His eyes widened. Mouth opened. Horror slithered across his face and nested in his eyes. His blood gushed out of the wound. Over the gem. His blood linking the sliver of the Blood Cross and the gem and my hand over his heart.
Red light blasted out. Over me. Over the clearing. It crashed through me like a tsunami and I staggered. Ripped through the light of the circle ward. Smashed against the power of the pentagram and rolled over Angie's ward, mating with it. The white light swayed, almost an audible sensation as it absorbed the red. Both seemed to grow, as if they were greater than the sum of their own energies. It was a tide. A river. An ocean. It bathed everything in bloody, brilliant light. It rolled over my head. Cleansing. It was like going to water, if water were made of blinding crimson light. It tore through me.
I pulled the sliver of the vamp's greatest weapon from his flesh. An instant later, a bloody flame licked up from the wound. Spread over his torso in a flash. My skin went hot and I smelled my own hair burning. I rolled back fast. Smoke curled up from my hand, and I knew my fingers were burned. But I couldn't feel the pain. Not yet.
The maker of the young rogues flamed. The heat was enormous inside the circle of red power.
I reared back and kicked out. My foot landed in the middle of Baldy's chest. Flame kissed my boot. I kipped to my feet again and rammed Baldy with Beast-strength. The burning witch/vamp fell back, through the red light. Onto the forest floor. I whirled. There were no more vamps standing. They all were down. The heat of the burning vamp was intense, and I covered my eyes against the glare.
The soldiers were all down too, screaming and moaning. Cutting their own flesh. Even Derek, who was grunting with the motion of his knife as it flayed a length of his skin away, the muscles of his arm exposed and bleeding onto the earth. His fingers raked into the exposed muscle, fingernails digging at a mote of red light. He was chewing the tissue of his mouth, his bloody teeth working at a mote buried in his lower lip.
I looked at the sliver of wood. It was the Blood Cross. The true cross? I didn't know. But even if it wasn't part of the true cross, it was a powerful relic. I wiped it clean and pricked Derek. He screamed again, and the red motes burst from his skin and up into the night. Buzzing like bees, they rose in the air. Derek's spine jerked in a whiplash of agony. He eyes cleared. "Son of a--"
I turned and pricked each of the others, even Hicklin, who had died so quickly. The red motes left their skin, formed small clouds, and rose. Joining into a hive of angry red light in the sky above us. It didn't look like a safe place to leave them. I held the wooden sliver up at them. Nothing happened.
Angie sat up from the ground, bracing herself with one arm. "Aunt Jane, try the necklace. The one the mean man was using."
They'd all been pretty mean to my way of thinking, but I stepped to Baldy's smoking remains. In the center of his scorched rib cage, the bones curled up around it like protective hands, was the necklace, untouched by the heat, still bright red with blood. I wasn't about to touch it. I pulled a silver-bladed vamp-killer and reached through the ribs with the point. Lifted it from among Baldy's smoking vertebrae by the gold chain. It was a lot heavier than it looked.
I stood there, surrounded by gasping, bleeding men, all but one still alive, holding a vamp-killer, a powerful amulet draped across its blade. And I started laughing. I couldn't help it. The motes in the angry cloud above me paused. I could have sworn they could hear my laughter and were responding to it. They formed a long, ropy shape, and spiraled down. Right toward the bloody gem hanging on the knife blade. They coalesced into a cloud around the now-scarlet gem. And melted inside it.
Their passage made the gem swing and pulse as if it were alive. And for all I knew, it was.
In my other hand, the sliver of wood glowed with a white light.
And in Angelina's hands danced a black light of might.
CHAPTER 24
Hot to trot?
We tramped out of the forest, a short line of blood-soaked humans and I. Angelina riding my back like a horsey ride, her heels kicking my hipbones. Little Evan, still asleep, was nestled in Derek's arms. Bliss was limp in a fireman's carry held by one of the soldiers whose name I hadn't learned yet. Hicklin was carried by the rest of his mates.