor was standing by Snowflake doing something inexplicable with a syringe. The cat was watching it with a sort of bored amusement. She’d been fed recently.

 

“Not bad, not bad at all,” the doctor replied. “I’m like ninety percent that your eyes are getting better now. Faster than I thought they would, too. You should be good to take the bandages off in about a week, and your eyes should be working within a week or two after that. I mean not working perfectly, there’s going to be some sequelae and, you know, side effects and shit like that. But you’ll be able to see, sort of.”

 

“You,” I muttered, “do not have a comforting bedside manner.”

 

“Slabside,” she corrected me. “And you know people tell me that sometimes, but I’m still the best at what I do so they keep coming back. I just figure, you know, fuck it. This deal with the dog is going to take a while you know, maybe a week or two? You might as well go, come back later and pick her up.”

 

“How do I get back here?” I asked, standing up. I was a little dizzy, and my eyes felt like they were the size of tennis balls crammed into sockets that couldn’t begin to hold them, but overall I was better off than I’d expected.

 

“There’s a room over there, behind the curtain, for people to show up. Open a portal there. You can open a portal right?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can. Thanks.”

 

“Coyote’s paying,” she said, shrugging. “Oh, and leave the cat. I haven’t had one around in a while. It’s kinda nice you know, and it gives the kids something to cuddle with while I’m cutting them up.”

 

“I don’t think she’s that great at cuddling.”

 

“Neither am I,” the doctor said, grabbing a tool off the slab. She pushed a button and it started to spin, something like a tiny buzzsaw.

 

I decided to leave before I saw what she was planning to do with that. I took the time to study the alcove behind the curtain before I left, making sure I knew it well enough to open a portal there, and I left the cat behind.

 

“We’ve got them,” Kyi said excitedly. “Both of them, ninety-five percent confidence that we have the location of their headquarters.”

 

I started to look up, remembered, and borrowed a raven outside to do so instead. It was a little while after noon, early enough that it would be several hours before dusk. “Great,” I said. “We’re hitting Katrin’s base, ASAP. Call Kikuchi, Frishberg, Pellegrini, and the independent mages and see if any of them want to participate. Other than that, I want all of the Inquisition mages and about half the housecarls, the werewolves if they want to come. Leave the other housecarls, the ghouls, Jackal’s people, Jack, and any of the humans who can fight to defend this house.”

 

“Yes, my jarl,” she said, bowing slightly. “Which of the housecarls do you want with us?”

 

“You know what we’re likely to be facing here. Use your best judgment,” I said. “Selene!”

 

“Yes?” the succubus said, from right next to me. Apparently she’d been standing there all along, and I just hadn’t noticed.

 

I tried not to jump, and reminded myself that apologizing wasn’t something a jarl did. “Get equipment distributed,” I said. “I want everyone going on this raid carrying grenades, light sources, and at least one sharp edge to decapitate a vamp with. Anyone who can reliably use a holy symbol of some kind comes with us, and make sure they’re carrying them. Tindr!”

 

“Here, jarl,” Tindr said. He was a distance away, but I heard his footsteps approaching rapidly.

 

“Call every church and place of worship in town,” I said. “Everyone you can get in touch with. I want as much holy water and blessed objects as you can beg, borrow, or steal. Keep it separate, but distribute it out. I want everyone that goes with us to be carrying water balloons, squirt guns, anything you can come up with. Also, figure out a way to get everyone a head of garlic.” I looked around—well, turned my head around, at least. “Move, people!”

 

They ran off in different directions, all three of them shouting orders to their various underlings. I walked over and sat in my throne, smiling a little.

 

“Wow,” Aiko said, hugging me casually. “This is it, huh?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Open my eyes, and the world went away.

 

Close them, and things were normal again. I couldn’t see, but I had an awareness of what was going on, I could hear and smell and feel things.

 

Open, and the world faded. I lost track of anything that might have been happening. I couldn’t see, or hear, or smell, or even think beyond the most basic of concepts. The world was just a blur, passing me by without my really being aware of what was going on.

 

Okay, I thought, closing my eyes again. I can deal with this.

 

So what did I know? Well, first off, the Wild Hunt was gone, or more accurately I was gone from it. There was no way I could have missed the sort of constant sensory input that connection provided, and I wasn’t feeling anything of the sort now.

 

I wasn’t in the forest. Again, I would have known that. There were scents associated with that environment, very distinctive scents, and I wasn’t smelling them. There was no odor of pine, no rich aroma of decaying humus. Instead I got the scents of clean fabric and soap. I was naked, but I could feel cloth against my skin when I moved, something that felt like flannel. Sheets, most likely.

 

So I’d been moved, and I was in a bed. That could be a very good or a very bad sign, depending upon who’d moved me. I tried to figure that out, and at first I didn’t make much, if any, progress. I could hear voices, but they were quiet enough or distant enough that I couldn’t make out words or meaning. I tried to reach out and feel for any animals that could give me a glimpse of what was going on, but I accidentally opened my eyes partway through getting the magic together, and dashed my concentration to pieces.

 

Damn, that was annoying. It struck me suddenly that if this kept up for very long at all, I would need some sort of blindfold to hold my eyelids closed. That made me think of Blind Keith, and that reminded me that this might very well not be a temporary problem. He was fae, the most powerful and deadly sort of fae, and a curse from that sort of being had a tendency to be permanent.

 

I tried not to think about that. I needed to focus right now, needed to keep my mind on track, and if there was one thing that was absolutely guaranteed to make me lose that focus, the idea of being permanently blinded was right up there in terms of what it might be.

 

I took a breath, forcing myself to keep still and calm in case anyone unfriendly was watching and waiting for me to wake up, and started to gather my magic again. Then I paused, noticing another scent, one which was considerably more welcome than anything else I’d experienced since meeting up with Blind Keith. The main tone was werewolf, with hints of olive oil and oregano, familiar and comforting.

 

“Anna?” I said. My voice came out as a croak, only barely comprehensible as speech.

 

A moment later, she hugged me, squeezing hard enough that my ribs wanted to scream. Had they been broken recently enough that it was a problem? I couldn’t remember offhand, which worried me more than if I’d known for a fact that they had.

 

I’d been warned by a rustle of cloth, and thus I managed to keep from making any noise in response. But I still made the mistake of opening my eyes again as she hugged me, after which it took a few seconds to get them closed again and get my head in gear.

 

I could really get to hate this. It wasn’t just the blindness, although that was more than bad enough. It was the fact that I had to choose blindness. If I’d had any doubts that Blind Keith was fae to the core, this dispelled them. The way it forced me to choose between bad and worse, the way it took something that should have been good and made it instead a devastating weakness, it was all in line with how the fae did things.

 

I could really get to hate them.

 

“Oh, my God,” Anna said, letting me go. “You’re finally awake.”

 

“Finally?” I said, as flippantly as I could. “How long have I been asleep?” My voice still sounded horrid, but I thought it was getting better.

 

“Around twelve hours,” she told me. “We were starting to worry whether you’d wake up. And your eyes.”

 

Anna stopped talking very suddenly at that. I couldn’t see her face, obviously, but I would have bet that she had the classic oh, shit expression on. She’d said something she hadn’t meant to, and she’d very nearly said something that she really hadn’t meant to. And somehow I was very confident that I wanted to hear the next line even less than she wanted to say it.

 

But what I wanted didn’t have a whole lot to do with what I needed to know. So I took another deep breath and asked, “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

 

There was another long, quiet pause. “I’m not sure,” she said at last, and now she didn’t sound so happy. “None of us have ever seen anything quite like it before. Not even Edward. It almost makes me think of a broken hollandaise. It’s like everything’s still there, it’s just…not meshing together right.”

 

“Except this is my eyes,” I said quietly.

 

“Yeah,” she said. “Except for that.”

 

“I’m blind, by the way. Or as good as. I’ll need some kind of blindfold, I think. Actually opening my eyes just makes it worse.”

 

“With how they look, I’m not surprised,” she said tartly. “How did this even happen?”

 

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. Thinking back on it, there was just a gap. I couldn’t remember anything of what happened between the moment Blind Keith lifted his blindfold and the moment I woke up. “But if I had to guess, I looked at something I really shouldn’t have.”

 

“I thought it was something like that,” she said. She reached out and took my hand, holding it tightly. I couldn’t deny that I was a little grateful for it. I wasn’t normally the type to really express affection physically, but under the circumstances, that connection, that grounding in the rest of the world was very welcome.

 

“Is the pack all right?” I asked.

 

There was a pause before she said, “Yeah, we’re fine. Some bruises, but nothing serious. A couple of guys probably got a look at the same thing that put you down, but they woke up after a few hours, and their eyes were fine by this morning.”

 

So what was that pause about? I wondered. If things were that good, if everyone was fine, then what had made her hesitate to tell me so?

 

And then I realized that she hadn’t hesitated. She’d nodded, before realizing that that wasn’t enough, that I couldn’t see it. Because I couldn’t see.

 

There had to be some kind of cure, something I could do about this. This was…I was not prepared to go through life like this.

 

“So,” Anna said, and there was a hint of anger to her voice that made me sit up a little straighter. “I heard you asked Kyra for help with something back in Colorado. I heard this from Edward, because you specifically told Kyra not to tell me about it.”

 

I made the mistake of opening my eyes to gauge her expression, and lost another few seconds. “Yeah,” I said sheepishly once I’d managed to get myself together again. “Yeah, I did.” I reached out blindly and grabbed one of the sheets, wrapping it tightly around my face. It wasn’t an ideal blindfold, but it would do for the moment.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I thought that you’d want to help otherwise,” I said quietly. “And you don’t have enough experience to handle this.”

 

“How am I going to get experience if you won’t let me do anything?” she asked, sounding more exasperated than angry now. “I have to start somewhere, Winter.”

 

“This isn’t a good place to start. Things are bad right now. Maybe the worst I’ve ever seen.”

 

“Well, that’s what I have to work with,” she said. “Or do you think this is going to blow over? You think things are going to magically go back to the way they used to be? Because I don’t think that can happen.”

 

I sighed. “You’re right,” I said reluctantly. “I suppose I could bring you with me when I go back. But you’d have to listen when I tell you to do things.”

 

“No problem! I’ll go and get everything I need. You won’t regret this, Winter.”

 

I was already regretting it, but I didn’t say a thing as she scampered out of the room. I just sat there with a sheet wrapped tightly around my face to keep me from opening my eyes by accident, thinking about just how badly things had gone wrong.

 

A minute or so later, I heard footsteps approaching, followed by a creak as weight settled into the chair next to the bed. “You’re flashing everyone that walks by with how you pulled that blanket off,” Edward said a few moments later. “In case you care.”

 

I didn’t, really, but I shrugged the blanket back into position on the off chance that someone else would. “What happened after the fight?” I asked. “I sort of lost it there towards the end.”

 

There was a rustle of cloth suggesting that he’d shrugged. “Nothing much,” he said. “After you went down, the fighting mostly stopped. The Wild Hunt left after a minute or so. They didn’t really care about us, once you were taken out.”

 

Somehow it didn’t surprise me that he’d recognized the Wild Hunt. “There were no injuries?”

 

“Nothing major,” he said. “A handful of young wolves tried to handle something they weren’t ready for and got themselves beat up a little, but it’ll heal. That sort of thing happens when young wolves get themselves into messes they can’t handle.”

 

I sighed. “This is about Anna,” I stated. “You really aren’t good at subtle.”

 

“Nope,” he said, and I could almost hear him grinning. “But it’s a valid point. You really sure you should take her with you? Might not be doing her any favors, getting her into a fight against these sorts of people.”

 

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I don’t see what else I can do. She’s young, and she thinks she’s invincible. So she’s going to act like it until she realizes that there are much scarier things out there than werewolves. I’ve seen it before. I don’t really like it, but I figure it’s probably better that she work through that when I’m around in case something goes wrong than if she does it on her own.”

 

“Maybe,” he said. “God knows I’ve seen enough younglings that think they’re immortal. I don’t like it, but…maybe she’s right. Things aren’t getting better from here, not that I can see. Maybe she does need to learn how to live in the new world.” There was a long, heavy silence after that, before he said, “Take care of my pack, Winter.”

 

“I will,” I said. “As best I can. Do you know where my stuff is?”

 

“Right next to you,” he said. “Let me help you into it.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs off the bed. “And…do you have anything I could use for a blindfold? I really don’t think leaving without one is a good idea.”

 

“No problem,” he said, accompanied by a sound of tearing cloth. “Lean forward so I can tie this on.”

 

I did, and he tied it around my eyes. It was a strip of fabric torn from the sheet, longer than I needed and ragged-edged, but it was a lot more convenient than having the entire sheet trailing behind me, and it would keep me from opening my eyes by mistake.

 

“Thanks for this,” I said, as he handed me the pants and shirt I’d been wearing under the armor. “For the help, I mean. I didn’t mean to put your pack in any danger, but I had the Wild Hunt after me and I wasn’t sure what to do. I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, helping me into the armor. It was fairly involved process, pretty challenging to do by myself even when I could see all the buckles. “You’ve stuck your neck out for us a few times. As far as I’m concerned you’re as good as pack, and the pack looks out for its own.”

 

“Still,” I said. “Thanks.” A minute or two passed in silence as I finished donning my armor and checked that everything was on and secure. “Cloak?” I asked.

 

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

I frowned, and reached out for it with my magic. I’d made that cloak, and I knew it with an intimacy that was hard to even conceptualize, let alone describe. It wasn’t hard for me to feel it, pooled on the floor beside the bed.

 

I picked it up and draped it around my shoulders, reshaping it from a puddle back into a cloak, and making sure that all the weapons and tools that were supposed to be in it found their way back to the places I wanted them. The result wasn’t as pretty as it might have been if I’d been able to see, but I thought it was passable.

 

“Ah,” Edward said. “Cloak. Now I see what you mean.” He pressed something into my hand. By the feel of it, it was round, hard, maybe three feet long, and probably wooden. A cane. “This might help while your eyes are out of it,” he said.

 

“Yeah,” I said, although I didn’t like admitting it. “Thanks for the help.”

 

“Don’t mention it. Like I said, pack looks out for its own.”

 

“I know,” I said. “I will.”

---

 

Back in Colorado, the mansion looked like it had been the site of a pitched battle. I was looking at things through Anna’s eyes, which made the picture a little blurrier, but I could see enough to recognize that much. The building had taken a fair amount of damage, most of it cosmetic, but some of it structural. Nothing that concerning, in the immediate sense. The forest around the house hadn’t fared so well, with large areas being scarred by bullets, fires, or more exotic defenses.

 

Anna whined a little at the sight, and I picked up my pace slightly.

 

Inside, I went straight to the throne, ignoring the hush that fell over the room with my entrance. It wasn’t as busy as it had been a few days earlier, just after Loki’s pronouncement, but there was still a decently large number of people gathered there, talking, working. People read pages, scribbled on them, and then handed them to runners to be conveyed to the next person in line.

 

But when I walked in, the quiet hum of activity ceased entirely. It was a brief lull, but very noticeable.

 

I’d barely been on the throne a second before a trio appeared in front of me. Kyi bowed, Selene nodded, and Aiko hugged me tightly, slapped me across one armored cheek, and then sat down next to me.

 

“Okay,” I said. “What happened here?”

 

“Newton and his faction of the independents attacked us yesterday,” Selene said instantly. “Then Katrin led a raid on this location. Both attacks were rebuffed easily, and without any casualties or serious injuries.”

 

“We have people tracking them back to their hideouts?”

 

“Yes,” Kyi said. “Both groups. The werewolves, Vigdis, and Jackal’s people are all working on localizing them.”

 

“Good. Aside from those attacks, has anything of note happened?”

 

“Not really,” Kyi said. “We’ve been focusing primarily on maintaining our current status while you’ve been gone. Some minor skirmishes with the vampires and some independents on our borders, but nothing major. The rakshasas appear to be dead or gone, and the military are still sitting tight on the land they claimed. The cops have an alliance with some of the independent factions that look more favorably on us, and their territories are effectively joined together.”

 

“Which, considering our alliance with both parties, effectively brings that part of the city under our control,” I noted.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Very good. And finances?”

 

“Not great, not terrible,” Selene said. “Tindr’s managed to keep most of your assets afloat, and he’s converted some of them to cash if we need it. But we wiped out a lot of our ready cash hiring those people you sent down here. We’re getting by, but if something big comes up, we might not have enough to handle it.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Good work, people. Excellent work. Anna, go with these people. They’ll send you to where Kyra is, and you can help her track our targets down. Selene, I want to be notified if anything changes, or the instant that we have a confirmed location for either of the groups that attacked us.”

 

“Got it, Boss,” she said. “Where will you be?”

 

They couldn’t see it, but I was confident my expression wasn’t a happy one. “I’m going to go see Snowflake,” I said.

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Pacing through the trees, I was surprised at how much I could notice the difference from adding the werewolves to the Wild Hunt. I felt stronger, but the difference wasn’t that serious in comparison to the power that was already there.

 

The real difference was in the sensory input I was getting. I could sense everything in a dozen miles, or at least it felt like it. The combined senses of a dozen werewolves, most of them in fur, were enough that very little could escape them. The scents and sounds flooding into my mind were so overwhelming that I felt like they should have incapacitated me, and they probably would have if not for the mediating influence of the Wild Hunt.

 

But with that influence, I could process and understand all of this input without even having to think about it. I could map everything in my mind, so that I knew where all of us were, and where every notable feature that we could see, hear, or smell was. I knew it all.

 

I also knew a couple of things that were a little more immediately important. First, I knew that my “side” of the Hunt was growing. More of the Hunters were wrapped in my ice storm rather than thunderclouds, and generally they were winning when the two came into conflict.

 

And I knew where Blind Keith was. He was still on his horse, but they were going barely above a normal running pace. There was enough frost and ice on the ground—enough people spreading the frost—that there weren’t many places where the animal could go much faster without running the risk of a potentially catastrophic fall. Apparently he didn’t think it was worth the risk.

 

That was all on the basic, instinctive level of awareness. That was going on in the part of my mind that was more animal, more predatory.

 

The rest of me was still occupied with being terrified out of my freaking mind. It was weaker now that Blind Keith was further away, and I thought that the weakening of his influence over the Hunt might matter too, limiting the influence he could exert on me through that medium.

 

So I was still conscious. I could function and observe, even process most of the information I was getting normally. I could think and make decisions other than just to gibber at myself or attempt to run away at maximum speed.

 

It was just very, very hard.

 

I could feel him getting closer, in spite of everything, and gathered myself to face him. I could feel the support of the others behind me, although very few were anywhere close to me in a geographic sense. The werewolves of the pack were the closest, both physically and in a more abstract sense, but I could also feel a few of the Sidhe, some goblins, quite a few hounds of various kinds. There were stranger things in the mix as well, creatures that I understood on a fundamental level through the Hunt but couldn’t have named.

 

It was a powerful force, almost terrifyingly so, especially with the magic of the Wild Hunt tying them all together. Hopefully it would be enough. It should be enough.

 

Against Blind Keith, when he was backed by his own contingent of the Hunt? It was anyone’s guess, really.

 

I saw him with my own eyes a moment later, riding up. His horse hadn’t struck me as obviously unnatural earlier, but now it was taller than it had any right to be, thin to the point of being skeletal, with dark fired burning in its empty eye sockets.

 

But it paled beside its master. Absolutely and completely paled.

 

Blind Keith was shrouded in his thunderstorm, but I could see through it as easily as I knew he could look through the fog and frost shrouding us. I could see him clearly, a tall, gaunt figure that seemed to loom out of the darkness, more a presence than a person. He still had that blindfold wrapped around his eyes, but now it didn’t seem a handicap. Rather, it contributed even more to the unnerving, disturbing nature of the sight. The dissonance there—a man who should by all rights be blind, coupled with behavior that was very much not—drove home how fundamentally wrong the scene was.

 

The werewolves whined and cringed, even those who weren’t in fur, and several of them took a step or two back. Edward was the only exception, but then that made a certain degree of sense. He was the Alpha. It was in his nature to stand when others ran.

 

“I really didn’t intend for things to go this far,” Keith said casually. His voice was quiet, almost silent; I could hear him more because of the Hunt communicating his meaning to me than because I could actually hear him. “I only meant to push you.”

 

Consider me pushed, I thought, as sarcastically as I could. The rational side of me didn’t have enough control or interaction with my own body just at the moment to express an idea that abstract, but I was confident he would hear me thinking it. He would get the idea, anyway.

 

“Doesn’t matter,” I said out loud. My words were as hard to understand as his, but for very different reasons. Blind Keith spoke so softly that a human couldn’t have heard from two feet away. I spoke in a snarl, more animal than human, the voice of someone who only vaguely understood how speech works.

 

“I suppose you’re right,” Blind Keith said, though which statement he was responding to was unclear. “What’s done is done. It falls to us to deal with the consequences.”

 

I wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. There was something about his attitude that said it was going to be big, and violent, and probably something I would regret deeply, but I couldn’t guess what it would be specifically. I mean, this was Blind Keith. Everything I’d heard about him said that there were so many things he could to that I couldn’t begin to guess at what he’d choose.

 

Before we could find out, Edward drew his gun and fired. He’d been practicing his quick draw for a couple hundred years now, and he was very, very good at it. It couldn’t have been more than half a second between when he decided to act and when the third bullet hit its target.

 

I’d been expecting him to shoot at Blind Keith, and apparently the fae lord had been expecting that too, because he didn’t do a thing to stop Edward, and I knew he could. He just didn’t need to. Bullets meant basically nothing to someone on that level.

 

But Edward was a canny old wolf, and he knew that as well as I did. So he didn’t shoot Blind Keith.

 

He shot the horse.

 

The bullets were precisely, perfectly aimed. The first two hit the creature in either eye, putting out the flames that smoldered there, and the third slammed home dead center in its throat. The horse staggered to the side and began to fall, and before it had moved six inches another two bullets hit it, aiming for the heart this time. Edward put one more round into it, in the side of the head, and then returned the revolver to its holster. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his satisfied smile.

 

It was a perfect opportunity, and I capitalized on it, running forward and drawing Tyrfing. The power of the Hunt ran through me, carrying with it the speed of a werewolf and the grace of the Sidhe, and I was moving so fast that my thoughts and reactions wouldn’t normally have been able to keep up with my movements. But here, now, that wasn’t a problem.

 

At the same time, the more disconnected part of me was acting as well, reaching out through the bonds of the Hunt to the werewolves. They were tied together by pack bonds as well as the connection of the Wild Hunt, and once I got into those bonds it was easy to feel what was happening to them. They were scared, and while that was entirely reasonable, I could feel the external influence pushing them in that direction, making that fear just a little more compelling.

 

If it really got established in them, the pack bonds would become a detriment, amplifying the effect until they were incapable of doing anything other than running mindlessly away from Blind Keith.

 

But I could feel the magic affecting them, and through the Wild Hunt I could do something about it. First I thinned the connection between my mind and my body, as far as I’d ever gone, until there were almost two completely different people, the me that existed in a physical form and the me that didn’t.

 

Then I reached out to that fear that was threatening to destroy my allies, and did the same thing I’d done before. I couldn’t stop Blind Keith’s magic, couldn’t overpower it, but I could redirect it.

 

Into myself.

 

The power of the emotion crushed me. Absolutely crushed me. There was enough left to maintain the magic redirecting it away from more vulnerable allies. But that was about it.

 

Physically, though, I’d reached Blind Keith, and started swinging. He’d fallen from the horse when it toppled, and though he’d done it as gracefully as only one of the fae could, it still left him briefly vulnerable. I followed up on that vulnerability, pressing forward, swinging again and again. He dodged most of the attacks, but on the rare occasions that I did manage to hit him, it mattered. He was powerful on a scale that matched Twilight Princes and demigods, but I was using Tyrfing. The sword cut through storm, cloth, flesh and bone without any difficulty.

 

Other members of the Hunt were charging in now, trying to interrupt, but the werewolves kept them off me, giving me room to fight. Another creature was beside them now, something that looked like a wolf but walked on two legs.

 

I really ought to learn his name, I thought absently, before going back to being crushed by the fear.

 

For a moment, I almost thought I would win. Blind Keith was on the defensive, and I was keeping him there, unable to fight back for fear of taking a serious hit from Tyrfing. The rest of the Wild Hunt was either on my side or kept at bay by those who were, and my strength in that realm was growing by the second, as more and more of the Hunters defected. It was the nature of the Wild Hunt to respect competence, and as I continued to hold my own against an enemy that should have destroyed me easily, more and more Hunters found themselves thinking that I was a more worthy leader than they’d anticipated.

 

And then I slipped.

 

It was a small mistake. One foot placed ever so slightly wrong, at the same time as a particularly intense surge of fear leaked through from the other side of me, leaving my muscles shaky just when I needed them to be strong.

 

A small mistake, but it meant that for a second—just one second—Blind Keith could act freely.

 

He reached up and pulled his blindfold away.

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