Magic Binds (Kate Daniels #9)(110)

“Don’t strain anything,” I told him.

“I won’t.”

The vampire picked him up, grasped a metal pole on the side of the tower, and slid down. The other Masters of the Dead followed suit. Pillman lingered.

“Yes?” I asked him.

“I . . .” he faltered.

I let the magic suffuse me. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” he said.

“I’m always afraid,” I told him. “Before every battle. Use the fear. It will make you sharp.”

He nodded, and his vampire took him off the tower.

“You’re starting to scare me,” Desandra said.

“That’s one off the bucket list.” I took a deep breath and yelled at the top of my lungs. “Chernobog! Living darkness, father of monsters, I ask for your aid in battle. I invoke your name. Lend us your power. Those who are afraid, let them pray to you and hear their prayers.”

Okay. The invocation was done.

“He’s coming,” Erra said.

In the distance the trees fell. Five huge shaggy forms burst out of the forest, their massive tusks wrapped in metal. Behind them vampires galloped with their odd jerky gait, followed by human troops.

“Are those fucking mammoths?” Desandra asked.

“Yes.” Enormous, colossal mammoths, bigger than any reconstructions I had seen. Where the hell did my father get mammoths?

Desandra’s eyes lit up. “Kate, get off the tower, so I can get down there. I’ve never killed a mammoth.”

“Christopher?” I asked.

He leaned back. Blood-red wings snapped open from his back.

“Whoa.” Desandra backed away.

Christopher picked me up and leapt off the tower. We glided and turned right. I craned my neck. The ground gave under the leading mammoth, and the massive beast collapsed into a hidden trench. A chorus of eerie cackles filled the air. Jim had put boudas into the trenches.

Christopher’s eyes turned blood-red.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“The battlefield is calling.” His voice wasn’t his own.

“Can you hold on for a little while longer?”

“I’ll try.”

We swung toward a large oak. Christopher plunged down and landed, setting me down next to Barabas and Julie. Barabas looked like he’d jumped out of some D&D book featuring thieves and assassins. He wore leather armor and carried a sharp knife. A dark rag covered the bottom part of his face. Above it, his eyes were blood-red with demonic horizontal pupils. Julie stood holding the reins of our horses. She would be riding a roan mare. We all agreed that Peanut was much too beloved to take into battle. I would be riding Hugh’s mean Friesian. No horse on this battlefield would stand up to him.

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.