So much for diplomacy.

  “Back to the chapel!” I ordered even as I swiped my axe across the ground.

  I’d spent the dialogue with Evangeline readying power. A wall of fire erupted across the face of the hill between me and the vampires even as they started darting forward like hounds let off a leash. Their deathly howls filled the night, washed out by the furious roar of flame.

  The freshborn night evaporated as my magic slashed its way across the dry grass. The wall spread twenty feet in either direction, cutting a slight curve to match the arc of my cut. On the other side of the dancing tongues of aureflame, the vampires balked and screeched in anger.

  A loud twang broke through the noise, followed by a golden streak flashing near enough for the wind from its passing to rustle my hair. One of the vampires jerked and fell back as Penric’s arrow took it through the skull. The space of a drawn breath later, and the creature erupted into flames as the sanctified arrow did its work. The dead villager thrashed and danced, pirouetting into the night in a display of macabre whimsy.

  No two of them moved the same, and none of them moved naturally. Some ran on all fours like animals, others leapt or gracefully sprinted like elves through the darkness. The moons hadn’t yet risen, yet in the dark the vampires shone like they reflected their own unearthly light.

  A shape lanced over the grass, clearing more than fifty feet before my wall even finished forming. I tracked the after-image of the motion as one of the villagers leapt over the fire, soaring more than a dozen feet into the night air. He landed to my left, a young man not even twenty in bloodstained clothes, crouching on all fours.

  I turned, preparing for him to lunge for my throat, but instead he only tossed me a furtive glance before darting to where the demigryphon and kynedeer stood together.

  They were going for our mounts, trying to prevent us from fleeing.

  “There’s one!” I roared.

  Emma saw the vampire rushing her and Hendry’s mounts. Cursing, she made a fist with her right hand — her armor formed a thin, almost delicate gauntlet of red-and-white metal that hugged her skin like a glove. Her middle finger sported a small spike like a claw. It curled inward.

  There must have been a gap in her armor there, an opening where she could draw her own blood. A flash of crimson in the gloom, and a pike of shimmering red aura appeared in my squire’s hand, twenty feet long and crowned in a deadly-sharp point.

  She bent one knee and slid the other leg back, ducking into an elegant thrust more suited to a fencer’s blade. The pike went through the young vampire’s spine just below his left ear. He’d been moving fast as a race-chimera at full sprint, yet Emma caught him with incredible precision, her avian eyes wide and focused. He went limp, his eyes rolling up into his skull.

  Emma dismissed the Shrike spear with a flick of her wrist, loosening her fingers and letting the whole construct gust away in the breeze like a blood mist. The man she’d scored tumbled into a roll before landing in a sprawl and going still.

  “He’s not dead!” I warned.

  Emma glanced at me, then at the vampire she’d brought down. Without warning, the limp body rose up onto all fours, chest aimed at the sky and head lolling back.

  Vampires and ghouls were hard to kill. Even grievous damage to their bodies wouldn’t do much more than piss them off.

  “I’m aware!” Emma shouted.

  I’d forgotten that my lance fought these same monsters in Mirrebel. They’d learned their tricks, developed their tactics.

  The vampire leapt like some kind of facsimile of a grasshoper, its chest still facing the sky so its body aimed backwards. Hendry stepped between it and Emma, a spiked hammer in his fist, and with a savage swing he slammed it back down to the grass.

  The creature writhed, bonelessly reconfiguring itself back into a shape that could stand, only to howl in frustration as a net of golden threads emerged from the ground like living ivy to wrap it up. Lisette stood nearby, pulling a pattern between her hands.

  Then Penric shot the creature, and it burst into flames.

  But there were more. Plenty more. My wall of flame had stalled most of the rest, but Evangeline’s slaves were spreading around it to attack from other angles.

  “I said get inside!” I snapped. With narrower spaces, we could mitigate their advantage in numbers.

  “Problem with that!” Emma drawled.

  I saw what she meant as I looked to the church. From the cemetery, and from the weed-eaten dirt at the base of the structure, gaunt forms crawled out of the ground. Dozens more undead, many of these far more damaged than the villagers ascending the hill. Some wore the garb of monks.

  Each faster than a human, stronger than a human, impossible to put down without fire, sacred gold, or banesilver through the head or heart.

  Trapped. Evangeline planned this well, if not originally for us.

  “What do we do, Alken?” Lisette backed away to stand at my side. Penric had another arrow strung, though he seemed uncertain which of the score or more targets to focus on. Emma held her sword in one hand and a freshly summoned blood pike in the other. Hendry twirled his hammer nervously, glancing to me for direction. The two chimera paced nearby, panicked by the overwhelming scent of rotting bodies and blood but unable to find a direction to flee.

  Too many to fight. I’d killed us.

  Just then, a light flashed in the sky. Blindingly bright, I had to throw up an arm to shield my eyes from the source. I thought it was some new evil at first, but after a moment I realized it had an even more dramatic effect on the vampires. Many had found their way around my barrier, moving to surround us along with the new group, but they’d all frozen, cringing away from the new star in the sky.

  It burned them. Flesh sizzled, eyes were scoured blind, and the air filled with cries of distress that were all too human. The light came from something arcing over the nearby countryside, not far from the distant treeline.

  “What is that!?” Emma cried out, wincing from the light.

  “Some kind of phantasm?” Hendry guessed.

  Penric said nothing, instead letting out a groan. The light burning over the fields seemed to be affecting him nearly as badly as the vampires.

  “No…” Lisette looked to me. “I think someone’s trying to help us.”

  That sounded suspicious as hell, especially considering I knew there was a third party out there somewhere. But we were short on options, and anything other than the spot we presently stood seemed like salvation to me.

  “Mount up!” I ordered. “Penric with Emma, Lisette with Hendry.” Two to a saddle would slow them down, but we were short on options.

  “What about you?” Emma demanded.

  “I’m buying you time,” I told her.

  Her features hardened. “I’m not separating, not again. They’re just vermin, we can win!”

  “No,” I said harshly. “We can’t. I can’t, not with the rest of you in my way.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. And the right thing, the only thing that would get her to listen. I saw the flash of rage in her amber eyes, her pride exposed.

  When Hendry tugged at her arm, Emma cursed viciously before tearing free of his hand, then mounted her demigryphon. The agitated creature almost bucked her before she got it under control. She grabbed Penric by the wrist as he flailed about blindly. Whatever preternatural aspect of his undeath allowed him to see, our savior took it at the same time they’d stunned the villagers.

  Lisette and Hendry mounted the stag, and the four of them tore off. Emma glanced back once, the anger in her eyes visible, raw.

  “Sorry, Em.” I muttered the words even as I turned to face the horde of monsters. That false star in the sky had already begun to dim. The world seemed much darker in its absence, like the night was angry at the intrusion and pressed its fist down harder. The vampires were already recovering, their skin showing superficial burns but little more.

  “Please tell me the plan isn’t to heroically sacrifice yourself, so the children can just die an hour later when these wretches catch up to them?” Vicar sounded more tired than annoyed, like he’d expected something like this.

  “Not exactly,” I muttered. “This might get a bit messy, though.”

  The lance wasn’t dead weight. I could tell they’d fought together many times since I’d left them to their own devices, devised tactics that allowed them to subdue dangerous enemies efficiently. Each was talented in their own way, capable. Emma and Lisette were prodigies, Penric a master archer, and Hendry a solid center to their formation, their rock.

  But I needed to tap into a different kind of strength than some tricks with fire to get us out of this, and that power was as dangerous to my allies as my enemies. I’d sent them away for the same reason I’d refused to let Rosanna bring her baby son close to me.

  As the light in the sky faded and the villagers recovered, some of them realized their prey were escaping and started giving chase. With a swing of my axe, I sent another wall of fire racing along the grass to head them off. The pack flinched back and hissed at me. The rest watched me with hungry glares.

  I took a long breath, let it go, and with that breath willed my aura to cool. The half-formed phantasms waiting to be unleashed faded back into the edges of possibility. The angry fire, sensing enemies to smite, resented being subdued. It snapped and growled, eager to be used, but I forced it down with a firm hand.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I let myself go cold, go dark. The flames still crackling along the hill shrank and died. When I exhaled again, my breath misted with ice rather than heat. The night around me deepened, like a localized cloud moved over the otherwise clear sky, spreading out from my feet and rippling up my limbs so I became like a shadow myself.

  As I let the fire fade, something else rushed in to fill the space it left, something just as hungry and twisted as the murdered villagers. They all sensed the change, hesitated, their bloodlust overtaken by uncertainty.

  The light in my eyes dimmed, my enhanced vision leaving me along with the rest of my powers. But I didn’t need it. I didn’t sense the world with mortal eyes anymore. Instead, I let the whispers I’d spent so many years trying to ignore and repel rush in.

  As all of this happened, I pressed my lips together and whistled, a single lasting note that traveled into the night.

  The first vampire that lunged came from my left. It happened fast, almost silent, just a rush of air and light steps on dry grass.

  One step back, a turn, a crackling sound as Faen Orgis grew in my hand. The branch lengthened just a few inches. I spun it up, around, wind whistling around the blade.

  While I’d let my inner flame dwindle to embers, there was still some inside the axe. As I swung in an upward cut it flared, a brief arc of red heat that illuminated the fanged maw surging toward my throat, a once-human face stretched taut as the skull beneath it grew into something more lupine, yellow nails sprouting from curled fingers.

  I stepped into the cut, spun the axe in a whirling motion that took it from one hand to the other and ended with it held above my head. The vampire fell to the ground several feet away, its skull bisected from chin to cranium, smoke billowing from the wound.

  Darkness slammed in again. A moment of silence as I sucked in another breath and waited.

  More movement over the grass, from several bodies this time. But it wasn’t the grass I listened to, not the telltale rush of air or the scrape of dirty fabric over dead flesh. The darkness was like still water through which my body floated. I reacted to the ripples that disturbed that lake.

  Another slash of the axe, another arc of fire. Claws reaching for me. Fanged maws. Empty eyes in the night.

  No thought in my movements. Just instinct, sensation, the drift of black currents and the sullen roar of brief-lived flames. For mere moments I let the angry power of the Alder out, creating eruptions of light and thunder, only to stamp it back down and sink back into the water.

  Swing. Turn. Duck. A furnace snarl, fire blooming. A swift chop into a malformed skull.

  Fangs clamping down inches from my right eye in the same instant my blade lifts up into the neck.

  A slash of claws across my pauldron, sparks from the impact to illuminate a face contorted with rage and fear.

  A serpentine hiss inches from my throat.

  That same voice whimpering as my hand clamps over the mouth, fearless of the fangs, the momentum of my arm slamming it into the skull of another.

  With each kill, a flash of heat, a flare of light. The echoing rumble of thunder.

  Yet with the aftermath of each flash, the night grew darker. The stars did not shine on that hill.

  One of the vampires lunged at my back while I recovered from a killing swing. The fur pelt on my back writhed and shifted, the lupine head normally lying limp on my shoulder twisting around. I felt power condense into a point just behind my head, a tingling pressure that made the hairs on my neck stand on end.

  The night fled as a wave of heat and crimson light washed over the hill. The stink of sulfur assaulted my senses, along with the crackling energy of magic foreign to the world, and hateful of it.

  I glanced back and saw a twisted piece of human-shaped charcoal burning in the grass. Vicar’s boneless visage stared at the scene with satisfaction, his eyes burning like hot coals, and then he sucked in another breath and wreathed our surroundings in a fresh wave of hellfire.

  I flinched from it, throwing up an arm to shield my eyes from the light — I had some resistance to natural fire, but this was anything but natural. When done, we were surrounded by a circle of infernal flames. The corpses of nearly a score of dead vampires lay smoking and blistered in the trampled grass.

  “The others are far enough away,” Vicar told me in a calm voice as he settled back onto my shoulder. “Time to go.”

  “Didn’t know you could still do that,” I said.

  “You never asked.”

  Before I could reply, the drumming note of hooves broke through the crackle of flames and a patch of deep shadow distinguished itself from the surrounding darkness. Reacting swiftly, I sprinted toward the edge of the burning circle and leapt. Morgause let out a high, almost avian screech as I grabbed the horn of her saddle and seated myself. She didn’t slow, tearing across the top of the hill and ramming through the disoriented packs of vampires. There were still plenty of them, though I’d ravaged their numbers.

  “Some broke away during the fight,” Vicar said into my ear. “They’ll be after your subordinates.”

  “They can handle themselves!” I said over the rush of wind. I’d just needed to give them a chance, distract the majority of the enemy.

  As we broke clear of the supernatural darkness drawn over the battlefield, I realized the stars had come out. They painted the sky in a wash of colors, silver and emerald, and the moon — the smaller one, the Corpse Moon — floated over the horizon. Its greater sibling would not show itself that night.

  “Toward the trees!” Vicar hissed. Flickers of fire were visible behind his jaws, dangerously close to the side of my face. “They fled into the woods.”

  Morgause practically flew over the fields, a patch of perfect darkness atop which my red cloak stretched like a curtain of blood beneath the gray moon. But other shadows raced through the tall grass. The dead kept pace with the chimera. They winged our path to the left and right, flickers of movement in the corners of my vision. I knew they’d be behind us, too.

  Vicar growled and twisted, coughing out another plume of hellfire as one of the vampires made a go for us. This one was a large man, heavily bearded, the village smith judging by his soot-stained apron. He moved more like a wraith than a heavy man past his middle years, his fangs bared in a sneer as the blast of fire missed him by the width of hands.

  Faen Orgis’s black blade flashed, its edge catching the moonlight and leaving a dark blur to mark its path. The vampire’s claws were aimed for Morgause’s neck, but they and the arm they were connected to went tumbling away as I cut it at the shoulder.

  The rest of the villager fell short of his leap and landed behind us in a crouch, clutching at the stump of his arm. As the flash of hellfire faded, his form was lost in the darkness save for two pinpricks of reflective eyes.

  There were more, closing in on us like a pack of hunting wolves. Eerily silent, moving in perfect sync with one another.

  “Evangeline is still watching,” I growled. “She’s directing them.”

  “Kill the master,” Vicar replied, “and its spawn become untethered.”

  But where? Close, to exert fine control over her minions. She wouldn’t let me go, not yet.

  I’d misread her before, pissed her off, and now I had to cut my way free.

  Please, let the others be alright.

  Where are you, Evangeline Ark?

  Vicar stiffened and let out a low growl. “She is close! Getting nearer.”

  I realized the other vampires weren’t attacking, just keeping pace with us and keeping Morgause from altering her direction.

  Heading us off.

  “Where!?” I asked. Vicar’s nose was keener than my intuition.

  “Ahead…”

  Ahead was the treeline, close yet frustratingly far. A long stretch of flat fields separated us from the edge. Plenty of time for the vampires to close in and overwhelm my chimera.

  But no sign of their leader. Hiding in the trees? The thought made my blood run cold. Had the others run right into her, one more jaw in this trap?

  Vicar’s eyelights brightened. “Above!”

  I looked up, and there in the sky, backlit by the rising moon, a shape clarified itself. Just a speck, but quickly growing larger as it dropped. It was difficult to make out at first, with the moon behind it, but soon enough the shape of what I looked at become more apparent.

  A white cape billowing in the night wind, white armor glowing in the moonlight, silver-blond hair dancing behind a pale face.

  A curved sword gleamed bright as a sliver of starlight as the rider lifted it, their other hand gripping a set of reins.

  A set of reins that connected her chariot to a team of two winged beasts.

  They looked like something out of Hell, something the Credo might have summoned. They were like horses, only their heads were huge and heavy, tusks jutting from their mouths. Instead of hooves, they clawed at the air with the paws of lions, and their dark hides bulged with muscle. Leathery wings grew from their backs, though those hulking creatures couldn’t have possibly flown of their own power.

  Some kind of magic must have kept the chariot aloft, the flying chimera directing it rather than giving it any kind of lift — Emma possessed a similar construct when I’d first met her, a relic of extreme rarity hoarded by some of the oldest noble families.

  Evangeline let out a piercing scream of rage and bloodlust as her chariot descended. With the winged pauldrons of her alabaster armor, she seemed like some kind of ancient valkyrie, like a champion of a dark god. The fiend-horses let out lionish roars as they raced towards me, beating their huge wings hard enough I heard the snaps of wind from three hundred feet away. Both looked capable of crushing me and my mare flat.

  She’d catch me well before I reached the trees. “More hellfire!?” I asked.

  “I cannot,” Vicar said. He sounded tired. “Besides, those are hengroen, originally bred in Antriss for the Cambion’s armies. They are unbothered by flame. Yours might sting them, but I wouldn’t rely on it.”

  Baring my teeth defiantly at the oncoming chariot, I took my axe in both hands, keeping my seat in the saddle by gripping hard with my legs. Evangeline, close enough for me to make out her face, saw my posture and flashed a fanged grin. The acid scars she’d been afflicted with during the battle with the Lindenwurm were gone, healed by her rebirth into undeath. Pale, beautiful, and fierce, she spurred her creatures on with a shout.

  The lesser vampires drew in close to either side, some even straying near enough to snap at Morgause’s legs. They would keep us from veering away from the chariot, force us to see this game of chicken to its conclusion.

  “Vicar…” I spoke in a low voice. “I need your help.”

  “No point asking for permission,” he replied.

  I ripped the pelt off my shoulders and hurled it. It unfurled in the air like a kite, flapping in the wind, the hellhound’s fangs bared as it closed with the hengroen. In the same moment, I brandished my axe and channeled my will into it, causing a bright flash of light to erupt from the blade. For a brief moment, the black metal turned yellow as sunlight.

  I’d stolen the idea from whoever helped us before, and to my satisfaction the vampires reacted much the same, throwing arms up over their eyes and scattering. My path clear, I jerked Morgause’s reins and pulled her to the right.

  The chimera pulling Evangeline’s chariot saw the animated pelt coming and flinched. They might have been monsters in their own right, but not like the crowfriar. Vicar collided with one of the two flying horses and clamped his teeth down on its neck. It screamed in rage and pain, but went off course, almost slamming into its sibling.

  This gave Morgause just barely enough room to avoid a more deadly collision. As we passed within a sword’s length of the spinning blades on the chariot’s wheels, I leapt from the saddle. Evangeline’s crimson eyes widened in shock. My boots collided with the edge of the vehicle, slipped, which was the only thing that saved the vampire’s head as my axe went an inch off course and slid from her sword as she brought it up into a hasty guard. Sparks erupted in the space between us, our faces near enough we could have whispered to one another.

  In the same moment, Vicar let go of his prey and let the wind catch him. The chariot, still moving forward at speed, brought us together in a snap of motion. I caught the pelt, jumped off the chariot, and then we were airborne even as Evangeline tried to slash me with her blade. She missed and shouted in frustration.

  The grass raced below me in a blur. Wind beat at my body, the stars turned overhead. I felt a thrill of terror—

  Then Vicar’s form writhed and changed, excess flaps of skin expanding into two great black wings. They caught the wind, jerked us from a fast and fatal fall to a glide in a snap of impact, and then we were soaring over the field and on toward the trees.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, exhilarated and horrified at once. That’d been stupid.

  “You missed her,” Vicar admonished me.

  I glanced back at the chariot. It was starting to turn, but it had gone too low and the hengroen were forced to beat their wings hard to avoid crashing. Their paws found the grass, starting to gallop like more earthly beasts, and the chariot struck the ground with a crack of impact before settling on its grinding wheels. Evangeline was shouting, trying to get her beasts to turn, but they would take minutes to pivot their direction.

  Vicar and I glided down onto Morgause’s saddle. Vampires darted through the night behind us, but their mistress’s rage confused them. I heard their pitiful whines echoing across the field.

  And just like that, we were into the woods. Morgause slowed to avoid colliding with the trees. She was heaving hard, her breath coming in loud snorts and her black hide shiny with sweat.

  I patted her neck. “Good girl. Sorry about that.”

  I was breathing hard too, my heartbeat pounding through my limbs. I hadn’t gotten Evangeline, but I’d eluded her. Her flying chariot wouldn’t be catching me in the forest. She’d have to come in and face me herself.

  But I had other problems, like who’d distracted the vampires and helped my companions make their escape. They would be ahead, waiting.

  I wasn’t out of this yet.

  Sorry for any inconvenience to those of you who were using those resources. I am in the process of getting my own discord server set up, something I probably needed to do at some point anyway just to have a space dedicated to the fiction without all the noise of a larger server. Appreciate being given a space in that larger server, but I was always a guest there and unfortunately this is out of my control. When I have the new space set up, I'll provide links in the author notes of a future chapter, hopefully within the next couple weeks. I'll use that space to have all the art commissions I've had done and also have the map pinned, which will allow me to update it more regularly and keep that in a spot easier for people to see. Might also have character lists and story-so-far writeups, I know some people find those useful and it'll be less awkward than combing through my chapter backlog.

  Thanks for reading,