Midas bounded up to me and leaned his bulk against my thigh. I scratched his ears while my balance returned. I was no good to anyone if I fell over and had to be rescued. Or worse, if I gave the coven a hostage.
Bishop stood three feet from the blonde, and her eyes said she could have eaten him up with a spoon.
“I owe you a boon.” She wet her lips. “Lucas was skimming, and the coven frowns upon that. We had eyes on his partner, but we couldn’t locate him. He was too careful. You solved that problem for us. Let us solve this problem for you.”
“Problem?” He squinted at her. “Are you offering to solve yourself?”
I had caught the tail end of their conversation, and it sounded like more recruitment garbage. They must not know Bishop at all if they thought they could sway him to the dark side so easily. Screw cookies. Weapons of mass destruction were his delight.
“You’re wasting your talent,” she chided. “Why pretend you’re less when you’re so much more?”
“Lady, you can take a flying leap into whatever hole you crawled from, or you can use ours. I’m not picky.”
Eyes downcast, she pushed regret into her tone. “Have it your way.”
Magic sizzled through the air, and she morphed into a massive bird of prey the size of a frakking giraffe. I had two brothers. I knew my dinosaurs. This resembled a Quetzalcoatlus. A storklike avian dinosaur with a thirty-something-foot wingspan that weighed over five hundred pounds. Except that wasn’t terrifying enough. The reddish-orange scales striped down its front shimmered with heat, and sparks dripped from its feathered tail. This was more a prehistoric phoenix than mere dinosaur, and why not? I had already been exploded and hauled Mendelsohn from a bonfire. Why not roast my goose flying lizard style too?
Smythe, despite having aquariums full of lizards at his facility, fainted dead away. I couldn’t tell if he was that overcome, or if he’d had a stroke. I was just glad he had climbed back into the ice cream truck first.
A rumble of interest came from the gwyllgi, and a few licked their chops. I hadn’t seen them clearly until now, but there must be close to three dozen in all. Midas threw back his head and sang a hunting song. The others lifted his voice, and more furry shapes emerged from the woods in the opposite direction.
Wargs.
They traveled in two distinct groups, one much larger than the other. A female led the smaller pack, and a male with silver in his fur kept the rest in line.
“The Clairmonts and the Loups?” I wondered out loud. “They’re the only packs in the area.”
Their numbers made it unlikely they were hosts, but then again, we hadn’t known there were so many roaches infesting the city. With the wargs shifted, we had no way to communicate. The change would take too long, and it would leave the alphas vulnerable. They would never allow that, certainly not on a battlefield, and that’s exactly what they had walked onto.
All we could do was wait and see which side they fell in on when the action started.
And pray.
That was probably as good an idea as any.
“I hate to say this,” Bishop exhaled. “They’ve got us pinned between a pit and a hot place.”
The Quetz was alone, and the coven traveled in pairs from what I had seen. There must be one more out here, but the wargs’ appearance worried me more. The size of the coven had yet to be determined. For all I knew, they were all hosts of one kind or another. We couldn’t put our backs to them until we knew, and we had run out of time to second-guess ourselves.
The Quetz shot into the air, its wings igniting. It flew circles around the clearing, gliding lower and lower, until its sparks ignited the trees. They caught fire in a rush, and soon we were trapped in a ring of fire that spread too quickly and burned too hot to be anything but pure magic.
Suddenly, I had an inkling of where they got the inspiration for the bomb they sent me.
“What is with all the fire lately?” I flexed my newly healed fingers. “I’m not a fan.”
“This might not be the best time to mention it,” Bishop hedged, “but dybbuks are vulnerable to fire.”
“What?”
“The exact reason is too complicated to get into right now, but it boils down to banishing shadow with light. Purification of evil through cleansing flame.”
Unable to formulate a response, I spewed incoherent noises at him.
“I researched it, after the bomb. The attack was so random. There had to be a reason for them to use an incendiary spell. They couldn’t have honestly believed you were stupid enough to keep the heart with you. And then Mendelsohn. He was crazed enough to dismember his pack but sat calmly in the fire until you pulled him out. The coven was controlling him through a charm or maybe the drug itself, so I get the how, but the why bugged me.” He flicked a glance at the pit. “No pun intended.”
“This would have been great to know yesterday.”
Granted, there wasn’t much accurate information on dybbuks. Since they had the nasty habit of going on killing sprees, they were put down as soon as they were identified. I ranked among the longest-lived ones, and it was all thanks to powerful friends sticking their necks out for me, believing that I would beat the odds.
I had done nothing to deserve a second chance. That’s why I worked so hard to earn it.
“Elemental fire can’t harm you.” He rubbed the base of his neck. “It has to be—”
“—magical.”
“Primal,” he corrected. “Say, from a prehistoric lizard bird of undetermined mythological origin.”
“This ought to be fun then.”
Without Ambrose, I was a plain Jane Low Society necromancer without a drop of power to my name. He was the
