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“Jump on the katana!” I hear Percival yell from a distance.
No one is going to obey that. Unless… are these vampires sire-bonded to Percival? That happens if a pre-vamp drinks the blood of a vampire before they turn.
That must be the case here. The vampire without the hand leaps forward and shish-kebabs himself on my sword.
Puck.
He lets his body go limp and drops to the floor, taking the katana with him. Before I can so much as take a fighting stance, the vampire right behind the sword-jumper grabs my throat.
“Now!” he bellows triumphantly. “If you don’t put down your weapons, this one will suffocate too.”
Chapter Forty
My lungs are on fire and my head feels like someone took a bat to it.
All my instincts scream for me to thrash and fight, but I go limp instead. Let my attacker think he’s won. I have only seconds of oxygen in my system, and I intend to make them count.
First, I attempt remote-entering Rowan’s dreams.
Nope. That technique is too novel for me to execute in this state.
Hoping the vampire doesn’t notice or care, I touch Pom’s fur—and because I’ve done this a million times, I catch a whiff of ozone and plummet into the trance even while being choked.
I appear in the dream palace lobby and realize I have a problem.
Lack of air is pulling me out of the dream world.
I strain my powers to stay in, the reverse of jolting awake. It seems to work, so I teleport right into Rowan’s room in the tower of sleepers.
Pom shows up, but I ignore him. Slapping my palm on Rowan’s forehead, I leap into her dream.
Not surprisingly given the Koshmar dart, Rowan’s dream is taking place in the canyon battlefield that would be our waking world.
Every single one of us is already dead here, clearly of hideous causes.
“This is too weird and scary,” Pom says when he sees what’s happening to Rowan, and promptly disappears.
I can’t blame him. Covered in blood and gore, Rowan is lying among our body parts, the top of her skull opened as if in the middle of a neurosurgery. Frank is here, and he’s eating Rowan’s brain as she convulses from time to time—I guess when he chomps on the parts responsible for movement.
That’s gross and disturbing. Then again, I’ve recently learned that my own pet had done something like this to me for real—stealing some neurons instead of eating them, but still.
I make Frank disappear, heal Rowan’s brain and skull, and remove all the gore from our surroundings.
“This is a dream,” I tell her. “You need to wake up and save everyone, starting with me and Dylan.”
She looks at me with bulging eyes.
“This. Is. A. Dream,” I enunciate. “Save me and Dylan first. Got it?”
She gives me the smallest nod but doesn’t speak, a bad sign.
I have to trust she understood what I said. There’s no time to waste.
I jolt her awake.
Now Valerian.
I teleport to the tower of sleepers again, but before I can touch him, the lack of oxygen yanks me out of the dream world.
Chapter Forty-One
For a second, everything is black, and my lungs feel like they’re bursting.
Then the hands around my neck let go, and as I greedily gulp in air, I’m gently lowered into a sitting position.
Rowan’s clearly come through.
Remaining in a sitting position is a struggle, but I force myself to stay upright and survey the battlefield.
The vampire suffocating Dylan has already let her go as well, and she’s lying on the ground, hopefully just resting.
Felix and Ariel dispatch the vampires they were fighting without realizing it’s no longer needed. Then they gape at the rest of their opponents—who are standing unnaturally still, ready to follow Rowan’s commands.
But not all of them are subdued.
Percival is still fighting Fabian, and Fabian is clearly getting tired.
“I can’t take over Percival!” Rowan shouts. “I’ve been trying.”
Right. Edith was immune to necromancer powers as well.
“Help Fabian!” is what I try to yell back, but nothing comes out.
Percival must realize the direness of his situation—and tries a desperate maneuver. He allows Fabian’s claw to enter his shoulder, then smashes a fist into the werewolf’s jaw.
Fabian flies up and lands in an unmoving heap.
Percival’s wound would kill anyone else, but he’s not even paying attention to it. What’s worse, the wound is healing. Rowan sends her vampires toward their sire, and in the distance, I see her zombies. She’s bringing them back from their search for Percival.
The first Rowan-controlled vampire reaches Percival and is ripped into pieces in an eyeblink. The second one gets the same treatment. The third one gets his neck snapped.
All this happens insanely fast—that or my brain is slowing.
Rowan makes the rest of the vampires and the newly arrived zombies attack Percival en masse. At first, it seems like an easy win, but vampire blood and zombie limbs are flying all around Percival, and he’s no worse for the wear.
