Crimson Prințesă's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

The single vial of fused blood had multiplied. Now a hundred flasks stood in rows along the stone floor of the Hall of Monsters. Maria had her well. But a well was not a legion. She had never raised more than ten warriors at once. She stared at the flasks and felt the truth of it. If she pulled too many corpses too fast, the pack would slip her grip and turn on her. Dawit set down two heavy jars beside her. "You look at that blood like it might bite you." "It might," Maria said. "Ten I can hold. A hundred I cannot. If one breaks loose, they all break loose. They will tear this hall apart with me inside it." Dawit did not soften it. "Then don't push them through your own veins. Push them through the blood." He tapped a flask. "You made this to carry your bending. Let it carry the pack too. One master vessel. The rest obey it." Maria understood at once. She lifted the largest jar and touched her ruby headdress. Moonlight poured down into her hands. She reached into every flask at once, all hundred rivers, hot and cold and eager. They fought her. She did not hold them herself. She bound them each to the master jar, strand to strand, the way she had braided the two bloods. The jar glowed. The pack of blood now answered a single throat, and she held only that one. Sigurd Erikson shoved through the great doors. Maria's crush and the keeper of Dracula's monsters, a wild Nordic vampire who bred beasts in the kennels below. Fur cape swinging, he dragged two men behind him, each hauling a covered iron cart. He owed her a debt. She had raised his dead wolves and nearly died doing it. "You wanted corpses," Sigurd said. "I brought my best." He tore the cover away. Twenty dead beasts lay stacked, wolves and bears and worse. Maria pulled the master jar's power outward. The blood flowed into every corpse at once. Bones cracked. Eyes opened red. Twenty beasts rose, then forty, then more, and none of them turned. They knelt. She held the whole pack through the jar and felt no strain on her own life. "That," Sigurd said, grinning, "is an army." Dawit came from the shadows with a covered shape between him and the other two men. "We heard the Prințesă wanted a great beast of Walachia," he said. He pulled the cloth. A massive black wolf hound stood there, red eyes blazing, vast bat wings folded at its sides. Their three-clan work. Her rider. Maria's cold face broke into a rare smile. She climbed onto the beast's back. Its wings spread wide. It leapt, and she rode it up into the black sky above the hall. Below her, the whole risen pack watched her fly, patient and hers. She could raise a legion now. But a legion needed somewhere to march.