Ilona Andrews - Magic Binds

She wasn’t there. One second I had her locked in and the next she vanished.

A teleporter.

The knife sliced across my back. I whipped around and barked a power word. “Aarh!” Stop.

The power word clamped her. Magic shot from her in a short concentrated burst, shattering my hold. She stabbed at my stomach and made it an inch in. I spun out of the way and kicked her.

She fell, then rolled to her feet, but I was already there, slicing. Sarrat’s blade kissed the skin of her long neck, drawing a drop of scarlet. Her eyes darted to the right. She vanished.

Short-range teleporter, line of sight. I spun right and sprinted, darting back and forth, turning myself into a moving target. She’d have to chase if she wanted a shot.

Irene popped into existence in front of me and charged. I blocked her sword with mine. We clashed in the middle of the floor, metal screeching. I muscled her back. She vanished. Damn it.

I jogged right, zigzagging, moving in a rough circle. My stomach hurt. My left arm burned. I was breathing too fast.

She popped up on my right. I dropped to one knee, her long blade whistling over my head, and stabbed to the side. Sarrat nicked her thigh. She leapt back and vanished.

I kept moving, breathing a little faster than I had to, walking a little slower. I let the point of Sarrat droop a hair too low.

Come on in. I’m nice and tired.

A hint of movement sliding soundlessly in the gloom to my left. Hello, Irene. I spun to my right and dramatically sliced the empty air. That’s right, I’m scared and chasing ghosts. Enjoy the show.

I spun back, then front, the sword raised, and kept moving. I really was getting tired. This had to be it.

She trailed me, quiet, patient, a strange creature, shaped like a human but so far from it.

I stopped and took a deep breath, as if to steady my breathing.

She vanished.

The thrust came from the left. I spun away the moment I saw her disappear and she came into my spin, her teeth bared, eyes wide open, expecting easy prey.

I hurled a handful of iron in her face.

Irene screamed. I lunged and buried Sarrat in her stomach, sliding the blade between the reinforced plates of her suit. She screeched higher, her voice sharp. I twisted, ripping her insides, and threw the remaining powder into her gaping mouth. The scream ended, cut off by a choking gurgle.

Translucent wings snapped out of Irene’s back. She leapt up, the wings beating in frenzy, sped all the way to the ceiling, then plummeted down, hitting the floor with a wet thud. Not enough power to truly fly, but she must’ve been a hell of a jumper.

Dark blood wet my blade, brown, almost rust-colored, as if the normal bright red of human blood was tinted with green.

Irene lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

I wanted to lie down, too. Instead I caught my breath and walked over to her. Rust-colored liquid poured from her mouth. She squirmed in a puddle of her own blood.

I raised my blade and finished it.

EVERYTHING HURT.

My left arm hurt. My right arm hurt. My stomach hurt. I’d stopped to slap some bandages on the cuts. I could control the vampires of Mishmar, but if enough of them got together, enticed by my blood, they would be difficult to deal with and I was tired.

Nobody bothered me as I walked down the long hallway. If any other monsters skulked in the darkness, they must’ve decided I’d be too expensive to kill.

The last time, when we fought our way out of Mishmar, getting from my grandmother’s tomb to the door took almost an hour, or it had felt like an hour. We fought the vampires, we moved slowly because I was at the end of my strength, and we had gotten lost at least twice. Now it took barely fifteen minutes.

In front of me the walls parted into an enormous cavern-like chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness, its floor shrouded in fog a hundred feet below. A narrow spire rose from the bottom of the chamber, fused together from concrete, stone, and brickwork. An identical but inverted spire reached down from the ceiling. They met in the middle, two hands clasping a rectangular stone box thirty-five feet high. A metal breezeway encircled it and a narrow metal bridge led to the breezeway from the stone ledge where I stood. Inside the room a magic storm howled, a power so ancient, so mad, that it made me shiver.

“Hello, Grandmother,” I whispered, and took the first step onto the bridge. It seemed longer than I remembered. I reached the breezeway and circled the room, my steps too loud on the metal, until I reached the doorway. It glowed with a pale purple light. I took a deep breath and walked inside.

A rectangular room lay in front of me. At the far wall a simple stone altar rose from a raised platform. Five stone steps led to it from the right. Between the altar and me lay my grandmother’s body. Long sharp blades, opaque and white, grew from the massive, nine-foot-tall skeleton, some branching, some isolated, some in clusters. One of these blades was now on my back, attached to a hilt.

In life my grandmother was Semiramis, the Great Queen, the Shield of Assyria. In death, her body was no longer a human thing; instead, it had become a magic coral, neither fully bone nor metal, stretching upward and outward, blooming like a lethal chrysanthemum. It burned with the cold fire of magic.

I could still turn back. There was still a chance.

No, I’d come too far to stop now.

I approached the bones. The magic brushed against me light as a feather, and the potency it carried gripped my heart into a fist and squeezed all the blood out of it. The world turned black.

Breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe . . .

The magic let go. She recognized me.

I knelt, opened the bag, and gently laid the bones of my aunt by her mother’s side.

A wail tore through the chamber. Magic slammed into me, throwing me across the room. I smashed into the wall, every bone in my body rattling.

Ow.

I blinked and saw the gossamer shape of my grandmother. She wore a thin red robe with glittering gold threads running down the length of it. A waterfall of black hair fell in soft curls down her back. She knelt by the bones, her face with its bronze skin and bottomless brown eyes twisted by grief.

I rolled to my feet and stumbled back to the bags. She let me approach. I knelt by her, took out a thermos filled with Erra’s blood, and poured it over the bones. They glowed weakly with pale red. I opened the second thermos and emptied it. The bones glowed brighter and dimmed.

Third thermos. A weak glow and then nothing.

It didn’t work. I came all this way, did all those things, and it didn’t work?

The tempest that was my grandmother stared at me, expecting something. I kept my gaze down. Looking into her eyes was like staring into an abyss. It would swallow you whole.

I had no more blood. Everything that the Pack had collected lay right there in front of me, like a fire laid out to burn. It needed an accelerant . . .

I pulled my sleeve back, peeled off the medical tape on my forearm, and squeezed some of my blood out. Why not? Everything else our family did was connected to blood. I let the hot red drops slide off my fingers onto the bones.

Nothing.

Work, damn you. Work!

My grandmother wailed. The magic slapped me and I rolled back across the chamber. My head swam.

I needed this to work. My son would die unless I did this.

I rolled to my hands and knees and crawled back to the body.

How could it not work? I was so sure . . . She was such a stubborn bitch, it should’ve worked.

The bones lay inert. My blood made no difference. I looked up at my grandmother. The awful gaze of Semiramis drained my soul.