“Fine,” he replied, sounding pissed. The Hel-Blar went to dust at his feet. “It’ll take a few minutes to boot up before we can recalibrate it. Just hang on.”

Once the satellite had little red lights popping up, he had me connect his laptop, which was in my backpack. Considering he’d had to fix my laptop one of the first times I’d met him because I’d accidentally pressed a button I didn’t even know existed, I thought he was being rather optimistic. He gave me a bunch of letters and backslashes to type in. The screen garbled at me, but when I read him what I saw he seemed satisfied. Until I got the blue screen of death. Even I knew what that meant.

“It’s frozen,” I called down.

“Turn it off and on again.”

“I tried that already.”

He climbed up to my branch. “Keep watch,” he said to me as we attached nose plugs over our nostrils. I started to climb back down, to be closer to Nicholas. He couldn’t fight off all those Hel-Blar by himself, no matter how kick-ass he was lately.

Connor opened his laptop and slipped straight into computer geek mode. He muttered words that made no sense to me, the same way Christabel muttered nineteenth-century poetry.

From my vantage point I could see a fresh wave of Hel-Blar arriving. Even on a purely moonless, starless night, I would have seen them. That many Hel-Blar were hard to miss. “Incoming!”

They swarmed around us, running to the battle. A few passed right underneath us and I had a fleeting hope that they’d all keep running by and Nicholas could scurry up the tree to safety. The last few found the ashes of their brothers coating the roots and screeched in fury. Half a dozen surrounded our tree and began to climb up. Nicholas did his best to stop them, grabbing their clothing and yanking them off even as he defended himself from fangs and fetid breath.

Christabel frowned down at me when I started to move. “Where are you going?”

“I have to help Nicholas.”

She pulled out of her bag a handful of the Hypnos-pepper eggs that Uncle Geoffrey duplicated from a mixture I’d stolen from school. Stakes and swords weren’t much use to her, but she could throw these like rotten eggs on Halloween night, if she had to.

She had to.

She lowered her backpack with the rest of her stash to me. I put my arms through the straps, wearing it over my chest for easy access. “Nic, heads up!” I tossed an extra pair at him when he looked up. “Connor,” I said, throwing my first egg. I was glad I was only halfway up the tree. Any higher and I would have been dizzy with vertigo by now. “You might want to hurry up.”

He glanced down, swore, and started to type faster. “I just have to wait for this to bounce to Chloe and her files. Chloe’s trying to activate Hope’s cell phone’s GPS tag. Now we just have to combine the codes and IPs with the GPS system. ”

I wasn’t really listening, I was too busy trying to toss eggs at the Hel-Blar without also tossing myself. I wrapped my ankle around a branch and leaned as far forward as I could. Cayenne pepper and Hypnos exploded. Above me, Christabel did the same.

“Go to sleep!” I shouted as the powder sank into their pores and drifted up their nostrils and down their throats. Two Hel-Blar tumbled out of the tree, arms and legs still curled as if they were climbing. Branches splintered as they fell. I kept throwing, as hard as I could. I kept them off Nicholas as he kicked them into the bushes.

By the time Connor gave a triumphant hoot, Hel-Blar littered the ground like dead cockroaches, hands and feet sticking up.

“Gotcha,” Connor said, grimly satisfied. He reached for his phone, dialing quickly as he clambered down to mid-tree level, behind Christabel. “Bruno,” he said. “Phase Two is complete, and Logan sent word that Phase Three is also done.” I couldn’t hear Bruno’s exact words but the smug triumph was clearly audible. Connor was equally smug when he added, “And now I have Hope’s exact location.”

Chapter 41

Solange

I couldn’t find my brothers.

There were too many bodies and too many battles and too much blood. I couldn’t even hear Quinn’s mad battle laugh over the noise. The Hel-Blar had finally found us. And though we’d been right about them forcing the hunters and the vampires to split their focus, the results were chaotic.

Somehow Mom spotted Kieran and me the moment we stepped off the ladders leading down from the platforms. There was a gash on her arm where something sharp had sliced through her sleeve and then her skin. Her eyes flared so pale, they were like frozen water. I didn’t know where the rest of my family was, except for Aunt Ruby, who was hunched over one of the dead hunters, collecting treasures from his pockets. She considered anything shiny a treasure; coin, knife, safety pin. She moved on to rifle through the discarded clothing of a dusted vampire.

Mom kissed my forehead and then pivoted, dragging her dagger across the throat of a Hel-Blar. He gurgled as she finished him off with the stake in her other hand. “Take cover,” she ordered me, spinning away again, her braid lifting behind her.

She left a trail of ashes ending in an unconscious Huntsman. He’d tried to stake her and she’d backhanded him into a tree. The Huntsmen had figured out that we were trying not to kill them. They had no such qualms.

And then the Host caught sight of my mother and me fighting together and they went as mad with bloodlust as any Hel-Blar I’d ever seen.

The sight of so many familiar brown tunics, all painted with Montmartre’s crest, made me freeze for a moment.