The
camazotz,
though, were pure killing machines, an army sent to wipe out the resistance. Which meant… what? That her signs that the
winikin
were crucial to the equinox hadn’t been signs at all, just wishful thinking? Or, worse, had she and Sven gotten it wrong, after all? Because something wasn’t right; that was for sure. The Nightkeepers didn’t seem to be making any progress; they were uplinked in a circle, heads bowed, with Dez leading a chant. He had the skull artifact in front of him; faint smoke rose from it where they had burned their blood offerings. But aside from that, nothing was happening. All the magic was dark, the newcomers demonic. And they were closing in.
Focus
. It was way too late to turn back now. All she could do was concentrate on the task at hand. Hold the shield. Protect the Nightkeepers.
“Ready,” Brandt said in the same calm tone as his
wife, the two of them working together with a seamlessness that put a lump in Cara’s throat.
A huge, burly bat demon grabbed a smaller one standing nearby and shoved it into the shield. The nearest
winikin
shouted and stumbled back, but the shield held. It held!
But it also didn’t fight back. Unlike some of the Nightkeepers’ shields, it couldn’t deliver an electric shock or slash of fire. It was a forcefield, not a weapon.
The
camazotz
roared in triumph, and attacked.
“Now!” Patience shouted, and let rip with her fireball. It slammed into the surging churn of demons, grazed one, and hit another squarely, engulfing it in flames. A nanosecond later, Brandt’s fireball hit a huge male nearby.
“Fire!” Cara ordered, and let rip with a burst from her machine pistol. The rest of the
winikin
started shooting a nanosecond later, and for a moment the only thing she could hear was the chattering hail of automatic weapons followed closely by the
crack-boom
s of the explosive-tipped rounds detonating to drive shards of sacred jade deep into the demons’ flesh.
The world outside the shield erupted with bestial screams and oily sprays of black ichor. The creatures reeled as their blackish flesh peeled away under the searing, magic-wrought fire or was shredded by the jade shrapnel. Within seconds, nearly a third of the
camazotz
were on the ground, writhing, but a dozen or so had reached the shield. They scaled the sides like spiders, wings outstretched so they blocked the light and made it hard to see what they were doing. They were moving like they had a plan, though, which wasn’t good.
“Get them!” Cara ordered, gesturing. “We don’t want them to—”
Suddenly JT shouted, clutched at his chest, and dropped to his knees. Natalie cried out and raced to him, only to fall partway there with her hands over her heart. Above them, a pair of
camazotz
clung to their sections of the shield and were regurgitating a dark ooze onto the surface of the magic. It burned where it hit, eating through the shield-stone spell and somehow knocking down the stones’ wielders.
“No!” Cara unloaded her clip into the first of the bat demons, which fell back with its face gone to pulp, leaving a gaping opening in the shield. Sebastian and Breece took aim at the second breach.
“I’ll patch the gaps!” Patience said to her. “Help them!”
Cara raced to Natalie as several others converged on JT, who was normally their medic. His kit lay beside him, but in the terrifying moment when she leaned over Natalie and couldn’t find a pulse, breath, or hint of life… Cara couldn’t remember who was next on call for medical emergencies. Suddenly everything was jumbled up inside her head, competing for space. Panic lashed through her.
Don’t lose it. Don’t you dare lose it
.
She automatically turned and said, “Who—”
There wasn’t anybody there to ask.
“It’s the blood-link,” called the man who was bent over JT’s unmoving body. “You’ve got to break the blood-link!” It was a sandy-haired
winikin
with steady blue eyes. Cara couldn’t remember his name or anything about him.
“Wait!” Brandt snapped. “Let me take over their
shields first. The punctures aren’t affecting me or Patience, and we can hold the spells.… Okay, go!”
The guy stripped off JT’s wristband, breaking his link to the shield stone. The second the band was off his flesh, JT arched up off the ground and sucked in a harsh, rattling breath. “It’s working!” the guy barked. “Get Natalie’s band off!”
Fumbling, Cara yanked off the device, which burned her fingers with cool fire. Natalie convulsed and then rolled over, gagging wretchedly. But she was alive. Blessedly alive.
Thank you, gods!
“Ritchie,” Cara called, remembering his name as her brain unlocked, then went into overdrive. “Over here. I want you to—”
“Here they come again!” Brandt warned. “They’re regenerating faster than we can blast them back.”
“You’ve got to get out there and cut their dicks off.” The pained rasp came from JT. “It’s the only way to banish the fuckers. At least it was a year ago.” Which was an ominous caveat, as the magic was stronger now.
“Fire at will!” Patience cried, and let rip, driving back the front line once more.
But Cara heard additional screams, shouts, instructions, and knew that other sections of the shield had been breached, other
winikin
taken down. Any minute now, the
camazotz
would break all the way through, and they’d be fighting for their lives, and for those of the Nightkeepers.
The huge, burly bat demon that had started the charge rose up from behind the line, screeching at the edge of her hearing, driving the others on as they got blown back, regenerated, and rushed forward again and again.
“Transfer all the shields over to me and Brandt,” Patience
shouted. “Then get over here and give us your blood-links. We should be able to hold it that way.”
Cara didn’t move, though. She stayed staring at the huge
camazotz
leader. As if feeling her glare, it pivoted and glared back with burning red eyes, then jerked its chin as if to say,
You and what army, bitch?
But that was the thing. This was her army. These were her people, and it was her responsibility to get them out alive. That might not have been her priority the day of the mock battle back at Skywatch, but it sure as hell was now. She couldn’t hang back or hide out, not when there was something she could do to help.
Her hands shook as she scooped Natalie’s wristband off the ground and added it to her own, then activated the shield-stone spell links of both, not as part of the larger shield, but to create a tough shell of magic surrounding her. Protecting her. Heart drumming a quick rhythm that was half terror, half determination, she slung her machine pistol on its harness and pulled her combat knife in its place. Then she headed for the shield.
Brandt caught sight of her. “Cara! What are you—”
His words went muffled as she plunged through, striking sparks where shield met shield.
The noise on the outside was worse than she had expected, even through two layers of shield-spell. Her pulse hammered in her ears, and she wanted to double over and puke with terror, but she didn’t let herself give in to the fear, didn’t let her determination waver. Instead, trusting the others to cover her with whatever firepower they had left, she bolted for the bat demons’ leader.
Before, she had used her people as a distraction to save her own ass and get the win. This time she would do the reverse.
Please, gods
.
A dark shape closed on her from the left, another from the right.
No!
She dodged, tripped, and nearly went down, and then a roar of magic exploded behind her with a shock wave that nearly flattened her. She didn’t look back, just kept racing across the sandy surface until she was within range of the huge
camazotz,
which was standing there with its hands out to its sides in the apparently universal gesture of,
Bring it on, bitch.
But although she was five-foot-nothing and weighed a hundred or so pounds soaking wet, she hadn’t grown up on a cattle ranch for nothing. And the fight training at Skywatch had been brutal but effective. She went in low, dodged the bat demon’s first swipe, ducked under the return, and felt the whiff of a wing slash right above her. The thing’s second blow caught her squarely on the shield and sent her flying back to crash into the cavern wall.
She hit hard and found that the shield didn’t do a damn thing to buffer the impact, leaving her dazed. She thought she heard someone shout her name with frantic worry, but she couldn’t stop now. The
camazotz
approached her, loomed over her—
And she yanked her machine pistol off its harness, fired screaming, and blew its head to mush.
Reality shifted around her as the creature’s body wavered for a moment, still upright, and then toppled in slow motion, crumpling forward onto her. She tried to roll clear, but shock and the power drain of the blood-link slowed her reflexes and the body hit her, slid sideways, and pinned her lower legs to the ground.
“No!” She shoved at the huge creature. “Gods, no!” It didn’t move. But already she could see the wounds beginning to knit as the thing regenerated.
The battle raged around the dome in a cacophony of gunfire, explosions, and screams, but the leader’s silence hadn’t gone unnoticed. A pair of
camazotz
detached from the dome and headed for her, eyes blazing.
Panic slashed through her and adrenaline flooded her bloodstream; she struggled, shoving at the big creature, trying to move the immovable—
Shit! Don’t be an idiot
. Going for her knife again, she risked turning off the shield to grab the bat demon’s limp penis. It was as thick as her wrist, slick with sweat and ichor.
Gagging, she set her knife to the base and started hacking. Ichor spurted, but she kept going, sawing through the surprisingly tough flesh until, with a last rasping knife slice, the thing’s penis parted from its body.
And all of it—bat demon, dick, ichor, and all—disappeared in a puff of oily smoke.
“Cara!” Her head whipped around at the sound of Sven’s voice, and her heart clogged her throat at the sight of him charging down from a narrow ledge with Mac right behind him.
“Sven!”
“
Behind you!
”
Magic boomed suddenly at her back, driving her to her knees. A wing whipped where her head had been, and a clawed hand slashed through the nearly empty air, just grazing her shoulder. But even that small slice burned like unholy hell, more painful than anything she could remember experiencing before.
She screamed, fell, and rolled, trying to get away from the
camazotz
that rose over her, its eyes burning with feral hatred.
“No.” She grabbed for her pistol, but the harness was empty and her hands were rapidly going numb. Dimly
she remembered Natalie talking about how one small scratch from a
camazotz
could knock out a full-grown man for twenty-four hours or more. “Noo!”
It furled its wings and leaned in, reaching for her with wicked claws as its mouth gaped wide to reveal viciously sharp reddish brown teeth. But then a dark blur raced up behind the demon and launched itself into the air with a feral roar, and a lean, dark-furred coyote slammed into the bat demon, driving it off her with a ravenous snarl.
“Mac?” Cara slurred, confused, yet beginning to hope against hope that this was real and she wasn’t already dreaming. Yet her vision blurred and it suddenly seemed that there were two coyotes attacking the
camazotz
. Which had to be a dream.
Then, as her consciousness wavered, she saw Sven coming toward her, saw all the world’s anguish in his stormy eyes, saw his mouth moving, shaping her name, and—
Nothing
.
“No! Cara!” The words tore themselves from Sven’s throat as he raced toward her, aware that JT was closing from the other direction, shielded and carrying his medic’s kit.
The
winikin
didn’t waste words; he dumped the kit, drew his knife, and killed his shield as he strode toward where Mac and the sable coyote were standing over the body of the demon they had taken out. When the female snarled at him, Mac barked a warning, or maybe an explanation.
And Sven didn’t catch a word of it. The new coyote hadn’t spoken to him since that first blast of communication, and he was deaf to Mac. More, his magic was dead. Finished. He’d used it up fireballing Cara’s attacker… and he’d been too damn slow to do it.
“I’m here, babe,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her and gathering her in his arms. His voice broke at the limp, unresisting feel of her normally strung-tight body and the pale gray-green cast to her skin, the fierce reddish black of the claw scratch on her shoulder. JT joined
him, his face going grim, and Sven’s voice broke as he kept talking to her. “Sorry. You don’t like ‘babe,’ do you? I’ll have to come up with something else.”
He was babbling but he didn’t want to stop, because if he did, JT would tell him what he already knew: that the equinox and the closeness of the end date had strengthened the venom of the
camazotz
from a soporific to a poison.
“Let’s get her inside the shield,” JT said, his voice equally ragged. “Natalie fought it off in a quarter the time it should have taken her to wake up, I think because she was connected to the magic. You can boost her, help her.”
Sven nodded and gathered Cara up, hating how light she was in his arms, as if the life had already drained out of her.
“Hurry!” Brandt called from the center of the chamber, where the defenders had knocked back nearly all of the
camazotz,
buying a brief window of safety while they all regenerated. Some of the
winikin
were out hacking away and puffing the bat demons to dust, but the creatures were regenerating faster than they were being banished. “Run!”
Sven ran, with JT leading the way and the coyotes on his heels. They made it inside the shield-stone perimeter just as the first demon lunged to its feet once more, screeching and pissed off, only to get a faceful of explosive-tipped jade bullets and go down again.