“The Keeper of the Iron Spike of Golgotha can wield all power over all Mithrans, even the Sons of Darkness,” Grégoire said. It sounded like a quote from a story or a history. He adjusted his posture, standing straight, his feet flat on the floor. He no longer looked like a teenager lounging. Weapons bristled on him, blades of every shape and variety and style. He looked what he was, the best fighter in the Americas. And my Beast didn’t like the way he was looking at us. There was a challenge in his eyes. I shifted my own body, inching my palms down over the guns.

“Men,” Katie spat. She stood too, and stared back and forth between the other vamps. “No one knew for certain that Joses Bar-Judas was here until that foul creature Reach was taken,” she said. “Our enemies De Allyon, Silandre, and Lotus began this crisis, with black magic, not her.” Katie pointed at me.

“What she said,” I said. “Had any of your enemies known Joses was a prisoner, they would have brought the war here first, hoping to steal your artifacts, combine their artifacts with the Son of Darkness, and rule the world of the Mithrans. Boom. Game over, months ago.”

“But you discovered only the pocket watches, and not the spike,” Leo said. “Without it I am not enough to rule.”

It sounded oddly like an accusation, as if I hadn’t done my job. Since Leo wanted the spike, and I hadn’t found it, I actually hadn’t done my job. Go figure. I grunted, a nonspecific sound.

“It is still missing or in the hands of another,” Katie said. “If we had the spike now, we could control the Son and maintain peace. But we do not. There will be war on the shores of this land for possession of the artifacts of power, for control of Leo’s prisoner and Joses’ gift of power, and for the right to possess and to ride les arcenciels.”

“His gift of power?” Bethany had talked about the gift she had given Leo. Had Bethany broken the crystal that set the arcenciel free and brought down Joses for Leo as some sort of gift? Bethany had wanted to ride the arcenciel, maybe because she had seen it when it got free the first time. She had tried to literally ride it in the gym. It made an awful sort of sense for a crazy priestess. I doubted the vamps would tell me if I asked, so I led the way in indirectly and asked instead, “Ride?”

Grégoire said, “To encase them in crystal from the earth and use their power. It is not a difficult process. All one needs is a length of quartz crystal, enough blood, and the proper power source, such as the Spike of the Hill of the Skull. Power is what we discuss. Who has it and how we use it.”

“Sadly,” Katie said, “it is easy to free them. The slightest crack and they may escape.”

“A dangerous slave is then set free,” Grégoire said.

“Uh- huh.” Slave? Yeah. Slave. Vamps were used to keeping slaves. “Bethany has three Onorios, some humans, and a werewolf in her control, and a desire to ride the arcenciel,” I said. All the vamps turned to me. Not one of them looked human when they did it. More like statues whose heads suddenly spun on their marble necks. Even Del raised her head, with something like horror on her face. Grégoire’s voice was full of shock when he said, “My boys are—”

My earpiece squealed and I jerked. “Incoming! Incoming!”

Something shook the entire building, like a bomb going off. The air pressure changed as a concussive wave battered through. I heard screaming in my earbud and from the front entrance. A second explosion followed.

And all hell broke loose. Again.

I had made a huge mistake. Because all of Peregrinus’ humans had been drained and left dead in the basement, I assumed that he was out of blood-servants. I had expected primarily a magical attack. I got a human one.

I was rushing from the office and down the stairs, the vamps left to get downstairs on their own. “Yellowrock on the way down,” I said into my mic.

I heard automatic arms fire as I raced. Screaming and the sounds of pain and anger. Orders being given. Derek in command mode, telling men where to move and what to do. From his words it was clear that an explosive device, maybe a rocket, had taken out the front entry again, and that more than a dozen attackers were racing up the outer front stairs. Where had Peregrinus gotten more soldiers?

I reached the stairs to the foyer. Part of the wall to my right exploded outward and on through the wall to my left. I dropped and crawled to the top of the stairs. I could smell blood and feces and the stink of fired weapons. The entry was full of fighters, both vamps and humans, the unknown humans wearing jeans, hoodies, and gang tats. I stayed low, moving like Beast on all fours, analyzing the scene below. I wasn’t getting down to Eli this way. Leo, Grégoire, and Katie leaped over me, over the stair railing, and landed on the marble floor of the entryway. Like a well-seasoned team, they started to clear the floor of opposition. Katie fell in a rain of automatic weapons fire, blood blooming across her chest. Leo and Grégoire pulled her to safety behind a wall.

The vamps at this assault point were all ours. I could tell by the smell of them. They smelled of the thing in the basement. They had fed on it. Not that it would help them. The attackers were using guns and explosive devices, not fancy, outdated flat swords. Being faster than a normal vamp sword fighter was useless here. This was war as mankind had envisioned it. Nothing elegant about it. Just efficient and deadly.

If this attack was by humans only, then the attacking vamp or vamps were elsewhere. Before I headed down the stairwell I keyed my mic and said, “Eli?”

“Go ahead.”

“No enemy combatant vamps at front entrance strike. Humans only.”

“Copy that. No encom action here.”

I started to say that didn’t make sense when he barked, “Incoming!”

There was an explosion. A big one. I felt it through my knees and palms on the floor and I jerked the earbud out of my ear to save my hearing.

“Eli,” I whispered, sticking the earpiece back in.

“Position to the basement as per plan,” he ordered me.

It was where I’d still be if I hadn’t wanted to see what Leo had to say. Curiosity killed . . . not the cat . . . killed my friends? But Eli was alive. “Okay,” I said, relief surging through me as I backtracked through HQ.

“Roger, Jane. Or copy. Not okay. Never okay.”

I smiled and said, “Okay.” I thought about how I could get to the basement now. It wasn’t going to be easy, dang it, but at least we still had electricity and lights. I retraced my steps to Leo’s office and through one of the no-longer-hidden passageways and into the room that was situated over the green room, the waiting room that guests used when they came for appointments. The room I’d last eaten oatmeal in. The room that had a hidden elevator shaft behind it. I called the elevator and the door opened immediately. The cage was just that, a brass cage, tiny and swaying, with an uneven floor. Only one or two people could ride at a time, so the invaders wouldn’t split up their forces to take it. The cage wobbled as I stepped in. I pushed the cage doors shut and the outside doors closed too. There were numbers on the buttons but they didn’t correspond to anything that made sense, so I took a guess and punched the lowest button to the right.