Crimson Wind (21 page)

Alexander did not wait for Max’s reply. He did what he should have done already. He used his telekinesis to fuse the trigger on her Casull and did the same with the weapons of the other three.

“Try it,” he said, knowing that Max would understand.

And then all hell broke loose.

Chapter 14

MAX’S RAGE WAS COLD AND METHODICAL. THREAT-ening her life was one thing, but Alexander— he was
hers.

She snatched the barrel of the heavy Casull and smashed the gun into the mouthy blond Spear’s stomach. The woman looked horrified and startled at once, like she’d figured that the gun and superior numbers made her invincible. She doubled over with a grunt. Max kicked her in the face, sending her flying. Alexander was caught up in a fight with Oak and Steel. The brunette Blade’s gun swung around, cracking Max in the thigh. Her leg went numb. She pivoted and dropped, tackling the other woman.

None of them seemed to be that well trained. They fought with the ferocity of desperation, but they were not prepared for two angry Primes who had plenty of fighting skills and the willingness to use them.

The four went down in less than half a minute. They weren’t dead. Max didn’t kill unless she had to, and neither did Alexander. That was one of the things she liked about him. She pulled her witch chain free and had it wrapped around Judith’s neck before the woman could react to the fight. Max knotted the chain tight and straddled the sick witch, planning to do the same to him.

“No! Please! He’ll die. Let me help him,” Judith pleaded. Her voice cracked, and tears streamed down her face. “Please. We won’t hurt you. We can’t. Neither of us have much left to use.”

Max hesitated. “Never trust a witch” was her own personal motto. But there was no doubting this one’s fear and desperation. Something terrible had happened to this coven, and those who were left were barely hanging on. She bit her bottom lip.
Don’t be stupid. Just finish this and get the hell out.

Apparently, “stupid” was her motto on this trip. With a heavy breath, she hopped down off the bed and unfastened the chain from the witch’s neck. “Don’t get cute,” she ordered.

The witch blinked. “Thank you,” she said, and went back to her chant.

Max looked at Alexander. He stood by the door, holding a steel police baton and looking none the worse for wear. Oak and Steel were in the middle of the room, where he’d dragged them. They lay next to the two women. The others were bloody and weren’t healing very quickly. Max wiped the back of her hand over her chin. Blood came away on it. It wasn’t hers.

“Shit,” she said.

“We should be able to make it back out to the truck without much trouble,” Alexander said, but made no move to open the door.

It was like he was reading her mind. That should have annoyed the hell out of her. “Let’s find out what’s going on around here first,” Max said.

They pulled the three Blades up and sat them up against the wall, stripping away their weapons. “Wish we had some water to wake them up with,” Max said as she paced in front of them. “We’re running out of night fast.”

It had been less than an hour since their capture. They could still make it to Winters in plenty of time before the sun rose. Still, something was terribly wrong here, and she couldn’t bring herself to just walk away without knowing what. Everyone looked shell-shocked. It reminded her too much of Horngate after the angels had attacked four weeks ago. Where were the rest of the covenstead’s witches? Where were the rest of the Spears and Blades?

It was a good five minutes before any of the four stirred.

The blond woke first. She groaned, blinking and looking first at Max and Alexander and then at her companions. She made a sobbing sound and fell back against the wall, her eyes closing. It was the picture of defeat.

“That’s it? You’re giving up?”

The blond snapped upright, her eyes blazing. When she spoke, her voice was slurred. Her lips were pulpy, and her jaw was swollen, no doubt broken by Max’s kick. She was too depleted for her healing spells to work. Max knew all about that.

“What do you know?” she said. “You were our last hope.”

“Then you probably ought to have talked nicer,” Max said, squatting down in front of her. “You know what they say about vinegar and flies.”

“Fuck you,” the woman said, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

“You aren’t all that tough as Sunspears go, are you?” Max said. “Not very smart, either. That’s a bad combo. If you’re going to be dumb, you should at least be tough.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

Her anger was starting to spark back to life.
Good
. Max wanted her mad.

“So why don’t you tell me, Tinker Bell?”

“My name is Maple.”

Of course it was. Max rolled her eyes. Witches and the stupid names they pinned on their Spears and Blades. “All right, Maple. What’s going on here? Where is the rest of the coven? Where are the Primes?”

The other woman bit her lips, then released a shaky breath. “We were attacked. Two days ago.”

“By who?”

Rage hardened Maple’s expression. “Her name is Lacey.” She swallowed, her mouth twisting. “She was one of us.”

“One of you? A Spear?”

Maple shook her head. “One of the triangle. Patricia, our
anneau
witch, got sick. No one knew what happened, but suddenly, she was dead. Then Lacey stepped forward and said she was going to take the
anneau
in order to keep everyone safe. If the
anneau
fell apart, we’d all be covenless.”

A full coven was made up of twenty-two witches. There were thirteen in the outer circle, five for the points of the pentagram inside the circle, three for the points of the triangle inside the pentagram, and one for the center point. The witch who held the coven held the center and the territory
anneau
. Once Patricia had died, the
anneau
would unravel and leave everyone homeless, unless someone else could take it and hold it.

“But some of you didn’t like Lacey and refused,” Max guessed.

“Not at first,” said the brunette Blade who’d helped capture them. The side of her face was a solid purple bruise. She rubbed a finger inside her mouth, feeling the back of her teeth. “You kick like a horse,” she told Max.

“Remember it. So what happened next?”

“Lacey said she was the strongest of the triangle, and it only made sense for her to ascend to the center point. Gregory and Judith were the other two points of the triangle, and they disagreed. She was strong, but she wasn’t a good leader. They said Gregory made more sense.”

“And Lacey didn’t like that.”

“No. She got furious. She said she already had the support of the star and most of the circle. Gregory and Judith just needed to get with the program. Most of the Spears and Blades didn’t know what to do. Patricia’s death broke our bindings and we weren’t all there for a while.”

“Compulsion-spell backlash,” Alexander said. “It can drive Sunspears and Shadowblades insane, if not kill them altogether.”

“Some of us were pretty bad off,” the brunette Blade agreed.

“So what happened? The condensed version. We’re in a hurry.”

“Gregory and Judith accused Lacey of killing Patricia. She just laughed and told them they ought to watch themselves, or they’d end up dead, too. It looked like there was going to be a witch battle when another three witches showed up. If that’s what you want to call them. Looked like they were carved out of ice—white hair, white skin, and silver-blue robes. They were so beautiful they were hard to look at. Made us want to crawl on our stomachs to lick their boots. And they were cold—so very cold. It felt like we’d all been stuck in the deep freeze. I don’t know where they came from. One minute there was no one there, the next they appeared.”

Max looked at Alexander, her brows rising. She’d not heard of anything like the three.

“Fairies, maybe,” he suggested.

That wasn’t particularly helpful. There were about as many kinds of fairy as there were homeless cats in the world.

“What did they do?”

“They told Lacey she’d done a good job. That’s when we knew for sure she’d killed Patricia.” There was a catch in Maple’s voice.

“What then?”

“Then they said they wanted to give her what she wanted—the center point of the
anneau
.

“They told Lacey to go stand on the center point and told the rest of the witches to take their positions. The idiots did it. Even Lacey, though she could tell something wasn’t right. She was sweating and looking around like she wanted someone to save her ass. And all we did was watch. We were so stupid. But it was like we were dreaming; we didn’t even think about resisting. All except Judith and Gregory.” She gestured toward the two witches in the corner. “That’s them. All the rest went like sheep, but those two tried to fight. Then Gregory went down. We never saw what they did to him, but we thought he was dead. It was so sudden, so silent—” She broke off, swallowing hard. “Judith was the only one smart enough to run.

“Before we even knew what was happening, the three ice queens turned the rest of the coven witches into ice statues. Literally.”

Maple stopped her torrent of words, breathing hard. Oak and Steel were awake now. Oak was looking malevolent, blood running from the cuts on his forehead and cheek. Steel just looked wiped out, like he could barely sit up. He was mottled with swellings and bruises.

“So then what happened, Pippy?” Max prompted the brunette Blade. Maple looked as if she wouldn’t be able to talk for another few minutes, and Max was all too aware of time slipping down the drain.

“Pippy?” She made a face. “I’m Ivy.”

“All right, Ivy. What happened next?”

“After the ice queens froze the coven, they went to stand around Lacey. They held hands and made a triangle but stood on the lines instead of the points. They opened their mouths like they were going to sing, only they made this noise. It was like a wind howling across ice. It was deafening and so empty. It felt like it was pulling our souls out of us. Then it changed. It felt like there was no hope for anything anymore. I wanted to cut my own throat.

“That’s when the Primes decided we’d done nothing long enough and organized us into an attack. I don’t know how they were able to resist that sound, but they did, and they kicked our asses until we could, too. We started to jump the ice queens, and then something exploded. Only there was no force to it. It was like something dead pulsed through the air—through us. It kept going, destroying almost everything all the way to the shield wards.” She shook her head, looking haunted.

It startled Max when Oak picked up the story. “We got knocked on our asses. Couldn’t think straight. When it ended, we couldn’t even move. We lay on the floor like sitting ducks. They came around. Said we shouldn’t have challenged them. They didn’t care about us, only the witches. But they couldn’t let the attack go unpunished. So they said they would give us a chance. Fight each other, and when enough were dead, they would let the rest of us live.”

“Fight each other?” Alexander repeated, revulsion clearly written on his face.

“Yeah. At first we refused. Then each of them pointed at one of us. Before we knew what to expect, the three unlucky bastards crumbled to dust. We had no choice.”

Max stared, appalled. What would she have done? Would she have tried to kill her own people? “So you tried to kill each other?” She could not keep the disgust from her voice.

“No.” Steel spoke at last. “How could we?”

She frowned, confused. “So what did you do?”

Oak snorted derisively. “We fought. Not to kill, but about half of the other Spears and Blades had other ideas. They wanted to save their skins. So they came after us and each other.”

“When it was done, we were all that were left,” Maple said, her hands clenching tight. She stared straight in front of her as if seeing it all again. “The ice queens turned to us and told us they hoped we had learned our lesson. To prove it, we are to bring them Judith and Gregory. They said they had to destroy the entire coven. They’d return in a couple of days for them. That’s tonight.”

“That’s why you want us? To fight these things? Why didn’t you just run?” Max asked.

“Where do we go? What do we do? No witch will take us in. Besides, this is our covenstead. We’re supposed to protect it.”

“There’s nothing left to protect. This place is dead. Can’t you feel it? Hell, you’re all not even healing properly,” Alexander said. “I bet it has everything to do with what they’ve done to this place. The smart thing to do is to take the two witches you have left and get out. Start a life somewhere.”

“That’s not what Judith’s vision said,” Ivy said stubbornly.

“You know they don’t understand half the shit they see, right?” Max said.

“She saw the two of you. She said you’d know how to get rid of the ice queens. You’re here. She was right about that, she must be right about the rest.”

Max thrust frustrated fingers through her hair. “I don’t even know what the fuck these three bitches are. How do you think we’re going to stop them if your entire coven and a full squad of Blades and Spears couldn’t?”

Maple gave a little shrug, but it was clear she wasn’t changing her mind. Max thrust to her feet and paced away. “This is futile. We should just get the hell out of here,” she told Alexander.

“I agree. We should leave. But you are not going to, are you?” Shadows moved in his eyes, and his face was pulled into a harsh mask. His Prime felt rabid.

She frowned at him. What had set him off? She shrugged inwardly. She’d find out sooner or later, and right now wasn’t the time. “Not my style, Slick. You know that.”

She winced inwardly. What was she? The patron saint of lost causes? Why was she such a sucker that she rescued witches with angry mage ex-husbands and pathetic Blades and Spears without the sense the Spirits gave rocks?

It was a character flaw. Or maybe it was such an ingrained habit to do exactly what Giselle would have hated that Max did it without even considering what she was doing. Or maybe she was just as much an idiot as these people she was trying to help.

Max swung around and went to the witch by the bed. “What did you see in your vision?” she demanded.

Judith paused in her chanting and looked wearily up at Max. “I asked the question, who can stop these three beings? The answer was you and him. I saw your car, and I saw you here. It was very clear. But beyond—I do not know. Just that you are the answer.”