His sternum cracked audibly, and he flew backward as if rammed by a truck. He hit the stone wall behind him hard enough to shake dust from the roof overhead, and crumpled like a broken toy. Which was exactly the kind of power the Winter Knight was supposed to have, and as I watched the poor idiot drop, I felt nothing but satisfaction.
The square temple had four doorways, one on each side, and in the one to my immediate right a vampire torn free of its flesh mask appeared, a jaguar skin still draped over its shoulders. It clutched an obsidian knife in its hand—the Red King’s dagger. It was the vamp he’d dispatched to kill Maggie.
“Fog of war, huh?” I asked him, and felt myself smiling. “Buddy, did you ever walk through the wrong door at the wrong time.”
Its eyes flicked to the floor to my left for an instant, and I looked, too. Maggie crouched there, directly between the altar and the door on my left, chained and shivering, huddling low to the ground as if hoping to be overlooked.
“Go on,” I said, looking back at the vampire. I bounced the sword in my hand lightly. White mist poured off the blade. So did a few snow-flakes. “Go for it, tough guy. Take one step toward that girl and see what happens.”
The door opposite me suddenly darkened.
The Red King and no fewer than four of his Lords stood there, gold masks shining, throwing back weird reflections from the dazzling array of flickering lights and fires in the darkness outside.
His face twisted with rage, and his will and the wills of the Lords behind him fell upon me like blows from individual sledgehammers. I staggered, planted my mentor’s staff firmly on the stone floor, and barely kept myself from being driven to the ground.
“Now,” the Red King said, his voice strangled with fury. “Put that little bitch on the altar.”
One of the Lords stepped forward and bent down to seize the child by her hair. Maggie screamed.
“No!” I shouted.
The Red King went to the altar and kicked the corpse of the dead woman from it. “Mortal,” he spat. “Still so certain that his will matters. But you are nothing. A wisp. A shadow. Here and then gone. Forgotten. It is fated. It is the way of the universe.” He jerked the ritual knife from the hands of the warrior and glared at me, his true nature writhing and twisting beneath his skin. The Lord dragged the shackled, screaming child to the altar, and the Red King’s black eyes gleamed.
“This is your only role, mortal,” he said, “your only grace, the only thing you are truly meant to do.” He stared at Maggie and bared his teeth, all long fangs, slaver running out of his mouth and down over his chin. “Die.”
Chapter 48
The Red King raised the knife over my daughter, and she let out a quavering little scream, a helpless, hopeless wail of terror and despair—and as hard as I fought with the new strength given me by Queen Mab, with the protection granted by my godmother’s armor, I could not do a damned thing about it.
I didn’t have to.
White light erupted over the altar from no visible source, and the Red King let out a scream. The shackles of his will vanished, even as his right hand, the one holding the stone knife, leapt off of his arm and went spinning through the air. It fell to the stone floor, still clutched hard around the leather-wrapped hilt of the knife, and the obsidian blade shattered like a dropped dish.
I let out a shout as I felt the Red King’s will slip off of me. The others still held me in place, but I suddenly knew that I could move, knew that I could fight. As the Red King reeled back screaming, I lifted a hand, snarled, “Fuego!” and sent a wash of fire to my right, engulfing the jaguar warrior who still stood a couple of feet inside the doorway. He tried to flee, and only wound up screaming and falling down the deadly steep steps of the pyramid while the soulfire lacing my spell found his flesh and set it aflame.
I whirled back to the Lords facing me from the far side of the altar. I couldn’t have risked throwing destructive energy at them with my daughter lying on the altar between us, and I’d had no choice but to take out the immediate threat of the warrior so that I could focus on the Lords and the Red King—otherwise it would have been relatively simple for him to come over and cut my throat while I was engaged by the vampire elite.
But two could play at that game—and my physical backup was a hell of a lot better than theirs.
I drew in my own will and lifted my borrowed staff—and as I did four more beings in golden masks entered the temple.
Where did all these yo-yos come from?
“Hold the wizard!” snarled the Red King, and the pressure of hostile minds upon me abruptly doubled. My left arm shook and the staff I held in it slowly sank down. My right arm just ran out of gas, as if the muscles in it had become totally exhausted, and the tip of the sword clinked as it hit the stone floor.
The Red King rose, and stared for a moment at the altar and at the column of shimmering light over it. As he did, his freaking hand began to writhe like a spider—and a second later, it flipped itself over and began to crawl back over toward him. The king just stood there, staring at the light. I tried to fight my way out of the mass of dark will directed against me. The light could only be Susan, veiled behind the Leanansidhe’s handiwork and wielding Amoracchius. I mean, how many invisible sources of holy light interested in protecting my daughter could there be running around Chichén Itzá? She hadn’t attacked yet, instead standing over Maggie—I wanted to scream at her to take him, that it was her only chance. If she didn’t, the Red King and his Lords could take her out almost as swiftly and easily as I had the jaguar warrior.
But he didn’t—and in a flash of insight, I understood why he didn’t.
He didn’t know what the light was.
He knew only that it had hurt him when he had tried to murder the child. From his perspective, it could have been almost anything—an archangel standing guard, or a spirit of light as terrible as the Ick had been foul. I thought back to the voice coming from Murphy’s mouth, pronouncing judgment upon the Red Court, and suddenly understood what was making the Red King hesitate, what he was really thinking: that the entity over the altar might be something he did not think actually existed—like maybe the real Kukulcan.
And he was afraid.
Susan couldn’t do anything. If she acted, if she revealed what she was, the enemy’s uncertainty would vanish and the conflict would immediately ensue again. Outnumbered so heavily, she wouldn’t have a chance.
But she knew what she had, in uncertainty and fear, and she neither moved nor made a sound. It was a weapon as potent as the wills of the demigods themselves—it had, after all, paralyzed the Red King. But it was a fragile weapon, a sword made of glass, and I felt my eyes drawn to the broken pieces of obsidian on the floor.
I couldn’t move—and time was not our ally. With every moment that passed, the more numerous enemy would become more organized, recover more from the shock of the sudden invasion of a small army smack in the middle of their holiday celebration. I needed an opportunity, a moment, if I was going to get Maggie out of this mess. And I needed it soon.
I strained against the wills of the Lords of Outer Night, unable to move—and keeping their attention locked upon me. One by one, my gaze traveled over each of the golden masks. I focused on the last one for a time, then began again with the first, tried to test each individual will, to find out which would be the weakest point of attack when my moment came.
Just then, Martin ghosted into the temple through the fourth door, making absolutely no sound, and it looked to me like the moment was freaking nigh. All of the Lords present were focused on me. The Red King stood intently distracted by Susan’s light show, while his severed hand crawled its way up his leg and hopped over to his wounded arm, where rubbery tendrils of black ooze immediately extruded from whole and wounded flesh alike, and began intertwining.