Something’s wrong, I thought to Beast.

Predator . . . Beast gathered my body in tightly, flooding me with adrenaline. My eyesight sharpened again, the world growing brighter. Danger . . . My heartbeat and breathing sped, scents taking on a sharper intensity.

The fingers of Joseph’s upraised hand snapped, a sharp popping sound. Softly, he said, “Strangulo.” The power of the wyrd spell pulsed through the ground. Lachish grabbed her throat and fell to the side, her mouth open and eyes wide in terror. Over the magics and the burned earth I could smell her fear, like the stink of castor oil and burning fennel.

“Sabina,” I whispered, a warning in my tone. “Molly?”

“Working on it,” Molly said, breathless. “Lachish, ward yourself! We can hold the cage.”

Joseph pointed at the two weaker witches and said, “Dormio.” Again I felt the spell as it rippled beneath the earth, and instantly they both fell asleep, toppling to the side. As they fell, Lachish managed to raise a pale blue ward around herself, the energies flickering and unsteady, but they were enough. She gasped in a breath, crying and shaking, hyperventilating. I realized that the magics Joseph Santana was using were strong enough to pass through the ground beneath his fingers, under and through a warded circle, and still be deadly. I wondered how the ice he’d placed on the ground might be helping that, but it was an isolated thought in the midst of thinking, My weapons are outside the circle!

Sabina raised one hand toward Molly, who reached back; energy crackled between their hands, blue and red electricity arcing between them in the air. Sabina held her other hand toward the trap and said, “Solidus. Profundus.” The bloody energy of the inner circle’s snare went brighter, richer, as their combined strength supported the existing working. The walls now looked like plasticized safety glass running with blood. “Stabilire,” she said, a heartbeat later. Her spell somehow put out the last of the flames in the large circle, and a wind blustered through, blowing away the stench before it died.

Even as the priestess said the words, Joseph turned the bracelet toward Molly and said, “Demorior.” And nothing happened.

Molly whispered a curse. “Son of a witch on a switch. That was close.” She was sweating, the vivid scent notes of terror on the air.

Without looking, the prisoner lowered his hand and picked up the gauze that had helped to bait the trap; it was burned to a crisp. He sniffed it, his nostrils moving delicately, before dropping it back to the ground. He stood, moving like a trained dancer, loose and balanced, but with something off, something not quite right, not quite human, in his posture and the movement of his joints. He raised both hands like a mime on a street corner, but far more mesmerizing. Pressing his palms against the trap the witches had set for him, he ran his hands up and down, along the walls of power, as if testing their strength.

My weapons are outside the circle. And the blood diamond was getting way too hot. How many of them were drawing on the power stored there?

His head rotating on his neck in that creepy, typically vamp, reptilian manner, Joseph looked back and forth between us all, taking our measure, as if seeing more than normal beings could. His eyes settled on Molly, and he lifted the wrist wearing the bracelet, angling it at her. Then he crouched and pressed the bracelet against the icy dirt beneath him. “Sanguinem ad mortem,” he said. Molly made a small sound, like a child in sleep, and blood gushed from her nose. Beast snarled deep inside me, her pelt rubbing against the underside of my skin, itching, tingling, her claws making my fingertips ache. Molly bent forward, her eyes wide, circled in white, murmuring, “Hedge of thorns.”

I jumped back as another small ward appeared inside the outer circle, this one the red-tinged energies of Molly’s strongest working, the warding created by the Everhart witch sisters. This one completely encircled her, a sphere of power around her, deep into the earth. Her bleeding slowed and Molly coughed, spitting blood, and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. She was quivering; her other arm encircled her waist as she bent forward in pain. “I’m sorry, Sabina,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m hurt.”

Beast-energies and mine flowed together like streams merging, her soul and mine joining. Mother of kits, she thought at me. Predator harms mother of kits. I showed Santana my blunt human teeth in a snarl, but he ignored me, angling his bracelet toward the priestess. The gobag at my side was flaring hot, and smoke curled up around me.

Sabina vamped out, her eyes going black and bloody, her jaw changing shape to allow three-inch fangs to click down from her upper jawbone. They looked enormous, hanging down below her chin. “It is not of my choosing,” she said, the words spoken with the precision of a verdict. She stood, her body also moving oddly, as if her joints worked backward. Her right hand rose over her head, her fingers bent and twisted like broken bird feet, her talons black and knifelike. Inside the outer protective circle, power gathered in dark motes, like a swarm of black, metallic bees, potent enough for me to feel on the air like the buzz of a power saw. Sabina held the black velvet bag in her other hand, the sliver of ancient wood exposed.

Joseph ignored her energies collecting, as if her power was unimportant, his eyes alighting instead on the sliver of the Blood Cross. He opened his mouth, a ghastly sight as his jaw unhinged and his mandibles separated, the lower dropping down. His fangs, the uppers five inches long, were massive, clicking into place, dwarfing hers. He looked like the spawn of a lizard and a fighting insect, joints taut and sharp, his frame altering shape, his shoulders rising, neck stretching. His talons extended, and even through the cage of energies I could see the cutting edges, like razors. He hunched, incongruous in the tux, no longer remotely human. “Sssabina,” he said, the word soft and sibilant. “It has been long. I see you still possess that which is mine to give.”

Sabina took a step toward the inner circle, her white skirts blacked at the hem by the grass fire. Another step brought her halfway across the small space. Smoke rose from the velvet bag holding the vamp’s greatest weapon as she neared the snare of thorns. “Too long, Le Créateur des morts. And never long enough.” She rotated her hand and said, “Contego.” A sheath of energies spread out from her right hand, a shield of protection curling around her, created from air and moonlight and the shadows cast by a bright moon.

Joseph stared at the shield and he chuckled, though the sound was nothing like a human might make, broken and raspy and cawing. “You have drunk of my blood. You joined those who used me while I hung in the darkness. A prisoner.”