“What was that?” the male vampire asked.

   Damian ran through the doorway, shoving past the two vampires. He joined us, breathing as if he’d run a race. He held his hand out to me. I cut his hand, and he reached out toward ours as we touched the stones.

   “What is it?” he asked, as he placed his bleeding hand over ours against the stones.

   “Vengeance.”

   The building shuddered around us, and a wind started down the hallway at our backs, not from the outside, but from inside the building. The two vampires went for the door, but a new vampire was there to stop them. He was huge by any standard, a giant of a man who had to stoop through the door and straighten up carefully.

   “Damian, you shit bag. You killed Roarke!”

   “Bachman, I see she called you back from Dublin.”

   “It served its purpose, for there stands the power that will make M’Lady into the new Queen of All Darkness.”

   “This is the one who’s been tearing people apart in Dublin,” Damian said.

   “And now that you’ve let all these people see us, I’ll get to slaughter them all,” he growled at us.

   “He’s always been more beast than vampire,” Damian said.

   The Harlequin brought up their guns and Bachman did rush into battle, but not with us. He dived through the doorway into the café and screams followed.

   “Save them!” I said.

   “We can’t leave you alone,” Rodina said.

   The wind spilled our hair around our faces. I could see the light like white fire burning through the building. It shuddered above us, like a giant waking.

   “We aren’t alone,” I said. “Go and save them. That’s an order!”

   “No more people die here because of us,” Damian said. Somewhere in all of it, the two vampires had vanished outside again. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they were more afraid of Bachman than us.

   The triplets went through the door and toward the sound of screams. We walked forward and the ghosts came with us. The light was so bright that I could see the individual shapes of the vampires in the blackness as they swept toward us. I’d never seen so many that could fly like that. It was a rare gift and I remembered that Damian was amazing at it, too. It was her bloodline; they could all fly.

   A vampire had a man in its grasp, feeding at his throat as it rose into the air. A gun exploded near us; the vampire wavered and dropped the man, who fell heavily to the parking lot. A second shot, a heavier boom of a sound, and the vampire exploded in a fine red mist. I knew who it was before I saw Edward step out of cover and say, “Did you forget to invite me to the party?”

   “Never. Keep them off of the civilians.”

   “Who keeps them off of you?”

   “They do,” I said, motioning at the ghosts.

   “You told me ghosts can’t hurt people.”

   “They can’t on their own,” I said.

   The ghosts swarmed around us, formed a pulsing, throbbing cloud as white and shining as Moroven’s was black and dark. She stepped out of that cloud of shadows and illusion and called out, “Ghosts cannot harm us!”

   “We harmed them!” Damian yelled, and he shared memories of walking into cells where people who could not afford to pay the gaoler starved to death, so the bite was a mercy in the end. Skin fever hot to the touch, vampires feasting on them like vultures at a corpse, draining them dry. The new prisoners, still healthy and beautiful, but Moroven liked beauty and collected them for herself. The victims that were tortured as part of their sentence, and pleased her because of new scars. Children weeping in the dark held, comforted, and killed. So many dead, so much murder. Moroven’s kiss of vampires had treated the gaol as their personal grocery store for centuries. It was as if Damian’s memories joined with the ghosts, made their stories, their lives, real again. The power of it roared upward like a thunderous waterfall of ghosts. They wailed and began to talk, and a lot them remembered exactly which vampire had killed them.

   The townsfolk were screaming and pointing now; even they could see it. The ghosts cried out for vengeance the way a murdered zombie will go after its murderer above all else. Ghosts don’t have a physical form that can harm anyone, but I’d given them blood and I was holding the hand of my vampire servant and my moitié bête. We touched our bleeding hands together the way I’d combined power with another necromancer to raise a bigger, older zombie, and the ghosts became a roaring storm of wind and rage that attacked the vampires.

   The white-and-black storm rose into the air. Edward, Nolan and his people, Dev, Magda, Socrates, all of my people except for Domino and Ethan, one dead, one injured—so many warriors on our side, but there was nothing to fight on the ground. The battle was in the air, and the only one of us who could fly was holding my hand, mingling his blood with mine.

   The window in the side of the café exploded into the street. It was Bachman with the triplets chasing him away from the people inside just like I’d told them to do. They climbed out after him, but the big vampire charged us, grabbing Donnie before she could bring her gun up, and then Giacomo was there as big as Bachman, and the fight was on. Donnie fell free of it, and Dev pulled her to safety. More of the vampires were on the ground and I saw Hamish. The rest of the Harlequin had joined the fight. I saw Nicky wade into him and marveled again at the blur of speed that was my Bride.

   “You will not kill us!” Keegan yelled, and he was just there with a shotgun aimed at the three of us. No one was close enough to help us. They were all fighting, as Nathaniel and I tried to get our guns up in time, but I’d been too deep in the magic and neglected the rest. Edward was moving, but he wasn’t going to be in time, and suddenly the triplets were there. Rodrigo stepped in front of Keegan and they fired at the same time.

   It sounded like thunder as Keegan fell backward and Rodrigo dropped to his knees. Nolan, Donnie, and Brennan surrounded Keegan, but he didn’t get back up. Rodrigo had finished him. Moroven screamed out and fell to earth in a shining white light of ghosts, because now with both her servants dead, she didn’t have the power to fight the vengeful spirits. I didn’t know that ghosts, even ones full of magical blood, could drain the life from a vampire. Maybe I’d shared Obsidian Butterfly’s gift with them. Rodina and Ru were still guarding me, so I was the one that knelt beside Rodrigo, along with Nathaniel and Damian.

   The shotgun had opened Rodrigo’s chest up. His heart was trying to beat in an open wound. “I have been what a Bride is meant to be for their Groom, Anita Blake: cannon fodder.” He laughed and spat blood.

   “Don’t try and talk,” I said.

   He choked, spat more blood, and said, “The oldest translations of the prophecy talk about joining life forces, mingling souls. They didn’t mean marriage.” He coughed so much blood, I wanted to tell him to stop talking, but I wasn’t sure he could hear me anymore. “It says for life . . . part . . . why some tiger clans are so serious about their monogamy.”