Chapter Fifty-Two #3
And a second later, I felt my perceptions blur, and my perspective shifted.
Suddenly, I felt I was floating about twenty feet above the street outside the front of the castle, and my physical eyes could see that only my head was showing up as an enormous image, bigger than ten men, lightning that echoed the storm above flashing in my eyes.
People screamed. They began retreating to either side of the street, looking up at me in sheer terror. Smartphones were exploding into clouds of sparks on every side.
“All right, people!” I shouted, and my voice was louder than the storm. “I tried to share hot chocolate with you! I tried to be nice! And now you’re shedding blood in front of my home!” The last word boomed out loud enough to crack the glass of windows all around.
“I have had it!” I thundered on. “Fulmen! Fulmen! Fulmen!”
And at each word, bolts of lightning crashed down from the storm above, thundered down into the center of the street, driving the two sides back even farther from each other, sending people to the earth, screaming and covering their ears and heads.
“Pluvias!” I screamed.
And rain, rain barely warmer than ice, rain so thick that you’d have to cover your mouth and nose to breathe, crashed down from the skies above. It smashed into the crowds, driving everyone left standing to their knees, crouching to cover their heads and faces.
And the falling water flowed down, water thick enough to melt through magical energy not grounded in the castle’s stone, smothering the fires of fear the Malvora vampires were spreading, bringing sudden, cold clarity to everyone being influenced.
“Nonpluvias!” I called. “Nontempestas!”
And like that, the rain stopped. The lightning stopped. The thunder stopped.
The silence was deafening.
The giant floating head of me said, in a voice all the more terrible for its softness, “I’m tired of the disturbance to my home.
Tired of you making the good people who live here afraid.
So unless you want the next communication from any of your insurance companies to include the words act of God, I suggest you all leave in peace. While you can.”
There was a long moment of stillness.
And then they scattered, running back down the streets, soaked and shaking, shocked and terrified looks on their faces, fleeing for their lives.
I closed my fist, cutting off the energy, sent it back into the conjunction of the river of ley lines beneath me.
The vast projection of my head went with it.
Spells backed by that much energy wouldn’t be of any help to what was coming next.
The castle was in a residential neighborhood.
It would have been like bringing a howitzer to a fistfight.
For the first time, I looked around and saw the pulsing fire of blue and green and gold energy burning from every inscribed rune in the castle. It lit the streets around it for a couple of blocks at least.
I blew out a breath and disentangled myself from the stone and rock of Merlin’s fortress, felt the power fade, felt myself returning to my normal self, felt myself become wholly human again.
I felt a little tired, but not as much as I’d thought I would.
Most of what I’d done had been a matter of concentration, not drawing energy out of myself, out of my own emotions.
I took a deep breath and looked around.
Fitz was staring at me, his face pale, his eyes wide and bright.
Matias looked like he might be in a state of mild shock.
Bear was watching me steadily, her face inscrutable.
I walked over to the battlements and watched people run.
I felt awful.
That I’d scared them that much. Most of them were just folks.
But if I hadn’t, they’d have been right in the middle of it.
Because as the regular mortals fled, what remained was a much smaller crowd.
They all just stood their ground as their human shields dispersed.
Ghouls, whose faces had grown more gaunt and hungrier as the mortals ran and they began to slide into their true forms. Vampires of House Malvora, mostly men and women with various shades of blond hair and the same pale skin of House Raith.
The Renfields, standing solidly exactly as they had been, never moving or changing expression in the pounding rain—their permanently damaged minds every bit as locked into obedience by the power of the Black Court as before.
And sundown came. You couldn’t see it under the glowering storm clouds, but it isn’t a purely physical event. Instead, you could feel it happen, if you were attuned to the energy. You could feel it like a single toll from some vast bell.
Forms appeared in the darkness, five of them, covered in black clothing, cloaks, hoods. Even from there, I could feel the cold, greasy energy around them, familiar from the battle in the graveyard the previous year.
Black Court elders. Drakul’s personal guard. The ones who had killed my friends in the Wardens. Wild Bill. Yoshimo. Chandler.
The Renfields let out soft, eerie, sighing moans as their masters appeared.
“Right,” I said, quietly, to Bear. “That makes it simpler.”
“You ready for this?” Bear asked.
“Yes,” I said simply.
And she shot me a sudden, ferocious smile.
Then I raised my voice and called out over the battlements, “Okay, you evil bastards. You wanna start trouble in my home? Come and get some.”