“Seriously?” I interrupted. “You want to destroy New York City because it’s too loud? Why can’t you just move to Westchester like everyone else?”
Reve Azrael glared at me. “Because then I would not see its streets fill with blood, nor its buildings become tombs.”
I shouldn’t have bothered. You can’t reason with crazy.
She turned back to Isaac. “Feel free to die, mage. I do not need you alive. I am very good at finding things. After all, I found this place.”
Isaac looked up at her. “How?” he gasped. “The ward … should have … stopped you…”
Reve Azrael smirked. “We had help.”
“What do you mean?” Bethany demanded. “Who helped you?”
Melanthius stepped forward. “When soldiers scour the battlefields for their dead, they do not waste valuable time searching blindly through the tall grass. Instead, they let themselves be guided by the sound of flies.”
Beside me, Philip scoffed. “That Halloween mask must be cutting off your air supply. You’re not talking sense.”
“He means something led them right to us,” Bethany said. “Here, and at the safe house.”
I thought back to the safe house. The protective ward Morbius had cast around it had stood unbroken for more than thirty years, until last night. Now Citadel’s ward had been breached just as easily. Both locations, I realized, had one thing in common when their wards had been compromised. My stomach dropped. I should have realized from the start. Maybe I would have if it weren’t so awful.
“Something didn’t lead them here, Bethany. Someone did,” I said. “When the shadowborn attacked the safe house, I thought we’d been betrayed by someone on the inside. Ingrid thought so, too. But you were right, it wasn’t Isaac or any of the others. It’s just like you said, there’s only one person it could have been. Me.”
The color drained from Bethany’s face. “What are you saying?”
I turned to Reve Azrael. “I’m right, aren’t I? You said you know me. I’m guessing that means somehow you know how to find me, too. You found the safe house because I was there, the same way you found this place. You used me like a homing beacon. So what is it, do I just light up like a flare to you?”
“Come to me,” Reve Azrael said, and the revenants dragged me forward. They shoved me onto my knees in front of her, letting go of me in the process. I looked up at her. She gazed back at me, the telltale red glow of her magic filling Bennett’s dead eyes. She smiled a terrible smile. “Tell me, little fly, how does it feel to know all your buzzing has brought nothing but pain and suffering to those around you?”
The revenants had made a big mistake letting me go. I sprang to my feet and wrapped my hands around her neck. She didn’t try to stop me as my hands squeezed the cold, dry flesh. Instead, she laughed in my face. Coming from the mouth of Bennett’s corpse, it was a chilling sound.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “How do you know me?”
With a single swipe of her arm, she knocked my hands from her throat. Her strength was incredible. “Perhaps we can strike a deal, little fly. The answers to your questions in return for what I want.”
“Been there, done that, it didn’t work out,” I said. “I’m done playing the patsy.”
Her triumphant grin melted away. “So be it.”
From where he knelt on the carpet, Isaac croaked out, “Philip, now!”
In a flash, the vampire was gone. The revenants that had been holding him tumbled backward, tossed as effortlessly as paper dolls. A dark blur sped toward Isaac, and then Isaac was gone, too, leaving something spinning in midair where he’d stood. For a moment, a silence hung over the room. Then the object hit the floor with a heavy clank.
It was the Hangman’s Damper.
After that, all hell broke loose.
Twenty-eight
A moment after the Hangman’s Damper hit the floor, a blazing fire erupted in the far corner of the room. Its flames whirled like a funnel cloud, and through the conflagration I caught a glimpse of Isaac in the corner where Philip had deposited him, fire bursting wildly from the mage’s hands. The spinning cone of fire barreled forward and engulfed the nearest revenant, transforming it instantly to smoldering ash. This had to be the flaming dervish spell he’d mentioned earlier, I thought. Then the fire, like a living thing, moved on to engulf the next revenant.
I ducked as my two half-faced guards came up behind me and tried to grab me again. I bolted for cover behind a nearby marble statue of a woman wearing a toga and some kind of battle helmet. From behind the statue, I looked at Bethany and Gabrielle still held fast by their revenant guards, and wondered how the hell I was going to get them free without my gun.
On the other side of the room, Melanthius and Reve Azrael shrank away from the raging flames, retreating to the wall. The shadowborn went with them, their blades drawn, covering their retreat.
I didn’t see Philip anywhere, but I hoped he was still close by. With Isaac busy on the other side of the room, Gabrielle and Bethany still being held prisoner, and me stuck behind a statue without a weapon, our odds of making it out of this mess without the vampire’s help were slim to none.
A group of revenants rushed Isaac, too many for the flaming dervish to take out at once. A pale, emaciated corpse slipped past the fire and came up behind him. Philip appeared out of nowhere, dropping down from above like a spider, and tackled the revenant to the floor. He sank his sharp teeth into the revenant’s throat and tore out a chunk so large that its head flopped off its neck at a peculiar angle. The revenant stopped moving. The red lights inside its eyes snuffed out. Then Philip was gone again, nothing but a dark blur moving through the chaos.
A split second later, he was standing in front of me. He wiped something dark and oily from his mouth with the back of his hand, and spat on the floor. “For the record, revenants taste like shit. Here, catch.” He pulled my gun out of the back of his pants and tossed it to me. He was gone again before I even snatched it out of the air.
With my Bersa semiautomatic in hand, I jumped out from behind the statue and ran toward Bethany and Gabrielle, lining up a shot to start blasting their revenant guards. I hardly made it half a dozen steps before I was clotheslined by a thick, meaty arm. I fell on my back. Above, one of my old pals, the half-faced revenants, reached to grab me. I rolled away and came up on one knee, squeezing the trigger and putting a bullet in Half-Face’s shoulder. The revenant didn’t stop, but it did slow down. I spun around and saw that from this angle I had a clear line of sight to Melanthius and Reve Azrael, sandwiched between the shadowborn and the wall. There would only be time for a single shot before Half-Face was on me again. I had to make it count. Reve Azrael was the one calling the shots from inside Bennett’s body. I drew a bead on Bennett’s head and squeezed the trigger.
Bennett’s skull was already fragile from decay. It burst like a melon from the bullet’s impact. His body crumpled to the floor.
Throughout the room, the revenants jolted and spasmed like they’d been hit with ten thousand volts, then went still as statues. They were blank, empty, like radios that had lost their reception. My shot must have broken Reve Azrael’s connection to them. Putting a bullet in Bennett’s brain while her consciousness had occupied it must have shattered her hold, stunning her, weakening her control over the other revenants. That was the key. Destroy a revenant’s brain, or sever its head from its body like Philip had done, and Reve Azrael couldn’t control it anymore.
The shadowborn drew back to create a tight, protective circle around Melanthius. He didn’t move, didn’t attack or cast any spells. I wondered if he had any magic of his own.