48. Max
Max
Spell fire, screaming, the crash of a shield wall somewhere close, and I stood there with a severed head swinging from each fist, both still dripping.
The whole battle froze.
Every eye on that field found me at once. Spartans mid-swing. Demons mid-charge. All of it caught for one held breath, staring.
Nothing came out of the DarkVeil alive but demons. Everyone on both sides of that battle knew it. I’d done it twice now.
Only this time, I came out alone.
Then the field snapped back. Caspian and Nikolai, leading the Spartans against a full battalion of demons. I hadn’t expected my princes here at the Veil’s edge, and by the way both of them locked onto me across the fighting, they’d expected me even less.
“Max?” Nikolai called, as if his own eyes had deceived him.
Then he shouted, “Max, I’m coming!”
Halfway through a swing, Caspian abandoned it, kicking a demon aside to get a clear line to me. His wolf howled out of his throat, and the sound rolled across the battlefield.
My girl’s here! I could almost hear his wolf.
Spent to the marrow, I hurled both heads at the nearest demons, cracking them back a step, and my Coldiron flew off my arm and into my hands as twin sanjieguns.
“To Max!” Caspian roared.
Caspian wheeled to hold the weight of the horde while Nikolai peeled off half the team and started cutting a lane to me.
The demons had seen what I’d thrown. Their prince’s head lay in the dirt. Then they saw what I wore, the heirloom of the Morningstar hanging over my heart with the First Drop turning inside it.
The largest demon bellowed in the demonic tongue and stopped his own battalion cold. Then he threw his ax down, spike first, into the ground, and dropped to his knees.
Rank by rank, the rest of the battalion went down after him.
The Spartans didn’t need telling. In three heartbeats there was a blade at every kneeling throat.
“Don’t kill them yet,” I called.
“Heir.” The ringleader spoke in the demonic tongue, horns down. “Even if Prince Rhemus still lived, we wouldn’t follow him now that we know you’re the true heir. Command us or kill us. We’re at your mercy either way, because we hunted His Majesty’s heir, and we can never go home.”
I looked down the ranks of them, horns bowed, blades at their necks. Killing the surrendered was a waste, and I’d been raised to hate waste.
But if I could make them obey…
“I have a use for you,” I said, my voice carrying. “Move south and hold our southern border. Let nothing out of the Haven through: no army, no mutants. You’ll fight my enemy. And if you hurt one of my people, you’ll burn in my father’s lake of fire over and over. Understand?”
Every demon on that field dipped its horns to the ground. “Understood, Heir!”
A sheen of dark light fell across every one of them, crawling over horn and hide and settling in, my command taking hold like a brand.
“And you’ll take orders from the Spartans where they’re given. Now go!”
My father had warned me not to command a demon army. But these were strays, and I doubted Gabriel would come after me over strays.
The demons rose as one and dashed south. Behind me, a Spartan captain said, “Holy shit, didn’t see that coming,” in the voice of a man revising his entire afternoon.
Then my legs quit on me.
I swayed, caught myself on one staff, and couldn’t get my feet back under the rest of me.
Nikolai reached me first at an inhuman speed and stopped dead a foot away. His hands came up, wanting badly to hold me, and froze there, the memory of burning written all over his face. He swallowed and turned his head to order a Spartan forward to catch me instead.
I didn’t wait for the Spartan. I closed the distance and threw myself into his arms.
He caught me, braced for the pain.
His arms closed around me and crushed me against his chest, my cheek against his. One of us was shaking hard enough to shake us both.
No cold burning came. Nothing but warmth, and the delicious feel of being in his arms.
“You’re touching me, Eirath,” he said into my hair, wrecked and awed at once.
“I know.”
“I felt every second you were gone.” His arms tightened past comfortable. “I couldn’t bear it. The wolf couldn’t either. Aelindor has to hold the fort, but we came out to the wall. We were done waiting. We were about to go in after you when the demons came out.”
“That’s reckless,” I scolded. “Don’t you dare go in there for me.”
“You know we lose our shit when we think you’re in danger.”
“You’d have died inside the DarkVeil.”
“Caspian and I will take that chance,” he said. “We have Coldiron armguards.”
“Coldiron can’t shield you from everything!”
“Don’t fuss.” He held me tighter. “Today is a good day. You came back to us, my Eirath. You came back.”
Grief cut straight through the middle of it. Drakken hadn’t made it out. What was I going to tell them? They’d ask the second they finished checking me over.
Caspian hit us like a storm with his wolf behind it. He got a hand on my face and turned it toward the light, cataloging me out loud like a quartermaster with a damaged shipment.
“You’re hurt, sweetheart.” His voice cracked down the middle. “And don’t tell me you’re fine. I can hear you breathing, and my wolf can scent the wound. Let’s get you to a healer.”
“Healers can wait,” I said.
He tried to lift me out of Nikolai’s arms into his own, and the vampire prince growled at him. Caspian rolled his eyes and stepped in behind me instead, and the three of us locked together. I squirmed in happily as both men wrapped me up between them.
Around us, the Spartans had snapped into a ring, shields out toward the Veil, bracing for whatever else the shadows might deal out.
“How?” Nikolai breathed. “There’s no burn. Is the geas gone?”
“And where the fuck is Drakken?” Caspian asked.
Whatever joy I’d had in me went under, and a sob came up out of the wound beneath it.
“It’s not gone. We cut it down,” I said, fighting to hold myself together while both heirs took my weight. “Inside the Veil, the White Witch’s mages came for us. They trapped me in a portal ring. Drakken got to me at the last second. He pushed me out and vanished with the portal and the war mages.”
Both of them went rigid. Then they pulled back just enough to look at me, one pair of eyes crimson, the other green, and both on fire.
Rage and fear for their brother came off them in waves.
“Then we go in,” Caspian said, already turning, already reading the shifting walls of the DarkVeil for a way through. “While the trail’s warm…”
“There’s no trail,” I said. “The mages used a potion portal. I want to go after him more than anything, but we can’t. Not until we… We have to…”
I’d tell them later what breaking the geas actually took.
I made myself say the next part, and it cost me. “We go to Aelindor. Before we go for Drakken.”
They stared at me.
I broke. “You think I want to leave him in there?”
“We’d never think that of you.” Nikolai shot Caspian a hard look, as if all of this were the wolf’s fault.
“Sweetheart, we all know how much you care about him,” Caspian said. “Even if you two never did see eye to eye.”
“I love him,” I said. “As much as I love the rest of you.”
Both of them sucked in a breath, and their eyes brightened.
“We won’t get Drakken back by rushing at that wall,” I said, and Nikolai’s hand came up to stroke my spine, holding me up.
Some distant part of me marveled at how steady my voice was while I was a wreck on my feet.
My heart was in tatters, fear for Drakken sat on me heavy enough to crush my lungs, and still my mind held the line.
I couldn’t afford to fall apart, so I didn’t.
If the heirs and I were the kind of weak that shattered when it mattered, this war was already lost.
“If we turn toward him now, the clock runs out,” I kept going, “and I belong to Xander. And then I’m a liability to the Zodiac Covenant and to all of you, and I’ll have to leave forever.
” My throat closed, and I fought to get a breath in.
“Drakken knew that. He told me to run, and he bought us these hours. We have less than twenty-four hours to break the geas, or it stays permanently.”
Caspian’s jaw flexed. He looked at the Veil for a long moment, then squared his shoulders and turned to me. “You know we’ll do anything for you, sweetheart.”
“Tell us what you want us to do, Eirath.”
“Mate me,” I said.