They’d come here to kill me. They died instead. Corpses piled up at my feet. My aunt was laughing. And then they broke and ran.

I looked up. The wall of black flames was thinning. I could almost see through it.

“Retreat!” I screamed. “Retreat now!”

The green-striped vampires fled from the field toward the Keep. Once the wall went down, my father would be able to reach them. The bloodsuckers would die by the dozens and so would the navigators piloting them.

I turned. The black smoke had dissipated. The entire front of my father’s army was gone. Mammoths lay like burial mounds of fur. Bodies, vampire and human, sprawled on the grass.

Most of the remaining army gathered around my father, forming a mass of bodies. I saw Curran roaring, enormous, demonic, tearing into monsters left and right. The mercs followed in his wake.

My father froze in his chariot, his face bloodless. One moment he had a vanguard and now it was all gone. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking to the left. I turned my head and saw the sea of green-and-blue banners the bloodsuckers had left thrust into the dirt as they retreated.

“Glory to In-Shinar!”

The hair on the back of my neck rose.

I spun around.

Julie sat on her horse, holding my banner. Her voice rolled, charged with power. “Glory to In-Shinar!”

The air screamed as the first blast from Andrea’s sorcerous ballistae tore through it. The green missiles shrieked over my head and pounded the front of my father’s remaining force. Bodies flew, burning with magic fire. Andrea’s ace in the hole.

My father raised his hands. A sphere of light appeared in front of him, shielding the troops. The missiles crashed into it, their magic splashing over the light and falling down, powerless.

My father brought his hands together. The corpse of the mammoth about two hundred yards to the left of me shuddered. Magic built within it, spilling out as thin green smoke. I reached for the magic around me and froze it, but the green smoke thickened. Whatever he was doing couldn’t be blocked by the land’s defenses. I started toward it, climbing over bodies.

The carcass burst. Three creatures emerged, clad in tattered rags. A foul magic wrapped around them. I had felt many fucked-up things over the years, but this . . . this felt like death. Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn and run the other way.

“Plaguewalkers,” my aunt snarled in my ear.

“Shapeshifters are resistant to disease.”

“Not this disease.”

I ran, scrambling over the bodies.

The plaguewalkers started toward the Keep.

A ballista missile smashed into the middle of the three and exploded. They kept walking. Shit. Magic didn’t do anything. They had to be physically cut down.