Chapter 10

G one is the mortal mask; his features are full fae—sharp high cheekbones, perfect bone structure, symmetrical features, and wide almond eyes glowing white without iris or pupil. His hair is long and wild and unkempt and thick black, shaggy around his jaw and collar, windblown and unwashed. A sparse black beard shadows his jaw, more than stubble and less than a full beard—apparently fae can grow beards, which in my mind seems to go against popular media tropes, not to mention my own observations. He wears faded and worn blue jeans, heavy black combat boots laced tight, and a black T-shirt fitted tight around his lean, hard, muscular frame. The letters A-O-M-Q adorn the front of the shirt in large, bright white letters.

"Andreas?" My voice quavers. "It's you!"

He swaggers toward me, his gait powerful and confident, his entire aura blazing with authority. He slings his arms around me, lifts me in the air, and swings me in circles, laughing. "Maeve! Gods and blood, child, I've missed you."

I squeeze his neck and laugh. "Andreas, god it's good to see you. I thought you were dead or something! You just vanished!"

"I had to. The Tribunal knew damn well that I was a threat—I know a lot of people in the fae underground." He sets me back with his hands on my waist and then frames my face. "This is what I could do for you, Maeve. I couldn't help you on your journey. I couldn't show you who you are. I couldn't defeat the Tribunal or Zirae. What I could do is build an army for you."

"You knew I'd need an army?"

He nods. "I've been a soldier more than anything else in my life. Even being a cop, I look at as being a soldier. If there's one thing I know, it's war. And I saw this war coming."

"I don't want it to be a war, Andreas." I step back and scrape my hair back.

He shrugs. "It is, whether you want it or not. Is it another Mortals' War? Not yet. That's avoidable, maybe. But it's not going to just go away. Things aren't going to just fix themselves. And like it or not, immortals look to you for leadership. You've only reinforced that since showing Stateside and doing pressers and gathering all of them." He points at the caravan behind me. "And mortals are divided on you—some admire you and look at you for leadership as much as the immortals do, but others fear and hate you."

I sniff a laugh. "I've noticed."

Andreas sighs, looking past me—I feel the crowd gathering. "We aren't safe here. The real battle is for Manhattan, but Nathaniel Bridgestone and his Mortal Federation control most of the boroughs surrounding Manhattan. We've secured this corridor as an approach to the territory we control, which is the southern half of the island."

"Is it open fighting?"

He nods. "Bitter, brutal, door-to-door, and street-by-street. They have superior numbers and technology. We have magic that almost counteracts their numerical and technological superiority. Almost." He juts his chin past me at the caravan and the crowd, watching us. "They will give us an edge that we badly need to drive the Mortal Federation off of Manhattan."

"And then?" I ask. "After we drive them out of Manhattan…what then? Take the fight into the Bronx?"

He shrugs. "That's tomorrow's worry. Today, we drive them out and establish Manhattan as a foothold. Secure the bridges and control ingress and egress. My inner circle and I have been discussing it, and we feel that once we control Manhattan, we turn it into what we've been calling the Immortal Enclave."

I sigh. "A foothold, huh?" I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Sounds like the first step in a war to me."

"You can't make reality go away by closing your eyes to it, Maeve." His voice is gentle but stern. "The Mortal Federation is real. They're well-armed, well-funded, and well-equipped. They're a real army with capable, ruthless leadership and a stated goal of running immortals out of New York entirely. If we let them run us out of New York, what's next? They move on to Jersey City? Atlantic City? Boston? Philly? They expand and turn the Mortal Federation into cells, into anti-immortal army franchises nationwide. If we let them win, here, it's over. Immortals will be persecuted. We'll have entered the mortal public awareness for the first time in almost two hundred and fifty years, and we'll be forced onto registries and into camps or reservations. The whole cause? Immortals being an accepted part of human society? It's won or lost here , Maeve."

At that moment, there's a piercing screech high overhead—I look up to see a red-tailed hawk stooping at full speed toward me. Emily. She hurtles toward me like a rocket, wings folded, talons trailing. She scoops her wings forward at the last second, abruptly arresting her momentum; ten feet above the ground, amber light flares, obscuring her form.

Her nude human female body emerges from the fading amber glow to land lithe and light in front of me, panting. Blood trickles down her left arm from a long, angry crease on the outside of her bicep.

"They're coming. Now. A fucking lot of them," she gasps. "They almost got me, the bastards. But we have to go, now ."

Andreas stares at her. "Who are you?"

"She's Emily, a hawk shifter who volunteered to do some aerial recon."

Andreas's eyes light up. "I've been hoping for a shifter who can fly. So far, we've only got quadrupeds." He snaps his fingers, and magic amplifies the sound, so it echoes like a gunshot. " IMMORTALS! MOVE OUT !"

Caleb eyes me, shoving his legs into his jeans. Gonna let him command your people?

Yes, I am. I know nothing of war, Caleb, and it's all he knows. I trust him.

He nods his head, a bow of acquiescence. Very well.

Andreas doesn't miss this silent interaction. "What?"

"My mate doesn't like you giving orders to my people," I tell him; before he can open his mouth to answer, I continue. "I was telling him that I know absolutely nothing about conducting a war, and it's all you've ever known, and I trust you."

Callahan, Channing, Colin, Saige, and Sierra arrange themselves in a semi-circle behind me.

"What are your orders, my queen?" Caleb says, dropping to a knee in front of me.

Andreas frowns in Caleb's direction and then looks at me thoughtfully. He drops to his knee. "Forgive me if I overstepped…my queen."

I shake my head. "You're the commander of the Army of the Once-Mortal Queen, Andreas. I may not want war, but as you've correctly pointed out, war is here. Best to do everything we can to end it swiftly." I look at Emily. "How many, which direction, and how are they set up?"

She dresses as she answers. "Several hundred, but I wasn't counting." She points to our left and right. "They're going to try to cut us off from the bridge. I don't know shit about tactics or whatever because, like, I'm just a kid, but it looks like a—what do you call it? A pincer sort of thing, where they're coming from two directions at once. They're mostly on foot, but they have a few jeeps with guns on the back, I saw one tank and, like, three things that looked like tanks but with wheels and no cannon thingies."

"APCs," Andreas mutters. "Armored personnel carriers." He looks at me. "With your permission, we need to move, as our new scout suggested."

I turn to face the caravan and the scattered, growing crowd. "We are now officially part of the Army of the Once-Mortal Queen." I allow a pause. "We march on Manhattan, where we will fight against the forces of the Mortal Federation, who seek to drive all immortals out of New York—if we let them drive us and our brothers and sisters out of Manhattan, we've lost before we've begun." I scan the faces. "You've all joined me voluntarily. You've followed me here. Now, I ask you to follow me into war. I will never command or compel. But, if you do choose to continue to follow me, you do so as soldiers in my army. As such, you have a commanding general: this man." I point at him. "Andreas Bouras, a fae warrior and a father figure to me. If you follow me, you follow him. Andreas?"

He nods at me and then addresses the…troops, I suppose they are, now. "I've fought wars all my life. I've been on the winning side and the losing side. I've fought mortals and immortals. What we face is hatred and bigotry, plain and simple. The Mortal Federation, led by a man named Nathaniel Bridgestone, wants all immortals out of New York and, preferably, dead. Barring that, he wants us all counted, registered, and monitored as if we're criminals. He wants all immortal reproduction rights stripped—all human rights, all constitutional rights, for that matter. He does not see us as human. Those with him may not all believe as he does, but he doesn't hide his beliefs—quite the opposite, rather. He proclaims them, announces them, advertises them, and the men and women who follow him voluntarily take orders from him. The Mortal Federation is not a government army, it's a collection of volunteers. So in the coming fight, you fight for your right to exist. Follow me—follow your queen—and we will show them the errors of their ways. What that means is we have to be better. We have to be smarter. We can't commit atrocities against them. We can't give in to hatred, as they have." His eyes glaze over, and his attention goes unfocused. "They've passed through my first layer of wards. To Manhattan—double time. Stop for nothing. Choose your targets if and when fighting breaks out. No collateral damage. Now, we move. My forces form a rearguard. Move out!"

Andreas' eyes flare white and gold as he lifts his hands palms facing forward—shadows stream from his palms in fist-thick ropes. Some fifty feet from his hands, the ropes begin to fray into hundreds and then thousands and then millions of thin strands that soar skyward, left, right—-every conceivable direction, streaming and seeking and boiling and roaming with semi-sentient eagerness, crisscrossing, joining and merging and splitting again. Each time the strands and streams merge and split, they multiply and expand, creating larger pockets and pools of seething dark. Soon, the whole caravan is swallowed by the shadows, and then the buildings around us, and then the sky.

Engines rumble and cough and strain. Caleb and Caspian guide me to our van, where we are joined by the pack and Nico. We roll forward at the head of the caravan as Andreas's small squad of soldiers jog down the line—I barely noticed them initially, shocked by the sudden reappearance of Andreas. They wear something approaching a uniform: jeans, combat boots, T-shirts, bulletproof vests, and black ballcaps with the letters AOMQ across the front. They carry weapons, too—assault rifles for a few, handguns for most, and a few carry what look like regular spears—six-foot-long wooden poles with diamond-shaped spearheads of black metal—the metal, however, is glamoured, glowing dull purple in the shadows. They must be something like hastaxi, I decide. A few others carry shockstick pairs. They're funded, I realize. The hats, the armor, the weapons…the AOMQ is not just a rag-tag bunch of immortals calling themselves an army. They're a real army with weapons and equipment and a command hierarchy.

It makes me feel a bit better about our chances.

I feel something tugging on my awareness—the shield dome Philemon and I created. I'd anchored it to the ground, and now we're leaving its protection. Hurriedly, I yank the anchor free from the ground and re-attach it to the hood of the van, hoping Philemon remembers to do the same.

Mere minutes after I re-anchored the shield, I hear the cracking rattle of automatic weapons fire and feel the shield work to absorb the impacts. I look out the window, but we're obscured by shadows. The mortals must be taking potshots at the moving pool of darkness, hoping to hit something.

So far, the shield is holding. I reach for the glamour and attach a thin thread of prana to it, feeding it to keep it strong.

More gunfire, close now. On our right. The shield shakes and I hear rounds clatter to the ground as they're stopped by the shield.

A thin beam of purple lances past my window from behind us, lighting up the shadows in a blinding blur.

A moment later, I hear a scream. The rattle of automatics cuts off momentarily and then renews with redoubled intensity. I feel the shield shaking and shuddering and pour prana into it— I focus my will and intent, thickening the dome, reinforcing it. I feel Philemon doing the same.

Another purple laser beam streaks past me on the left, and I hear metal on concrete and shouts. Overlapping gun chatter rattles and echoes off of buildings, oddly muffled by the shadows.

Ahead, I see the bridge arching over the East River. Immortal sentries stand guard in clusters of six on either side—a heavy steel I-beam lays across the road. As we approach, four immortals—two shifters and two unblooded vampires—pull on a thick guide rope attached to a series of pulleys; the beam rotates skyward just enough to let us through. They tie the guide rope off to the railing of the bridge but hold it, ready to drop the beam as soon as the last immortal is through. The immortal guards drop to their knees and fire assault rifles. Return fire zings over their heads. One of the immortal bridge guards jerks and topples to the ground and then crawls toward the bridge. One of the shifters on the beam detail breaks away, grabs the fallen immortal, and hauls him to safety.

I turn to peer out the window—shadows subsume the bridge and the guards, obscure my sight of the water below and the sky above, and the sound of weapons fire fades behind us.

A few minutes later, the shadows begin to clear, and I see Andreas about a hundred yards ahead of the van, standing in the back of a pickup truck, braced inside what looks to be a custom-rigged cage, hands outstretched, wielding the shadows. As I watch, the shadows stream into his hands, boiling black ribbons absorbed by his palms. I shove open my door and stand on the edge, peering back—our whole caravan made it unscathed. I can just make out the far end of the bridge—I'm just in time to see two of the guards hurriedly erecting a ward, plugging the bridge and cutting off access to the island.

And now I understand what the coming battle will be.

We'll fight for the bridges.

Andreas, once the ward is in place, slumps, exhausted, sweating, panting, and pale from the effort of holding the swarm of shadows that got us here.

But only for a moment. I watch him rally, forcing himself straight and tall once more. He wipes sweat from his brow, inhales deeply, holds it, shakes his hands, rolls his shoulders, and then exhales.

And then we're on the move once more. This time without shadows. I relax my grip on the dome, tying off my prana feed to it.

Twenty minutes later, Andreas is directing our caravan into an underground parking garage, above which is a squat office building of glass and metal—much of the glass windows are shattered and blasted out, but I also sense glamours hiding and disguising various elements. I squeeze my eyes shut, send a thin coating of prana over my eyeballs, and then open them. The prana acts like a filter, so I can see the glamours—screens of magic hiding the actual facade of the building, making it look blasted out and broken. It's perfectly intact, except where certain windows have been removed intentionally, replaced with blocks of concrete—sniper nests with firing lanes down the approaches from every direction.

Our van trundles underground into darkness, the sound of the engine dopplering off the walls and ramps, echoed by the vehicles behind. Down, down, down we go, in wide concentric circles. We reach the bottom and are directed to a parking spot near Andreas's truck. He hops out, swiping his hand through his sweaty, messy black hair.

"You'll have to teach me that trick with the shadows," I tell him, exiting the van.

He grins. "Neat, huh? Learned it from a sepoy sergeant in India, back in, oh shit, when was it? 1883? Somewhere around there. It's not hard." He strides purposefully toward the door. "Come on. You need to meet my command group. We have to plan our next move now that you're here. They're pushing hard from the west and encroaching south. We've taken two bridges in the last month and lost one."

"Andreas?"

He halts, holding the door. "Yeah?"

"I need to meet with Bridgestone."

Andreas frowns. "To what end? I've spoken to the man on the phone, and he's not gonna budge. There's no diplomacy, no bargaining. No deals. We push them off the island, or we surrender."

I shrug. "I'm sure you're right. Nonetheless, I shall meet with him. Face to face. Neutral territory."

Andreas barks a laugh. "There is no such thing. Mortal-controlled territory is everywhere that's not the southern half of Manhattan. The only truly safe place for immortals is right here, in this building."

"A contested bridge. One that is not controlled by either side. As soon as possible."

He eyes me, curious, calculated—this is not Andreas the cop, not Andreas the father figure—he's Andreas the soldier, purely and entirely.

He bows at the waist. "Very well, and as you wish." He pulls a walkie-talkie from his back pocket. "I'll set it up. Meantime, let me show you and your mates your quarters. I've been expecting you, so I've got a place ready for you."

I rest my hand on his shoulder. "Thank you, Andreas. I can't tell you how good it is to see you."

He pinches a lock of my hair. "You too, honey. We've got some catching up to do when we get a second." He brushes a soft, quick, fatherly kiss to my cheek and then keys his radio. "Zeke—get me a line to Bridgestone."

I follow him up a stairwell, my mates with me, our pack tailing behind us.

We've made it to Manhattan, and yet it feels like the real work has just begun.