Blood Winter (6 page)

“They’ll all live,” the witch said with a tired smile. She’d cut her brown hair short recently, and it curled unexpectedly, making her look about twenty-five. But her eyes were old. She’d seen a lot of betrayal, a lot of death, and it had tempered her. Just like Gregory. Both preferred to heal, but out of recent necessity, they had grown adept at killing.

“When will they wake up?” Max asked.

“Maybe by tomorrow. Depends. They suffered a great deal.” She glanced at Tyler and the boy and frowned. “Their bodies are healed, but their spirits are in shock. It may take them a while to decide it’s safe to come back to the world.”

Or they might not. Max could almost hear the unspoken words.

Judith reached over and smoothed the sheet over the man, then stood and went to do the same for the woman. “Some people just need killing,” she said softly, then looked up at Max. Silver magic swirled in the hollows of her eyes. “And soon,” she added.

Max saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”

With that, she went to find Giselle. It took her a while. She wasn’t anywhere Max expected her to be, and no one seemed to know where she was. Finally, she thought of the angel vault. It was the only place she hadn’t looked.

THE ANGEL VAULT WAS A SMALL ROOM DEEP DOWN AMONG
the roots of the mountain. The space had started as a small cave, and by using magic, Giselle had enlarged it.

As Max approached the entrance, she heard voices within. Giselle’s was one, and the other—Kyle? What was he doing in there? With Giselle?

Anger coiled in Max’s chest. She drew closer. She could be wrong. She’d damned well better be wrong about what they were up to.

She wasn’t.

“There’s every possibility,” Kyle said enthusiastically. “We’ll have to experiment and see, but just look at what one of Tutresiel’s tiniest feathers has done for Max. What a witch could do with the same feather I can’t even begin to imagine.”

Except that judging by the tone of his voice, he was imagining, and by the sound of it, he thought it was the holy grail.

Max gritted her teeth, her jaw muscles knotting. She rubbed her thumb absently over the palm of her hand. The feather Tutresiel had given her allowed her to jump huge distances. If she caught a breeze, she could glide a long way. It had been a gift, but Kyle was talking about mining the angels’ comatose bodies for magical gold.

Her hand clenched.

“It’s risky,” Giselle said. “I don’t know that we should take the chance. There could be recoil issues and dangerous complications. We can’t afford to lose any more witches. We’re too depleted already.”

“But isn’t that the point?” Kyle argued. “You said it yourself. That preacher wielded impossible power. He pierced the wards without any of us knowing about it. You need to use every weapon you have. You can’t be squeamish about taking advantage of them. They wouldn’t want to see Horngate destroyed.”

They wouldn’t want to be used like groceries in the pantry, either, Max thought. She waited for Giselle’s reply.

“Horngate isn’t so far in trouble,” she replied dryly. “I have the Fury Seed.”

The Fury Seed had been created when a Fury was born recently in Horngate. Sacrificed by her father, an enemy witch, a teenage girl had been reborn with a Fury’s insane rage and thirst for vengeance. In order to keep the explosive power of her birth from destroying Horngate altogether, the coven had created a matrix to collect the magic. The matrix was like a pit at the center of a magical fruit. The Fury Seed, as it had come to be called, was an extraordinarily powerful reservoir of magic.

After the Fury’s birth, the seed had been sunk deep under the fortress. It now fueled the day-to-day needs of the covenstead, the greenhouse heat, the phones, and some of Horngate’s other necessities, although Giselle liked to keep its power in reserve against future problems. Maybe the future was now.

“Of course,” Kyle said. “But that’s raw and unformed. Angel magic could enhance specific abilities and allow you to do spells you never could before. You need both to protect this covenstead.”

Max had heard enough. The angels were in these bizarre comas because they’d been defending Horngate against the rage of the Fury. They deserved better than to become ingredients in Giselle’s spells. Or Kyle’s.

She strode to the door and leaned against the jamb. “You two can stop arguing now,” she said quietly, her jaws aching with the effort to keep herself from screaming at them. Her Prime was wild. She didn’t bother restraining it.

Choking power flooded the room. Kyle staggered back toward the wall, his mouth falling open. Giselle stood between the stone slab tables that held the two angels, her arms crossed. She had the grace to look guilty, no doubt for getting caught, not for her plans to harvest angel parts.

The thought spurred Max’s fury. In a minute, she was going to rip Giselle’s arms off. “Let me make something very clear. Neither one of you is going to touch so much as a single hair on their heads. Not now, not ever. Understand?” She didn’t wait for the answer but sauntered inside. “I suggest that if you’re interested in surviving to your next birthday, you both ought to get the hell out of here. Now.”

Kyle practically ran out. Max could smell his fear.

Giselle lowered her arms. “Feel better?”

“I’ll feel better when you go get yourself run over by a truck. Feel free to have at it right now.”

Giselle’s head tipped to the side, her lips curved, and then the smile faded. “Like it or not, your brother is right,” she said. “We have to use whatever weapons we have, no matter how distasteful it might be. Using the angels might become necessary.”

“
Might be distasteful?
” Max lunged close, hands closing on Giselle’s biceps hard enough to leave bruises. “You coldhearted bitch. They are my friends. My family. You. Will. Not. Touch. Them. Ever.”

Giselle stared at her a moment, then wordlessly shook Max off and stepped away. She stopped at the door and turned back. “You know better, Max. I’ll do anything to protect Horngate. Anything. So don’t be surprised when I do just that.”

With that, she left. Just in time. She wasn’t going to survive if she stayed much longer.

Max took several breaths and then went to look over Tutresiel and Xaphan.

The two angels lay parallel to each other on two basalt tables. In between, a tiny waterfall trickled through the roof and dropped down into a basin on the floor. On the left lay Tutresiel. He was pale as ice, with long jet-black hair pooling around his head. His eyes were closed, his chiseled face looking as if Michelangelo had carved it. His expression was savage in its beauty. Silver wings folded beneath his back, the edges of each feather sharp as a scythe. They were tarnished a dull gray now.

A sheet covered him from the chest down. Beneath it, his body was beautiful and perfect—the epitome of pure masculinity. Too bad he wasn’t breathing.

On the other slab lay Xaphan. He was equally beautiful, with white-blond hair and iridescent black wings. The flames that usually flickered along the edges of his feathers were doused now. Like Tutresiel, he wore nothing but a sheet and looked like a corpse. And, also like Tutresiel, he was in some sort of angel coma, and nobody had any idea of how to wake him. The pair would remain in the vault until either they rotted away or someone found a cure for them.

They looked undamaged, except—

Max scowled. Red dust sprinkled the sheets covering them and outlined their torsos like tiny bulwarks of powdered crimson chalk, although strangely, it didn’t seem to touch their skin. It almost
avoided
doing so, in fact.

More layered the floor and had turned the waterfall basin to blood. It was scuffed where Kyle and Giselle had walked, but even as she watched, the dust swirled up and then settled back down in a pristine blanket.

“What the hell?” she asked. Her voice sounded loud.

Annoyed, she brushed at the heap surrounding Tutresiel. The dust coated her hand, then slid up over her fingers and forearm like a bloody glove. Max turned her hand, splaying her fingers. It was thick as velvet. She scraped the fingernails of her other hand through the compacted dust, and it slid up over her fingertips and congealed around that hand, too.

As it skimmed over her palm and the scar left behind when Tutresiel’s feather had pierced her skin, the tide of red dust halted, and then the edges recoiled. Her palm glowed, the feather a shining shape inside its nest of tendon and muscle.

Light flashed, and the dust dropped to the floor in a sprinkle of black ash. The heat and light from her hand flared and ran like a jolt of lightning up her arm into the rest of her body. For a moment, Max felt like the center of a star. Her vision went white. Her body was incandescent. Every cell vibrated with elemental force, the kind that had sparked the birth of the universe.

For an instant, she felt the entire world on her skin; she felt every death, every birth. Fire and water poured through her veins. Salt, earth, and ash swirled on whirling wind.

It stopped.

She blinked and drew a slow breath, surprised that it didn’t hurt. Her body throbbed with the fading memory of the pulse of power. She looked down at her hands. The dust had fallen away, and all that littered the vault was gray. Which meant that even though he was comatose, Tutresiel had enough residual juice to incinerate the invader.

Max smiled a smug smile. It faded just as quickly. This just added fuel to Giselle’s argument for using the angels to power spells. As a necessity.

Fuck that.

She reached out and slid her palm over Tutresiel’s cheek and down to rest on his chest. “Never,” she said, and bent down to brush his forehead with her lips. She did the same to Xaphan, momentarily resting her head on his chest. She hoped to hear a heartbeat. Something to say he was still alive. But, as ever, she heard nothing. She straightened. She had better hearing than a bat on super-steroids. If his heart was working at all, she’d hear it.

Then again, he wasn’t exactly dead. That was something.

She turned to leave, and as she did, a flicker caught her attention. She froze. What was
that
?

She stared, stepping closer. She saw it again.

A gleam of silver along the edge of a feather.

It flashed and was gone. There was another. And another.

Max lost track of how long she watched. The shine moved over Tutresiel’s wings without any pattern. She waited for it to vanish like a blown candle. But it didn’t. Hope lurched in her chest. Could he be waking up?

But nothing more happened. Max waited, the minutes ticking by. Still nothing. She sighed. She had things to do.

Max turned and left, scuffing at the gray ash on the floor.

Her stomach rumbled, and she headed for the dining commons to calorie load. After that, the first order of business was to go down into Missoula and figure out who the preacher witch was and find him.

And if possible, kill him.

A
LEXANDER LISTENED TO MAX SHOWER, DRESS
, and leave. A moment later, he felt the spike of her emotions and the surge of her Prime. He leaped out of bed in response but stopped himself from exploding through the door. He could feel her grief and knew that if he went to her, she would only push him away.

Instead, he showered and dressed. Most of his clothing was still in his apartment, although he slept every day in Max’s bed. He did not think she would welcome anything more permanent.

As he was putting on his shirt, he felt her Prime rise again. He went still for a moment, then finished dressing. Every particle of his being was homed in on her. But whatever had set her off, she was safe enough inside the fortress. She would not want him showing up to help her. His mouth twisted. Lately, she seemed to want him in her bed and nowhere else.

As he strode out of the bedroom, Beyul and Spike lifted their heads, cocking them. A strange flash of energy burst through the room and was gone. It tingled over Alexander’s skin, leaving behind a faintly itchy sensation.

Beyul gave a low bark and stood up, shaking himself. He went to the door and walked through the wood as if it were not there. Spike, who had followed him, barked at Alexander to open the door so she could follow.

Alexander did as commanded and followed them out into the corridor. Beyul was already at the steps, bounding up. Spike flowed after him like a silver shadow. He followed the pair.

They glided through the fortress, clearly heading for the outside. More Grims joined them, until all thirteen trailed behind Beyul and Spike. They were silent as ghosts, their green eyes lambent. Unease prickled down Alexander’s back.

The Grims spilled out of the fortress into a whirl of thick snow. The flakes were heavy and wet. A thin layer already covered the ground beneath his feet. The temperature had gone from the sixties to the twenties since the night before.

He brushed the snow from his eyes. The Grims had spread out, all facing the southeast. Their noses tipped up into the air as if smelling something.

“What’s going on?” Thor stepped out into the snowy darkness beside Alexander. “What’s up with the puppies?”