“Do it,” Walter ordered. Their bodyguard followed Angie into the house. The queen’s banner unfurled behind him. Marking him as the queen’s. Him alone.
“What the fuc—?” EJ muttered, biting off the last word as the feel of dangerous magic hummed and vibrated along his flesh. He knelt, and tore the guards’ unicoms off, tossing them into the bushes. He pulled his sleeves down over his fingers and lifted their weapons, removed the magazines to clatter on the driveway. He racked back the slides and let the rounds fall, tossed the weapons into the landscaping.
He raced inside. To see Angie standing in the center of the big entryway, her cloak in a puddle behind her on the floor. The notes of a fourth-generation, portable,defensive hedgesounded softly in his ears, anantimagic, antiexplosive-weapons hedge.
So far as he knew, Angie was still working on this iteration of thehedge. It had proved problematic. Unless she had used her own blood to power it.
He looked down and saw two drops of blood.Hell’s hounds. She had opened herblood gauntletthe hard way.
Soft musical magic sounded from somewhere in the house, steady, ready to be unleashed. EJ had no idea what kind of working it portended.
Walter stood to Angie’s side, not protecting her. He couldn’t. She wasn’t here as the queen’s godchild. She was here as…as the owner of The Firm, to demand answers about her dead client. Able to act freely. And she was here as thespurned wife.
Walter, unless attacked, was the queen’s observer.
“I’m guessing someone has a plan?” EJ said into his mic, his tone sarcastic. Walter ignored him.
Having deduced his position, EJ stepped to Angie’s other side, far enough away to keep from getting nicked by swords, but close enough to provide cover, and to cover most of their six. He pulled a silver flute, a flautino, this one with a dozen workings built in and a thin blade that would slide out with a flick of his thumb.
In a semicircle in front of Angie, stood three vamped-out fangheads, two with bigger fangs than Walter’s, marking them as older. In vamps, older meant they had survived challenges to their positions, so they were likely excellent fighters. EJ had a working for that, but it would also hit Walter. There were also a half-dozen humans. Armed, of course.
“Where is Marrazzo?” his sister demanded.
A man moved into sight, stepping from behind one of the marble pillars that held up the floor above. He was a medium man: five-ten, blond hair, blue eyes, and not gloriously beautiful by vampire standards. Until he smiled, as he did now. The smile was dazzling, giving him a dimple, making his eyes sparkle like gems. It was an intimate smile, as if he saw no one in the room but the recipient.
“Hello, my darling,” Marrazzo said. “So nice of you to drop by.”
His sister growled.
A vamp twitched.
EJ blew a single note on his flute.
Walter touched his ear, activating his headset to mute all sound.
Knowing Walter had understood, and that he was now safe, EJ played the opening lines to “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” originally by John Denver. All the vamps facing them, including Asshat, dropped to the floor, sound asleep. It was a joke created in Section Seven, thatsleepy-timeworking, because vamps slept in the daylight, when the sun shone. The working was targeted just to vamps.
But the soft humming of dangerous magic continued from somewhere deep in the clan home, a single note rising in volume.
Air-witch working.The first note of aconcussive attackworking.
EJ stepped in front of his sister and blew a second note. His version of awyrdmagicsound-protectionhedge, inside his sister’shedge. Instantly the three of them were enclosed in a bubble of dead silence, trapping air and sound. If theconcussiveworking got past Angie’s ward, it would dissipate when it touched his.
Walter pulled off his ear protection. “What?” His voice was dead-sounding too, as if they stood in a sound booth in an audio production studio.
“Air witch on the premises.” EJ blew the note again, strengthening thesound-protection hedge. He began counting down the seconds of protection he had just given them.
“Pretty,” Angie said of his working. “Lots of lights. Some bright. Some dark. Are you hearing Konstantin’s magic?”
“We never had much on him,” EJ said, his eyes following the motions of the humans in the entry. They were stepping back. That wasn’t good. That meant whatever was coming was more deadly than guns and knives. “He was dead, so why bother. And I haven’t had a lot of time tonight. Been busy, you know?”
“Okay,” Angie said. She took a breath and let it out slowly; the breath was a gathering, a building of power. The notes of her magic wrapped into hishedge, increasing, growing stronger. It wasn’t anything she could hear as she merged their energies, because Angie saw magic as light. But to him it was the opening to a sonata. A low muted G, sliding into a G sharp, into an A, the enharmonic notes sounding as if she played them on a baby grand in a massive auditorium as she wove her magics with his.
Behind them, icy air blew in through the open doors, but didn’t touch them inside thesound hedge. Nothing did. Nothing could. But such magic came with costs. While this defensive working kept out all sound, it also kept out all air exchange. They’d run out of oxygen soon, even with Walter not breathing.
EJ blew another note to add strength to their shield. It wasn’t created to last long—two minutes max—and as the air inside thehedgehad already been activated in the working, there wasn’t a lot of power left to bolster it. He wasn’t adding any of his personal reservoir of power to it. He was saving his life force. Saving Delta. Hoping neither would be needed.
Outside thesoundhedge, the vamps were coming to. Someone had activated awake-upworking. Someone with power and skills, or at least someone able to use amulets to great effect.
