After a while, it occurred to me that not all the sounds of forthcoming battle might be coming from our forces.

Somehow Snow slewed the dragon's great head around. "Down!" he shouted in voice that reverberated as if electronically amplified. We all bent our knees and heads, just as the dragon released a fire-hose force of flames that raked the walls on both sides.

The exquisite art melted like crayons, but so did armed and armored Egyptian warriors. Unfortunately, more leaped into life from behind them on the walls.

La Gargouille slowly swung its huge haunches left and then right, driving the ships into the landings on either side so the riders could scramble onto the stones and engage the Egyptians hand-to-hand, spear-to-sword. The swords didn't stop them, and the spraying bullets just jolted the brown bodies pouring out from the walls like fire ants.

The dragon's hot breath was too broad to use with our own forces thick in the fray. It paused as Snow slid down the rough terrain of its scales to stand and fight.

Now the "little dragons" some fighters carried came into play, flame-throwers that fried the ancient figures like insects in a campfire.

The sizzling crackling sound was icky, but I saw a werewolf's hood being ripped away by one set of dark hands even as another drove a spear though the opening. Both Egyptians sank their fangs into either side of his neck as he fell, gulping a swallow of life's blood even as it surged away, and turning to head for me.

I'd jumped to the stones with the rest of my ship's riders. I took the sword Grizelle had given me two-handed and swung it horizontally from one man's broad shoulders to the other's.

Vampires they were, but also the result of unknown ancient Egyptian funerary rites. My blow was as strong as desperation could make it. I wielded my sword like a scythe and reaped two bloody-mouthed heads on the stones at my booted feet.

I don't know whether I was more horrified at destroying what might be ancient historical artifacts or finding it so easy to decapitate vampires.

It didn't matter. Other bodies were pressing against me, pushing me forward, running toward me.

It seemed unfair that our enemies were half-naked and we were swathed from head to toe in modern defensive measures, but seeing some wetsuited figures lying still on the stones with limbs and heads lying nearby in puddles of bright blood cured me of any second thoughts.

So I hacked and charged with the crude weapon I'd been given, my cheeks burning from the nearness of the flame-throwers.

And Ric.

How would we even find Ric in the mass slaughter?

I slipped on a pool of blood and went down, my whole body thudding with the impact. A helmeted Egyptian warrior was near enough for me to see the triumph on his face, in his kohl-lined eyes.

I struggled to get my long blade pointed up and braced to spear him as he dove down to slit my face downward with an axe.

A huge gray shadow slipped between him and me, and brought him down with his throat gushing blood as if a vampire chainsaw had been at him.

"Quicksilver!"

My dog was gone in a flash of fur, werewolf fast and strong, growling and snarling like the pack at Starlight Lodge, chasing his own pack: a trio of the powerful-jawed hyenas. The blood and fur that flew as he overtook the last one convinced me that only death would banish these creatures on their own ground.

I struggled upright just in time to slice off a mummy's wrapped arm. It felt like attacking the halt and the lame. These creatures were dry and sere, as easy to maim as the morning paper. Yet they kept coming, diverting us from the more dangerous vampire warriors.

In time, I only heard the ring of steel on steel, the thud of steel on flesh and bone, I only saw the contrails of blood catching the torchlight as they lashed the stone walls with a fresh wet embroidery of spatter.

The din, the heat, the motion… it was impossible to tell who was friend or foe, but I sensed Grizelle behind me, her long, lithe reach keeping enemies from reaching me even as I slashed and kicked and screamed my way forward, looking for Ric in this dungeon of chaos.

"Why? How? Quicksilver here?" I managed to shout.

She shrugged and elbowed an advancing mummy, then took it apart like a chicken dinner.

"He was on the boss's list."

Snow had somehow brought Quicksilver into this slaughter? As if it didn't matter if I lost my beloved dog too?

My weary sword arm lifted to cut down a pair of warriors, whose fallen forms erupted instantly in sizzling flames from the Inferno fighter bearing a flame-thrower behind me.

These creatures are not alive, I reminded myself again and again. These are undead predators and their zombie flunkies, no more than movie extras. These deaths aren't real, because the victims aren't alive.

But we are.

But maybe Ric still is.

Chapter Thirty-four

By now everything was happening in slow motion and my senses finally understood that the battle was winding down.

Apparently, as many Egyptian soldier vampires had been decapitated as possible, as many zombie mummies had been minced to papery remnants. Who could tell?

Whether Snow stood, or any of his allies beyond Grizelle I didn't know. Or care.

Where was Ric?

We'd fought our way into the absolute deepest, darkest depths of the Egyptian tomb maze beyond the river, the master vampire lair. I'd seen not a glimpse of Kephron and Kepherati, too noble to join the fight, probably.

And no Ric. And no Ric? Was he dead and buried already?

No. That made no sense. They'd want him in one form or the other, alive or dead. Perhaps they might use him better dead. Newly undead to raise the dead. Were we too late?

No!

But we were up against the far wall of the current dungeon.

I couldn't beat my way forward past a stone wall.

I stopped, straightened and lowered my sword point.

The dragon's roars were distant. There didn't seem to be anyone left to skewer, slash, burn, or make doubly dead.

Behind me, Grizelle growled softly. Hearing a woman growl like a tiger is unnerving. I knew she'd shifted to tiger form earlier, but back to woman as the battle waned. I knew she'd protected me on Snow's orders, and resented and begrudged Snow for that, but not for Ric's sake. He'd need me now as he never had before.

I felt Grizelle's heavy hand on my shoulder. She didn't much like me. Snow was her boss, her reason for being. He was too involved with me for her liking. But no six-inch-long tiger claws bit into my flesh, only inch-long supermodel fingernails.

And then I looked harder at the last wall.

Fallen bodies of all kinds mortal and immortal lay around us like effluvia coating a flooded floor.

Grizelle hissed behind me, an eerily human/feline sound. I heard Snow approach us. "Grizelle," he said without expression, sounding winded and weary. Snow weary? "What is it?"

There was silence. I felt I stood alone on an island.

And then the scene before my eyes took rational shape after the irrational jumble of battle when limbs flew and heads rolled and bizarre appendages twisted and broke off.

I viewed a mass of pale and dark shifting motion, of refuse and vermin devouring refuse. I saw a Dumpster from Hell disgorging its contents, leaving a swatch on the stone floor, and remembered the dead groupie behind the Inferno.

I took in iron cuffs bolted two feet from the floor. Empty.

I saw the verminous, devouring, shifting black blanket of bugs and the cloud of buzzing darting insects massing above them.

I discerned the barely visible oases of human flesh.

I roared like the tiger Grizelle was. The silver familiar melted from a breastplate into a thick chain in my hand that I wielded like a whip at the fist-size hovering insects.