Around me a sea of vampires waited, each bloodsucker crouching, perfectly still like a statue, a stripe of bright green running down their spines.
Christopher closed his wings around him and walked off, pacing, gripping his left forearm with his right hand so hard, his fingers turned the flesh completely white. Barabas walked over to him. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught Barabas’s voice, soothing, calming . . .
A battle horn roared.
I ran up to the oak and climbed up the rope ladder Jim’s people had conveniently left in place for me and clambered to the wooden platform at the top. Next to me a vampire crouched.
“Ghastek?”
“Of course,” Ghastek’s dry voice said from the vampire mouth. “Did you expect Santa Claus?”
I gave him my hard stare and turned to the field. We were in the woods on the south side. The Keep was a little to the left of me, and my father’s advancing forces were to the right. Somewhere to my far right, Curran and his forces waited. I had kissed him this morning and didn’t want to let go.
A battle raged less than half a mile from us, across the open ground. Two mammoths made it past the trenches and battered the Keep walls while waves of my father’s troops splashed against it. Vampires swarmed up the stones and shapeshifters met them among the parapets. The fortress held.
No sign of my father.
“Erra?” I said softly.
She appeared next to me.
“I cannot tell you how disturbing this is,” Ghastek said.
“You’re telling me. You know she killed my favorite mule?”
“You killed me,” Erra said. “I think we’re even.”
My father wouldn’t commit to the field until he was reasonably certain of a victory. And that wouldn’t happen until the Keep’s front door was kicked in.
The bodies of shapeshifters fell from the wall. Argh.
“Your lion built it too well,” Erra told me.
“Yes, everything is my fault.”
“What’s going on with Steed?” Ghastek asked.
“He’s having difficulty with bloodlust.”
“It is really him?”
“Yes.”
“Life moves in mysterious ways,” Ghastek said.
Blood smeared the gray stones of the Keep, as the mammoths threw themselves against it again and again. The left side of the wall trembled, rocked, like a rotten tooth ready to come out, and collapsed. My father’s troops flooded into the gap and broke like a wave on shapeshifter claws and teeth.
Come on.
Bodies flew. People screamed.
Come on, Father. Come to the slaughter.
Minutes ticked by.
More bodies.
A new line of troops spilled onto the field and in its center a shiny chariot sped, drawn by horned horses.
“Is your father riding a gold chariot?” Ghastek asked.
“He’s a product of his times. It’s what he grew up with.”
“There is nothing wrong with a gold chariot,” Erra said. “It’s meant to be symbolic.”
We watched the line of troops advance, gaining ground against the isolated clumps of shapeshifters. Slowly Jim’s forces retreated to the Keep.
Not yet.
The trenches emptied as boudas scrambled toward the Keep. Jim’s forces broke and ran for the safety of the walls, leaving their dead on the battlefield.
Now.
I looked down. “Now, Christopher!”
He shot into the air, spinning as he rose. Barabas waved at me and sprinted through the woods, heading east to where Curran’s forces waited.
The trees across from us, on the other side of the battlefield and to the right, turned black. Dark magic gathered there, cold and terrible. The trees rustled and a gigantic black dragon head emerged from the trees. My father raised his hand. Golden light poured from it, shielding the troops directly around him.
Aspid slithered across the field. Roman rode atop his head, feet anchored, his arms opened wide. A black crown rested on his hair. Behind him black smoke stretched like an impossibly long mantle. A wall of black flames, thirty feet tall and twenty feet wide, cut the field in two in the dragon’s wake.
I scrambled off the tree. Two vampires stepped forward, spread a sheet of clear plastic on the ground, and knelt on it. I felt the navigators let go and grabbed their minds. The bloodsuckers opened their throats in unison and I crushed their minds as they bled out.
I sliced my arm, let my blood mix with that of the undead, and felt it catch on fire with my power. The red spiraled up my legs, climbing higher, over my thighs, over my waist, forming armor. It felt clunky.
“Awful,” Erra said. “You are an embarrassment. Stand still.”
My aunt circled me, words of a long-forgotten language falling from her mouth. It felt like forever, but it took only seconds. When I looked down at myself, I wore blood armor. My aunt stopped in front of me and rested her ghostly fingers under my chin.
“Go and free yourself from your father.”
“I will,” I told her.
I swung onto the Friesian. He pawed the ground, his nostrils flaring. Julie was already on her mare, her eyes wild and scared.
“Raise the banner.”
She raised the flag, and the green standard of In-Shinar fluttered above us.
I let the stallion go. He tore out of the woods at a gallop. We burst into the open. The wall of black flames rose to the right of us, and within it monstrous mouths and claws writhed, grabbing any who strayed too close and tearing into their bodies. We had cut my father’s forces in half. I was on the Keep side of the flame wall, and Curran and his mercs, the Order, and Jim’s reserve were on the other.