my mind. “Dive off and swim for the next vortex. The current will help carry you—”
“No.”
“—and you can hide in the caves. They’re so vast that—”
“No.”
“—the fey might never find you!”
“They would find me. And I would not face my end that way.”
“Why?” the voice in my head raged. “You have to try! You know you can’t win if you stay—”
“This isn’t about winning.”
“Then what the hell is it about?”
I cupped his cheek, and felt his blood slide under my fingers, warm and wet and precious. “Pain.”
He looked at me, uncomprehendingly. But something else heard, and finally understood. From somewhere, far underground, there came a distant rumble.
My calls had not raised the goddess I’d sought, and they had been ignored by the only other ears there were to hear. Something in the caverns had listened, but not comprehended. What did they care for honor, a concept both foreign and trivial? What did they need of revenge? These were not words they knew, or cries they answered.
But, by chance, I had stumbled across one they did.
The cry of my heart had reached them as the call of my mind had not. Because yes, pain was a concept they knew. They had felt the red burn of it in the flesh—their own or a mate’s or a child’s taken too young; they had heard the sweet sound of it in an enemy’s cry, savaged in tender places, never to threaten them again; they had tasted it, thick and warm and meaty in their throats.
Yes, they understood pain, in all its permutations, as I did.
And now, they listened.
Come to me, I whispered, my mental voice fading along with my strength, but still echoing in the vast chambers below. Come to me and I will give you all that you seek, and more.
Come to me . . .
The argument on shore was a short one. The leader knocked the argumentative fey to the ground, who swept his feet out from under him and pulled a knife. But two more fey stepped forward before he could use it, holding him at spearpoint. And another kicked him savagely in the head, bouncing it off the large rock.
It seemed that the leader’s take on events was popular.
But I needed more time.
“Let the vampire go, and I will come with you,” I offered. “Quietly.”
“The time for negotiation is past!” the leader snarled, jumping back to his feet. “The only thing I want from you is blood!”
The rumble was louder now, enough that several of the fey had noticed. They turned their heads toward the skies, as if they thought a thundercloud approached. Not quite, I thought, and strengthened my call, putting every ounce of my energy I had left into it as the leader raised his weapon again.
The fey on the ground was now either unconscious or dead, unable to help. And none of the others seemed remotely interested. But something else wasn’t under the leader’s command, and it had heard me.
And it had decided.
Only no, I thought, as the ground shook and the fey stared about and some of the smaller rocks on the hillside tumbled down toward the water, that wasn’t exactly right. Not ‘it’. They.
And as in the case of the small, furry things, where my power had cascaded across the entire group, giving me a hundred eyes at once, it overflowed this time as well. Only this time, there weren’t hundreds. There weren’t even thousands. This time . . . there were millions.
A living, breathing cloud of blackness that burst out of caves in the banks, out of tunnels in the rocks, and from crevasses so small that you would not have thought an insect could have fit through them, much less an army. Yet an army is what came forth.
They erupted like black geysers all along the riverbank: bats of every type and description, from tiny things barely the size of my hand, to huge, fanged beasts half as big as me, with wing spans that looked more like a pterodactyl’s than anything from the modern world. And everything in between. Whole colonies of them had answered my call. I had always had trouble holding a single animal on Earth. But here—
It was different.
I could not fight, could barely even remain upright. My legs did not work, my shoulder throbbed and bled, my hand had already swollen to twice its normal size, beaten almost as badly as the fey it had pulverized. No, I could not fight at all.