Magic is mostly about intent. There are a lot of trappings and rituals used to focus that intent and bind it to power so that it will result in a desired action, but ultimately to accomplish anything with magic one fundamentally only requires two things, power and the will to use it. Even a weak practitioner can accomplish some truly amazing things when the chips are down and things get desperate. By contrast, even a Wizard level talent can be unmade by an instant of indecision in using their power.
But when a Wizard has power and the will to use it? We can do some amazing things.
So when I say that I hate vampires, I want you to understand what I mean. I don't dislike vampires. I don't disagree with vampires. I don't have distaste for vampires. I loathe the Red Court with every fiber of my being. I tolerated the presence of Ariana and Ortega's forces under the auspices of desperation when my Godmother had brought them to repel the forces of Chronos on Nekheb – but even tolerating them required imminent and active Nuclear War.
I wasn't in an especially tolerant mood at the moment. Hell, I was downright pissed off.
It probably boded ill for my responsible use of my powers that the first thing I did with a godly whallop of power was to full Old Testament, but at the moment I was feeling a bit less "Matthew 7:1" and a lot more "Ezekiel 25:17." And when all else fails in life, I find that fire goes a long way towards solving most of my major problem sets.
All things considered though… I probably went overboard on this one.
I plummeted to the Earth wreathed in a searing corona of silver fire, my apoplectic screech of rage not so much a specific incantation as a vocalization of the incandescent spite that thundered in my ears. The Mantle wasn't like Lash's suggestions or the maddened whispers of Heka had been, this was a pure and primal echo chamber of my own wants and desires. It was like someone took my own thoughts, cranked the volume up to 11 and started pumping them into my own head to the theme of "We Will Rock You," complete with accompanying stomps and claps. And as much as I hated vampires, the amplified near-Dresden archetype of the Mantle wanted to defeat them more than I could have even begun to imagine.
It was like I was in front of a massive crowd, all cheering at once - egging me onward, praising my every action. I felt like I was mainlining a pure jolt of prophetic peer pressure, a simple inexorable mandate to go forth and kick ass.
I impacted with the force of a comet, searing waves of argentate scourging the ground in every direction as a tornado of unbidden wind spun the inferno into a protective pillar around me that rumbled with a trumpeting roar of pure spite. It spun ever wider, effervescent incandescence ripping at the vampire armies as my companions made the jump. Ammit came first, landing with a thunderous crash as she carried Enlil and Muminah on her back. She was followed soon after by my brother, his vampiric grace allowing him land with more poise than the goddess could match with her massive bulk. The portal closed after Kincaid and the Russians repelled down through the open air, tethered to the ground of the Fairy kingdoms.
I stepped across the charred bones of Red Court soldiers, enjoying the brittle crunch they made as I crushed them beneath my armored feet. Dozens of vampires had been immolated down to their marrow, creating the macabre carpet upon which we stood. Their near-human forms were contorted into agonized remnants of the monsters they'd once been, a smoldering carpet of broken monsters. I idly noticed that the ashes of vampires were billowing out around me in a vaporous cloud of cremains that clawed up from the ground by unbidden magic - giving the illusion that clawed hands and faces were impotently trying to grasp at my feet as I passed them.
"Empty Night," My brother swore as he looked around us, whispering to me in English. "I - I just realized. I can't let the Red Court see me. My father doesn't know I'm here. Explaining this would be… awkward. Can you cast an illusion or something?"
"No…" I replied, even as I felt the well of power at my fingertips demanding that I try. Using illusions required concentration or a totem of some sort, and I couldn't guarantee that I could stay focused on my brother's disguise in this fight. Hell, I might end up with him disguised and dead. "No, it's better to use more mundane means to hide you."
On first glance however, we were not overburdened with choices for his disguise. Muminah and Ammit were borderline nudists, Enlil would fight tooth and nail before surrendering anything to a vampire, and neither Kincaid nor the Russians had any sort of extra items of clothing that might supplement Thomas's need for secrecy.
Thomas, ever the practical one, found a solution that I would not have sought out myself - but I also didn't have his intimate knowledge of his father's vengeance upon those who betrayed him. He dug into the pile of cremains, ripping silk garment from the bodies and shaking the ashes from it. The white court vampire sniffed it once, making a slight gagging noise before wrapping it around his face in a keffiyeh-like mask. He made another gagging noise as he did so, "Oh, that's just awful."
"You look like a West Hollywood production of a Mad Max movie." Annoyingly, he still managed to make the combination of post-apocalyptic clothing look as intentional and fashionable as anything else he wore. Stupid vampires, they were always cheating at that stuff. "I can't tell if you're going beyond the Thunderdome or somewhere over the rainbow."
"I'll be sure to click my heels together first - Kansas is sounding pretty good right about now." My brother shook his head as the white-hot flames started to die. "How did you say that you and my mother became acquainted?"
"I didn't" I replied, smiling wryly at my brother. "I didn't know her for long. I've only spoken with her once, but my father spoke of her often - and fondly. At least he did before he died."
"Heka knew the Vampire's mother?" Ammit inquired, speaking in broken English.
"Heka was not my father." I snarled, unbidden crimson lightning sparking across the starry pits of my eyes.
Ammit sniffed once but didn't press the matter further. She would likely bring up the topic later, the subject of my identity prior assuming the leadership of Nekheb would be an inevitable topic now that it was public knowledge that I wasn't, and had never been, Heka.
My eyes tracked across the vampire army, seeking out the shape of Koschei moving through it. The scion was gleefully killing vampires on the Southern edge of the property, hopping from topiary to topiary as he killed the hungering monstrosities with child-like glee. There were at least six of the massive Ik'k'oux demons laying dead upon the ground, their steaming viscera poisoning the Earth with noxious shadows. Exactly in the opposite direction of the tower of Archangel and the Brute Squad Wizards I knew to be mounting their desperate, and ultimately futile, battle against the Red Court.
I was strong - stronger than I had ever been in my life. Not strong enough to defeat the army by myself, but perhaps strong enough to turn the tide for the Wizards of Archangel. If I tried, I could maybe save them - maybe even turn the tide of the war early enough that we would be able to force a truce before thousands of Wizards lost their lives on the front lines against the Red Court. But I couldn't - not without risking the dangers of Paradox and not without abandoning Ivy to Koschei's plans for her.
The mantle made the choice for me, before I'd even had the opportunity to wallow in the guilt of abandoning the Brute Squad Wizards. Harry Dresden might have been conflicted with guilt, but the Lord Warden's Mantle was under no such moral dilemma. A monster had a child, so the Lord Warden was going to save it or die trying. Men were fighting, and dying, for a purpose - who was the Lord Warden to deprive them of that?
Under other circumstances I might have found the psychic imposition horrific, but I was honestly just glad to have been given an out. I don't think I could have forgiven myself for choosing not to help those people, but caught in the addictive rush of the mantle's will - choice was almost a foregone conclusion.
"I'm going to break the circle," I spoke to my compatriots, alternating between Goa'uld and Russian. "Stay close. Aim for the head or the stomach - if you can rupture their blood supply they'll die and the frenzied ones will go for the corpse. We're going to head South."
"I know how to kill the Blood Born, Warden. I've been doing it for ten thousand years." Ammit's voice was murderously chipper as the oversized Kara'kesh glowed in her saurian palm. "But you know they're going to chase us right?"
"They can't follow us too far or too intently." I hoped. "Not while they're besieging a fortress."
"A fortress whose wards we brought down Warden." Ammit shook her head, "No - they're not going to let us go. They can't let us go. The curse of the First Maya won't let them. They're not all going to chase us, not at first, but they will pursue us. It's in their nature."
"I could be mistaken, but aren't you the one who spends every free moment reminding me how killing them is in her's?" I replied glibly, feeling near giddy at the prospect of combat with the vampire hordes with a near manic fixation upon the butchery to come.
Ammit snorted. "Warden - every once in a while you remind me why I signed on for this craziness."
"Utterly mad…" Enlil muttered under his breath, eliciting an amused snort from my brother. The White Court Vampire couldn't possibly have understood the Akkadian deity, but the tone of contemptuous resignation was unmistakable. Enlil's capacity for complaining transcended the barrier of mere language.
They briefly shared a look of commiseration before Enlil realized that he was empathizing with a vampire. He whipped his neck away from making eye contact with Thomas hard enough to make it pop audibly, eliciting a howling peel of laughter from the my brother.
"A moment Warden." Kincaid interjected over the howling vampire hordes beyond the ring of fire. "We need to address something first. We need to discuss the terms of your compensation."
"Now?" I turned to face the mercenary in utter incredulity. "We're in the middle of an army of vampires, everything is literally on fire, and you choose now to start nickle and diming… did you just say my payment?"
"I did." Replied Kincaid. He was standing at ease, far too relaxed under the circumstances - placid even. "You're not doing this for free, and I want to know what you want before I let this go any farther. Everyone does something for a reason, and I'm pretty short on reasons why I should trust you right now."
"Are - are you out of your freaking mind?" The mantle's rush faltered, my well of power continued to empower my spell but the sheer oddness of Kincaid's utterly misplaced priorities was striking. "If I wanted to betray you I could have thrown you to the Erlking in a heartbeat."
"You never even once asked for payment. Someone who can get a Fae Lord to bend to his whimsy doesn't do things for free. And if you're doing something as crazy as fighting Koschei, you have something in mind." He rose his weapon to his hip, pointing the barrel at my chest. "Or you're going to claim that she 'owes you' whatever you ask - which is worse. So, you're going to tell me what you want, right now, or we throw down."
The Russians around him immediately started edging away from the mercenary in an effort to clear my line of fire.
"You can't kill me." I tilted my head in bafflement. "I just literally took mordite to the gut - that thing isn't going to do much more than annoy me."
"This thing has enough power to take your head off your shoulders, and I'm a decent shot." Replied Kincaid, in one of the most grandiose understatements I'd ever heard in my entire life. "Killer Croc and nega-santa might take me down, but the vampires will be on us before you're back in one piece. I don't think that I'd be able to kill you, but the older vampires? I'm sure there is at least one of them that can hurt you bad enough to prevent you from chasing Koschei."
"But… but that would leave the Archive kidnapped!" I pleaded for some degree of sanity to take hold as I tried to do the math on how to fight an entire vampire army while headless. I knew enough of how the merc fought to be confident that he could make good on that threat, shield or no.
"Koschei has been a known threat since the Archive was made. She has contingencies." Replied the merc, shrugging. "She's in no immediate threat, not for a couple days anyway. Easily long enough for her contract with Monoc Securities to trigger, you see I'm not thrilled with the idea of saving the Archive from one powerful asshole just to bind her to another. But I'll admit that I would rather live. So name your price or we do this - right here, right now."
"Oh… crap." I muttered. Kincaid wasn't just Ivy's bodyguard. The Archive was just a child, after all. "Bodyguard" was an all encompassing job covering everything from driving her around to getting her meals to generally just taking care of a little girl. He was the Alfred Pennyworth to the Archive's Batman, complete with all the emotional baggage of being a surrogate parent. My plan to save the Archive couldn't help but ring hollow considering how recently the Archive had been trying to kill me.
Who would actually believe that I was sincere in my intention to save the Archive? Hell - I barely would buy that story from me and I'm me. Goa'uld didn't save little girls out of the goodness of their heart. Goa'uld didn't even understand the concept of the heart except in the most mercenary and mercurial of terms.
I didn't want to Soul Gaze him, that's for damn sure. The Hellhound was a contemporary to my mentor Ebenezar McCoy, a murderer of the highest order. His soul, if he even had one, was tainted by centuries of doing things I didn't even want to imagine. I also hadn't yet experienced a Soul Gaze since my ascension… I wasn't looking to break the seal with Jared freaking Kincaid.
But what could I possibly tell him that would sound plausible? What could the Archive have, that she would be willing to give me, which would merit going toe to toe with Koschei? The Archive was a repository of all human knowledge, but she could have hardly been called a font thereof. The Archive was famously stingy with the knowledge that it chose to meet out, and even then it seemed to be governed by a set of rules that were never articulated to the uninitiated.
And then it came to me - an answer so unobjectionable that I could confidently ask for it without fearing it might break whatever rules were imposed upon the archive - even if, as I suspected, the Goa'uld responsible for its creation had placed limits upon its utility outside of its specific functions. An answer that would be believed without question, god bless the spiteful pettiness of the Goa'uld.
"I want her to tell me what the fire Moloch uses for his ritual sacrifices actually is." I replied, "I want to know why he passes people into the flames. I want her to help me stop it."
I would never forget my horrific first meeting with that loathsome excuse for a god. His treatment of that poor girl wasn't something one could ever forget. They dying cries of a woman and her infant child tossed into the oven will haunt me till my dying day.
I didn't know the bible verbatim like Michael did, but I remembered the highlights - especially anything that had tweaked as anthropomantic in nature. Moloch's particular brand of depravity had meritied several mentions in the Old Testament - long after the Archive had been made if Heka was involved.
Every world we'd taken from Moloch, every outpost we'd destroyed, and every single place that remained within his desmine all had one thing in common. Giant brass icons were laid out at regular intervals for the purpose of human sacrifice. I'd never managed to get one of them in pristine condition, his Jaffa and clergy damaged them rather than allow them to fall into enemy control, but I recognized a ritual object when I saw one.
And rituals requiring human sacrifice? They never lead to anything good.
"Moloch?" Kincaid's brow arched, but his weapon stayed pointed at me. "As in the demon from the Bible?"
"As in the Demon God from the bible." I agreed. "I'm at war with him. I want him dead."
The merc nodded once - only once, before lowering his weapon. "I can't promise she'll tell you what you want to hear."
"Guys… Little problem!" My brother shouted excitedly as the ring of fire parted in front of me, warping out and around a cluster of vampires. I recognized the man at their head immediately – Duke Ortega. He was holding a green gem aloft, using the green light coming from it to beat back my silver fire and allow his cadre to pass. His other hand held a long silver rapier that glimmered with blue energy.
Oh… this opportunity was too good to pass up. I slammed my staff to the ground, summoning a gust of ensorcelled wind to warp the flames around the Duke's protective light to blind him as I shouted. "Duke Ortega, I have not seen you since my coronation. How is your wife?"
The Duke was suitably rattled by my presence. The Spaniard's jaw dropped as he realized who I was. He was one of the few people on earth who realized the magnitude of his situation. "Coño… Lord Warden?"
"Hi Paulie," I greeted him with an intentionally insulting diminutive as I raised my staff to eye level and pointed it at the Conquistador's head, firing a burst of kinetic energy that set him rocketing back through his forces and into the distance. "Bye Paulie."
Ammit didn't afford his honor guard the chance to regroup as she throw her massive bulk into their midst, grabbing a vampire by the jaws and literally ripping the creature in half. Muminah followed the crocodilian carnivore, punching and kicking at the vampires with more efficacy than anyone of her waifish form ought to have been able. Her ensorcelled tattoos burned and repelled the creatures, holy light as effective as the sun's rays in close proximity.
Our group forced their way through the vampiric hordes, shooting, burning, blasting, stabbing, and punching our way towards the increasingly distant form of Koschei across the grounds. At this point it was only the distant glowing green motes of unholy light from that Mordite blade giving me any indications that he was still even roughly proximate.
I grabbed my brother and threw him to the ground as a Vampire soldier tried to open fire on us with a more modern weapon, unleashing a torrent of bullets at my glowing shield. The conclave field of energy ricocheted the projectiles back towards the advancing vampire hordes, slaying several before I immolated the vampire who'd made the attempt. Enlil helped my brother back to his feet, placing a Goa'uld pistol into the vampire's hand – much to my surprise. Not only because I wouldn't ever have expected for him to willingly arm a vampire, but also because I couldn't figure out where the Zat weapon had come from. Enlil always seemed to have weapons secreted upon his person – especially when one thought he was unarmed.
My brother held up the Zat and pulled the trigger, sending a ray of lightning into a Vampire. The creature crumpled to the ground instantly. I didn't need to see my brother's face to know that he was grinning like a madman.
I would normally have taken the opportunity to say something pithy about little boys and their rayguns, but I was too distracted by Aztec blade lodged in my forehead. It was only a "sword" in the most liberal description of the term, an item made from obsidian and wood – shocking in its primitive brutality.
I promise you that it hurt just as much as any blade of modern make when it was pulled out by the massive, masked figure wielding it. This guy was tall. I mean really tall, I'm practically NBA sized and he was at least a foot taller than me. But I suppose the huge ceremonial mask goes a long way to re-orienting one's size.
I ripped the shard of obsidian from my face, an eight inch long chunk of stone, and flung it into the still raging near-circle of fire. "Nice try skippy, but I'm made of harder stuff than that."
"You should not be." The man in the mask wasn't speaking, his words just seemed to echo through the air around us. It left a coppery flavor in the back of my throat that couldn't help but taste of blood. "The Terms prohibit your existence."
"I've never been particularly good at following the rules," I replied, parrying his next attempt to gut me with the obsidian blade and attempting to catch him with a burst of kinetic energy from the foci in my palm. To my astonishment, he collapsed in around the blast – his body dissolving into a blood-soaked mess of centipedes and ants that swarmed my armor. I screamed as the wave of insects poured over me, burrowing into my flesh greedily to drink my blood.
I was near delirious with pain when Muminah reached me, beating away the insects from me with her bare hands. The ensorcelled swarm fled the light of her tattoos, billowing around the incoming vampires to reform into the masked man. I stood back up with Muminah's help burning the ground between us and the vampires to slow their frenzied advance towards the scent of my blood.
The man laughed with near-erotic degrees of satisfaction. "The Blood… I had forgotten the Blood – it has been so long."
"Don't get used to it." I replied, acutely aware that there were sizable holes in my cheeks where centipedes had chewed through the sides. "I'm off the menu."
I suspect the masked figure probably had more of a monologue planned. Ancient evil creatures were strangely fond of witty repartee. But whatever dialogue the masked figure might have intended to use in menace was rather undercut an abrupt collision with the front-end of an Soviet Era APC that came crashing through the elaborately manicured shrubbery of Archangel and into the vampires. Vampiric nightmare or not, 15 tons of Soviet War machine is going to hurt when you end up unexpectedly under the belly of it.
The vampire screamed in surprise as he was subsumed in the undercarriage of the vehicle, dissolving into the insect swarm beneath the transport's wheels. It spun around, opening its rear hatch and exposing the crew space within it. The Russian Colonel and his men rushed for the vehicle, waving us towards it as pair of main battle tanks breached the shrubbery. I winced at the sound as they opened fire on the black-bodied monsters with high-explosive fragmentation rounds, ripping them to ribbons as the shells burst in the air above them.
Enlil all but threw himself into the armored belly of the Russian transport vehicle, not even bothering to pretend that he was providing covering fire for the rest of our group as we entered the vehicle. Ammit entered last, her bulk just barely managing to fit into the compartment.
"Where did this come from?" I asked as Kincaid slammed the door shut and the transport kicked into gear. "And how did it know where we were?"
The Colonel tapped the radio clipped to his vest. "This is the 20th Century. There is no need to fight an army with six people. Not when I have tanks."
His look of smug satisfaction was diminished greatly when he looked out the window only to see one of those precious tanks being ripped in two by the masked figure, newly reconstituted from the swarm of insects. To my horror the swarm was actually tearing the armored vehicle to pieces, devouring the tank's crew as they screamed and tried to flee it. Their gored bodies tore apart as though they'd been run through a blender, devoured by the swarm of insects that made up the body of the Lord of Outer Night.
Ammit followed his gaze and let out an annoyed huff. "You're not going to kill one of the Lords of Outer Night that easy. Especially not one who has recently fed upon a God."
The Colonel scowled back at the Goa'uld, unable to understand her speech but clearly annoyed at her tone.
"Can this thing go any faster?" Thomas inquired in a voice of increasing frustration as the Duke Ortega and a number of vampires on motor vehicles started to chase our APC. It looked like the Colonel's assessment was correct, the vampires had in fact killed a number of Russian soldiers to reach Archangel. Judging by the uniforms of the drivers, however, they hadn't just killed them.
That was the worst part of fighting the Red Court, really. You didn't just loose people to them. More often than not, the Red Court would use your casualties to replenish their own. The Russian Soldiers that had been protecting the front lines of the White Council's bastion against the Red Court were now the newest fledgling monsters of the Red Court.
"Yuri…" One of the Russian soldiers whispered sadly as the driver of one vehicle shed its skin mask, rippling the flesh from it's face to allow the massive, black predator's eyes beneath their full range of vision. "God above, what have they done to you?"
"He's not Yuri anymore." I disagreed sadly. "They're turned. They've all turned. They're with the vampires now."
"… They know everything that Yuri knew?" The Colonel replied in a voice of deadly calm.
"Yes." I replied simply.
"The Wardens are going to lose, aren't they?" Inquired the Colonel as he took in the full scope of the battlefield. There were thousands of vampires and monsters of all kinds swarming Archangel, more than even the council had estimated from their reports on the total destruction of Archangel. How had they missed this many troops? "They're going to lose and leave with my men as their slaves."
"Yes." I replied for a second time.
The Colonel nodded, apparently having made a decision. He looked at his soldiers before saying, "I am going to activate the contingency. Do any of you wish to lodge a protest?"
Not one of them spoke. Taking their silence as assent, he moved to the front of the APC, climbing up to yell commands to the driver that I could just barely make out to be human speech. He seemed to be asking for a more powerful radio than the handheld one strapped to his vest.
Bullets railed across the armored rear of our APC as I popped out of the hatch on top of the vehicle, holding up my foci and channeling a wave of force at Duke Ortega's vehicle. The APC bumped over a log, jolting my aim enough to miss the Duke but not enough to miss the jeep next to his and force his driver to avoid the wreckage.
As the smoke cleared it became apparent that the Duke was holding a long something in his hands, but it took me a moment to actually place the weapon.
"Hells bells, he's got an RPG!" I swore, casting a powerful gale of wind as the projectile rocketed towards our transport. The contrail from the weapon arced at a hundred-and-twenty-degree angle, killing a huge smoky-black, multi-armed something that was charging alongside the Vampire's jeep. The monster howled as the explosives tore though its side, spilling violent green entrails on the ground that bust into flame. Apparently Duke Ortega did not suffer from the myopically traditionalist weapons preference that most immortal creatures gravitated towards.
I held up my hand, shouting "Maximo Fulminos" as the ensorcelled red lightning rumbled across the summoned storm clouds. I cackled like a madman as the protective envelope of darkness that the red court had summoned for their own protection turned against them. The red lightning arced down and through my staff, lancing out from my foci in a coruscating stream of doom. The searing lightning scourged at the advancing motor pool, blowing up two vehicles and colliding with the increasingly large cloud of insects that was advancing upon us. The Lord of Outer night seemed to be using the carnage we'd caused to empower himself, working himself into a frenzy of blood magic so that he might overtake us.
His advance was forestalled, however, but the howling screech of fast moving engines as ten contrails moved through the roiling mass of red clouds, supersonic darts forcing their way through the broiling storms like furious angels of death. They flew horrifyingly close to the ground, turning vampires to pulp as their guns unleashed a storm of steel and death. The flying beasts of the Red Court make a token effort to slay the vehicles, but they were flesh and bone where the Russian aircraft were constructs of industry and death.
The Lord of Outer Night broke away from us and to the skies, forming a cloud of red mist and hideous insects as he allowed himself to be sucked into the intake of two jets. The churning multitudes expanded within their fuselages, ripping apart the delicate components and ripping the jets from the skies to explode upon the ground below. The unfortunate pilots managed to eject mid-air, only to become fodder for the Lord of Outer night to heal himself from the damage done to him by the exploding aircraft.
The fighters dropped ordinance on the vampire army, making no apparent effort to avoid collateral casualties among their ostensible allies in the tower. I was yanked back into the APC by the Russian soldiers as we broke towards the tree-line. They forced the hatch shut and spun the lock as they strapped themselves into their chairs, the cause of their worry immediately apparent. A trio of massive quad-propeller planes was moving across the horizon, the thunderous beating of their propellers audible even through the vehicle's armor.
"Oh fuck me…" Kincaid strapped himself into his chair, lashing the bets in place with manic fervor. "That's a TU-95."
"Should that mean something to me?" I inquired, strapping myself into a chair indicating that Muminah and Ammit should do the same. Neither Thomas nor Enlil required prompting.
"It's a Strategic Bomber. Bombs on bombs for days!" Kincaid plugged his ears with his fingers as the bellies of the propeller planes opened up, unleashing their payload upon Archangel and the Vampire armies around it. One of the Russians slammed shut the view-port as the first explosive touched the ground, the Russian made explosives combining with the pool of sliver flames I'd left behind to form a blinding corona of pure destruction. The entire world sounded like it was coming to an end as the bombers unleashed hell upon the battlefield.
I wasn't able to hear anything as the APC breached the treeline, but I felt it as a concussive wave of force flipped the vehicle through the air, end over end, whipping my head back and forth as it spun through the air. We ended up at an odd angle, but more or less upright, as the APC landed on the ground. The vehicle's engine, however, was fried. Between having so much magic used around it and the force of the explosion, the compartment filled with noxious black smoke as the engine gave up and died.
There was a scream from the front compartment of the APC as something burst in the cockpit, immolating the drivers and forcing the rest of us to disembark immediately as the armored vehicle roasted from the inside out.
We disembarked from the smoke-filled compartment, exiting into a world on fire. I half expected to see a mushroom cloud on the horizon, but apparently the Russians had elected to go with conventional rather than nuclear weapons. The tower of Archangel was nothing more than smoldering rubble now, the power unbound from its runes searing across the lands around it – no longer bridled by any sort of existing logic or structure to bid and control it. It would likely kill anything that even tried to touch the rubble for years to come.
The Vampire army was only a specter of what it had been, the few remaining troops were in a blood frenzy – feeding upon each other with mad abandon as they tried to recoup for their horrific injuries. Only one of the propeller planes, I noticed, was moving out into the distant horizon. It's two fellows were only wreckage upon the ruins of Archangel, torn apart by the Lord of Outer night that even now pursued the remaining plane.
The battle of Archangel was over – the Brute Squad was gone forever. And not, as we'd suspected, at the hands of Vampires or some horrific death curse. Mortals had undone both Wizards and Vampires with near horrific glibness of action. I grabbed the Colonel by his shirt-front, apoplectic with rage. "There were people in that building, possibly even more apprentices – more children!"
"Were you going to save them?" The Colonel replied dryly. "Nyet. We were driving away from them. Don't even pretend to be interested in their welfare. We would not escape that army, not in time, and the people inside that fortress would have become meat for the vampires. Better to die quickly than to become one of those things, no?"
I wanted to disagree with his logic. I wanted to save those people… but no. He was right. Those people were fated to die today. Perhaps blowing up the fortress was the better choice… perhaps. I tossed the man aside in frustration, disgusted with myself for not being able to disagree with his actions. I flinched as the magazine to the APC's weapons overheated, sending bullets in all directions. My companions dropped to the ground to avoid them, but I didn't even bother to dodge them. It hurt as the projectile passed through my skull and out the other side, but physical pain had become an annoyance rather than a real hinderance.
Was there even anything capable of killing me at this point?
Yes, there was. Of course, there was. A single dagger taken from Sokar's fortress, I was sure the Key of the Dead could kill me. And, of course, I'd given it to Mab. Stellar thinking as always, Dresden.
There was a groan of pain from just beyond our APC, behind the bushes. On investigation it transpired to be Duke Ortega. The vampire was badly injured, his legs were broken and his arms were too badly burned to even move them. His flesh mask just barely clung to his face and chest, distorting in pain as the monster beneath screamed in agony. His companions lay around him – dead.
Ammit snorted, leaning down to sniff the vampire. She smiled wolfishly. "You smell that, Warden? I love that odor, the musk that comes with the petrified inevitability of ending these things."
She raised her foot, fully intent on stomping the life out of the Duke when I yelled, "Stop."
She paused in confusion. "Warden?"
"I need him alive." I replied. The Duke still had a role to play in what was to come. Killing him here meant that we couldn't duel a year from now. So he not only needed to survive this encounter, he needed to recover from it.
"Why in the name of all that is would you require this monster to continue breathing?" Ammit inquired in confusion as she lowered her foot.
The Duke's eyes bulged with a mix of pain and fear as I let my eyes flash menacingly. "Because I already know how he dies, and I would not rob the Blackstaff of his prize. I owe him too much to deny him that satisfaction."
Ammit arched her brow but consented to let the vampire live. She did not resist the opportunity to kick his head hard enough to knock the noble unconscious, however.
"We should move." Interjected Kincaid, "They'll regroup soon, and if we don't get out of here before they've had the opportunity to catch our scent we won't be able to escape on foot. For now they'll likely assume we died in the blast, that should give us enough of a window to reach a town with vehicles."
"Agreed." I replied, following him easterly into the Russian wilderness and walking away from the still blazing chaos I'd brought down upon Archangel.