I don’t know what I’d expected, but not this. The ranks of the dead were like an army, and went from those long since expired, who were closer to the city walls, their sun-blackened corpses serving as a feast for a huge flock of birds; to the still suffering farther out, writhing slowly in their agony, their faint cries blending into a symphony of horror; to the poor unfortunates stacked like cord wood in wagons, waiting to their turn to die.
I guess I’d always assumed that there must have been some exaggeration in the old stories, maybe a lot of it because plenty of people had hated Vlad and h
ad reason to slander his name.
But apparently not.
I slowly sank to my knees, wanting to look away, but finding myself unable to do so.
“You see, Cassie,” Mircea said softly, catching me. “We cannot leave her here.”
And no, we couldn’t. My skin iced over at the very thought. But even if I’d been willing to freeze time the way he wanted, that was a spell and like any other it had a range.
No way would a time bubble extend so far.
“Where is she?” I asked thickly, after a moment. There were so many people, some still slowly moving, that my eyes didn’t know where to look.
I’d seen less disturbing scenes in hell.
“There.” Mircea pointed at a wagon far to the left, almost out of my field of vision. I could hardly make out anything at this range, and didn’t know how he could. But a moment later I understood, when a hand descended on my shoulder and some of his strength coursed through me. “Do you see now?”
And, suddenly, I did. It was as if my eyes had acquired telephoto lenses, with the scene rushing at me so fast that I would have fallen, if I wasn’t already mostly down. My vision skewed as I tried to right myself, showing me a close-up of the underside of a bird, soaring far overhead, in an incongruously beautiful bright blue sky. Before coming in for a landing in the decomposing shell of a man’s rib cage, where its mate had made a nest.
I jerked my eyes away, focusing on the individual blades of grass along a muddy cart path, instead. And at the mud and blood that had run together to form pools underneath the pikes. And at a wagon parked in the grass, where people were being unceremoniously unloaded like sacks of grain.
They were being chucked casually on the dirt, not with any particular malice, but just as if it didn’t matter anymore what happened to them. Which I guessed it didn’t. But with their hands and feet bound with heavy ropes, they had no way to stop their heads from being split open on rocks, or their faces from hitting the hard roadbed, or their limbs from being crushed by their own body weight or that of the other prisoners being thrown on top of them.
I felt Mircea’s hand clench, and knew that, if I didn’t do something soon, he would. But we had to be careful. Broken bones could be mended; a broken time line was a lot harder to fix, as I knew from personal experience.
“The other wagon is moving off,” he said, drawing my attention to an empty cart that had just started trundling its way back toward the city, probably to pick up another load. A contingent of soldiers moved along with it, leaving just the one close by. There were other such groups, but they were spaced out, the concentric circle having gotten fairly large at this point.
And a time bubble might just cover the ones that were left.
“All right,” I told him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
But we didn’t do that.
We didn’t do anything.
Because, a second later, a soldier grabbed for a woman whose long, dark hair had fallen down, hiding her face. Even with Vamp-o-Vision, I could only see a pair of dark eyes glittering from behind the strands. But they didn’t look panicked or terrified or crazed like everyone else’s.
They looked furious.
A second later, the guard staggered back, his face a mass of blood, like the splatter now dripping down her chin. I heard his screams, saw the others look up, saw her spring out of the wagon with no ropes to bind her, and what, at a guess, was the guard’s knife in her hand.
I didn’t see much of anything after that, because she was a blur, savaging the squad so quickly that even vamp eyesight couldn’t follow it. And then she was gone, her naked body nothing but a pale blur before she disappeared into the thick tree line. Leaving two dozen corpses on the ground behind her, some of them still wearing the same shocked expression that I probably was.
Because what the hell?
Chapter Two
“What was that?” I asked—no one. Because Mircea was no longer there. I looked around, surprised but not shocked—not at first. Vamps could move like the wind when they chose, and he was definitely motivated. But that was not what had just happened here.
I felt the familiar magic of a shift swirl around me for a second, the kind that Pythias used to move through space instead of time. It dissolved into the wind, but it didn’t take me with it because I hadn’t cast it. Mircea had.
Son of a bitch!
“Mircea!” I yelled, furious.