Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“It does next to a portal.”

“It does sometimes next to a portal.”

“But yours works all the time, and the power you need you already have.” I put out a hand. “Be my partner, one last time?”

Pritkin stared at me, a hundred emotions running across his face.

And then he snarled and slapped his hand into mine.

Mircea smiled, baring fangs. “Let us make them pay for it.”

Chapter Forty-Three

It wasn’t a battlefield; it was an abattoir. There were little pockets, here and there, of resistance: groups of mages who had linked shields and were somehow holding out; scattered vampires who were hiding behind fallen colossi one minute, and attacking a new target the next; random piles of wounded who were being guarded by clusters of the Corps’ medics, but who were still coming under attack. Because it didn’t look like Aeslinn wanted prisoners.

It didn’t look like that at all.

But most of it was a disaster, with our army—what was left of it—being systematically hunted down while Aeslinn and his forces stayed secure behind their walls, not even bothering to get their hands dirty.

“Start small,” Pritkin said, his voice harsh. “We don’t know how much we can do, or how effective we’ll be.”

“Fuck that,” Mircea said calmly. “Take down their shield.”

“Damn you!” Pritkin rounded on him. “We need to be careful—”

“No, we don’t.” Mircea sized up the man opposite him, who was kneeling behind a pile of leather coated corpses. And for once, there was no animosity in his eyes. Mircea had commanded men before. He knew what Pritkin was feeling right now, seeing literal heaps of his comrades, their faces slack in death, their bodies in some cases ripped to pieces. The stench was awful, the visuals worse.

I saw a coat valiantly trying to defend its wearer, who was missing a face. I saw swarms of levitating weapons buzzing around the piles of bodies like flies, using whatever residual energy they had left to fight off all comers. I saw what looked like an ocean of blood leeching into the ground, just so much that you’d think the sands

were red instead of gray, and wondered if I’d done the right thing.

Had Pritkin been right? Should we have gone back? I honestly didn’t know anymore.

But Mircea never wavered.

“If we go small, we lose,” he said tersely. “We don’t have unlimited power, we’re in enemy territory, and no back up is coming.”

“If we take down their shield, they’ll know a new power is on the field,” Pritkin said. “They’ll come looking for us!”

“Possibly. But they’ll have far fewer people to do it with their capital under attack.”

“And you know that your troops will attack how?”

“I trained them.”

They both looked at me.

“We go for the shield,” I said hoarsely, and shifted.

I landed behind the severed head of a manlikan. It was of the mountainous variety, and was still “living,” if you wanted to call it that. But its rider was dead beside it in the dirt, his silver hair mixing with the mud made from dirt and his own blood, his pale face staring skyward with eyes that reminded me of Jonathan’s: pewter gray and lifeless.

Without him, the creature was safe enough, although the dark, cavernous eyes turned toward me when I flashed in. Its mossy beard was serving as a nesting place for a family of small starlings, who paused to look at me, too. But that was as much of a reaction as I got, and the head was the size of a train car, giving me plenty of cover.

I needed it, because this wasn’t going to be easy.

Mircea and Pritkin shifted in while I examined the shield. Or tried to. The barrier was so thick that I couldn’t even see through it. It looked like solid ice, and felt like it, too, when I put my hands on it. Blueish white, hard and cold; it was like no other shield I’d ever seen.

But Pritkin had. “Elemental energy,” he told me. “It won’t break easy.”