Chapter 13

T he battle at the Lincoln Tunnel is fierce. Purple bolts sizzle and sear, gunfire rattles and chatters, fireballs explode, tanks concuss.

The plan worked, it seems—our forces have cut the mortals off from the tunnel and are attacking from behind, having waited until the bulk of the mortal army emerged from the tunnel and marched inward, and then swarmed from the wings.

We're still vastly outnumbered, however, and the mortals use their armored vehicles, tanks, and weapons to great effect. As I land on a rooftop overlooking the center of the battle, I don't like what I see.

I watch an immortal die, a shifter gunned down by half a dozen mortals. A vampire goes down as well, taking a tank's round to the chest; the mess is immense.

Andreas is using guerilla tactics, keeping his forces harrying the mortals and then vanishing back into the blown-out and abandoned office buildings. The tanks comprise the bulk of mortal destructive capacity, blowing buildings apart and eradicating hiding places as fast as the immortals can scurry from place to place.

What's not happening here is teamwork. I watch for a few minutes, assessing from above. What worked for us at the bridge was teamwork—the element of surprise that is me aside. The fae drove in with their shields, the shifter followed, and the vampire cleaned up around the edges.

I see Andreas on another rooftop, wielding one of the spears as a projectile weapon while directing the battle from above.

I wish again that we had a way of communicating—I don't have a walkie-talkie, and I cannot communicate with him mentally. It's an issue.

With nothing else to do, I leap across the road, using a gust of wind to boost me further. I land beside Andreas.

"You need to regroup," I tell him. "We need new tactics."

He ignores me, watching as a pair of bear shifters tear into a squad of mortals. The bears take multiple rounds each but shrug them off as they rip the mortals apart.

"Assign a pair of fae with shocksticks to each shifter. The fae provide cover for the approach and guard the flanks." I point at a vampire, surrounded by a dozen mortals who are trying to kill the vampire with knives and fists—it's not going well for the mortals. "The vampires take out the vehicles—their strength allows them to rip doors off and take care of the occupants."

Andreas eyes me. "The bridge attack went well, then?"

I nod. "I sent a dozen mortal survivors into the Enclave with my mark of fealty. Have someone collect them and give them work." I hold Andreas's eyes. "They were offered money to join the Federation and weren't told ahead of time what the mission was. I doubt most rank-and-file soldiers in the Federation are truly here for the cause—just the money. And fear—the noncoms, whatever those are—kill anyone who doesn't obey commands."

Andreas's expression darkens. "That changes things." A glance at me. "Noncoms are non-commissioned officers—they're the ones running the army."

"The fae who have been trained as enforcers are an excellent resource," I tell him. "They can get close and keep the mortals from being able to use their guns. Once we're inside their range, the edge provided by their guns and armor is gone."

Andreas nods thoughtfully. "Adjusting tactics mid-battle is difficult. We'll have to train them on that for the next one."

I give him an annoyed glare. "Fine. I'll do it myself."

"Maeve!"

I leap off the roof and land on the sidewalk below. Immediately, gunfire is directed my way, round whizzing, whining, and snapping past me.

" FAE !" I shout at the top of my voice, magically amplified. " TO ME! "

I throw up a shield as dozens of fae warriors disengage and swarm in my direction. Within a few seconds, they're forming up on either side of me—round snap overhead and slam into my shield, and then I can lower the shield because my fae warriors have their shocksticks in shield mode, edges overlapping.

The column of mortal soldiers inches forward—and then halts as Caspian and the others from the bridge arrive and form a line across the Federation's route. My line of fae extends parallel to the Federation column; the warriors huddle behind their shields as automatic weapons fire chatters and rattles and cracks.

An ominous sound echoes over the battle: the squeak of the tank's turret rotating.

" VAMPIRES !" I shout. " GET INSIDE THE TANKS! FAE! COVER THEIR APPROACH! "

Andreas lands beside me. "You're crazy!" He shouts in my ear. "I love it! Lead the vampires! I have the fae."

Caleb, have the shifters distract the soldiers. Wait for the fae to make their move. I feel him but can't see him—he's with the others from the bridge.

At once, my love, he answers.

Seconds later, I watch shifters break away from skirmishes, reacting to Caleb's Alpha Prime command. They form up in an alley-mouth with Caleb at the lead, waiting for the fae.

Twenty-some vampires have answered my call, flashing in blurs of shadows across the battlefield to hunker behind the shield wall. I look left, look right—blacked-out eyes watch me intently, waiting. Andreas watches. Caleb watches.

The mortals have halted the column—at the front, the fae shield wall holds up under withering gunfire from the mortal vanguard. The tanks are working in concert, adjusting their aim—all at me.

It's been a matter of seconds—less than thirty—since I landed on the sidewalk. It's felt like an hour.

" NOW !" I shout, hurling myself over the fae line with a blast of wind.

Andreas leads the fae charge, pushing the shield wall forward—these are armed with a spear and a shockstick, and the spears belch purple bolts with an audible crackling sizzle. The bolts are not as powerful as hastaxi orbs by quite a margin—they hit the tanks' sides and char and dent the metal but can't break through; mortals they sear through without so much as slowing. The sudden onslaught has its intended effect, distracting and slowing the gunfire from the mortals.

Vampires soar around me, blurs of shadow in the bright sun. A tank's cannon roars in the instant after I leap, the round whistling over the shield wall and blasting the brick building into spewing shards. I land on the nearest tank's turret. Two more vampires touch down with me. Mortal soldiers on the ground beside the tank whirl, draw aim, and fire. I throw up a shield, but not in time—several rounds hit the vampire nearest me, dropping her to her knees—she's unblooded, so the rounds crack and smash her stone-like skin, leaving bloodless pocks and divots. The other vampire scrambles up onto the turret, wrenches the circular door off with a scream of protesting metal, and then drops in.

Screams echo briefly and cut off abruptly, and then the tank rumbles to a halt.

I drop off the tank, grab the nearest mortal soldier, and fling him away—he bowls over several other mortals, and they all topple to the ground. A pack of coyote shifters seizes the opportunity and swarms over them, and blood flies.

The wounded vampire, one arm useless and missing an eye, lands beside me. She snarls viciously, rips the arm off one mortal, and uses it to club another. The other vampire leaps up out of the tank, scrambles down, and grabs the body of a dead mortal, hauling it to himself. He snags a pair of grenades from the mortal's equipment webbing, rips the pins free, and tosses them into the turret—seconds later there's a muffled CRUMP and a pillar of smoke boiling up from the opening.

The lead tank swivels its turret forward and draws aim on the fae shield wall. I fling myself toward it, but it's too late—the cannon booms, the tank rocks backward, and the shield wall is broken as fae bodies are scattered, blood spraying and limbs going in every direction. The mortals seize the opportunity and redouble their fire. The tiger shifter attacks, soaring over the shattered shield wall and pouncing on the mortals. Caspian and the other vampires with him blur toward the tank, and we four land at the same time. Caspian rips the door off and he and the other drop in. I ride the slowing tank, assessing the battle. Two tanks down, one still operational—but not for long. More vampires swarm over it now that the tactics have been proven.

Shifters of all kinds harry the mortal foot soldiers, dodging among the ranks and ripping and tearing and biting before leaping away, confusing the mortal ranks.

Still, as effective as the tactics are, we're still losing too many—shifters fall, wounded or killed. The fae shockstick shields can only take so much before they falter, and then the fae wielding them go down.

The third and final tank is taken out, and now the vampires go to work on the APCs, wheeled, armored tank-like vehicles bristling with weapons protruding from portholes.

The wounded vampire is down. The coyote pack has lost three. I feel Sierra take a hit—I hear the yelp.

I need to do something—this has to end. We're winning, but the cost is too high.

A surge of fury energizes me—these mortals are killing my people. For what? Why?

No.

I lash out with prana and yank the lifeforce from the dozen or so nearest mortals, a sudden flood of blood and prana swirling around me and soaking into me. The abrupt influx of energy cascades through me, and I immediately redirect it. I send a blinding lance of prana horizontally through the mortal column of men and machinery. Instead of igniting it, however, I keep pouring prana down the line, making the lance thicker and denser and more volatile.

With a snap of my fingers, I turn the prana in on itself—an implosion rather than an explosion.

Panic seizes me—that's not what I intended…at all.

All along the column, there's a sound like rushing wind, and a dense black line of nothingness appears where my prana was. It's razor-thin at first—thin but dense. Tanks, APCs, and HUMVEEs all sink down on their suspension, metal groaning. The line thickens, widens—the roaring of wind becomes a deafening freight train blast of noise, and the machinery tilts, wobbles, tips inward, denting, crushing inward.

The wind screams and dust swirls and blasts, chunks of rock and dirt and debris charging the air with deadly projectiles hurtling toward the expanding line of sucking blackness.

Fuck—what did I do?

A sense of wrongness pervades my spirit, a sourness, bitter and dark.

Slowly at first and then all at once, the sounds of the battle fade. The black line expands and expands, now the width of a tank—the vehicles are sucked in, twisting and twirling and toppling end over end like toys kicked aside by a careless giant foot.

Mortals are sucked in as well, screaming into the void.

My people are drawn toward it—what did I do? How do I stop it?

Panic shudders through me. I withdraw my prana, but there's nothing to draw in—it's been consumed by the void.

Shouts, screams. A shifter vanishes into the void.

" RETREAT !" I shout, amplifying it. " RUN !"

Immortals scatter, mortals with them, differences forgotten as the vortex of nothingness seeks to consume everyone and everything alike.

And then I hear a sound that chills me to the bone: laughter. A dry, mad cackle of deranged amusement.

It comes from everywhere and nowhere.

I whirl, see nothing.

Another bark of laughter from above, behind, all around.

The vortex expands.

The air above it shimmers, coruscates. Something immense and not quite visible crawls out of the vortex—it's only seen by the absence of light, or the refraction of light, perhaps. Words fail, but there it is. A creature. Too many legs, too many arms. Or not enough. Eyeless. Faceless. It slithers out of the vortex and oozes across the concrete of the road, glomming over corpses. Where it goes, the corpses vanish, and the thing gains reality—definition. Form.

A corpse becomes a spider-like leg—two, three, four…eight legs, but fashioned out of gore-dripping corpses, arms flopping, eyes sightless and staring. The thing scuttles with deceptive speed over the ruined hulk of a burned-out taxi—the scorched and blackened metal becomes the spider's torso. Bones crack and crunch, each step leaving a nauseating trail of gore. Dropped weapons become snapping pincers, discarded helmets dropped from dead mortal skulls become eyes, glittering and alien.

Before I can register what's happening, another shimmer catches my eye—a second thing emerging from the vortex. From the void, The Dreaming.

A dozen feet from the howling, sucking void is an abandoned city bus, windows shattered, two tires blown out, folding door sagging open. The thing from the void congeals onto the bus, and for a moment, nothing happens. And then one wheel wiggles, creaks, and extends, the axle becoming a long, thin, stretching leg. Another, and then all four, becoming legs. The tires dig into the ground and support the creature's weight as it stands up on all four legs. The windows along the sides are dark, showing only shadows writhing inside; twin red points of light glow behind the windshield—demonic, alien eyes.

The bus-thing scuttles forward, metal protesting, clicking, screeching, creating a spine-shuddering noise of insectile movement.

A squad of mortal soldiers huddles against the wall, kicking and scrabbling as the vortex sucks them toward it; the bus-thing pauses near them, hunkers down, pauses…and then pounces forward.

There's an audible crunch, and blood pools beneath the bus-thing, running toward the curb. It scuttles forward, leaving only a smear of blood and shards of bone.

The corpse-spider, leaking and trailing gore, clambers with awkward, horrifying speed up the sheer, slick glass side of an office building.

Another shimmer from the vortex—this one shudders up the side of a brick apartment block and in through a window. Seconds later, the window and a ten-foot-wide chunk of brick surrounding it explodes outward in a shower of glass and masonry, and a ten-foot-tall bipedal monster leaps through the opening. Fat and bulbous with a thick greenish-gray reptilian hide, the creature has two small beady stupid eyes, saggy flesh jiggling and sagging around massive shuddering muscles. The sight of it tickles something in my memory:

It's the cave troll from that iconic scene in The Fellowship of the Ring—"They have a cave troll!"

Not just like it—it is it.

Real life. Huge, violent, and hungry. It picks up a wrecked taxi in one huge hand and hurls it at me with petulant rage. Shocked into motion, I throw myself to the ground, rolling out of the way as the hurtling taxi smashes through the air where I was.

Gunfire erupts, and purple bolts fly—the troll bellows defiantly and stomps toward the cluster of mortals firing at it. It picks one poor mortal soldier up by the legs and uses him as a club to bludgeon the others, sending them flying like bowling pins.

My attention is stolen, then: a figure emerging from the vortex. This one is solid and real—and recognizable.

Zirae.

Naked but for a scrap of cloth covering his groin, his flesh is sagging and wrinkled and papery, his long white hair tangled and loose and fluttering behind him like a pennant. His eyes glow with a weird, alien, disturbing greenish-white light.

He cackles, perched on the edge of the vortex like a gargoyle, toes hooked, fingers clutching. He has a blade clenched in his teeth, a foot long, S-curved with a wicked point, the hilt made of human skin wrapped in copper wire—the pommel features an eyeball, the iris red as blood, alive and roving and seeking.

"I found you!" he screeches. "Like my new pets?" He grips the knife in his fist as he spits at me. " COME ! Come, Once-Mortal child." He gestures with the knife, a come-hither circle of the tip.

I make my feet. The vortex howls and sucks, but the range of the vortex seems to be limited to six or eight feet from the center. The tanks, APCs, and HUMVEEs have been sucked in, along with several wrecked cars and trucks, and several mortals, as well as a few immortals.

I scan the scene—my army has vanished, thankfully, except for Andreas, Caleb, and Caspian, who watch from the intersection where the bridge crew made their stand.

Zirae cackles. "The longer you wait, the more of my pets come through."

As he speaks, the air around the vortex shimmers again, and another of the things emerges—this one is long and serpentine, slithering in six-foot-thick coils of shimmering air like heat waves. Its huge, wedge-shaped head smashes down through the road itself—through a manhole cover, I realize. The concrete around the manhole splinters and cracks as the huge mass of the thing shatters it apart. Water splashes and something small and brown and chittering in fear scrambles up out of the hole—a giant sewer rat the size of a small dog.

Fifty feet away, another manhole cover explodes upward as the road around it crumbles away, and the void-serpent reappears, now coated in a skin of sewage and trash and wriggling rodents. It streams out of the sewer, its body six feet thick, its head the size of a car. Glowing green eyes scan and roam, hungry and alien. Its jaws yawn wide, revealing fangs the size of sabers which drip with venom the same glowing green of its eyes.

"Come to me, child!" Zirae screeches, cackling. "My pets are hungry, and this world is ripe with prey."

I look at Caspian. Caleb.

DON'T! Caspian shouts into my mind. We can do this together!

Caleb stares at me; he knows.

Love you, I say to both of them. Finish the Federation. Create the Enclave.

Maeve No! Caspian lurches forward, but Caleb grabs him and holds him back, presses his mouth to Caspian's ear, and murmurs something.

Caspian reaches for me, eyes haunted.

Caleb's mind brushes mine with soft, delicate affection. Do what you must, my love.

I beat him once, I tell Caspian. I'll beat him again. It's okay.

I touch his mind, press my love into him.

Zirae wiggles his fingers at my mates in a demented wave, cackling madly. "Ta-ta!"

He leans backward and lets himself fall back into the void, vanishing. I summon a blade of prana, solidify it in my hand until it's real—a transparent crystalline short sword with a straight, double-edged blade, circular guard, and heavy, pointed pommel. I snag a dropped shockstick and switch it to a shield.

Zirae's mad cackle echoes, echoes. And I realize that I didn't cause the vortex at all—Zirae did, somehow. A trap?

He must have been watching the whole time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

I hop up—the edge of the vortex is solid, somehow, a mushy, shifting surface like sand. Stare down into the abyss—it's a gray world of dark, shifting shadows. Not The Dreaming, but like it, or a part of it I've never seen.

Things move in it—vast, leviathan shapes lurking and flowing, shuddering and soaring, circling near this vortex. They see our world, and they want it. I feel their hunger—not for flesh but for mana. Ideas. Dreams. Nightmares. Stories. Daydreams.

One of them billows toward me, fluttering and twisting like a bedsheet ripped from a clothesline by a tornado. I duck, and it sears past me—I feel it, a cold, slippery, greasy touch of icy malice and alien hunger.

Malice is the wrong word; there is no intent, no sentience. Just flat, emotionless, algorithmic purpose: devour.

A mortal soldier, seeing the thing, or perhaps merely sensing it, runs. The thing swarms over him, wrapping itself around him. The mortal slows to a walk, then a zombie-like shuffle, and then drops to his knees. His head droops, his chin touching his chest. All fours. His back arches upward. The knobs of his spine erupt through his back and lengthen into spikes. His bones crackle and snap, twisted into abnormal shapes—curved, sectioned, crablike. His jaw splits vertically down the lower mandible, and a long, spiny tongue slithers out, impossibly long and freakishly prehensile. It wraps around the ankle of a mortal soldier ten feet away, snapping out faster than a lizard's strike. Drags the mortal, kicking and screaming, into its maw. Here, physics doesn't seem to apply. Bones crunch and gore splatters as the deformed creature devours the mortal, slurping up every last bit of gristle and blood. Its skin, now mottled in a bizarre distortion of camouflage, ripples, and the thing grows, limbs lengthening, spine-spikes curving longer and sharper, its tongue dragging on the ground, twisting and writhing with a life of its own like an unattended firehose.

Zirae cackles, the laughter echoing. "Come, come, come." More daft, shrill laughter. "The portal won't close until you come through."

I look back at my mates. Caleb meets my eyes, grins, and then shifts, his wolf loping toward the long-tongued thing.

He pounces on it, claws shredding it back, teeth closing on its neck.

Caspian touches my mind with his once more, and then he blurs away, landing on the serpent, fingers clawed and ripping.

Andreas salutes me with his spear and then charges the cave troll.

That's the last thing I see: Andreas charging, spear raised, teeth bared in a rictus, preparing to do battle with a ten-foot-tall cave troll out of a fictional story.

I have no choice—I have to follow Zirae.

I leap into the void, hearing Zirae's mad cackling below me. I glance up as I fall into nothingness—the vortex is narrowing, narrowing, my view of the sky and the tops of buildings now a thin slice of blue, and then a razor-thin line of light, and then nothing at all.

I'm falling, and all around me is the echoing, reverberating madness of Zirae's manic laughter.