Naeemah shook her head. “Magic never goes away here.”

Curran looked at me, his gray eyes calm. “Baby?”

“Don’t,” Ghastek warned me. “You have no idea what it’s like to feel the weight of it on your mind. It will burn you. It’s darkness in the primordial sense of the word.”

It probably was darkness, but it was my kind of darkness. It spawned me and its magic ran in my blood. I stepped onto the bridge. Magic brushed against me, thin like gossamer but saturated with power. Wow.

“At least tie a rope to her so she doesn’t fall,” Ghastek called out.

I took another step. The gossamer magic thickened, sliding against me, guiding me, its touch soft against my skin but not against my mind. There the magic surged, overwhelming, terrifying, and potent. It offered no resistance. It just watched me, waiting, aware and alive, so strong that if I made one misstep it would choke the life out of me.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Curran said. “Kate?”

The gossamer veils pierced my mind, sliding through me in a flash of blinding pain.

“Kate?”

The magic moved around me, unimaginably ancient. I could see it now. It swirled with blue and gold, flowing into silver and then into deep red, a diaphanous light, its own aurora borealis spilling out in front of me, and beyond it an ancient heartless power that watched me.

“Get her off that bridge!” Ghastek yelled.

The magic beckoned me. To refuse was to die. I strode across the bridge and walked into the stone room.

Plain walls greeted me, devoid of any ornament or decoration. The room was just a hollow box of stone with a simple stone platform at the far end. But on the floor, in the center of the room, something magic waited. It started as a long pale mass rooted to the floor, and like a coral spreading from a common root and splitting into dozens of branches, it too spread out, growing out into a forest of pale protrusions. They glowed pale blue and purple, some as tall as me, some short, the size of my hand, but all sharp and dripping magic that swirled like tendrils of smoke. This looked so familiar . . .

The magic pulled me forward. I followed it, circling the mass, toward a platform at the far wall. I walked up five stone stairs, each a foot tall, and turned. The odd magic coral lay below me on the floor. In my head, I cleaned the main mass of protrusions, trying to see the form beneath.

Magic swirled at the other end of the coral.

The contours of what lay on the floor suddenly made sense.

A skeleton.

An enormous skeleton, at least nine feet tall. Its ribs curved up, its bones stretched, distorted, each bearing branching antlers of pale metal, but it was a human skeleton.

The magic snapped and shone like a length of silver silk suddenly stretched taut. A woman appeared above the skeleton, a translucent shape hovering above the bones level with me. She had dusky skin and big brown eyes. Gold colored her full lips and dusted her eyelashes. Blue-black hair cascaded down her back in soft curls. She wore a diadem of thin gold, so light and intricate, it looked spun rather than forged. Two golden winged serpents, crafted with meticulous detail wound around her arms, their spiderweb-thin wings cradling her wrists.

She looked like me.

No, wait. That was wrong. I looked like her.

Pressure ground on me. The magic of Mishmar waited like a colossal hammer poised above my head. If it fell on me, it would crush every bone in my body.

The magic drove me down. I sank to my knees.

I reached into my clothes and pulled out pieces of broken Slayer wrapped in a cloth. They matched the skeleton below perfectly. Same pale substance, neither metal nor bone, but both. A pale purple radiance emanated from Slayer’s blade, matching the bones below.

The magic ground against my mind and I heard the same word whispered over and over in my head.

“Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit.”

Oh my God. I knew that name. I read about her. I studied her legends, but I never thought I would come across anything of hers because she had been dead for thousands of years. Dead and buried in distant Iraq, somewhere on the east bank of the Tigris River. That name belonged to the bones in front of me. I could feel it. I knew this magic.

I was looking at the corpse of my grandmother.

She wanted me to say her name. She wanted to know that I understood.

I opened my mouth and said it out loud. “Semiramis.”

Her magic drenched me, not the blow of a hammer, but a cascade of power, pouring onto me as if I stood under a waterfall.

Z’emir-amit. The Branch Bearer. The Shield of Assyria. The Great Queen Semiramis. A line from Sarchedon floated up from my memory. When she turns her eyes on you, it is like the golden lustre of noon-day; and her smile is brighter and more glorious than sunset in the desert . . . To look on her face unveiled is to be the Great Queen’s slave for ever more.

She had ruled ancient Mesopotamia. The gates of Babylon bore her name, but through the centuries she had returned to her beloved Assyria again and again. She built the walls of its cities, she led its armies, and she breathed life into its first hanging gardens.

I had carried a piece of her with me all these years and never knew it. Did Voron even know where Slayer came from, when he gave it to me? If he knew, then he must’ve wanted me to murder Roland with a blade made of his mother’s bones. How poetic.

The image of Semiramis floated forward. The magic clamped me in its jaws and lifted me into the air. I rose above the platform, held so tight I couldn’t even breathe.

Semiramis reached me. Her dark eyes looked into mine. I stared into the depth of her brown irises and saw the abyss. Time disappeared. Power battered me, crashing against my mind again and again. The first wave cracked my defenses, the second shattered it, and the third set my mind on fire. All of my secrets, fears, and worries lay before her and she drank them in like a starved vampire. It was like being thrown into the heart of the sun and feeling its raging fire consume you.

Her fury saturated me. My father had taken the bones of my grandmother from her resting place in Iraq and brought them here. She hated it. Her magic, her anger, and her grief permeated every inch of Mishmar and twisted it into hell on earth.

Hot tears bathed my cheeks. I was weeping.

She recognized me. She knew who I was. It was as if I were the grandchild of a devastating hurricane or an insane monster that had crushed and destroyed for so long, it no longer remembered how to nurture its young, but it still recognized its own blood and it tried to be gentle and to keep its own wrath from destroying me.

The magic released me. I floated down to the floor, landing on my feet, the translucent image of Semiramis looming before me. A single bone blade slid off the skeleton and landed before my feet.

A gift.

Slayer clattered on the floor before me. The hilt fell apart, releasing the broken blade. I slid the new blade into it, and the hilt sealed itself, binding to the new sword as if forged together. I picked it up. It wasn’t Slayer. It was a quarter of an inch longer and slightly heavier, but it felt right. I knew exactly what I would call it.

I raised my head. My grandmother was gone, her magic withdrawn. It hadn’t disappeared. It had just pulled back, waiting. She would let our party pass as long as they didn’t disturb her.

I walked back to the doorway. A metal wheel thrust from the wall by the exit. I turned it and heard the clang of a metal bridge sliding into place. I stepped onto the breezeway and saw Curran running up the bridge. The rest of our people waited on the ledge, looking at us. “You okay?”

I swallowed and nodded. “Don’t go into the room. She’ll kill you. As long as nobody enters, we can pass to the other side.”

“She who? What the hell was in there?” Curran asked.

“The bones of my grandmother.”

Curran opened his mouth, closed it, and finally said, “Your grandmother is the magic of Mishmar?”

“She wants to go back to the Tigris. She hates it here.” I slid Sarrat a little out of its sheath. “Look, she gave me a new sword.”

Curran peered at it. “It looks like Slayer.”

“That’s because they’re both made of her bones.”

“Your sword is made out of your grandmother’s bones?”

“Okay, I see how it sounds weird when you say it in that tone of voice . . .”

Curran grabbed my hand. “I’m not even going to say anything else. Let’s just get out of here.”

16

I HAD STOOD in the doorway of my grandmother’s tomb, blocking access to the inside, until the last of our party made it across. She let us go. When I got to the other side, nobody spoke. They just looked at me, their faces freaked out.

“Keep moving,” Curran growled.

We ran through the twisted hallways of Mishmar. We’d been going for the better part of an hour now. I was so damn tired.

“Break,” Curran called.

I almost ran into him, but at the last moment, I twisted away and sagged against the wall. Kate Daniels, the picture of grace.

Ghastek paused in front of me, still in the arms of his vampire. “I demand an explanation.”

Bite me. How about that for an explanation?

“Let me know how that goes for you,” Robert told him. “I’ve been demanding explanations for the last two weeks.”

“You’re not in a position to demand anything,” Jim said.

“Me?” Robert turned to Jim.

“No, him.” Jim nodded at Ghastek.

“Clearly, I haven’t been made aware of certain things, and considering that I’m an innocent bystander to this entire sordid affair, I deserve to know what’s going on,” Ghastek said.

Curran turned. His voice dropped into the flat tone that usually meant he was half a second from erupting into violence. “You and your undead brood came to my house and threatened my people and my mate. I have a strong urge to crush your neck between my teeth. Now, so far I’ve been resisting this urge because Kate is fond of you—why, I can’t understand. But my patience is wearing thin.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Ghastek told him.

Curran glanced at Jim. “Would I dare?”

Jim chuckled. “You would. In fact, I can’t understand why you haven’t dared yet. Mulradin is already dead. If Ghastek doesn’t make it out, the People will experience a power vacuum. Either they’ll fight it out or they’ll get a new boss from above who doesn’t know anything about Atlanta. Either way it’s a win for us.”

“We don’t really have to kill you,” Thomas said. “It can be a happy accident. You could step into a dark hole and break your neck. Or you and Jim could linger behind for a moment or two, and then you’ll slip and fall.”

“On my claws,” Jim added. “Very unfortunate.”

“Or I could accidentally shoot you,” Andrea offered from behind. “It was dark, I saw something move. Everybody knows I’m a terrible shot.”

“Ha-ha,” I told her.

“We’d get back,” Robert said. “And the People would ask us ‘Where is Ghastek?’ and we’d say ‘Terribly sorry, couldn’t find him. Mishmar is a big place, you know.’”

“I feel like I’ve been captured by a horde of savages,” Ghastek said dryly.

“You are a man who pilots monsters,” Nasrin said. “We are monsters. We look after our own. You are not one of our own.”

“I would like to go on record now: we should kill him,” Jim said. “We’ll be kicking ourselves in the ass if we don’t.”

“Yes, Curran,” Andrea said. “After all, how mad would Kate really be? She loves you. She’ll kick you a couple of times and then she’ll forgive you.”

“You guys are a riot,” I said. I didn’t hold Ghastek’s head above the water for hours so they could bump him off. “I promised him he would get out of here. You’re not killing him.”

A flood of undead magic rushed at us, as hundreds of bloodsuckers surged toward us somewhere above. The vampires must have found a way around Semiramis’s chamber.

“Run!” Ghastek screamed.

We sprinted through the hallway. Turn, another turn . . . The hallway opened into what must’ve been at one point a lobby. Giant double doors blocked our way and in between the doors, a narrow, hair-thin gap glowed weakly. Sunlight. We’d found the exit. I almost couldn’t believe it.

Robert slammed into the door. “Locked from the outside. I can see the bar.”

“Stand back.” Curran took a running start and rammed the door. It shuddered. He rammed it again. Wood splintered, the doors burst open, and we shot out into blinding daylight. The fresh air tasted so good. I stumbled, blinking, trying to get used to the glare.

A bridge melded together from sections of a concrete overpass stretched before us, covered with snow and chunks of ice. It spanned a gap at least two hundred yards deep and about a hundred yards wide. An enormous sheer wall encircled the gap. The bridge ran directly into the wall and in the place where they met, a large steel door marked the exit.

In the middle of the bridge stood Hugh d’Ambray.

Adrenaline surged through me. My heart hammered. The world slid into sharp focus. I saw it all at the same time in half a second: the six people in the familiar black tactical gear of the Iron Dogs behind Hugh; the E-50, an enhanced heavy machine gun that spat bullets so fast, they cut through steel like a can opener, mounted on a swivel platform to the left; the two gunners half-hidden behind the gun’s blast shield; Hugh himself, huge, wearing dark armor; and the door behind him. He stood between us and freedom. Hugh in front of us, the undead horde behind us. We had to go through him or die.