Shadow Rites

I repocketed the blob and raced to the nearest Onorio. I tore his leather jacket open to find enough blades to run that good-sized butcher shop. I took three, a long sword in my right hand and two in my left, the blades held forward and back, like a helicopter blade. I cut through the bloody blob with all three steel blades, coating the edges with the mixed blood, smeared there by Gee, and with magics. Then I raced to Tau. And I cut her.

CHAPTER 20

In the Blood of My Enemy

She threw up her arm in a defensive gesture, shock on her face. Her defensive spell was too late to stop all damage, as if defensive magics hadn’t been prepared for. As if was no one was supposed to fight back with mundane weapons.

Stupid girl, Beast thought as my blades slid through the rising wards, cutting.

It wasn’t a killing strike. Her raw power was enough to stop the edges of the swords long before that. But it was enough. Maybe. Moving in Beast-speed, I watched as two of my circling blades cut along her raised arm, shallow enough to do no long-term damage, but deep enough to hurt like a son of a gun. Taking her blood with them. Anointing my blades, the same way she had anointed Grégoire’s, because, for sure, blood had been part of the Nicauds’ dark working.

Killing claws in the blood of my enemy, Beast screamed inside me. The sound came out of my throat, a puma’s fighting scream of rage.

Tau screamed back, the sound a shrieking peal of anguish, so close to a vampire’s death scream it was hard to determine the difference. She dropped to the floor beneath an emerald ward, hard as diamond, cradling her arm. Her mother rushed to her and slid into the ward as if it were made of water, already muttering incantations of healing.

I slashed my helicopter blades through the mist in the air, and the green fog we were breathing parted. Gathered. Tightened into tight, irregular, balls of dull green, like sleet. Congealed and hardened. The solidified mist fell to the floor, raining down with slight pings. The air cleared instantly except around Tau and her mother, where the mist grew more dense and then settled on their personal wards like a layer of glue. Score one for blood-magic used against a blood-magic user by a nonmagic user. That had to be record of some kind.

The edge of one blade I had used on the air was coated with a gummy slime. I tossed it out of the way, to land with a clang in the corner. I still had two blood blades. I raced to Leo.

Yanking his arm, I whirled him around and pulled back my right arm. I stabbed Leo in the center of his abdomen, exactly where the stake had been. “Molly!” I called. As the blade slid from Leo’s undead flesh, I plucked the brooch free and whipped it through the air to Evan.

His ward parted and closed again with an audible snap, the brooch in his hand. Beside him, Molly was waking again, her hands going to her belly.

Something hit me, in the same spot where the scarlet leathers had been nicked. I looked down to see another scrape. Something hit me again, a little to the left, but hard enough this time to hurt. Green energies swarmed in front of my face, a confused-looking mass of undirected power.

Tau had thrown a spell at me. The magics had impacted my leathers, rebounded, and gathered themselves. In front of my eyes, her working reshaped itself. And shot back. The spell hit Tau, who fell again. Silent this time, her screaming having stopped cold.

Gee. He had wiped his blood all over me and all over the blob. Somehow he had warded me. Or my clothes. Or . . . added to the spells on my leathers that protected me against magical attack. Yeah. That.

I whipped my head back to Leo. The green in his eyes fluttered like flames in a wind, and vanished. He blinked once and his pupils constricted. His fangs clicked back. “My Jane. What . . . ?” He looked down and his eyes widened in a purely human gesture. “You stabbed me? Mon Dieu!” Oddly enough, he sounded surprised, maybe even traumatized at the reality.

“Yep. After I staked you. That’s why you feel so crappy. You can thank me later.” I put an Onorio blade in his hand and said, “I figured it out. The young witch’s blood”—I pointed at the bloody blade—“is also Ming’s blood, because she’s, in a way, Ming’s scion.”

And then it hit me. Every working of the Nicauds was blood-based. And their blood or Ming’s blood was disruptive to the workings. “It’s also powering the spells she’s using,” I said. “Bringing Ming? Was an act of genius.”

“But of course, mon amour.” Leo flipped the short sword, testing its balance. “Je suis brillante.” He had just taken credit for my idea. Of course. He lunged into the fight, taking on Ming. Marlene stepped away from her daughter and threw a red-hued spell at Lachish. Lachish and two other witches, standing in a triangle, shielded against the attack spell and threw one of their own, coating Marlene in a cocoon of magics that looked like spun pearl, if pearl came alive and vibrated with might.

Tau was on her knees, under a ward, picking apart her own spell, as if peeling tar off her body.

Now was my chance to obey Gee, his words still ringing in my head. You must protect the children. Always. Molly’s children. I tapped on the mixed magic ward and Evan looked around before dropping it. I grabbed the Truebloods and hauled them bodily out of the ballroom, through the Chaperone’s Alcove, and the short hallway through the office. With another swipe of the Tau-bloodied, vamp-killer short sword, I cut through the black-light wards, and we all raced out the side door.

The couple looked like crap, but there was no blood and I didn’t smell amniotic fluid. However, Molly’s fancy dress was blackened and ruined, and I didn’t want to know what had happened to it. I pressed the blob into Evan’s hands. “You said it could take three people out of the ward. Baby makes three, in my book. Go. Tell the ones out front to be ready for anything.”