said. “Creatures who cannot control themselves are of no use to the Red King, after all. Their deaths simply reduced the number of useless, parasitic mouths he had to feed. He may think of humans as a commodity, but he’d rather not throw that wealth away.”
“Harry?” Murphy asked. “Can you do that anvil thing again?”
“Hell. I’m sorta surprised I got away with it the first time. Never done anything with that much voltage.” I closed my eyes for a second and began to reach down for the ley line again—and my brain contorted. Thoughts turned into a harsh explosion of images and memories that left long lacerations on the inside of my skull, and even after I had moved my mind away from those images, it took several seconds before I could open my eyes again. “No,” I croaked. “No, that isn’t an option. Even if they gave me enough time to pull it off.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Thomas asked. He held a large pistol in his left hand, his falcata in his right, and stood at my back, facing the darkness behind us. “Stand here until they swarm us?”
“We’re going to show them how much it will cost to take us down,” I said. “How’s it coming, padawan?”
Molly let out a slow, thoughtful breath. Then she lifted one pale hand, rotated an extended finger in a circle around us, and murmured, “Hireki.”
I felt the subtle surge of her will wash out and drew in my own as it did. The word my apprentice whispered seemed to flow out from her in an enormous circle, leaving visible signs of its passing. It fluttered leaves and blades of grass, stirred small stones—and, as it continued, it washed over several shapes out in the night that rippled and became solid black outlines, where before there was only indistinct darkness and shadow.
“Not all that skilled,” Molly said, panting, satisfaction in her voice.
“Fuego!” I snarled, and threw a small comet of fire from my right hand. It sailed forth with a howling whistle of superheated air and smashed into the nearest of the shadowed forms, less than a dozen yards away. Fire leapt up, and a vampire screamed in rage and pain and began retreating through the trees.
“Infriga!” I barked, and made a ripping gesture with my left hand. I tore the fire from the stricken vampire—and then some. I sent the resulting fireball skipping over to the next form—and left the first target as a block of ice where the damp jungle air had emptied its water over the vampire’s body and locked it into place, rigid and very slightly luminous with the residue of the cold energy I felt in me, the gift of Queen Mab. Which was just as well—there were a dozen closing attackers in my immediate field of vision alone, which meant another fifty or sixty of them if they were circling in from all around us, plus the ones I couldn’t see, who may have employed more mundane techniques of stealth to avoid the eye.
I wanted them to see what I could do.
The second vampire fell as easily as the first, as did the third, and only then did I say quietly, “One bullet apiece, Martin.”
Martin’s silenced pistol coughed three times, and the slightly glowing forms of the ice-enclosed vampires shattered into several dozen pieces each, falling to the ground where the luminous energy of Winter began to bleed slowly away, along with the ice-riddled flesh.
They got the point. The vampires stopped advancing. The jungle became still.
“Fire and ice,” murmured the Leanansidhe. “Excellent, my godson. Anyone can play with an element. Few can manipulate opposites with such ease.”
“Sort of the idea,” I said. “Back me up.”
“Of course,” Lea said.
I stepped forward and slightly apart from the others and lifted my hands. “Arianna!” I shouted, and my voice boomed as though I’d been holding a microphone and using speakers the size of refrigerators. It was something of a surprise, and I looked over my shoulder to see my godmother smiling calmly.
“Arianna!” I called again. “You were too great a coward to accept my challenge when I gave it to you in Edinburgh! Now I am here, in the heart of the power of the Red King! Do you still fear to face me, coward?”
“What?” Thomas muttered under his breath.
“This is not an assault,” Sanya added, disapproval in his voice.
I ignored them. I was the one with the big voice. “You see what I have done to