I don’t remember what happened when the ritual went off. There’s a blank spot in my head about two minutes wide. I had no desire whatsoever to find out what was there.

The next thing I remember is standing outside the temple with Maggie in my arms, wrapped up in the heavy feather cloak her mother had left behind. She was still shivering and crying quietly, but only in sheer reaction and weariness now, rather than terror. The shackles lay broken on the ground behind me. I don’t remember how I got them off her without hurting her. She leaned against me, using a fold of the cloak as a pillow, and I sat down on the top step, holding her, to see what I had paid for.

The Red Court was dead. Gone. Every one of them. Most of the remains were little more than black sludge. That, I thought, marked the dead vampires. The half-breeds, though, only lost the vampire parts of their nature. The curse had cured them.

Of course, it was the vampire inside them that had kept them young and beautiful.

I saw hundreds of people on the ground aging a year for every one of my breaths. I watched them wither away to nothing, for the most part. It seemed that half-breeds came in a couple of flavors—those who had managed to discipline their thirst for blood, and thus carried on for centuries, and those who had not been half-vampires for very long. Very few of the latter had ranked in the Red King’s Court. It turned out that most of the young half vampires had been working for the Fellowship, and many had already been killed by the Reds—but I heard later that more than two hundred others had been freed from their curse.

But for me, it wouldn’t matter how many I’d freed in that instant of choice. No matter how high the number, it would need to be plus one to be square in my book.

Inevitably, the Red Court had contained a few newbies, and after the ritual went off, they were merely human again. They, and the other humans too dim to run any sooner, didn’t last long once the Grey Council broke open the cattle car and freed the prisoners. The terror the Reds had inflicted on their victims became rage, and the deaths the Reds and their retainers suffered as a result weren’t pretty ones. I saw a matronly woman who was all alone beat Alamaya to death with a rock.

I didn’t get involved. I’d had enough for one day.

I sat and I rocked my daughter until she fell asleep against me. My godmother came to sit beside me, her gown singed and spattered with blood, a contented smile upon her face. People talked to me. I ignored them. They didn’t push. I think Lea was warning them off.

Ebenezar, still bearing the Blackstaff in his left hand, came to me sometime later. He looked at the Leanansidhe and said, “Family business. Please excuse us.”

She smirked at him and inclined her head. Then she stood up and drifted away.

Ebenezar sat down next to me on the eastern steps of the temple of Kukulcan and stared out at the jungle around us, beneath us. “Dawn’s about here,” he said.

I looked. He was right.

“Locals stay hidden in their houses until sunrise around here. Red Court would meet here sometimes. Induct new nobility and so on. Survival trait.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was like that a lot, especially in nations that didn’t have a ton of international respect. Something weird happens in Mexico; twenty million people can say that they saw it and no one cares.

“Sun comes up, they’ll be out. They’ll call authorities. People will ask questions.”

I listened to his statements and didn’t disagree with any of them. After a moment, I realized that they were connected to a line of thought, and I said, “It’s time to go.”

“Aye, soon,” Ebenezar said.

“You never told me, sir,” I said.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ve done things in my life, Hoss. Bad things. I’ve made enemies. I didn’t want you to have them, too.” He sighed. “At least . . . not until you were ready.” He looked around at the remains of the Red Court. “Reckon you more or less are.”

I thought about that while the sky grew lighter. Then I said, “How did Arianna know?”

Ebenezar shook his head. “A dinner. Maggie—my Maggie—asked me to a dinner. She’d just taken up with that Raith bastard. Arianna was there. Maggie didn’t warn me. They had some scheme they wanted my support on. The vampires thought I was just Maggie’s mentor, then.” He sighed. “I wanted nothing to do with it. Said she shouldn’t want it, either. And we fought.”

I grunted. “Fought like family.”

“Yes,” he said. “Raith missed it. He’s never had any family that was sane. Arianna saw it. Filed it away for future reference.”

“Is everything in the open now?” I asked.

“Everything’s never in the open, son,” he responded. “There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times. Or that’s been my experience.”

I nodded.

“Sergeant Murphy told me what happened.”

I felt my neck tense. “She saw it?”

He nodded. “Reckon so. Hell of a hard thing to do.”

“It wasn’t hard,” I said quietly. “Just cold.”

“Oh, Hoss,” he said. There was more compassion in the words than you’d think would fit there.

Figures in grey gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Ebenezar eyed them with a scowl. “Time for me to go, looks like.”

I nudged my brain and looked down at them. “You brought them here. For me.”

“Not so much,” he said. He nodded at the sleeping child. “For her.”

“What about the White Council?”

“They’ll get things sorted out soon,” he said. “Amazing how things fell apart just long enough for them to sit them out.”

“With Cristos running it.”

“Aye.”

“He’s Black Council,” I said.

“Or maybe stupid,” Ebenezar countered.

I thought about it. “Not sure which is scarier.”

Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. “Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.”

“How’d Lea arrange a signal with you?” I asked.

“That,” Ebenezar said sourly. “On that score, Hoss, I think our elders ran their own game on us.”

“Elders?”

He nodded down the stairs, where the tall figure with the metal-headed staff had begun creating another doorway out of green lightning. Once it was formed, the space beneath the arch shimmered, and all the hooded figures at the bottom of the stairs looked up at us.

I frowned and looked closer. Then I realized that the metal head of the staff was a blade, and that the tall man was holding a spear. Within the hood, I saw a black eye patch, a grizzled beard, and a brief, grim smile. He raised the spear to me in a motion that reminded me, somehow, of a fencer’s salute. Then he turned and vanished into the gate. One by one, the other figures in grey began to follow him.

“Vadderung,” I said.

Ebenezar grunted. “That’s his name this time. He doesn’t throw in often. When he does, he goes to the wall. And in my experience, it means things are about to get bad.” He pursed his lips. “He doesn’t give recognition like that lightly, Hoss.”

“I talked to him a couple of days ago,” I said. “He told me about the curse. Put the gun in my hand for me and showed me where to point it.”

Ebenezar nodded. “He taught Merlin, you know. The original Merlin.”

“How’d Merlin make out?” I asked.

“No one’s sure,” Ebenezar said. “But from his journals . . . he wasn’t the kind to go in his sleep.”

I snorted.

The old man stood and used his right hand to pull his hood up over his face. He paused and then looked at me. “I won’t lecture you about Mab, boy. I’ve made bargains myself, sometimes.” He twitched his left hand, which was still lined with black veins, though not as much as it had been hours before. “We do what we think we must, to protect who we can.”