“Oh,” Mavra said. Her body turned to match the facing of her head, the motion weirdly liquid and mechanical at the same time. “It’s you.”
Five of the other six figures turned to face us, hoods coming down.
Black Court vampires. All of them. I didn’t recognize any of the others—but it seemed pretty clear that Mavra, as the drummer, was the least among them. The Black Court had been all but exterminated, thanks to a really underhanded move by Lara’s people a century and change back. The only ones who were still alive—well, who continued to exist—were the oldest, wiliest, most vicious, and most powerful of their kind.
These vampires were old-school, the real deal, nightmares of the Old World. A Black Court vampire was a match for any dozen counterparts in the Red or White Court.
And we had seven of them.
“My lord,” Mavra said. “May I suggest violence.”
The last and tallest of the hooded figures straightened his shoulders, turned, and lowered his hood with one hand. In the other, he held a ritual athame, an ancient knife of rough iron. He stood over the bound figure on the ground. His face was not like those of the other vampires present. No rotted corpse he; his face had the severe, angular regularity of a marble statue’s, beautiful in the severe fashion of frozen mountains and crackling ice. Thick black hair swept back from his face and down his back. His hands were long and white, the fingers fine like an artist’s.
But his eyes.
Dark.
Black.
Empty as the soul of hell.
I had just looked toward them, and they’d nearly sucked me in. Hell’s bells. I shored up my mental defenses with as much focus as I dared spare from my environment and kept my eyes away from his face.
“So,” he said. His voice was . . . pure, smooth whiskey, touched with a soft, throaty accent. “This is the city’s wizard.”
“I’m in the phone book and everything,” I said. “In the name of the city of Chicago, and by the authority of Cook County and the state of Illinois,” I said, loudly, hoping to give River that much more of a distraction, “I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the next convenient parallel dimension.”
Ramirez choked.
“Welp,” Wild Bill drawled. “That oughta do it. Thanks, Harry.”
“Who is that?” breathed Yoshimo.
“That,” said Chandler in a low, shaking voice, “is Drakul.”
Okay.
My eyes might have gotten a little wider.
I might have had trouble swallowing.
“Oh boy,” I breathed.
And Drakul smiled, as if genuinely delighted, and said, “Wise enough to know, but not wise enough to run. Wizards. Arrogant. Take them, my children.”
Chapter
Twelve
Elders of the Black Court do not screw around.
Before Drakul had entirely finished his sentence, the air sizzled and spat with magical energy, as five elders of the Black Court unleashed a tsunami of sorcery.
I lifted my shield bracelet and stepped forward to meet it.
Once upon a time, that gesture would have been futile. Defensive shields were a fairly standard working of magic, but they had limits. The more kinds of energy you want to defend against, the more layers of shielding it takes—and the more power you have to put into it. Back when, my shield had been handy for stopping objects that were moving very quickly and not much more.
But times had changed. I was older now. I’d learned lessons the hard way and had the scars to prove it.
So five heavyweights hit me all at once: A couple of lances of white-hot energy, a sputtering globule of some kind of horrible-smelling acid, a crackling bolt of lightning, and what looked like a ghostly tentacle made of translucent green mist hit the shield like five separate speeding automobiles. My rough shield bracelet dribbled green-gold sparks and grew uncomfortably hot in seconds. The shield itself flared out in a quarter dome of blue-white, nearly coherent light, a barrier of raw, stubborn will.
Maybe if it had happened somewhere else, at a different time, I might not have been able to stop them all. Maybe if it had just been me, it would have gone badly. But tonight, my city was under siege. Tonight, millions of terrified people were going to die unless they got help from people like me. Tonight, their fear rode the air, an inflammable mist that only needed a magical spark to roar into reality.
Tonight, Chicago fought for its life.
And my shield held against them all. Though it scorched my wrist, though my feet were driven six inches back across the green grass, I stopped them.
All of them.
Meanwhile, my companions had not been standing around with their fingers up their anatomies. Yoshimo’s arms swept out and whirled in circles, and within a second she sent a slender column of whirling air arching up over my shield and down among the Black Court. When the white column touched the earth, it roared up into a whirling dervish of dirt and flying grass, blinding the foe and disrupting their evocations.
Ramirez’s hand came down on my shoulder and he said, “Now!”
I dropped the shield.
Now, don’t get me wrong. What the elders of the Black Court had dished out at us was enough energy to put us all in the ground and then some. But on the White Council, we call people with talent like that “sorcerers.” And we sneer when we say it, for a reason. Yeah, maybe they can throw the raw magical strength around. But magic is about a hell of a lot more than simply power—and though they might have been young, the people backing me up were wizards of the White Council, and each and every one of them had cut their teeth on war.
I checked over my shoulder to see Chandler standing calmly with both hands planted on the handle of his cane. A dozen stones the size of my head floated in a small cloud around his shoulders, and as my shield came down, the stones began to leap forward as if fired from a cannon, hissing toward their targets. Not to be outdone, Wild Bill murmured something to his old lever-action rifle and the old steel of the weapon suddenly pulsed with threads of scarlet fire in the shape of some kind of primitive pictograms. As my shield dropped, he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the nearest vampire, and with a word sent a rod of semisolid fire the thickness of my wrist right through the vampire’s belly and one of the huge headstones behind it alike, splitting the air with the thunder of sundered stone.
The vampire let out a scream that ripped and slashed the air it passed through and . . . was apparently pulled back and away from us by some unseen, horribly fast force.
Ramirez cast a beam of pale light at the vampire whose strike had gone all hentai on us. That one was a large male, or what was left of one, and he swung both arms dramatically and sent his ghostly tentacle smashing into Ramirez’s disintegration ray. The collision of forces was enough to turn the whole thing into a thrashing mess that spewed ectoplasm in every direction.