“I’ll try.”

We swung toward a large oak. Christopher plunged down and landed, setting me down next to Barabas and Julie. Barabas looked like he’d jumped out of some D&D book featuring thieves and assassins. He wore leather armor and carried a sharp knife. A dark rag covered the bottom part of his face. Above it, his eyes were blood-red with demonic horizontal pupils. Julie stood holding the reins of our horses. She would be riding a roan mare. We all agreed that Peanut was much too beloved to take into battle. I would be riding Hugh’s mean Friesian. No horse on this battlefield would stand up to him.

Around me a sea of vampires waited, each bloodsucker crouching, perfectly still like a statue, a stripe of bright green running down their spines.

Christopher closed his wings around him and walked off, pacing, gripping his left forearm with his right hand so hard, his fingers turned the flesh completely white. Barabas walked over to him. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught Barabas’s voice, soothing, calming . . .

A battle horn roared.

I ran up to the oak and climbed up the rope ladder Jim’s people had conveniently left in place for me and clambered to the wooden platform at the top. Next to me a vampire crouched.

“Ghastek?”

“Of course,” Ghastek’s dry voice said from the vampire mouth. “Did you expect Santa Claus?”

I gave him my hard stare and turned to the field. We were in the woods on the south side. The Keep was a little to the left of me, and my father’s advancing forces were to the right. Somewhere to my far right, Curran and his forces waited. I had kissed him this morning and didn’t want to let go.

A battle raged less than half a mile from us, across the open ground. Two mammoths made it past the trenches and battered the Keep walls while waves of my father’s troops splashed against it. Vampires swarmed up the stones and shapeshifters met them among the parapets. The fortress held.

No sign of my father.

“Erra?” I said softly.

She appeared next to me.

“I cannot tell you how disturbing this is,” Ghastek said.

“You’re telling me. You know she killed my favorite mule?”

“You killed me,” Erra said. “I think we’re even.”

My father wouldn’t commit to the field until he was reasonably certain of a victory. And that wouldn’t happen until the Keep’s front door was kicked in.

The bodies of shapeshifters fell from the wall. Argh.

“Your lion built it too well,” Erra told me.

“Yes, everything is my fault.”

“What’s going on with Steed?” Ghastek asked.

“He’s having difficulty with bloodlust.”

“It is really him?”

“Yes.”

“Life moves in mysterious ways,” Ghastek said.