I blinked, unprepared for his hostility. Bones didn’t have any hesitation, and he had Ian by the throat before I could even formulate a response.

“Don’t you say another accusing word to her or I’ll lose the very thin hold I have on my temper,” he growled. “If not for her, we’d all be dead right now, or did you forget that?”

Ian’s turquoise gaze was blazing emerald.

“What I haven’t forgotten is why we were all dragged into this war in the first place. It was all because of her! Her injury was repairable, Crispin, but you can’t do anything about our friends lying in the other room, can you? How many more lives will be needed to avenge one woman’s injured pride-”

“Bones, no!”

Mencheres appeared out of nowhere, and not a moment too soon. There was a wrenching sound, a blur, and then Bones was thrown backward missing an arm. The scream I made drowned out Spade’s shout as he arrived just in time to witness it.

Ian stared with stupefied amazement at the hand still clutched to his throat, the limb beginning to wither. I went to Bones, but he sidestepped me and strode right to Mencheres.

“Did you have a reason for preventing me from silencing that insult, Grandsire?”

Now my whole body tensed. If Bones and Mencheres went at it, all hell would break loose.

“You were going to tear Ian’s head off,” Mencheres answered. “You would have regretted it afterward, for many reasons, and I think we have already given Patra enough cause to celebrate without further reducing our numbers.”

Ian appeared mildly dazed by recent events. He shook his head as if to clear it, then stared at me and Bones with a look of vague disbelief.

“By Christ, Crispin, I don’t know what got into me,” he breathed. “I had no cause to rail at you like that. Forgive me, both of you.”

Bones started to run a hand through his hair, stopped when he saw his limb was only half grown back, and snorted incredulously.

“Two hundred and forty-seven years I’ve had that arm. Didn’t think to lose it while trying to rip your head off. Bugger, I have to pull myself together.”

“Now more than ever we all have to pull ourselves together,” Mencheres agreed.

“Yes,” Bones said, eyeing him in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Especially you, Grandsire, because thismust end.”

Vlad entered the room. He looked around, saw the staring contest between Bones and Mencheres, and took a seat.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mencheres said with bleakness. “And I tell you, I cannot do it.”

Bones was next to him in a flash. “The reality is that either you or she will be dead very soon. Whatever Patra meant to you, whatever secret dreams you’ve harbored of fate intervening at the last moment to make things right-you of all people know better. You told me never to doubt your visions, yet here you’ve lingered with the hope that you could be wrong. But you’re not, so you must end this, because that is the responsibility you have to the people under your line and now also under mine.”

I was confused. Mencheres didn’t have Patra stuffed in a back room, to my knowledge, so how could he have the power to end this, as Bones was implying? Vlad leaned forward, picking up on my thought. “Don’t you see, Cat? When Patra had you trapped in a lethal nightmare, who knew how to break it? Last night when the zombies attacked, who knew the only way to destroy them was to destroy their homing beacon? Mencheres. So if he knows these spells well enough to know what counters them…then he also has the knowledge to cast one himself.”

One look at Mencheres’s ashen face confirmed it, and then I was right in front of him as well.

“Youhave to. She’s not going to stop! Do you want to see everyone around you dead? Because that’s what will happen if you don’t do something.”

“And could you?” Mencheres flung at me. “If this were Bones we were talking about, could you mete out death to him? Could you sentence him so easily to the grave?”

He stopped, showing more naked feeling than I’d ever seen from him, and it hit me.He’s still in love with her, even after everything she’s done. Poor bastard.

I chose my words with care. “I don’t pretend to know how hard this is on you, Mencheres, and if this were Bones, it would rip me apart inside, too. But”-I paused to look straight at the man I loved-“if you ever went so far off the deep end that you’d try-and succeed-in killing those I loved, and you made it very clear through countless examples that you wouldn’t stop until I and everyone I cared about were dead, then yes. I’d kill you.”

Bones stared back at me and a small smile touched his mouth. “That’s my girl.”

Then he fixed his gaze back on Mencheres. “I can’t offer you any comfort in this but one, single thing: a quick death for Patra. She doesn’t deserve it, and I’d promised to treat whoever plotted against my wife to a much more prolonged, gruesome experience, but for your sake I’ll amend that. If you do what you must now.”

Green blazed from Mencheres’s eyes, and so much power crackled off him that I flinched. “Are you threatening me?”

Bones didn’t even twitch. “I’m the co-ruler of your line and I’m stating my intentions toward an enemy who has butchered our people. You need to remember whose side you’re on. Can’t you see Patra has been betting her life on the notion that you’re incapable of that?”

Mencheres didn’t say anything. Every set of eyes in the room were trained on him. Then at last he stood, reining in that angry flash of power like a bird folding up its wings.

“So be it. Last night Patra unleashed the contents of the grave on us. Tonight, we will give her back its vengeance.”

THIRTY-THREE

THE STARS WERE WINKING FROM THEIR NEW backdrop of ever-deepening navy. Mencheres was in the center of the lawn. We’d cleared the snow off the ground so the large tablecloth placed on it didn’t get wet. Mencheres sat cross-legged in front of it, and I couldn’t help but think that with his center positioning, the dozen or so vampires in the background behind him…and the bones lined up on the white linen, this looked like hell’s version of the Last Supper.

None of us knew what was about to happen. After making that cryptic statement, Mencheres had simply said to be dressed for battle at sunset and then he went up to his room. I half wondered if he’d make a break for it via an upstairs window, but Bones seemed satisfied that Mencheres would keep to his promise, and here he was.

Earlier I made a call to Don to tell him something was going down tonight. Maybe with a heads-up, he’d be able to come up with a better cover story than avalanches and mini-earthquakes. Problem was, I couldn’t tell him where this event would take place. Or what time. Or what it would consist of. Or any other helpful details that would allow him to minimize human interaction and prevent a full-scale media fallout, he scathingly told me.

Well, I didn’t have those details, so I could only relay what I knew. Don’s frustration was understandable. Here I’d warned him that for the second night in a row, the undead were going all-out with a black magic attack, but I didn’t know if bodies would be crawling from their graves-or raining from the sky. Don had cause to freak, sure. Me, I had other concerns aside from keeping the existence of vampires a secret. I had to stay alive. So I was dressed for battle, wearing over my traditional black spandex various knives, a sword, several silver bullet-filled guns, and even some grenades.

“I don’t want any of you to speak,” Mencheres said in the first words he spoke himself since sitting down in front of the bones. “Not until I am finished.”

And how are we supposed to know that?I thought.When you take a bow? When the ground opens up and things crawl out from it? A memory of those horrible rotting creatures flashed in my mind and I shuddered. Ugh, if I never saw one of them again, it would be too soon.

Something prickled in the air, centering my attention back on the Egyptian

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