Blood Prophecy

CHAPTER 40



Lucy


We ran over the rocky terrain, heading around to the far end of the Blood Moon camp into a grove of red pine. There was nothing but dead needles and snow on the ground, no bushes or undergrowth to hide us as we raced against the wind and right into a clutch of Hel-Blar. What was the plural for Hel-Blar anyway? Pack? Nest? Murder.

Definitely murder.

These weren’t even the ones Aidan had just released. They wore no collars, no leashes. They’d been drawn by the smell of spilled blood.

“Climb up that tree.” Connor tossed Christabel up onto a low branch and spun back around, a stake in each hand. The Hel-Blar clacked their jaws, saliva dripping off their fangs. “When you reach the satellite give a holler.”

“I’ll give a holler when I crash out of this tree and onto your head from fifty feet up,” she muttered. I knew why she was muttering, I was doing the same thing as I climbed up after her to distract myself from the height, the adrenaline swimming through me, the sounds of jaws clacking at Nicholas and Connor, and people dying in the near distance.

“Being a vampire seemed like a lot more fun in those books you used to read,” she said to me as I pulled myself up onto a wide, sturdy branch below her. “And it’s probably not a good sign that all I can think about it is Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’: ‘Theirs was not to question why, theirs was but to do and die.’ ”

I shook my head. “Connor’s right, your taste in poetry has gotten downright depressing.”

On the ground, Connor dodged a clawing grab, swinging up onto a branch just long enough to swing back down, stomping hard. His boot crushed a Hel-Blar’s shoulder, cracking his bones. He howled, stumbling. Connor kicked him onto the stake he’d left sticking out of the ground.

“Who could have guessed smart geeky boys were so hot?” Christabel flashed me a conspiratorial grin. She wrinkled her nose. “Being a vampire and hanging out with you again is clearly a bad influence. I’m thinking how hot Connor is when we might all die horribly before the sun comes up.”

“Keep calm and carry on,” I said cheerfully.

“Isn’t that from World War II London when the bombs were falling?”

“I stand by the comparison.”

I glanced at the feral blue monsters currently attacking our boyfriends. “Good point.” She climbed faster, until she reached the small satellite. “Got it,” she yelled down.

“Okay, flick on the switches behind the dish, on the left,” Connor called up, then grunted when he tried to avoid a bite and hit the tree hard enough that we nearly lost our perches.

We clung to the trunk, swearing. “Are you okay?” Christa asked.

“Fine,” he replied, sounding pissed. The Hel-Blar went to dust at his feet. “It’ll take a few minutes to boot up before we can recalibrate it. Just hang on.”

Once the satellite had little red lights popping up, he had me connect his laptop, which was in my backpack. Considering he’d had to fix my laptop one of the first times I’d met him because I’d accidentally pressed a button I didn’t even know existed, I thought he was being rather optimistic. He gave me a bunch of letters and backslashes to type in. The screen garbled at me, but when I read him what I saw he seemed satisfied. Until I got the blue screen of death. Even I knew what that meant.

“It’s frozen,” I called down.

“Turn it off and on again.”

“I tried that already.”

He climbed up to my branch. “Keep watch,” he said to me as we attached nose plugs over our nostrils. I started to climb back down, to be closer to Nicholas. He couldn’t fight off all those Hel-Blar by himself, no matter how kick-ass he was lately.

Connor opened his laptop and slipped straight into computer geek mode. He muttered words that made no sense to me, the same way Christabel muttered nineteenth-century poetry.

From my vantage point I could see a fresh wave of Hel-Blar arriving. Even on a purely moonless, starless night, I would have seen them. That many Hel-Blar were hard to miss. “Incoming!”

They swarmed around us, running to the battle. A few passed right underneath us and I had a fleeting hope that they’d all keep running by and Nicholas could scurry up the tree to safety. The last few found the ashes of their brothers coating the roots and screeched in fury. Half a dozen surrounded our tree and began to climb up. Nicholas did his best to stop them, grabbing their clothing and yanking them off even as he defended himself from fangs and fetid breath.

Christabel frowned down at me when I started to move. “Where are you going?”

“I have to help Nicholas.”

She pulled out of her bag a handful of the Hypnos-pepper eggs that Uncle Geoffrey duplicated from a mixture I’d stolen from school. Stakes and swords weren’t much use to her, but she could throw these like rotten eggs on Halloween night, if she had to.

She had to.

She lowered her backpack with the rest of her stash to me. I put my arms through the straps, wearing it over my chest for easy access. “Nic, heads up!” I tossed an extra pair at him when he looked up. “Connor,” I said, throwing my first egg. I was glad I was only halfway up the tree. Any higher and I would have been dizzy with vertigo by now. “You might want to hurry up.”

He glanced down, swore, and started to type faster. “I just have to wait for this to bounce to Chloe and her files. Chloe’s trying to activate Hope’s cell phone’s GPS tag. Now we just have to combine the codes and IPs with the GPS system. ”

I wasn’t really listening, I was too busy trying to toss eggs at the Hel-Blar without also tossing myself. I wrapped my ankle around a branch and leaned as far forward as I could. Cayenne pepper and Hypnos exploded. Above me, Christabel did the same.

“Go to sleep!” I shouted as the powder sank into their pores and drifted up their nostrils and down their throats. Two Hel-Blar tumbled out of the tree, arms and legs still curled as if they were climbing. Branches splintered as they fell. I kept throwing, as hard as I could. I kept them off Nicholas as he kicked them into the bushes.

By the time Connor gave a triumphant hoot, Hel-Blar littered the ground like dead cockroaches, hands and feet sticking up.

“Gotcha,” Connor said, grimly satisfied. He reached for his phone, dialing quickly as he clambered down to mid-tree level, behind Christabel. “Bruno,” he said. “Phase Two is complete, and Logan sent word that Phase Three is also done.” I couldn’t hear Bruno’s exact words but the smug triumph was clearly audible. Connor was equally smug when he added, “And now I have Hope’s exact location.”