I leaped up the steps, taking them two at a time. Just as I reached the top, Drake saw me coming. A thread of heat woke in my heart as he spun backlash into me with a fevered smile. Vai was blinded by the force of all that magic, and my sire was too far away to help me. It would take me only a few heartbeats to burn.

But I only needed one, for my sire had given me all the opening I needed.

I leaned into the thrust. Cold steel slid up under Drake’s rib cage and pierced the beating fury of his heart. I ran him through up to the hilt.

His brow wrinkled as if he were puzzled by how close I stood.

I shoved, just one step more, to make sure I really had him. He rocked back. Caught on my blade, he could not pull away. His eyes flared and sparked in sheer stymied fury. He tried to speak, but although his mouth opened, no sound came out, only a trickle of blood.

There flashed in an instant through my mind a hundred triumphant retorts and gloating taunts, but in the end I realized I simply did not care enough to speak. With a grunt of pain, for my hand hurt from clenching so hard, I jerked the sword out of his body and turned the blade to cut his throat. Blood poured down his chest, ruining the dash jacket he had stolen from Vai. I stepped out of the way as he toppled face-first onto the stone stairs.

With a sound like a monstrous beast inhaling, the flames vanished as all the fires went out.

Drake was dead.

Dead.

I had to secure our precarious situation. The cold mages sprawled limp on the steps, but I had not the leisure to worry about them. The fire mages were frozen. The soldiers stared in horror at my sire. While it was true that a great deal of magic was billowing off him, to my eyes he looked like a perfectly ordinary man. And while his clothes certainly were severe for being sewn out of unrelenting black, they were not otherwise exceptional or astonishing. But the soldiers dropped their rifles and fell on their faces, begging for mercy.

A moment later several young fire mages and a few more soldiers came running around the side of the building, chased by a saber-toothed cat. They, too, surrendered in abject fear, but the instant the cat saw the Master of the Wild Hunt, he turned tail and ran.

I knelt beside Vai and bent to rest my cheek lightly against his lips. The whistling of his labored breathing calmed me. He was alive. Yet that was not his breath whistling. A teakettle hiss shivered the air. Pinpricks of ice jabbed my skin. Crystals grew out across the scorched and blackened front of the building. Ice spread in curves and scallops, cones and six-sided lacework.