Blood Winter (39 page)

Tyler nodded and gestured for the others to follow him.

Alexander trotted up the temple steps to check on Gregory. The witch was sweating and pale. He circled around the pillar holding Giselle, glancing up as Alexander joined him.

“These bonds are like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Gregory said. “I haven’t been able to put even a dent in them. I need Judith, but to tell the truth, I’m not sure she and I are going to be able to do much better.”

Alexander chewed his lips, thinking. Then he strode back down the stairs to where the angels stood talking together.

“Gregory cannot get them out alone. He thinks Judith’s help will not be enough.” He turned and pointed to Liam and Bambi. “Those two are new friends of Max’s. They just volunteered to be guinea pigs. I want you two to see if you can crack the magic. You have got Tutresiel’s sword and Xaphan’s magic. Between the two of you, you ought to be able to break open the spells.”

“They might not survive,” Xaphan pointed out.

“They might not,” Alexander agreed. “Do it anyhow.”

Both angels nodded and skimmed up the steps. Gregory drew back, watching. Tutresiel went first. He pulled his sword from the pocket universe he kept it stored in. It appeared flaming white in his upraised hands. He swung. The blade smashed against the golden column and bounced back. Magic exploded. The force shoved Alexander backward and widened the ring of melted snow surrounding the temple.

Tutresiel bent and looked at his handiwork. He shook his head and drew back to try again. This time, the white witchlight surrounding the blade seemed to sharpen, like a diamond lit by the sun. He swung straight down. The sword stuck in the column. The two magics crackled, sending bolts of sizzling gold and white streaking through the air. All around, the night grew hot as a blast furnace.

The muscles in Tutresiel’s arms, back, and legs bulged as he struggled to pull his sword free. Finally, it came loose. He spun with the force of the release. He was panting.

He turned back to face the column. It no longer stood straight and round. Instead, it looked a little bit like melted taffy. It had bubbled and melted, and the top was blackened.

Tutresiel stood back a moment, and then his sword vanished. Before Alexander could ask what he was up to, he rose into the air until he was a good two hundred feet up. Then he turned and dove. He held his wings close and, at the last moment, spread them with a loud metallic ringing sound. Then he crashed into the column with the leading edge of one wing. The force flipped him around and sent him rolling down the steps and into the mud.

A moment later, the column simply shattered, the chunks of it dissolving as they fell. Liam slumped to the floor. Xaphan bent and checked him.

“Alive,” he said. He slapped the man’s face. “Wake up.”

Alexander bent and offered Tutresiel a hand. The angel eyed him disdainfully and stood on his own. His body was caked with mud.

They went up the stairs, where Liam was starting to come to. He blinked, his eyes widening at Xaphan. His attention moved to Tutresiel and then Alexander.

“Am I nuts?” he asked. “Or do the two guys standing next to you have wings?”

“They are angels,” Alexander said.

Liam’s gaze flicked back and forth between the two. “You have got to be shitting me. This is heaven? How come I hurt so fucking much? Where’s all the white light?”

“You are not in heaven,” Alexander said, reaching down to pull him up. Liam leaned against him heavily. “This is still Montana, and these angels, well, I would not call them particularly angelic. Come on, you need to get out of the way.”

He pulled Liam down the steps and onto an outcropping of rock, before returning to Tutresiel and Xaphan. “Can you do that again? For Giselle?”

“I have to rest first,” Tutresiel said. “I am still weak from being in Ledrel.”

“You try, then,” Alexander told Xaphan, not letting his frustration show. He pointed at Bambi. “See if you can get him out.”

Xaphan gave a thin smile and extended his wings. Flames erupted along every single feather. The fire stretched high into the air. The flames were orange, blue, and yellow. Heat flashed through the air, drying the mud clinging to Tutresiel. Xaphan stepped up to the pillar and embraced it, folding his wings down around it.

Nothing happened.

Then the fire shifted into the white-blue of a welding torch. The stench of burning hair and ozone swelled in the air. The ground dried under the heat, and Alexander’s lips and eyes turned parched. He backed away until he stood beside Liam, who was staring, his eyes wide.

“Is Jack going to be okay?” he asked in his rough voice.

“Hard to say.” Alexander’s mouth twitched with gallows humor. “If I recall the movie, Bambi survived the forest fire, if it makes you feel any better.”

Liam snorted. “I feel like I’ve wandered into a horror flick,” he said. “Afghanistan seems almost normal compared to this.”

“Welcome to the new world,” Alexander said. “Where your dreams and nightmares come true and everything you read in the fairy tales is real. Get used to it.”

Just then, there was a sound of shattering glass, and Xaphan tumbled through the air, landing fifty feet from the temple. He sank through the snow, and the ground lit on fire, his wings igniting dirt and rock alike. He rolled to his feet and knelt down, setting his hand onto the burning earth. A moment later, the flames died, leaving a scorched spot a full twenty feet in diameter.

Alexander approached the temple, with Liam hard on his heels. Tutresiel got to Bambi before them. He picked him up like a rag doll. The unconscious man’s head lolled, his hands and legs dangling lifelessly. Liam squeezed in and lifted his jaw. “Jack! C’mon, Jack! Wake up!” He gave Bambi a little shake.

The other man coughed suddenly. Tutresiel let him go, and he dropped like a bag of onions. Liam swore and crouched beside his friend. Alexander turned to Xaphan. The angel was practically translucent.
Dammit.

“How long before you two might be able to release Giselle?” he asked.

“A couple of hours. Maybe more,” Tutresiel said.

Gunshots rang out down in Mansion Heights. Alexander spun around and ran to get a better view. The Last Standers had gathered inside their barns and houses and spread out into bunkers all along the crown of the hill. Below, a mob of people were flowing out of Missoula. They rode on snowmobiles, skis, and snowshoes. They carried torches, but as the shots rang out, they doused the fires.

Kara had brought the cavalry, and a war was about to erupt. He had to stop it. Max would want him to stop it.

He turned to look at Tutresiel and Xaphan. “Get Sterling. Whatever it takes. Take him out. I will handle the rest.”

He did not wait for a reply but launched himself down the hill. Even with Sterling gone, he did not know how nine Shadowblades were going to stop a war. Each side had at least a couple of thousand people and a lot of weaponry. It was going to take a miracle, and he was fresh out.

T
HE WORLD WAS WHITE. THERE WAS NO DEPTH
to it. No shadows, no shapes. Just misty whiteness. Everything, that is, besides the red angel and Max. He was looking around him in patent disbelief. She watched him, part of her wanting to gloat at his defeat, the other part of her wondering just how she was going to get out of the place.

“You’ve been here before,” she said, and her voice sounded washed-out and gray.

“Unfortunately,” Shoftiel answered with a grimace. “I spent five hundred years here.”

“Looks like you’ve got another five hundred to look forward to.”

“Yes. Thanks for that.”

“Nothing you didn’t deserve.”

“I did believe you were enslaving and harvesting my brothers.”

“Well, that makes all your torture and murder all right, then,” Max snapped. She looked down at herself. She was still naked from the waist up. Her right arm was smeared with his blood. His sigil on her stomach and chest was gone. “I stopped bleeding.”

“My hold on you broke when you stabbed me. That was clever, by the way. Painful but clever.”

“I don’t suppose you know how to get out of here,” she asked.

“No. Otherwise, I would not have waited five hundred years for the curse of the blood-and-bone blade to wear off.”

“Of course, you could be lying. You probably are.”

“I could be. I could want your delightful company for the next five centuries.”

“No thanks.” Max stretched and turned. “I think I’ll have a look around.”

“I will accompany you.”

Max scowled. “I don’t want your company.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Are you planning to try to kill me again, Daffy? Finish the job?”

“I would, but no one can die in the Mistlands.”

“That’s too bad. You could use a little killing.” She started away and stopped when he fell in beside her. “What’s your damage?”

He frowned. “My damage?”

“Why are you following me? We’ve established that you hate me and want to kill me. That pretty much means we’re not going to be besties. So shove off.”

“Afraid not. I’m not ready to say good-bye just yet, and once you disappear into the mists, chances are we will not see each other again.”

“How big is this place?”

“Who knows? There are no landmarks, nothing to measure by. You can walk forever, but who knows if you go in a straight line? It does tend to get monotonous. I once flew for what I believe was four days. I got nowhere.”

At that point, it occurred to Max that she might be able to escape through the abyss. Gathering herself, she dropped into her fortress, and—nothing.

“No exit that way, I’m afraid,” Shoftiel said, almost sympathetically. “I must have tried that a thousand times my first day and at least once every day after.”

“What about food? Water?” Max was trying very hard not to sound as panicky as she was beginning to feel.

“Don’t need them.”

They wandered together through the endless mist. She was glad of Shoftiel’s company, despite herself, and despite the insanity of strolling half-naked with the asshole who’d spent most of the last couple of days trying to kill her. The monotony was suffocating. Max bent to touch the ground. It was soft, like velvet, and slightly moist. There were no rocks, no trees, no landmarks of any kind.

She couldn’t stay there. There had to be a way out.

“I take it your magic doesn’t work?”

He shook his head. “I’m toothless in this realm.”

Max put her head down, thinking. Maybe she should clack her heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Too bad she didn’t have a pair of magic ruby slippers.

There had to be a way. She paced a circle around Shoftiel, then another and another. Around and around she went. He watched with a disdainful smirk. Clearly, he thought that if he hadn’t figured a way out in five hundred years, she wasn’t going to, either.

What did you do when you were in a prison with no doors, no walls, no locks? But of course, there was a lock. The inability to leave. That was the lock.

Max stopped. She was a walking key. No lock could hold her. All she had to do was figure out how to leave.

And then she knew. There were no doors because the realm itself was a door. And if she was the key . . .

She grinned at Shoftiel. “Time for me to go home. Enjoy your stay. I look forward to never seeing you again.”

With that, she closed her eyes and fell backward. In her mind, she pictured herself falling through the mist and out of it.

Falling, falling, falling, falling.

She bounced on hard-packed dirt, and her eyes popped open. She half expected to see Shoftiel laughing down at her. But he and the mist were gone.

A
LEXANDER FLUNG HIMSELF HEADLONG DOWN
the hill. The snow had turned to a glop of slush, ice, and mud. It was not until he had reached the top of Mansion Heights that he realized he had left Gregory up at the temple. Just then, a streak of fire erupted along the base of the hill in the field between the bottom of the Heights and the nearest neighborhood. It ran from right to left and grew into a wall of flame, separating the two motley armies.