“The priestess of the sepulcher—she told you this hidden story?” Big H asked.

I figured he meant Sabina Delgado y Agulilar, the oldest Mithran I knew. She had told me a lot of stuff that vamps usually keep secret, including the origin of vampires via the crosses of Calvary and Golgotha. I nodded.

He sighed, a sound almost human; he moved slowly to a chair and sat. “Forgive me. I am fatigued from the healing of the medicine. It has been many centuries since I felt thus. I find I do not miss it at all.” He stretched out his legs. “I will tell you the rest of the story, of the iron that bound flesh to tree. Ferro chiodo. The others, however, must leave. This is for your ears only.”

“I’m not going anywhere, fanghead,” Rick growled.

“Yes. You will,” I said, studying the vampire Master of the City of Natchez. His bald head was paler than it had been, but his motions were more human than before, something that took control and practice. He was in control of himself and of his people. “Go on. I’m okay. Please,” I added, without looking away from the MOC.

I heard Rick growl, and the hiss of whispered words, and then the sound of people and equipment moving away into the stairwell. Big H smiled grimly. “I never heard of such an attack, of using holy water by the gallons against a Mithran’s lair. How did you get a priest to bless such a volume of water?”

“Baptismal water,” I said, figuring it would get out anyway.

Big H made a hmmm sound, as if rethinking his security arrangements. I had a feeling that drains would be installed in all his lairs soon.

“They’re gone.” I said. You were speaking of the ferro chiodo. Whatever that is.”

“I speak of the iron spikes that bound Christ to the cross,” the older man said, his voice reverential, his eyes on the thing in my hand. “But do not think that there is something holy in this tale.” His voice took on the pitch of a story told often, and when he spoke, he quoted the same words I had heard spoken by Sabina. “When the sons of Ioudas heard that the master had risen, they went to the mount of the skull to find the cross where he died, to steal the wood bathed in his blood, to work arcane magics with the blood and the cross. But the crosses of the thief, the murderer, and the rabbi had been pulled down, broken up, and piled together, the wood confused and mixed.”

Around him, the vamps settled to the floor, watching the Master of the City. Others entered through the broken door and sat there as well. Some small, irreverent part of me saw it as a bunch of preschoolers sitting around at story time, and I had to swallow down my laughter. I figured that if I giggled at the creation story of the curse of the Mithrans, I might get drained in retaliation.

“They took it all, all the wood of the crosses. By dark of night they pulled their father’s body from the grave, and with their witch power and arcane rites they laid his body upon the pile of bloody, broken wood. My own histories say they sacrificed the life of their small sister on the wooden pile. Others say not. But with arcane rites, they sought to raise their father from the dead. And he rose, though he was yet dead, his soul given over to the night and the dark. Soulless, he walked for two nights, a ravening beast. And he could not be killed, though he rotted and the flesh fell from his bones to writhe upon the ground. And thinking that some benefit might yet be gleaned from their sin, his sons drank the blood and ate the flesh of their father. And they were changed.”

I nodded. I had heard the story, almost word for word.

“But what is not spoken of is the iron,” he said to me, his cadence changing back to his usual accented English. “Forged metal was rare in ancient times and of great value. For death on a tree, most were hung with ropes made of plants or the ligaments of animals, easy to make and to replace. For iron to be used, the punishment required a swift death. With the holy day of the subjugated people upon them, the Romans who crucified the three required such speed.”

Big H’s voice took on the storytelling tempo again. “When the Sons of Darkness gathered the wood, they found, piled nearby, the iron that had bound the three, and they gathered it and the wood from all three trees. When their father could not be killed and yet walked the Earth, a rotting corpse, they melted the iron spikes down into one great spike with which to kill their father.”

I looked at the necklace in my hand, the sliver of iron wrapped in copper. I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no words. None at all.

“When the Mithrans were forced into the diaspora, the outclan priestesses took the wood of the crosses and created weapons to be used against our kind. The Naturaleza took the iron, and created weapons of binding and control. Two great tribes arose, the Fame Vexatum and the Naturaleza. A war was fought for many years and across many countries, until the Naturaleza heard of the New World. And they came here. Lucas Vazquez de Allyon was one such.”

“And with the weapon of the iron spike, or a part of one, and the magics of the witch circle and the sickness that the vamp . . . ires”—I finished the word as an afterthought—“he hoped to take over the New World now, in the twenty-first century, after the first vampires walked the earth.”

“Yes. And more.” Big H looked up from the necklace I still clutched. “The ferro chiodo creates. With its binding powers it takes that which is and makes that which is darker, stronger. The spirito malign, the immortal that cannot be killed, the thing of legend and nightmare.”

“Like the father of the Sons of Darkness.”

“When they have the methodology and spell for the transformation, the Naturaleza will stake themselves and rise on the third day. Invincible. No weapon, not even sunlight, will kill them. The only way to defeat them will be to take their heads and it would become a bloody, difficult venture.”

That sounded pretty sucky. I had a moment to wonder if a bomb might work, and realized that if it blew them apart, it would also take their heads, so yeah. I pulled the fused iron discs out of my pocket. “These are being used for binding witches into a circle.”

Real fear crossed Big H’s face, wrinkling his forehead up into his bald pate. “How many of those things do you have? And how many witches in the circle?”

“This one was three. The discs got close to one another and they fused. Twelve witches make up the circle, each with her own disc. At midnight tonight, it will be the true full moon. It’s likely that the working will be complete then.”

“You must find Lotus and take her head before that,” Big H said. “I will give you the location of her lair.” He smiled slowly, all pretense of humanity peeling away, all fang and vamped-out eyes, the huge black pupils in scarlet sclera like dark pits falling straight into hell. “You will destroy my enemy and bring me the blood-iron of the crosses.”

The SUV’s heater was on full blast. The sun was setting, the evening growing colder and wetter. Ice was starting to build up on the trees and shrubs, and icicles were starting to form on the eaves of houses. We sat in the dark, staring at the house, silent. We’d been here for an hour, waiting. It should have been tense or uncomfortable or something. It should have felt weird. But it didn’t. It felt like coming full circle somehow.

We had done this job by the book, researching like crazy, gathering all the records, following all the paper trails. We had then done all the footwork, checking out the properties owned by Lotus, by Silandre, even those owned by Big H. We had checked out so many other places, but they were empty; no lairs or only vacant ones. And all that basic research had been a waste of time. All I had needed was a scrap of paper given to me by the MOC of Natchez. He had known where she was all along, but until I ripped away the binding, he hadn’t been able to tell me, and none of his people had been able to speak of it either.

Lesson learned—save the MOC first. Then go after his enemy.

Now Bruiser and I were back at the house with the turret, the one where we had found Esther McTavish beheaded, and a charnel room in the basement.

I hadn’t gone down to the basement then, hadn’t inspected the place. I should have. I had screwed up, thinking that no one was left there.

Now it was just Bruiser and me, waiting in the icy rain for our backup. There would be no debate now, no unexpected visitors, no preacher standing in the rain, praying for us to succeed. No Rick to tear out the throat of a vamp. No Soul to ward us.

We would go in without the Kid or Rick. . . . My hands clenched in the dark. It was just the two of us, because we had snuck out of Esmee’s and taken off like bats on fire, leaving behind anything electronic that the Kid could use to track us. We would go in alone because we were the only ones who stood a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. And everyone knew what happened to a snowball in hell. I smiled grimly at the thought.

We had found what we were looking for, and Bruiser had called Leo, who had authorized the funds. And then Leo had called in the backup we needed. Leo. Not me. Because he wouldn’t have come for me.

A pickup truck pulled in behind us; a bear of a man climbed out of the truck, the whole thing rocking like a toy.

Without speaking, we unbuckled and left the SUV, not locking the doors, and walked around to the back of the vehicle to meet Evan Trueblood, Molly’s husband. He stood in the rain like a mountain in the fall, topped by red hair and beard, a man so big he made two of Bruiser, and without an ounce of fat on him.

“How many people now know what I am, what my daughter must be, because of you?”

“Too many,” I said. Justified guilt swarmed through me, earned because Big Evan’s being a sorcerer had been a secret until I came along. And because his secret was out, Angie Baby and Little Evan, his children, faced future danger. “Leo’s vamps know. Rick. But not Rick’s partner. Soul. She knows there’s a witch because of Rick’s spell music, and she might have figured it out, but she hasn’t been told, and therefore, PsyLED doesn’t know. But when they find out—and they will eventually; that is always a given—we’ll be there to protect you and yours.”

I could hear his molars grinding. “You know how much I hate you?” he ground out.