Stiletto Read online

I recognized him. The pale angles of his face, his dark eyes, the black hair that fell around his hollow cheeks—this was Luke, Sienna’s lover and the second-in-command. I grappled with him and managed to shove him against the wall. I pushed my arm up to his throat and raised my dagger, but his knee connected with my gut. My cough was enough to let him free; he pushed me and ran down the hall.

  I chased him, my feet pounding on the carpet in a series of dull thuds.

  We ended up in the foyer, and I threw up a wall of flames to stop him from heading for the front door. He looked around the room with panic in his wide eyes and darted into the throne room.

  The rest of my force was still well behind me, dealing with the vampires that had crawled like cockroaches from every shadow. I could let him go; I could turn around and leave him to hide in the bodies and wreckage while I returned to clear the way for the children.

  But he wasn’t just any vampire. He meant something to Sienna, and after seeing those terrified kids downstairs, trembling in their cells and waiting for the next time a monster would bleed them, I needed to hurt her and anyone she held dear.

  I followed him into the throne room and let my eyes adjust to the dim glow of the flickering chandelier. With the rest of both our forces far behind us in the hallways outside the kitchen, this cavernous space was strangely abandoned. There were bodies scattered across the wide floor, but there were only two souls here—maybe one, if some theories about vampires were to be believed.

  Across the room, Luke ducked behind what was left of Sienna’s splintered throne. His figure moved like a shadow, and I jogged quickly across the stone floor. I reached out a hand and sealed the door to the Dagger children’s former prison with a spell. It was the only other way out.

  Now, to leave, he would have to pass me.

  I threw a ball of flames toward the throne. The broken wood smoked as the fireball hit and dissolved around the chair’s edges, and Luke cried out. He stumbled forward, hitting at one of his arms. The tiny tongue of flame that had burst to life in his clothes was quickly extinguished, but his howling continued. I remembered Rowan’s caution around the Wildwoods’ campfire all those nights before.

  One more burst of flame would finish him.

  I raised my hand, and then a voice rang out across the hall.

  “Stop!”

  Sienna stood in the doorway.

  41

  “Stop!” she screamed again. She rushed forward, a shadow herself in slim black pants and a tightly fitting jacket.

  She held up a hand, and I managed to shield myself from her spell just in time. A series of crackling red bolts of electricity burst from her fingers and sparked across my shimmering wall. I braced myself and used the shield to push the energy back at her. My curse hit her but stopped her advance only for a moment.

  “How dare you?” She raised her other hand, and another bolt of dazzling blood-red smashed against my defenses. “How dare you invade my home. Murder my clan.” She threw the spell at me again, and this time I stumbled backward with the force of it. “You nobody.”

  I did my best to absorb the crackling energy into my shield and into myself. Her magic was strong, and attempting to control it felt like trying to wrangle a muscled python or furious alligator. Her energy was thick and violent, and it hated me, and I sucked in a long breath as I tried to master the power.

  I collected what I could between my hands and dropped the shield just long enough to throw a wicked ball of fire back at her. She dodged and it missed, but the fury of my flames slammed into the stone wall hard enough to make the nearby door shake in its frame.

  “You’ve been injuring children,” I said, as if saying it aloud could somehow make her aware of her actions in a way the sight of her own dungeon prison somehow hadn’t. “Children.”

  My words affected her, but not how I’d expected. She stopped and stared at me, then, in a sudden shift that froze my blood, she laughed.

  “And?” She lifted her hands and, thoughtfully, as if she had all the time in the world, created a ball of glowing blue-white energy.

  I added force to my shield and watched her every tiny move. Behind me, Luke stayed still, clutching his burnt arm.

  “Everyone was a child once. Why should childhood confer special treatment?” she said.

  “Their age was special enough to single them out for kidnapping,” I said. “But maybe you’re just afraid to pick on someone your own size.”

  She pulled her hands apart a little, and the ball of blue lightning crackled. Tiny bolts jumped between her fingertips.

  “We chose children for their potential,” she said. “Not everyone deserves to be one of my vampires, but if they are capable of earning a place here, it’s better to start them young.”

  My stomach turned over. Rowan had been right—about the kids, about Sienna’s entire plan—and it sickened me.

  “When they’re too young to make a real choice, right?” I snapped. “Who would choose this?”

  Luke’s footsteps sounded behind me. I maintained the shield with one hand but held up the other toward him.

  “You take one more step and you’re going to be barbecued vampire,” I said.

  He cut his eyes at me but took a slight step back. I waved my finger at him, and thick cords the color of rich soil appeared from the air and snaked around his body, pulling his hands tight against his back and trapping him where he stood.

  “Let him go,” Sienna said.

  She raised a hand to free him herself, but I’d been practicing. She wasn’t strong enough to undo one of my spells with a snap of her finger anymore.

  I took a step toward her. I might be able to kill her here and now. I might not. But every second she spent shouting at me or trying to protect her undead boyfriend was one more second the others had to get down the hallways and out of this nightmare.

  “You’ve been using the children as food,” I said, not trying to hide my disgust. “You’re not using them for their potential, you’re using them because they’re easy to harvest and easy to control. Wouldn’t want your filthy clan to have to work for their meals.”

  Her mouth curled into a sharp, fanged sneer. “You have no idea what it’s like to lead a clan of this size.”

  “I’m a Stiletto,” I said.

  “Yes, everyone’s thunderstruck at the way you help your granny keep tabs on a group a tenth the size of mine,” she said, eyes widening. “You’re an inspiration to us all.”

  “Is that why you switched to werewolves?” I asked. “And then to vampires? Just trying to grow your harem? What, were there not enough dogs for you in your last pack? Oh, wait,” I said, widening my eyes to match hers. “That’s right, your last pack is rotting in prison. Thanks to me.”

  It hadn’t been about me. It had taken the combined efforts of the entire coven and the Wildwood pack to trap and arrest Sienna’s last gang of criminals. But Sienna didn’t hate the rest of them like she hated me, and I could use that.

  I took a step forward. At the same instant Sienna threw the ball of blue lightning toward me.

  I’d been counting on her quick reflexes, and I held my ground as the lightning sparked its way across my barrier. It would take her a few moments to gather enough magic to try again.

  “That’s what I don’t get about you,” I shouted over the loud cracks and hisses of lightning. “You were already a Stiletto. You could have had the power of your coven behind you, and it was a power you had by rights. You’d already won. How was that not enough for you?”

  I bowed a little under the pressure of her magic still sizzling its way over my shield, and she took the chance to move forward. She bent over one of the vampire bodies and relieved the corpse of a long, gleaming knife.

  “My coven,” she said.

  She was incredulous, and now my blood boiled. I’d spent my entire childhood trying to measure up to her. I’d been devastated when she’d been named the future Stiletto—the role I had hoped to fill since my earliest memories. The wa
y she’d turned around and defied everything we believed in sickened me, and the derision in her tone filled me with rage.

  “My coven,” she repeated. “Yes, my coven, which follows Nelly’s rules. Which requires the input of your mother and the other Cardinals. Which is full of women who would have always followed my orders while knowing in the back of their minds that they’d changed my diapers.”

  “We’re a family.”

  “Not everyone is born into the right family,” she snapped. “Why would I want to lead the Daggers? The traditions you all follow are stronger than anything I could have started.” She threw a blast of fire, but it didn’t seem like she’d put her heart into it. The flames curled around the edges of my shield in a single hot blast and dissolved. “I don’t want to be the leader of someone else’s dream.”

  “Why bother when your own dreams involve torturing toddlers?”

  She sneered. “I offer immortality to the ones who deserve it. It’s better than anything they’d find in their dreary lives. Especially the Humdrums.”

  “Some immortality.” I cast a glance down at the floor, which was littered with the useless shells of her clan. “What about the children who don’t deserve it, in your humble estimation of their potential?” I said, brushing aside the other glaring problem: that none of them had asked for the prize she offered. “What about them? Do they get to be animals in your stables for the rest of their lives?”

  “We can’t all be winners. You should know that firsthand.”

  She threw another fireball, and this one was painfully hot. The iridescent shimmers of my shield melted and flowed together like liquid wax.

  We were at a standstill, her attacks against my defenses, and neither of us seemed to be winning or waning.

  And that was fine, just so long as it bought me enough time to get the children out.

  But Sienna had other ideas.

  “You’ve been in my home long enough,” she said coldly. “Get out of my house. If you run fast, I might let you go.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. She smiled, baring her pointed teeth, and she began to shift.

  42

  In one horrifying instant, my cousin was gone. A slavering beast stood in her place, with bloody red eyes and gleaming fangs set into a snarling werewolf face.

  She was hideous and awe-inspiring, the largest werewolf I’d ever seen—and the deadliest.

  Her shoulders were knots of muscle and sinew. Between her fangs and her claws, her body was a mass of strength and sharp edges. Her dark fur rippled in the candlelight, the red tips creating the illusion she was already covered in blood.

  My blood.

  A jolt of ice traveled down my spine, and my heartbeat sped up as fear took hold of me. My energy barrier wouldn’t protect me. It could shield me from spells and enchantments, but it wouldn’t be enough against her sheer physical mass.

  She took one step forward, and I stayed frozen.

  I had no idea how to fight her. A creature like this shouldn’t be possible—a vampire and a werewolf and a witch, forced into the same body and compelled to coexist. But somehow, perhaps through the nurturing of her clan as she made her final transformation, she had survived to become this unnatural beast.

  All of Saffron’s research felt like nothing compared to the reality that advanced toward me, but I took a deep breath and tried to remember it anyway.

  She would have the strength of each creature, Saffron had said. She would be strongest at night—I had something going for me there—but even at her weakest, she was the sort of enormous, vicious beast that could only be defeated by the whole coven working together. Her werewolf nose could smell my fear; her vampire hunger would make her eager for my blood. She had the cunning of a witch, the speed of a wolf, the constitution of the undead. Fire wouldn’t bother her like it might a vampire; the bite of a vamp wouldn’t weaken her like it might a werewolf. The only weapons worth anything were the ones that could wound all three of her component parts.

  Silver bullets might slow her down. Ripping her apart would do the trick, if I could think of a single way to accomplish a feat of that magnitude. And a stake through the heart might kill her—a stake, or, better yet, a dagger, a silver dagger, like the one strapped to my waist.

  I reached for it, and my shield dissolved as my concentration shifted. I backed slowly away as she approached and tried to see how I might get my blade through the thick barriers of her fur and skin and muscle.

  It seemed impossible.

  But I could attempt the impossible, at least long enough for the others to get out. Every Dagger had to die sooner or later. I might as well spend my last moments distracting this beast long enough to save my family and the innocents they shepherded.

  Sienna took another step. In her grotesque new form, each step was huge, and I felt the size of the great throne room shrink in her presence.

  Ten minutes. I had to stall her for ten minutes. Maybe five.

  She took another step forward, and the floor beneath me shuddered at her weight.

  Maybe three.

  Behind her, a figure appeared in the throne room doorway. Brendan’s werewolf filled the opening, and his shoulders tightened as he took in the scene. He shifted silently to his human form and crept forward. He crouched next to a body and relieved one of the corpses of its gun.

  It wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be nearly enough. I caught his eye and shook my head. The movement was slight, but it was enough to alert Sienna. She swung her massive head around. Her tail dropped to the floor, and her body tensed when she saw him. She bared her fangs and growled.

  Brendan raised the weapon and pointed it at her.

  They eyed one another. Brendan’s normally imposing figure looked like a doll next to the enormity of Sienna’s wolf body. He didn’t let fear onto his face, but I could see it in his shoulders and in the way the gun trembled. I raised my hands and conjured a vortex of freezing cold air. It spun between my palms as I pulled water from the environment around me, and then I pushed the magic out at the beast. A giant spike of ice sailed toward Sienna like a spear and slammed into her hindquarters.

  She yelped and spun with a hair-raising growl. She bit at the ice protruding from her thigh, then, realizing it had only hurt but not seriously injured her, she advanced on me.

  A gunshot cracked through the room. The sound echoed against the walls and high ceiling, and Sienna yelped again and whipped back around.

  She was on attack from both sides; she’d have to deal with one threat at a time. She looked between us, yellow eyes sharp, and I gestured at her to come and get me if she could. Sienna was competitive; she had always fallen for taunting.

  She narrowed her eyes and leaped for me.

  At the same instant, another shot rang out, and she yipped as the bullet found a mark. Not that it mattered. Such a tiny injury on her giant frame didn’t make a difference, and Brendan’s angle meant he’d maybe been able to shoot a leg at best. The gun, a vicious weapon against an ordinary werewolf, wouldn’t hurt this monstrosity any more than a bee sting might.

  Brendan realized it, too, and his footsteps pounded across the floor as he ran to get a better angle.

  She kicked him when he tried to pass her, and the force of the blow sent him sprawling onto the stone floor.

  I raised my hands and pushed my next spell at Sienna’s face. My fire singed her hair, but she had seen it coming, and she rolled on the floor and doused the flames before they had a chance to take.

  There was no space at all between us now, not when I accounted for the distance she could cross in a single jump. I searched the room for a way to dodge her next approach, but now the wall was behind me, and there was nowhere to run. I could always take the stairs that led to the cells where Grandma and the others had been held, but that would leave me cornered and Brendan on his own, and he didn’t even have the aid of witch magic.

  He scrambled to his feet. A stream
of blood poured from his nose, and he wiped it with his arm, smearing crimson across his face. He raised the gun again while I brought my hands back up to conjure another spell. Maybe if we both fired at the same time, and he managed to aim just right, and I managed to pick the right spell and hit Sienna with everything I had, maybe we would startle her enough to buy ourselves an extra minute. Maybe she would be distracted long enough that I could slip around her and race again to the other side of the hall, and that would give me precious time to make sure the children escaped.

  I raised my hands, and my arm brushed a lump in my jacket. I caught Brendan’s eye. He fired again, and Sienna spun around and snapped her jaws at him in warning.

  Then she turned back to me: to her real enemy, the one she had been fighting all along.

  I stared at her, and I forced energy into my hands and formed it into crackling arcs of light.

  And then I saw it.

  He was against the wall. She was approaching me. I had a weapon none of us had yet considered. A plan laid itself out before my eyes, a geometric pattern that saw the triangle that existed between us and also saw a way to twist it—to twist it and to force us into just the right arrangement for the merest instant—an instant that might be enough.

  I saw the plan, and I saw the consequences, too. My heart clenched at the cost, and the electricity forming between my hands faltered.

  43

  I threw the weak bolt of lightning at Sienna, and she crouched and stared and seemed to dissolve the magic before it could hit her. Whatever witch abilities lay deep inside her, she had figured out how to use some of them even in this form.

  We had to destroy her before she got any stronger. And we had only moments to do it.

  I caught Brendan’s eye, and the conversation that had followed our kisses last night sprang into my mind along with the memory of cool rain and the heat of our bodies pressed against one another.

  “I’m all in with you tomorrow,” he had promised me, looking deeply into my eyes and stroking my cheek with one gentle finger. “No matter what happens, I’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish our mission.”