The duchess studied me and shook her head. “I shall never understand why someone hasn’t killed you before now.”

“Wasn’t for lack of trying,” I said. “Hey, why do you suppose he set up the rules the way he did? If we’d gone by the Code Duello, there’s a chance it could have been limited to a physical confrontation. Really seems to be taking away most of your advantages, doesn’t he?”

She smiled. “A jaded person might consider it a sign of his weakness.”

“Nice spin on that one. Purely out of curiosity, though: Once you kill me, what comes next?”

She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I continue to serve the Red Court to the best of my ability.”

I showed her my teeth. “Meaning you’re going to knock Big Red out of that chair, right?”

“That is more ambitious than reasonable,” she said. “One of the Thirteen, I should think, will ascend to become Kukulcan.”

“Creating an opening in the Lords of Outer Night,” I said, getting it. “Murdering your father to get a promotion. You’re all class.”

“Cattle couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Couldn’t understand that Daddy’s losing it?” I asked. “That he’s reverting into one of your blood slaves?”

Her mouth twitched, as if she were restraining it from twisting into a snarl. “It happens, betimes, to the aged,” Arianna said. “I love and revere my father. But his time is done.”

“Unless you lose,” I said.

“I find that unlikely.” She looked me up and down. “What a . . . novel outfit.”

“I wore it especially for you,” I said, and fluttered my eyelashes at her.

She didn’t look amused. “Most of what I do is business. Impersonal. But I’m going to enjoy this.”

I dropped the wiseacre attitude. The growing force of my anger burned it away. “Taking my kid isn’t impersonal,” I said. “It’s a Kevorkianesque cry for help.”

“Such moral outrage. Yet you are as guilty as I. Did you not slay Paolo’s child, Bianca?”

“Bianca was trying to kill me at the time,” I said. “Maggie is an innocent. She couldn’t possibly hurt you.”

“Then you should have considered that before you insulted me by murdering my grandchild,” she hissed, her voice suddenly tight and cold. “I am patient, wizard. More patient than you could imagine. And I have looked forward to this day, when the consequences of your arrogance shall fall upon both you and all who love you.”

The threat lit a fire in my brain, and I thought the anger was going to tear its way free of my chest and go after her without me.

“Bitch,” I spat. “Come get some.”

The horn blew.

Chapter 45

Both of us had been gathering up our wills during the snark-off, and the first instant of the duel nearly killed us both.

I called forth force and fire, both laced with the soulfire that would help reinforce its reality, making the attack more difficult to negate or withstand. It took the shape of a sphere of blue-white fire the size of an inflatable exercise ball.

Meanwhile, Arianna fluttered her hands in an odd, twisting gesture and a geyser of water erupted from the soil with bone-crushing force.

The two attacks met halfway between us, with results neither of us could prevent. Fire and water turned to scalding-hot steam in a detonation that instantly washed back over us both. My shield bracelet was ready to go, and a situation something like this one that had rendered my left hand into a horror prop had inspired me to be sure I could protect myself from this kind of heat in the future.

I leapt back and landed in a crouch, raising the shield into a complete dome around me as the cloud of steam swept down, its heat boiling the grass as it came. It stayed there for several seconds before beginning to disperse, and when it finally did, I couldn’t see Arianna anywhere on the field.

I kept the all-around shield in place for a moment, and rapidly focused upon a point a little bit above and midway between my eyebrows. I called up my Sight and swept my gaze around the stadium, to see Arianna, forty yards away and running to put herself in position to shoot me in the back. A layer of greasy black magic seemed to infest the air around her—the veil that my physical eyes hadn’t been able to see. To my Sight, she was a Red Court vampire in its true form, only even more flabby and greasy than the normal vamp, a creature ancient in power and darkness.

I tried not to see anything else, but there was only so much I could do. I could see the deaths that had been heaped upon this field over centuries, lingering in a layer of translucent bones that covered the ground to a depth of three or four feet. In the edges of my vision, I could see the grotesqueries that were the true appearance of the Red Court, every one of them a unique and hideous monster, according to his particular madness. I didn’t dare look directly up at the spectators, and especially not those gathered on the second floor of the little temple at the end of the stadium. I didn’t want to look at the Red King and his Lords unveiled.

I kept my gaze moving, as if I hadn’t spotted Arianna on the prowl, and kept turning in a circle, timing when my back was going to be exposed to her before I dropped the shield and rose, panting, as if I couldn’t have held it any longer than that. I kept on turning, and an instant before she would have released her spell, I whirled on her, pointed a finger, and snarled, “Forzare!”

Raw will lashed out and exploded against her chest just before the flickers of electricity she’d gathered could congeal into a real stroke of lightning. It threw her twenty feet back and slammed her against the ancient rock wall along the side of the ball court.

Before she could fall, I looked up at the top of the wall, seized a section of large stones in fingers of unseen will, and raked them out of their resting places, so that they plunged thirty feet down toward Arianna.

She was superhumanly quick, of course. Anyone mortal would have been crushed. She got away with only a glancing blow from one of the smaller stones and darted to the side, rolling a sphere of lurid red light into a ball between her hands as she went.

I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, whatever it was. So I kept raking at the wall, over and over again, bringing down dozens of the stones and forcing her to keep moving, while I ran parallel to her and kept our spacing static.

We were both slinging magic on the run, but she had more one-on-one experience than me. Like a veteran gunslinger in the Old West, she took her time lining up her shot while I flailed away at her with rushed actions that had little chance to succeed. All told, I must have dropped several dozen tons of rock down onto her as we ran, inflicting nothing worse than a few abrasions and heavy bruises.

She threw lightning at me once.

The world flashed red-white and something hard hit me in the back. My legs went wobbly and I sat there for a subjective hour, stunned, and realized that whatever she had packed her lightning bolt with, it had been sufficient to throw me twice as far as my heavy punch had thrown her. I’d bounced off the opposite wall. I looked down at myself, expecting to see a huge hole with burned edges—and instead found a black smudge on my overdone breastplate, and a couple of flaws in the gold filigree where the metal had partially melted.

I was alive.

My head came back together in a sudden rush, and I knew what was coming. I flung up my shield, shaping it not into a portion of a sphere, as I usually did, but into a lengthy triangle in the shape of a pup tent. I crouched beneath it and no sooner had I done so than stones from the wall above me, torn free by Arianna’s will, began to slam into the shield. I crouched there, rapidly being buried in grey stone, and tried desperately to get my impact-dizzied brain to think of a plan.