Staked

It was an excellent plan for about ninety seconds. A lot can happen in ninety seconds. I unbound just as many vampires as I did in Berlin, probably more—all their fine clothing ruined by the juicy sounds of their owners’ elements being forcibly separated. Splortches and splashes and gushes ahead of me, even more behind me. So much blood on the steps, splashes of black and sometimes red in the white snow, if the vampire had fed recently. A few vampires got past Owen and Granuaile and rounded the pillar on me, but I staked them and wondered how many Theophilus had brought with him. He was sacrificing a lot of soldiers to get to me. Did he have the guts to fight himself, I wondered? Had he emerged from the warded building, or was he still coldly issuing directions from the safety of his darkened room?

The vampires figured out that Granuaile and Owen were doing most of the damage, and they sent a few of their soldiers over the rooftops to land on Babington’s and deal with them. Not that I saw that happening from down on the steps—I pieced that together later. The first I realized that something was wrong was when I heard Granuaile cry out in surprise. I looked up at the Babington’s rooftop and saw her twist in midair and just barely catch the tiled edge with her hands. She and Owen had been facing in my direction and leaning out the wide window of the pavilion to target the vampires coming my way, so they hadn’t seen the ones sneaking up behind them, and Granuaile got defenestrated. To keep from falling, she’d had to drop Scáthmhaide—the only source of energy available to her. A vampire danced down the slope of the roof to finish her off, while Owen made the inexplicable decision to shape-shift into a bear to fight the remaining two in the room. He couldn’t unbind any vampires that way, either by unbinding or by stake. I targeted the one coming after Granuaile and spoke two whole words of Old Irish before an unseen fist slammed into the side of my jaw, both breaking and dislocating it and causing me to bite off the tip of my tongue. It spun me around and I tried to face my attacker, but my balance was a mess, my ears were ringing, and the pain was occupying all my headspaces until I could get it shunted into a tidy screaming box. The result was that I slipped on the icy steps and fell on my ass again. I let go of the bloodied stake in my left hand when a booted heel stomped down on my fingers and broke most of them. The stake got kicked away, and I blinked furiously and triggered my healing charm, trying to focus enough to have a chance at saving my life. A ball of dough sitting atop a pickle laughed at me, and I blinked again. Now it was a pale, bloodless face laughing at me, and the torso was dressed in a hunter green turtleneck underneath a long olive trench coat. Dark eyes and a douchelord’s haircut up top, clean shaven, and a scar that began on his upper lip and continued underneath the bottom one.

“Thfff.”

He cupped his right ear and mocked me. “I’m sorry, what was that? Theophilus? Yes. We meet at last, Mr. O’Sullivan. For a very brief time, at the end of your life. You were better than all the rest of the Druids, at least—congratulations on presenting a genuine challenge. Thought I should say farewell in person.”

I scrambled back and up in a crabwalk to put some distance between us. Pointless, really, when he could close it very quickly. I stole a glance at Granuaile. She was still hanging from the roof, and a vampire was trying to stomp on her hands to make her fall. It wasn’t necessarily a fatal drop—three stories—but there was nothing save unforgiving stone waiting below.

Theophilus followed my gaze and didn’t like what he saw any more than I did. “Karl!” he shouted. “Hurry up and help Hans with the other one!” Karl turned his head to confirm that, yes, Hans was still having difficulty subduing Owen in the little rooftop pavilion. And that’s when Granuaile lunged up, grabbed Karl’s pant leg, and yanked mightily to pull him off his feet. He hit the edge of the tiles with his ass next to her handhold, she latched on to his torso, and then they were locked in a horrible embrace and fighting as they fell, tumbling so that when they disappeared behind the raised blocks of stone partitioning the steps, they were falling horizontally, the vampire’s back to me and Granuaile almost invisible except for the trailing flame of her hair. The crunch of their impact and their joint, choked cry of pain caused Theophilus to wince.

“Ouch,” he said, and my inarticulate attempt at shouting Granuaile’s name sounded as if I were trying to talk through duct tape. I reached behind my right shoulder and drew out Fragarach, pointing it in the general direction of Theophilus. His eyes returned to me and he snorted. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish with that? Steel won’t do anything except make me hungry later for any blood you manage to spill with it now.”

He was right. Steel wouldn’t do anything significant to him unless I could manage to decapitate him. But Fragarach was more than simple steel. It could cut through any armor, or make people tell the truth, or summon winds. Down the steps to the west, past the fountain and beyond the plaza, the narrow Via dei Condotti descended in a straight line to the Tiber River, which I’d be able to see on a clear day. But it was all dark and gloomy now. It was a long shot, but I had to try. Summoning wind didn’t require a verbal command, just an effort of will and a source of energy. I pointed Fragarach down the Via dei Condotti and gave it all the juice remaining in my bear charm and a little bit of me as well. I groaned from the effort, drained, and fell back against the steps.

“What the hell was that?” Theophilus said. I gave a little bit more of myself to target him and trigger my unbinding charm. He clutched his chest and said, “Hrrk,” so I hit him with it again. He took a step back, but that was all I had left. I listened to Owen bellow upstairs, out of my sight, heard people finally screaming about the blood-soaked snow, and realized that the Hammers of God must have either suffered mightily and their cloak was no more or at some point the carnage became too great to ignore under any spell. I heard nothing from Granuaile. And Theophilus, when he recovered, finally looked annoyed. If nothing else, I’d defeated his smug expression. And maybe I’d get a small result for my efforts after all. The dirty-dishwater clouds in the west swirled and tore apart as Theophilus said, “I think that’s enough,” and a few weak rays of late-afternoon sun pierced the snowfall and set his head to smoking as he lunged for me. He felt the burn and halted, turned, and shot away into the plaza, behind the buildings, where there was plenty of shade. His entire face sizzled and vented steam, and now he looked satisfactorily pissed.

I heard a scream from up at the top of Babington’s and saw a human form engulfed in flames, flailing in the pavilion. Owen’s troublesome opponent had caught much more of the sun up there. Pointing at me, Theophilus turned his head to call over his shoulder, “Marko! Shoot him!”

The steel barrel of a rifle peeked out a window in the terra-cotta building, and I scrambled to hide myself behind the stone pillar. A bullet cracked off the steps and shattered some marble quarried hundreds of years ago. I was effectively pinned down now, unable to speak any more unbindings through my broken jaw, and my stake was nearby but in the line of sight of a sniper. I couldn’t bind it to my palm without the ability to craft the binding. At least the sun had placed me in a no-vamp land. Any vampire who wanted to get to me would have to get through the sun first.

I allowed myself a tiny sniff of hope: I’d figure something out in the next minute or so. A minute without someone in your face was all you needed sometimes. And then the lovely yellow patches of light on the steps faded as the storm clouds boiled back together in the absence of continued influence from Fragarach.