That hug lasted barely five seconds. Not nearly enough time to exchange the chain. The realization sank in like a heavy stone to the pit of her stomach. They had failed.
KARMASH strode to the house on the left, where the murmur of voices announced the presence of people. The three operatives followed him.
“Where are you going?” Cotier murmured, a step behind.
“We need sword meat.”
“There is only one Edger man and one woman.”
Karmash was getting tired of this constant opposition. “You haven’t fought the Mars. I have. We’ll need a shield of bodies between us. Trust me on this.”
The door loomed in front of him. He punched it open and walked into the room. Eight men stared at him. He noted rifles on the walls. As he’d surmised, they were the rest of the priest’s guards.
Karmash reached into his pocket and dropped a handful of gold coins on the table. A small ransom. A quiet sound fluttered through the room as six men simultaneously sucked in their breath.
“I’m hunting a man,” Karmash said. “He’s in your church trying to kill your priest. I need this man alive. Help me apprehend him, and this gold is yours.”
AUDREY landed in her seat and leaned over to Kaldar. “What’s the plan, C again?”
Kaldar slipped his arm around her, pulling her closer, possessive, and toyed with her hair. “No need for Plan C. I’ve got it.”
“What?”
He eased his jacket open, squeezing the lining with his hand, and she glimpsed the outline of the chain in the secret pocket. “How . . . When?”
“Trade secret, love.” He smiled at her.
Damn it, but the man is smooth.
She leaned over and kissed the corner of his mouth.
“Careful now,” he murmured.
Ed Yonker climbed to the pulpit and raised his hands. “Brothers and sisters!”
The crowd stared at him, rapt.
“Listen to me and heed my words.”
The crowd stared. Someone cleared their throat.
“Today I bring you the Blessed Light!”
The crowd watched him. Yonker frowned. Alarm squirmed through Audrey. Something must have usually happened during this part of the service, and it was clearly not happening. George leaned to Kaldar and whispered urgently. Kaldar leaned toward her. “The gems are supposed to emit light when hit with magic.”
“I don’t suppose you can do emotion-manipulation magic?” she whispered.
“No.”
Audrey eased her feet out of her spiked heels.
Yonker touched the chain. His face turned bright red with fury.
A man jumped up on the right. Slicked-back hair, pale, where had she see him before? The recognition popped like a soap bubble in her head: Magdalene’s receptionist, Adam, with the weird haircut. He’d pulled his hair back off his face, and it had thrown her for a minute.
The pale man pointed at them. “They stole it! They took it!”
Magdalene had double-crossed them.
“Kill them!” Yonker bellowed.
“Cover your ears!” Kaldar hurled something toward the pulpit. Audrey clamped her hands over her ears.
The guards yanked their rifles off their shoulders.
A brilliant white light exploded between the benches and the stage, followed by a clap of thunder that punched through her hands straight into her eardrums. The church shook. The pictures danced and crashed to the floor.
A dozen people screamed at once. Men and women jumped from their seats, pushing each other out of the way in a rush to get out, concealing them temporarily from the guards. Audrey jumped to her feet and pushed her way into the aisle, trying to brace against the crowd so the boys could exit. Jack somersaulted over her head and landed in the center aisle, his eyes on fire with glowing amber. George ran along the bench like a tightrope walker. Jack grabbed her right arm, George took her left, and they pulled her to the doors. Kaldar brought up the rear.
The white light turned orange as the photographs and the purple brocade at the altar caught fire. The choir fled. Yonker didn’t move. He simply stood there, bewildered, looking at the flames.
A bench collapsed in the other row, knocking a knot of bodies to the ground. The closest guard was closing in, clubbing people streaming to the doors with the butt of his rifle. A long, slender blade flashed in Kaldar’s hand.
He does have a sword.
Audrey blinked.
The guard took aim, almost point-blank. Kaldar sliced, someone howled, and the flood of people hid them from her view.
The crowd crashed against the church doors. They held. People smashed into Audrey, pushing her forward into the writhing mass of bodies clawing at the door.
We’ll get crushed,
flashed through her head.
A loud yell, savage and inhuman, overtook the desperate cries of the crowd. The doors parted, and for a moment Audrey saw a giant man, silhouetted against the light, enormous muscles bulging on his arms. He leaped aside, and people spilled out of the church, into the sunlight.
“Go!” Audrey pushed the boys forward. “Go, go, go.”
The press of the crowd carried them outside. They burst into the open, running past two men with rifles. A guard on the right, a big thick man with a short beard, cursed. “Thin the crowd! Thin the crowd, or we’ll lose him.”
The man next to him raised his rifle and fired into the crowd. A dark-haired man dropped to the ground. On the other side of the church, another gunshot popped. A man screamed.
They were shooting at their own congregation.
The bearded guard raised his rifle.
Oh no, no you don’t, you sick bastard.
Audrey sprinted and hit him, ramming him hard with her shoulder. The man went down. Jack landed on top of him with a guttural snarl, ripped the rifle from the guard’s hands, and smashed the butt into the man’s head. The other guard stumbled back, jerking his weapon up.
George’s eyes ignited with white. Tiny streaks of white flash, bright like lightning, rolled from his hands.
The guard dropped the rifle and took off.
People still ran from the church. Kaldar and Gaston were nowhere in sight.
The kids were looking at her. They had to get a car. Audrey whirled, looking around. Yonker’s Jeep Cherokee was parked on the side of the church. “Jack, grab that rifle and follow me!” She sprinted to the Jeep, her bare feet barely touching the ground.
THE exit beckoned Kaldar, a glowing rectangle of light. He walked up the aisle, light on his feet. Behind him, two men writhed in pain. Farther still, behind the low wall of fire, Yonker screamed curses from the pulpit.
A peculiar calm claimed Kaldar, the smooth serenity that always came to him in battle. His family was old, rooted in a half-forgotten time when wars had pushed elite warriors of the old Weird kingdoms into the pit of hell that was the Mire. Their blood flowed in his veins. His uncle was a man of the Old Ways—his sword was death on the battlefield. Cerise was one, too. His brother Richard was one as well. And so was he.
The blade had been a part of Kaldar’s education since he could stand on his own two feet. He didn’t like to kill unless he had no choice. Not even Murid’s death had changed that. But he was raised to find peace within the slaughter, and that peace sustained him now.
A bullet whistled by Kaldar’s ear. On the left, a young man, barely old enough to hold a rifle, tried to reload his weapon with shaking hands. Kaldar ducked and threw a knife. The blade sank into the wall next to the guard’s head. The boy dropped the rifle.
“Run!” Kaldar called.
The guard scrambled outside.
“You!” Yonker snapped out of his daze and screamed like a stuck bull. “Stop him!”
A man lunged at Kaldar from the right. Large, muscular, but sadly too slow. Kaldar rolled his blade over the man’s left thigh. Blood gushed. Kaldar leaned away from the man’s punch and sliced the other thigh. The man croaked something and went down like a log. Kaldar skirted him and kept walking. Three guards burst through the doors, ran down the aisle, saw him, and halted. The blond man on the left looked at the two bodies behind him. “Holy shit.”
“Shoot him!” Yonker howled from behind the flames. “Shoot his ass!”
Kaldar looked at their faces. “Let me pass, and you will live.”
“He said to take him alive,” the man on the left said.
“Fuck that.” The older of the men jerked his rifle up.
Kaldar flashed. The magic flared from him in a blue sheath, shielding him. The guard’s bullet ricocheted and bit into the wall.
Kaldar ran forward.
As one, the guards fired.
“HOLD on!” Audrey stomped on the gas. The Jeep roared and jumped over the threshold into the church. She saw Kaldar in the aisle, three armed men opposing him, and slammed on her brakes. Kaldar’s face was so relaxed, she barely recognized him. The Jeep skidded to a stop.
The guards fired. A glowing blue wall surrounded Kaldar. The bullets impacted on it with weak ripples and bounced off. The light imploded, sucked back into Kaldar’s blade.
Kaldar struck. Light, graceful like a dancer, he cleaved the first guard’s arm. It fell off. Kaldar kept moving, so sickeningly fast, she had no chance to be shocked. He spun, moving as if his joints were fluid, sliced the second man’s chest, his blade going through the muscle and bone like a hot knife through butter, swept past him, and thrust his blade backward, into the small of the third guard’s back.
The three men dropped.
Kaldar turned toward her and smiled. It wasn’t his usual smug smile. His face was at once sad and at peace. Audrey wasn’t sure who this man was, but she knew she hadn’t met him before.
The corners of Kaldar’s mouth drooped, and the smile turned into a scream. “Get out! Get out now!”
“Kids, out!”
They scrambled out of the car. She shoved her door open. A large metal dart smashed into the hood and shivered, stuck upright, its end glowing. Audrey grabbed the rifle and dived out of the vehicle. Behind her, the car exploded in a flash of white magic. The explosion punched the inside of her head, and her skull rang like a gong being struck. Suddenly, everything was quiet.
The world swam.
Move, move, move.
To stay in one place was to die. Audrey scrambled away, blindly. Someone caught her and carried her off. Pain bathed her legs. It hurt to breathe. The haze dropped from her eyes. She realized that she sat propped against Kaldar’s body, his arm around her. He had grasped an arrow sticking out of her thigh and was pulling it out.
She couldn’t feel her legs.
The two boys crouched next to her. Everyone was looking at the door.
A giant man with pale hair stood in the church’s doorway. She’d seen him before, peering at them over the blond blueblood’s shoulder as the wyvern carried them off. Karmash, she remembered.
The giant stared at them. A dark-haired man crawled over the top edge of the doorway and moved up the wall onto the ceiling like a fly. A woman crossed the threshold. Her long, tattered cloak fluttered about her. Her hood was down, and the exposed skin of her face was a bright, unnatural orange. Her hands held twin narrow swords.
A third man stalked through the church entrance. Or at least he might have been a man at some point. This creature looked more like a beast. Massive, slabbed with heavy muscle, he crouched in the doorway, his huge claws digging into the wood.
The Hand had found them. Kaldar’s lips moved, but she heard nothing. George nodded, his pale face smudged with dirt.
On the ceiling, the lizard guy had crawled all the way over and paused, directly above them. His skin turned pale brown, matching the wood beams. Jesus Christ.
Karmash pointed at them.
The freak on the ceiling let go and swung down, hanging as if his feet had suckers.
“Now!” Kaldar barked. She didn’t hear him, but she read his lips.
The lizard man’s hands glowed. She blinked and realized his fingers held darts, the same kind that had pierced the hood of the Cherokee.
The darts rained on them and dimmed behind a glowing white translucent shield. George’s eyes bled white lightning. It spilled from him in long, twisted ribbons and fed the semicircle. Ripples pounded the flash shield. The floor around them shuddered. George clenched his fists.
It’s possible to die from expending too much magic,
George’s voice said from the recesses of her memory.
The darts kept pounding the shield.
George, kind, quiet, calm George. She looked at him and knew he would rather die than stop shielding them.
Her hands were full of something. She was still holding the rifle. She checked the magazine. One shot left.
The lizard freak couldn’t shield and hurl the dart at the same time.
“Drop it!” she yelled, hoping her voice held. “Drop the shield!”
Kaldar looked at her. Understanding sparked in his eyes. He yelled something.
George shook his head. Blood spilled out from the corner of his mouth.
Kaldar’s voice snapped into a rigid mask. He was biting off words.
George took a deep breath.
This was it. One shot. She made it, or they died.
The shield vanished. Audrey fired.
The lizard man’s head exploded in a wet blossom of blood and pale chunks.
The last dart fell straight at her. Small price to pay . . .
Kaldar lunged. His sword slashed in a wide arc, its edge shining bright blue. The two pieces of the dart fell harmlessly on the floor.
Suddenly, sound exploded in Audrey’s head, as if someone had the volume turned up all the way and had just pressed the unmute button.
“Mar!” Karmash roared. “Face me!”
Something smashed into him from behind. Karmash flew forward, rolled over, and jumped to his feet.
In the doorway, Gaston landed on the carpet. His black hair spilled over his shoulder like a mane. His eyes flared silver, reflecting the flames. Muscles bulged on his exposed shoulders. He looked demonic, like some prehistoric monster.