"A pleasure," Mavra whispered. "To meet you, at last, wizard. We should talk. I suspect we have much in common."
"I'm failing to see anything we might possibly have in common, ma'am. Do you two know each other?"
"Yes," Michael said.
Mavra's whisper became chill. "The good Knight here murdered my children and grandchildren, some small time ago."
"Twenty years ago," Michael said. "Three dozen people killed in the space of a month. Yes, I put a stop to it."
Mavra's lips curved a little more, and showed yellowed teeth. "Yes. Just a little time ago. I haven't forgotten, Knight."
"Well," I said. "It's been nice chatting, Mavra, but we're on our way out."
"No you're not," Mavra said, calmly. But for her lips and her eyes, she still hadn't moved. It was an eerie stillness, not real. Real things move, stir, breathe. Mavra didn't.
"Yes, we are."
"No. Two of you are on your way out." Her smile turned chilly. "I know that the invitations said only one person could be brought with you. Therefore, one of your companions is not under the protection of the old laws, wizard. If the Knight is unprotected, then he and I will have words. A pity you do not have Amoracchius with you, Sir Knight. It would have made things interesting, at least."
I got a sinking feeling in my gut. "And if it isn't Michael?"
"Then you keep offensive company, wizard, and I am displeased with you. I will demonstrate my displeasure decisively." Her gaze swept to Susan. "By all means. Choose which two are leaving. Then I will have a brief conversation with the third."
"You mean you'll kill them."
Mavra shrugged, finally breaking her stillness. I thought I heard a faint crackling of tendons, as though they'd protested moving again. "One must eat, after all. And these little, dazzled morsels the Reds brought tonight are too sweet and insubstantial for my taste."
I took a step back, and turned to Michael, speaking in a whisper. "If I get Susan out of here, can you take this bitch?"
"You might as well not whisper, Harry," Michael said. "It can hear you."
"Yes," Mavra said. "It can."
Way to go, Harry. Endear yourself to the monsters, why don't you. "Well," I asked Michael. "Can you?"
Michael looked at me for a moment, his lips pressed together. Then he said, "Take Susan and go. I'll manage here."
Mavra laughed, a dry and raspy sound. "So very noble. So pure. So self-sacrificing."
Susan stepped around me, to close a triangle with Michael and me. As she did, I noticed that Mavra leaned back from her, just slightly. "Now just a minute," Susan said. "I'm a big girl. I knew the risks when I came here."
"I'm sorry, Miss Rodriguez," Michael said, his tone apologetic. "But this is what I do."
"Save me from chauvinist pigs," Susan muttered. She turned her head around to me. "Excuse me. What do you think you're doing?"
"Looking in your pick-a-nick basket," I responded, as I flipped open one cover. I whistled. "You came armed for bear, Miss Rodriguez. Holy water. Garlic. Two crosses. Is that a thirty-eight?"
Susan sniffed. "A forty-five."
"Garlic," Michael mused.
Above us on the stairs, Mavra hissed.
I glanced up at her. "The Black Court was nearly wiped out, Thomas said. I wonder if that's because they got a little too much publicity. Do you mind, Miss Rodriguez?" I reached into the basket and produced a nice, smelly clove of garlic, then idly flicked it through the air, toward Mavra.
The vampire didn't retreat—she simply blurred, and then stood several steps higher than she had been a moment before. The garlic clove bounced against the stairs where she'd been, and tumbled back down toward us. I bent down and picked it up.
"I'd say that's a big yes." I looked up at Mavra. "Is that what happened, hmm? Stoker published the Big Book of Black Court Vampire Slaying?"
Those drowned-blue lips peeled back from her yellowed teeth. No fangs. "It matters little. You are beings of paper and cotton. I could tear apart a dozen score of your kind."
"Unless they'd had an extra spicy pizza, I guess. Let's get out of here, guys." I started up the stairs.
Mavra spread her hands out to either side, and gathered darkness into her palms. That's the only way I can explain it. She spread out her hands, and blackness rushed in to fill them, gathering there in a writhing mass that shrouded her hands to the wrists. "Try to force your way past me with that weapon, wizard, and I will take it as an attack upon my person. And defend myself appropriately."
Cold washed over me. I extended my senses toward that darkness, warily. And it felt familiar. It felt like frozen chains and cruel twists of thorny wire. It felt empty and black, and like everything that magic isn't.
Mavra was our girl.
"Michael," I said, my voice strangled. Steel rasped as he drew one of his knives.
"Um," Susan said. "Why are her hands doing that? Can vampires do that?"
"Wizards can," I said. "Get behind me."
They both did. I lifted my hand, my face creasing in concentration. I reached out and tried to call in my will, my power. It felt shaky, uncertain, like a pump that has lost its prime. It came to me in dribs and drabs, bit by bit, stuttering like a nervous yokel. But I gathered it around my upraised hand, in a crystalline azure glow, beautiful and fragile, casting harsh shadows over Mavra's face.
Her dead man's eyes looked down at me, and I had an abrupt understanding of why Michael had called her "it." Mavra wasn't a woman anymore. Whatever she was, she wasn't a person. Not like I understood people, in any case. Those eyes pulled at mine, pulled at me with a kind of horrid fascination, the same sickly attraction that makes you want to see what's under the blanket in the morgue, to turn over the dead animal and see the corruption beneath. I fought and kept my eyes away from hers.
"Come, wizard," Mavra whispered, her face utterly without expression. "Let us test one another, thou and I."
I hardened the energy I held. I wouldn't have enough juice to take two shots at her. I'd have to take her out the first time or not at all. Cold radiated off of her, little wisps of steam curling up as ice crystals formed on the steps at her feet.
"But you won't take the first shot, will you." I didn't realize I'd spoken my thoughts aloud until after I had. "Because then you'd be breaking the truce."
I saw an emotion in that face, finally. Anger. "Strike, wizard. Or do not strike. And I will take the mortal of your choice from you. You cannot claim the protection of hospitality to them both."
"Get out of the way, Mavra. Or don't get out of the way. If you try to stop us from leaving, if you try to hurt anyone under my protection, you'll be dealing with a Wizard of the Council, a Knight of the Sword and a girl with a basket full of garlic and holy water. I don't care how big bad and ugly you are, there won't be anything left of you but a greasy spot on the floor."
"You dare," she whispered. She blurred and came at me. I took a breath, but she'd caught me on the exhale, and I had no time to unleash the crystalline blast I'd prepared.
Michael and Susan moved at the same time, hands thrusting past me. She held a wooden cross, simple and dark, while he clutched his dagger by its blade, the crusader-style hilt turned up into a cross as well. Both wood and steel flared with a cold white light as Mavra closed, and she slammed into that light as if it were a solid wall, the shadows in her hand scattering and falling away like sand between her fingers. We stood facing her, my azure power and two blazing crosses, which burned with a kind of purity and quiet power I had never seen before.
"Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent," Michael said, quietly. "You and yours have no power here. Your threats are hollow, your words are empty of truth, just as your heart is empty of love, your body of life. Cease this now, before you tempt the wrath of the Almighty." He glanced aside at me and added, probably for my benefit, "Or before my friend Harry turns you into a greasy spot on the floor."