Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter
Fifty-Three
The last time I’d run into the Black Court elders, they’d come at me without a second’s thought—just instant attack, with big and badass sorcery. They were beings with centuries and centuries of power and experience and death and terror behind them.
The coterie had killed two of my friends. Wild Bill and Yoshimo. Drakul had done for Chandler personally.
And between Ramirez and me, we’d killed two of theirs. Didn’t know their names, because they hadn’t taken time for introductions. They hadn’t shown me any respect.
This time they did.
One of them stepped forward and lowered its hood.
It had been a female at one time, I thought, though mummified corpses reduce gender considerations to a large degree.
It was wearing jewelry that looked like it might have been inspired by ancient Egyptian fashion, definitely somewhere in the Middle East, though historically speaking it was likely an affectation, since Drakul had been a late-fourteenth-century type.
I dubbed it Cleopatra anyway. They were doubtless in similar shape.
“Okay, Cleo,” I said. “What you got?”
The vampire’s eyes glittered with pure malevolence and she raised her right hand, sending a bolt of white-hot flame scorching straight at me.
I narrowed my eyes, focused my will upon the castle’s defenses, and otherwise didn’t move a single muscle.
The fire streaked toward me—and stopped cold at the line of the battlements.
The runes and sigils there burned brightly for a moment, and a faint impression of a wall of blue light appeared in the air between us, immaterial as a phantom and very much real enough to stop the hostile magic in its tracks.
The stones of Merlin’s fortress absorbed the energy as easily as they stopped the wind.
Cleo lowered its hand, black eyes narrowing. Then it spoke, and its voice was as charming as sandpaper on rusted steel. “Malvora.”
I started to say something, and Bear grabbed my collar and jerked me back as a gunshot rang out. I had the flash impression of one of the Malvora moving swiftly, hand extending bearing a long-barreled pistol. Something hissed past my face, close enough to stir some of my hair as I dropped back.
Merlin’s fortress had been designed to be impregnable to supernatural forces.
Modern firearms hadn’t really been a factor in its engineering, and while the stone was damned near impregnable, especially while charged with power like it was at the moment, I couldn’t use it to stop bullets from zipping through the air.
“Cover the roof!” someone shouted, and gunfire started ringing out. Bullets zinged through the air and sparked on the castle’s stones.
“Get down!” I shouted to Matias and Fitz. The pair of them hadn’t reacted as swiftly as they should have, but then they weren’t in any direct lines of fire. I was just worried about fragments and weird ricochets. They dropped to a crouch.
Cleo’s voice rasped over the gunfire as she shouted, “Forward!”
“Major General!” I shouted.
Toot-Toot came streaking out of the darkness in a sphere of violet light, bobbing and weaving madly through the air, surrounded by a whirling, dizzying cloud of Little Folk in their own spheres. “My lord!” he piped.
“Report!”
“Half the ghouls circle the castle to come from the rear!” he said. “Some of the scary vampires are going with them! The walking corpses send their slaves at the front gates!”
I glanced at Bear. “Explosives, you think?”
“What I would do,” Bear confirmed.
“Tell Basil and his people to get back from the entry gate,” I snapped to Toot. “Hold them at the inner door.”
“My lord!” Toot whistled, pointed, and several of the Little Folk zipped off into the castle, staying low.
“Bob!” I called.
Blue light whirled across the rooftop as the spirit of intellect sped through the enchanted stone of the castle to appear at my side like the splash of an immaterial flashlight. “Here!”
“Show me what’s going on,” I said, and placed a hand flat to the stone.
There was a dizzying sensation, and my eyes burned as if I were walking through a pall of smoke and began to water. I squinted through it—and could suddenly see through the stone of the castle as if it had become as clear as glass.
Toot’s report was accurate. Maybe half the ghouls had peeled off to circle to the rear of the castle, and several Malvora vampires, armed with concealable firearms, had gone with them.
There was a back door there, but it was built out of the same stone as the rest of the castle, sealed into place with enchantments that made it damned near as tough as the walls around it, and would be too heavily fortified to open without a serious amount of explosives, which they did not appear to have.
That crew would have to climb to the roof and try to win entry to the castle from up here.
It would take them a moment to get into position, so they were the secondary problem.
At the front gates, seven or eight Renfields were approaching.
The gargoyles had indeed transformed the wooden front gate of the castle to a single slab of thick stone that still bore the wood-grain marks of the gate, filling the open area and flush against the castle stone, ruined steel hinges bent and torn.
Interestingly, from an academic standpoint, I couldn’t see through the newly transformed stone—but I had a good angle from up here and could clearly see the Renfields shuffling forward and dumping their backpacks on the ground in front of the gates.
The ghouls and Malvora in front of the castle had proceeded to the walls, keeping well clear of either side of the gate.
The Malvora kept up a suppressive level of gunfire on the battlements, preventing me from standing up and throwing my usual stuff or return gunfire at them.
Meanwhile, the Black Court had withdrawn several paces, to the yards on the far side of the street, unnaturally still shadows in their black shrouds, to wait for what came next.
I reported to Bear what I saw as I saw it.
“They’re trying to coordinate it,” Bear said, as if we were eating sandwiches after pankration practice instead of lying on the stone with bullets going by a foot and a half over our heads.
“They’ll blow the gate. Black Court goes in on the ground floor.
Ghouls and Malvora will come up the walls and come in from the roof, all at once. ”
“This plan seem kind of simple to you?”
“Simple’s good,” Bear said. “Less to go wrong. They were counting on having a lot of screaming mortals around to cover them, too.”
“Probably work,” I admitted, “if I hadn’t had warning and it was just me. Major General,” I said, “who could make it in time?”
He told me.
“No kidding?” I said. “Where?”
“A block to the north, my lord,” he piped.
“Get over to them. Tell them to come in as soon as they hear the front gate go,” I said.
“My lord!” Toot snapped and zipped away like an arrow from a bow.
I waved at Fitz and Matias and shouted to them, “There’s going to be an explosion! We’re going down the stairs not long after! Get into the doorway and hold the stairs!”
Fitz shouted something mostly lost in the gunfire, but Matias, flinching as a ricochet went somewhere near him, held up his thumb in acknowledgment.
“Bob,” I said, “I want the energy from the blast contained to just the gates. Absorb as much of it as you can.”
“Uh,” Bob said. “If I do that, the gates are going to come down.”
“That’s the idea,” I said. “Get to it.”
“Will do, boss!” Bob said, and the blue light zipped off through the transparent stone of the castle. As he did, the stone became real and opaque again, and my eyes stopped burning.
Bear was frowning at me. “You want them inside.”
“Come on,” I said. “They’re Black Court. Why do you think I invited them in? ‘Come and get some’ wasn’t an accident.”
Bear’s frown turned into a fierce grin. “You think you can handle them?”
“Time I get done with them, we’ll need a lot of mops,” I said darkly. “This is my house.”
She nodded, understanding. “You want to handle the lightweights first.”
“Yep. Scatter the riffraff, then I’ll deal with the rest in the main hall.”
Bear reached up over her shoulder to flick a snap on her leather strap and take her double-bladed axe down, setting it near at hand. “Sounds fun.”
Someone shouted something below. The gunfire abruptly stopped, and I slammed my hands over my ears and opened my mouth. Bear mirrored me.
There was a sound so big that it blew back the branches from the trees across the street, shattered the windows of houses and parked cars, and made everything lighter for a second, as if a wave had come along and lifted me a little up off the stones of the roof.
The runes of the castle flared painfully bright.
It was followed by the sound of stones rattling, smaller rocks bouncing against enchanted stone, and a cloud of dust and powder billowed out from the front of the castle, filling the already misty air.
The resulting mixture condensed almost instantly into a kind of mucky, grimy rain.
Then there was a single, rasping, inhuman howl, instantly echoed by dozens of yowling ghoul battle cries, and my enemies came for me.