I sat up straight and looked around. The park was full of small groups of people talking in hushed tones. I knew if I expanded my radius, I would encounter witches, vampires, and werewolves of all ages and strengths. This was our community, brought together to face a common enemy.
It was kind of nice, if you didn’t think about the part where we might all die.
Around midnight, Dashiell flinched suddenly, lifting a hand that was already holding a cell phone. He read the text and looked up—right at me. “The spotter to the north,” he said, standing up. “They’re here.”
Chapter 44
I pulled in my radius, and Jesse and I ran to the corner of the wedge, through the gate leading down to the riverbed. Most of the Old World could see just fine in the dim light from the city—at least, for now—but Dashiell’s vampires had set out powerful camping lanterns along each bank, spaced every hundred feet or so. From the air we probably looked like a bizarre runway. I’d never really looked at the river at night, but the dry concrete bed seemed even bigger somehow, and alien, like the concave surface of the moon. It really was an enormous amount of space.
I turned right, crossing the narrow bike path and climbing down into the riverbed with Jesse and Shadow alongside me. The other leaders followed behind us, out of my radius, as we’d planned.
“You ready?” Jesse murmured.
“Nope.”
Then we heard the horn.
What was the real term for it again? Oliphant. I had expected something sort of flutey, but it sounded more like a hollow foghorn with a sense of dread. I thought it was a little loud, but all around me, I saw people drop to the ground, covering their ears. Jesse and Shadow seemed unaffected, but when I turned to look, even Beatrice had fallen to one knee. Dashiell was bent over her, looking worried. Will’s hands were clamped over his ears. Kirsten’s lips were moving in some sort of protection spell.
Then the sound finally faded, and I faced forward again. Before anyone could speak, I heard a galloping sound, like hooves striking concrete. Hooves and claws.
It sounded like a whole horde of them, ominous as fuck, and my stomach turned into a rock. What if I was wrong about all this? What if we were all just lined up here waiting to die?
Then they came around the bend, and into the light of the farthest lanterns. The Hunt rode toward us as a single organism. There was no jostling for position, no veering off course, no confusion. They moved like an enormous, rolling black wave: terrible and inevitable.
Beside me, Jesse said something low and scared in Spanish. The people of the Los Angeles Old World, God bless them, held steady, waiting for a signal from me.
My eyes went to the horses first, because . . . well, the horses were horses the way that Shadow was a dog. They were all ink-black, their hides covered in pebbled armor, galloping and snorting like something out of a nightmare. I didn’t know much about horse breeds, but they looked like Clydesdales or something similar. Each one probably weighed twenty-five hundred pounds, and despite the dim light and the distance, I could see that their hooves set up little sparks on the concrete, like metal ax heads. There were too many for me to count quickly, but probably close to twenty.
“Oh, shit,” squeaked Kirsten’s voice behind me.
“What are they?” I heard Hayne ask her.
“Hellhest.”
It didn’t sound like English, but it was as good a name as any for the equine equivalent of bargests.
I couldn’t make out much about their riders, because all the lights were sitting on the ground, but running at the hellhest’s feet, I saw a pack of terrifyingly massive black dogs.
Bargests. Five of them.
I recognized an Irish wolfhound mix and a couple of Great Danes, all with the trademark inky darkness of the spell. Each and every one of them was bigger than Shadow.
And it was only in that moment that I realized what had happened to the people living on the edge of Sunken City. Permanently changing dogs into bargests and horses into hellhest would require a human sacrifice . . . for each one. Which meant that something like twenty-five humans had been killed, and judging from the bedrooms I’d seen, some of them had been children.
I felt righteous anger build up in my rib cage. The humans of Los Angeles weren’t technically under my protection, but that didn’t mean these assholes could show up and kill entire families in my fucking town.
I stepped forward, and when the Wild Hunt was a hundred yards away, I held up my hands in a stop gesture.
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure they were even capable of stopping. The law of inertia didn’t seem to apply here. But the leader pulled on his reins, and the entire group pulled up short behind him.
I walked forward.
Only now that they were close could I make out anything about the riders. Dressed in black robes and metal masks, they were both terrifying and glorious, like something out of Guillermo del Toro’s personal happy place. The leader moved his snorting, stamping hellhest closer, but stopped a good twenty yards away from me. He had a massive sword slung onto the saddle. They all had swords, but only his seemed to emit its own gentle glow.
“Dashiell?” I said over my shoulder. “You’re up.”
The vampire came up behind me and slowly passed me, stopping ten yards from the silent rider.
Then I closed my eyes and pushed my radius out until it encompassed the entire Wild Hunt.
It felt . . . astounding. I was used to Shadow’s power, and this felt similar, but magnified by the sheer number and size of the different animals. Something still felt wrong, and it took me a moment to realize that I hadn’t actually broken the spell. I’d only subdued it, like holding your foot down on a cockroach. The magic was still there, so powerful that it staggered me. Jesse appeared beside me, putting out a hand to subtly support my elbow.
Dashiell was talking, trying to negotiate, but I couldn’t focus over the intensity of the Wild Hunt magic. “Scarlett?” Jesse murmured, glancing down at me. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. I looked at the riders, who had instantly transformed back into humans. They were all blinking and looking around with obvious disappointment. Their black robes and masks had disappeared, revealing regular street clothes. The majority of them were women, which shouldn’t have surprised me—statistically, nearly all witches are female. I just never expect women to do the really evil stuff.
The Wild Hunt’s leader was, of course, Aldric, now dressed in jeans and a red button-down shirt. There was black cloth showing under the shirt, and I figured he was also wearing Kevlar. Like the others, he blinked a couple of times, looking around, and then a smile spread across his face. “Intoxicating,” he said, lifting one hand from the reins and studying both sides of it. “Just as I hoped.”
I forced myself to tune him out. I had to figure out what why the Wild Hunt spell hadn’t broken. I closed my eyes again so I could pick out the different sensations that were swirling in my radius. It was hard to separate and identify them, like picking out different ingredients in a smoothie. Only the magic was trying to blend together into a fucking force of nature rather than a delicious beverage.
My eyes popped open again. The witches didn’t feel like witches. That was the answer. Whatever magic drove the Wild Hunt was the same substance that all witches used—but Kirsten and her kind channeled magic, pulling it out of the air and letting it run through them. These Luparii witches had done something different. They’d summoned the Wild Hunt magic into themselves and kept it there, something no one was supposed to be able to do. So they felt less like witches and more like magic incarnate: densely concentrated and borderline unstable. This was stronger than witch magic. It was elemental.
And it was exhausting. I could do it—I could keep them human—but for the first time in my life, nullifying magic was slowly tiring me. Then I realized that it wasn’t just the riders, their hellhest, and the bargests, although that was plenty. It was also the sword, Durendal, hanging at Aldric’s side, and something else. There was something on Aldric’s person that felt practically radioactive.
Jesse squeezed my hand. The conversation had been getting tense. I tuned back in.
“You need to leave my town now,” Dashiell said to Aldric. I had to admire the vampire. He was currently in my radius, but he spoke with such bracing authority and command that even I kind of wanted to get a plane ticket out of there.