When I read The Ragana’s Revenge, I’d scoffed at the idea that magic could be real. I wished now that I’d had the chance to finish the book before losing it in the fire. Seeing as how my life had started to mirror the novel in ways I never would have imagined, it suddenly felt very important to know whether or not it had a happy ending.
We followed the paved path deeper into the park, surrounded on either side by booths of jewelers, gamers, purveyors of period clothing, and one booth labeled, oddly, YE OLDE LONG DISTANCE SERVICE, where a woman wearing a velvet gown and a wreath of flowers in her hair took customers’ applications on a decidedly anachronistic laptop. So much for escapism, I thought. The path was so packed with festivalgoers that we could only move at a crawl. As I weaved my way through, I almost collided with a group of college-aged men and women in forest-green tunics and dresses. They laughed at some private joke and touched their comically big, prosthetic pointed elf ears to check that they were on straight.
Next to me, Bethany adjusted her hair self-consciously.
A flash of red caught my eye in a small field just past the booths, where the crowd was less thick. A figure in a hooded red cloak was moving swiftly across the grass, his face hidden from me. He wasn’t browsing the booths or studiously checking the festival-grounds map like the others around him. He walked with speed and purpose, definitely heading somewhere specific.
Melanthius. I took off at a sprint after him.
“Trent, wait!” Isaac shouted after me, but I wasn’t about to let Reve Azrael’s manservant get away.
I zigzagged through the crowd and ducked past a blacksmith presentation at the edge of the path. I tried to keep my eyes on Melanthius as I ran, but every time I thought I was close, I lost him in the crowd, only to catch a glimpse of his red cloak again even farther away. I ran up the grassy hill toward him. Suddenly a unicorn appeared in my way, snorting and stamping one hoof. I paused, startled, then realized it wasn’t a unicorn at all, just a white horse with a long fake horn attached to a part of the bridle that covered its forehead. The long-haired, long-gowned woman riding atop it smiled down at the children who had gathered around her, blocking my path. I went around them and kept running. Ahead, Melanthius had paused near the edge of the forest, his back to me. I ran up, grabbed him by the shoulders of his cloak, and spun him around to face me.
A startled man with fat, ruddy cheeks and a patchy beard gaped back at me from inside the hood.
I let him go. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“The fuck is wrong with you, dude?” He walked off cursing as the others came running up behind me.
“It wasn’t Melanthius,” I said.
“I can see that,” Isaac replied angrily. “Don’t go running off like that again. We need to stick together.”
I scanned the crowd, only half listening. I saw red cloaks everywhere—on a teenage boy walking by, on a young woman buying something at a jewelry booth, on an older woman standing near the path and singing madrigals. “We’re never going to find him in this crowd,” I said.
A loud scream startled us. We took off running, following the commotion to the side of the park grounds, where a low stone wall overlooked the Hudson River. A crowd had gathered by the wall, pointing at the Palisades cliffs across the water. A thick, dark gray column billowed out of a cave in the cliffside and drifted across the river toward the park.
“Is that smoke?” Isaac asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s gargoyles.”
There were hundreds of them, all pouring out of the cave en masse and stretching like a ribbon across the sky. They followed the path of the river northward, flying inside a thick cloudlike cover of steam. It took me a moment to realize what the steam was. Their flesh was burning in the sunlight. They must have been in immense pain, but they had their orders direct from their king, and from what Jibril-khan had told me, if they didn’t obey they would end up dead. This was the Black Knight’s endgame, his final push to acquire Stryge’s power for himself, and he wasn’t the kind to let a tiny detail like his subjects’ painful aversion to sunlight stop him.
“We have to get everyone out of the park, right now,” Isaac said. “Philip, Gabrielle, you’re with me. Bethany and Trent, you follow the gargoyles, find out where they’re going. If I’m right, we won’t need Melanthius after all. The gargoyles will lead us right to Stryge’s tomb.”
The three of them took off, shouting at everyone they saw to evacuate the park. Bethany and I ran north with the gargoyles. In the distance, the single tower of the Cloisters peeked over the trees like the battlements of a mighty castle. The gargoyles were making a beeline right for it.
We ran past the tournament field, a long meadow of grass and dirt enclosed by a semicircle of portable bleachers on one end and a small picket fence on the other. I caught a glimpse of the jousting tournament inside, a man in an armored breastplate and plumed cap atop a chestnut stallion. He was holding a lance in front of him and galloping toward his opponent. The bleachers were filled with hundreds of cheering festivalgoers, oblivious to the gargoyle army flying past. I hoped like hell the gargoyles stayed over the river and didn’t come inland. The people here were sitting ducks, locked in by the bleachers and the fence with only a handful of narrow exits. If the gargoyles chose to attack, it would be a massacre.
But they ignored the tournament field and kept flying. Finally, they turned inland, sailing over the forest that surrounded the Cloisters. Bethany and I followed them, running into the woods and up a hill. At the top of the hill, Bethany stifled a cry of surprise, and we both skidded to a halt.
Below, the woods were filled with revenants, more than I’d ever seen in one place. There had to be a hundred of them, all shambling toward the Cloisters. They wore leather sheaths on their backs, and as one they stopped and turned their ragged forms toward us, until we were looking out upon a field of glowing red eyes. I reached for my gun, but as a great shadow fell over them, I realized it wasn’t us that had caught their attention.
Overhead, a pack of gargoyles had broken away from the others. They swooped down through the treetops and attacked the revenants with their claws, teeth, and tusks. Undeterred, the revenants fought back, pulling machetes from the sheaths on their backs and hacking at the gargoyles.
Bethany grabbed my arm and started pulling me away. “Come on! Back this way!”
I looked up. The sky was filled with gargoyles flying toward the Cloisters. The ones at the head of group had already reached the tower and were circling it like a funnel cloud. “But the tomb, we must be close,” I said.
“We’ll never make it,” she insisted. “You saw all those people back there in the bleachers. It’s only a matter of time before the fight spills over to where they are. You think either side cares how many humans get caught in the crossfire? We have to get them out of there before it’s too late.”