Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [439]
I got painfully to my knees and found that we were losing. Everywhere I looked our people were buried under piles of vampires. Asher and Damain were still standing free, but both were bleeding and Colin and Barnaby were pressing the attack. Richard was completely lost to sight except for one arm gone long with claws. Verne was standing with another werewolf in human form. It was a woman shorter than I was with short dark hair that touched her shoulders, dressed in a thigh-long T-shirt and pants. She looked small beside Verne, but she was the only one of his people still standing. The others were dead or dying on the ground.
My right hand was working again, just stunned not dislocated. Lucky me. I drew a knife from one of the wrist sheaths. It wasn’t a blade consecrated to ritual, but it would have to do.
I wanted to whisper to Asher and Damian for them to fly, but it was too far away to whisper, and I didn’t know how to talk directly to either of their minds. I did the only thing I could think of, I yelled. I yelled, “Asher, Damian!”
They turned startled faces to me.
I raised the knife so they could see it, and screamed, “Fly, damn it, fly!”
Nikki was almost to the bone circle. I screamed, “Fly!” Asher grabbed Damian’s wrist, and I had to turn away before I could see them safe. I had moments to try and make this work. Nikki had a power similar to mine. If she figured out what I was trying to do she’d stop me if she could.
I pressed my hands to the tree trunk and the power breathed through me. It was magic that had been built with death, and that was my speciality. The moment I touched the tree I knew that it wasn’t human sacrifice, but that this was where their munin gathered. The spirits of their dead were here in the bones, the tree, the ground. They filled the air with a whispering, tittering, noise that only I could hear.
The lukoi consume their dead, at least part of them, and the eating of their flesh puts them into some sort of ancestral memory. Munin they call them after Odin’s raven, Memory. They aren’t ghosts, but they are the spirits of the dead, and I was a necromancer. The munin liked me. They eased around me like a cool caress of wind, entwining like phantom cats. I could channel the munin, sort of like a medium at a séance, but more, and worse. The only munin I’d ever channeled had been Raina, the wicked bitch of the east. But when she came, it was like a battering ram. Standing there in the middle of hundreds, thousands of munin, I knew I could open to them. But it would be like opening a door, an invitation. I could wallow in the past, live other lives. It was a whisper of seduction. Raina came like a rapist, an overwhelming force. Not a sharing, but a taking.
However they’d tied their munin to this place it was blood magic, death magic. I cut the palm of my hand and pressed it to the tree. I prayed, and sprinkled blood on the bones at my feet. The circle of power snapped into place with a rush that raised my skin as if it would crawl off my flesh. I invoked the circle. I called the wards. I worshipped, and it was enough.
Shrieks, screams filled the night. The vampires went up in flames. They ran, burning, for the edge of the ward and all who made it across exploded in a rain of burning bits and pieces.
I felt Damian above me, and Asher. None of the vampires left behind tried to do anything but run. Most fell into burning heaps on the ground without taking another step. Anyone under a hundred died where they stood.
The Indian woman had come to stand on the edge of the bone circle. She stared at me while the vampires screamed and died, and the stink of burning flesh and hair was thick enough to choke. Her face showed nothing. She’d rescued the club.
Finally she said, “I should kill you.”
I nodded. “Yes, you should,