19. Nikolai
Nikolai
At high noon, three vans rolled out of the warehouse into the bright traffic of a city that hunted us.
The brightness had never bothered me the way it did others of my kind, though my strength peaked at night. Lately even that had changed. Sunlight fed me now, ever since I took Max’s blood.
The sun on my face wasn’t a slow burn anymore. It was warmth, a caress, a privilege I’d never take for granted. And my Eirath, my eternal sunshine, had gifted it to me.
Enna drove the lead van with Frost, Odalys, and a pair of elemental mages. Caspian took the wheel of the middle one, carrying Max, Quill, and half the people we’d cracked out of the glass. I brought up the rear. My job was to hold the pursuit off the other two and buy them road.
Marco and Belmonte rode with me. Jace and Bryn were wrapped and strapped down in the last row, going home.
Twenty-one blessed minutes of ordinary traffic. Three delivery vans in a lunch rush, exactly as the witch had drawn it.
Then the radio.
“Roadblock,” Frost said. “Half a mile. Military wagons, spell-wire, twenty men.”
“Punch it,” I barked.
“Attention, all teams.” Caspian’s voice came flat and hard. “Battle ready!”
We punched it.
The roofs slid back on their racks, and our people rose out of them into the wind.
Frost with ice already climbing his forearms. Odalys with a bow and a quiver braced against her hip.
Belmonte planting his boots on my roof, fireballs twisting on both palms. I’d thought the man was only good with a sword.
A dozen Coldiron throwing stars went out ahead of all of it.
They came from the middle van, low and shrieking, and they took the spell-wire first. The wire snapped in a whipcrack of sparks and lashed back across the wagons. Then the Coldiron stars climbed and went through the barricade, and the barricade came apart into scrap.
Max’s work. Pride brimmed in my chest. My Eirath was a great deal more than an alchemist.
Fire, death cards, ice shards, and arrows hit the gap, and two-thirds of the men behind the wagons went down before they got a spell finished.
We shot through the hole at a hundred miles an hour. A wagon door tore off on my mirror. Something soft went under my left tires, and I did not look.
Then the plain opened up, brown and blinding, and the hills on both sides of it were moving.
“Contact rear!” Marco bellowed. “Contact rear, twelve cars!”
The road turned into a running battle an hour long.
Enemy vehicles came up the shoulders in packs, spitting rooster tails of grit, and slammed into us broadside.
Metal screamed on metal. I let the first one commit, then wrenched my wheel and took his rear quarter with my bumper at speed.
The car snapped sideways, dug a fender into the asphalt, and cartwheeled into the ditch with its doors flapping.
The second one wanted to come up on my blind side. I let him.
He drew even, close enough that I could see the pores on his throat through his open window, and I reached across the six feet of screaming air between us and took him.
Blood Reaper wasn’t a callsign anyone had handed me for fucking show.
He arched off the seat, and his hands slid off the wheel. His car went straight off the shoulder into a culvert at ninety.
Marco held a shield over Belmonte the whole run, a low dome of gray light that rang like a struck pot every time a spell landed on it. Belmonte tossed his fireballs, and a car on our flank went up. It rolled twice and burned in the median.
The swordsman cracked up like a maniac. “Daddy’s home!”
“Quit laughing, madman,” Marco shouted. “Incoming, your left!”
A mutant came off the hood of the next car mid-leap, jaws already open.
Belmonte’s hand went to his longsword. “Just my type.”
The blade came out and went home and was back in the sheath before the mutant’s body finished passing over my roof.
Up front, Enna drove the lead van the way she fought, which was ugly and intimidating.
A jackknifed hauler swung across the road, and she did not brake.
She put two wheels in the dirt, threaded the gap between the trailer and the guardrail, and came back onto the asphalt with the van groaning and Odalys still shooting out the roof.
Frost kept himself busy. Every mile or so he laid a sheet of ice across both lanes, and the pursuit hit it at speed and did their own dying without my help. Three cars went into each other in a single knot at the second sheet, and the knot burned in my mirrors.
Motorcycles found us next, whining up through the smoke in wedges of six, riders standing on the pegs with carbines braced.
“Wolf, your nine o’clock,” I barked.
“See them uglies.” Caspian drove with one hand and dealt with the other, and six death cards went out his window in a flat fan. Three motorcycles became three tumbling fires. The fourth rider swerved wide and lived eleven seconds longer than his friends. The remaining two motorcycles fell back.
A jeep broke from the pack and went for the middle van’s flank, aiming to fold Caspian into the guardrail.
“Brace,” I said, and took it.
I hit the jeep behind its front wheel at ninety and put it off the road into a stand of scrub. The impact threw Marco into the roof hatch. He cursed under his breath.
My van stank of scorched Stormglass, hot brake dust, and blood. Everyone still breathing was bleeding from the crash, the fight, or both. The heat came up off the road in sheets and rolled through the shattered windows.
I drove like the van was an extension of my body, making the rear of our column a place where the enemy came to die. Every car I wrecked, every pursuit line I broke, was one that never reached the middle van, where Max rode.
I watched her through Caspian’s rear window between kills.
She was still spent, burned to the wick from the power that had come alive on the bridge and saved our butts. My Eirath was a terror to our foes.
Even now, she knelt on the back seat with the window down, the wind dragging her white lock across her mouth, and she flew her chakrams. The twin rings went out low and hungry, shearing tires off enemy axles in pairs, came home to her palms, and went out again.
Her foresight had armored us in advance. Before we rolled, she’d kissed a drop of Coldiron into the Stormglass core of every engine in the convoy, and now the spells that should have shredded our tires skipped off them like stones off ice. Not one flat, the whole running hour.
Our windows were another story. By the halfway mark, every pane in the convoy was gone. We drove in a hurricane of wind and glass dust, grit in our teeth, shouting to be heard.
Then a black reinforcement jeep that had joined the pursuit died mid-charge. No spin, no fire. It simply stopped being a machine, and the car behind it climbed its trunk and flipped.
Any vehicle running on Stormglass with a drop of Coldiron in the mix didn’t stand a chance against my woman. She was reaching down the road and switching them off one at a time, the way another woman might turn out lamps in a hallway.
“Van holds!” Frost called from up front.
“Down to knives, tarot cards, and opinions,” Quill shouted from the middle van.
“Kiss! Kiss!” Max roared and threw the chakrams again.
“I want what she has,” Belmonte declared, mid-fireball, aggrieved.
“You can’t have what she has,” Marco said. “No one can. She’s our top alchemist. Metals only listen to her.”
We toppled the enemy vehicles by the dozen, and they kept coming. Our vans were dying by inches, panels flapping, doors bound shut in their frames, and somewhere under my floorboards an axle had begun to sing a bad note.
We were still going to make it.
Then the horizon behind us grew a second convoy, and every enemy radio we passed was suddenly speaking with one voice.
Xander had joined the chase.
He came on hard, elite force in black-and-green cars with columns of troops strung out behind them, the whole strength he had in his capital, and a pursuit that had been hungry before turned rabid. The Collector was done sending servants to fetch his property.
His elites didn’t ram. They reached.
A spell came off the lead black-and-green car and hit the road ahead of the middle van, and the asphalt peeled up in a curl thirty feet long. Caspian put his van on two wheels through the gap it left.
The green light of the next casting was already blooming.
The border was still ten minutes out, and my axle had stopped singing and started screaming.
The math had turned against us again.
Then, ahead, out of the dust and heat-shimmer where the road met the sky, the border produced an army.
It spread across the whole plain on the New Mexico side, rank upon rank resolving out of the haze. The front line was Spartans, a wall of them a mile wide with shields up and locked. The wall stood open at its center, a clean lane of daylight left waiting over the road.
Behind the shields, Covenant armor sat deployed for war. Bulwark-class crawlers hull-down in the scrub. Arcane artillery ranked on the low hills, glyph-wheels already spun to firing patterns.
At the center of the open lane, ahead of his own shield wall, stood Aelindor.
The Fae heir had brought the army. Not sent it.
He’d brought it in person, for his mate, our mate, and for us, his brothers.
For the first time in our lives, we had all abandoned the oldest protocol we kept, the rule that one heir always stayed behind, and all four of us stood in the same hour on the same field for the same woman.
My eyes went hot.
A thunderous roar came down out of the sky, and every head on both sides of the border lifted.
Drakken had returned. The dragon blotted out the sun, noon running gold along his black scales. Arrows still feathered his wings, and his back was empty. No Missy. He’d delivered her to safety and come back for the rest of us.
We hit the gas hard, and the Nightingale convoy shot through the lane in the shield wall.
The Spartans closed behind us. Our pursuers broke off in a squeal of brakes and burned rubber, fanning out along their own side of the line.
Two armies faced each other across the New Mexico border in the falling dust. Ours outnumbered Xander’s. Whatever strength the Haven had, he had not been able to march it here in a day.
We stepped out of the battered vans. Max walked to the front and took her place at Aelindor’s side, and her gaze fixed on Xander, fierce, vicious, and predatory.
“What’s it going to be, Xander?” Aelindor’s voice boomed across the border, amplified by his magic.
Xander brushed the front of his white coat with the backs of his fingers.
The coat was crisp to the collar. There was no dust on him anywhere.
Even his boots refused it. A man so certain the world was his property that he would not permit it to touch him uninvited, and his warlock magic made sure of it.
And my brothers and I would make sure he never had our woman.
“You have something that belongs to me,” he said. “I’m just a man who wants to take back what’s his.”
“Max isn’t a thing, or your slave.” Aelindor was cold. He was enraged, and the rage showed nowhere but in his utter stillness, every last degree of it held down, which was far more chilling than any shout. “She’s her own woman, and she makes her own decisions.”
“I don’t fucking belong to you and never will.” Max’s voice didn’t shake, her fists clenched white at her sides. “Come for me again, and you’ll fucking regret it. So will the bitch who sold me.”
Max didn’t deal in threats. Every soldier on both sides of that border heard it for what it was: a promise.
“You want a battle, Xander?” Caspian called, taunting. “Let’s do it.”
I smiled at the Collector, nice and slow, my fangs flashing.
Xander’s eyes tracked our army, the four of us, the dragon carving furious circles overhead. Then they alighted on Max, and everything in me wanted to step into that look and break it.
I held my ground. She had battles that were hers to face, and this confrontation was one of them. As Aelindor had said: her own woman. She always had been.
Max Morning stood like a monarch, feet planted on our soil, and met Xander’s alpha glare with her own.
She would make a formidable queen someday. Just not his.
Ours.
“Fierce. I like it.” Xander smiled, and his eyes roved over her inch by inch with open lust while she trembled with rage. “It suits you. A queen.”
He knew precisely how powerful she was. Her defiance only fed his appetite, and the possessiveness in his gaze ran sharper.
My whole body ached with the want of draining him dry and tearing the throat out of what was left.
Xander grinned and pitched his parting words to carry across two armies.
“I look forward to seeing you again soon, Princess Morningstar. You’ve proved yourself twice now.”