Rebekah watched Max flex his wood arm.
He had just gotten it a few weeks ago.
The lustrous reddish surface really shined with life.
It was different from his usual rough, rocky arm of wood and earth.
He rolled his wrist and repeatedly made a fist.
Then, he touched each finger to thumb in quick succession, varying the order in a random pattern.
“Your control’s better.”
“I should’ve gotten it sooner,” Max said. “It’s an adjustment. Asking a thousand year old redwood to give me a living piece of itself isn’t nearly the same as going down to the park and grabbing some dirt and dead branches.”
“How are the roots?”
“Not painful. Distracting. I’m more worried about the fact that I can feel through this now.” He held up his arm of living redwood. “Can’t just shove it into things without caring anymore.”
“You’ll manage. You always do.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about me. Say… you do know that we need your leadership, right?”
“I’m not suicidal, but I’ve made this clear. I will use the Skill if I believe it is for the best. Just like Commander Lawrence did.”
“A leadership void in this specific situation and in the general overall state of our world could be a killer. Not just for the Watch, but for everyone.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re prepared with clear lines of succession.”
“Let’s not test them.”
Rebekah felt the portal stone in her palm and eyed the floor next to her chair.
She and Max were armored up in full, unpowered Threnium, which meant that they didn’t have to worry about being bathed by the sunlight spotlights in her office.
The slow time field generator was hidden behind a plant and pointed to the small circle in the middle of her office purposefully left out of the sunlights’ coverage.
She had emptied Watch HQ.
Just her and Max and the automated defenses.
The enemy had already entered the city.
Guess that showed a weakness to their wall-based defense system when not up against unintelligent monsters.
People were dying while she sat and waited.
She knew she had made the right call when Tessa got paid a visit by Vukylokyr, then Vee, then the governor from the sounds of the frantic chatter over the command channel.
Sutter was another place that sounded like it was getting some extra attention. Megan was at the hospital.
Classic HVT take out tactic.
“I hope this bloody bastard actually shows up,” Max said.
“Yeah, I agree. Fuck this leech. Can’t wait to show it what the Watch does to monsters.”
She figured that there was a good chance it was listening.
To speak of the Devil was to invite an appearance or so the saying went.
Reality tore in the middle of her office.
Somehow, right in the area untouched by the sunlights.
“Target has arrived,” Max whispered into the comms.
They starred at a blur even as it stood motionless in the slow time field.
Max pointed his pinkie at it.
The redwood lengthened into a thin lance as it shot toward Vukylokyr’s chest.
Somehow, the ancient vampire moved.
“Bail!”
Max snapped his wood pinkie off with a grimace.
Rebekah shot to her feet and jumped, stomping as hard as she could.
The floor had been pre-cut.
She crashed down several levels until the feather fall enchantment kicked in as she breached the basement ceiling.
Max was a beat behind her.
“The generators about to run—”
His words were swallowed by the thunder above them.
“Emergency portal!” Rebekah activated the portal stone with a tap of her finger.
She appeared in an alley several blocks away.
To her relief, Max showed up a second later.
He had deep gashes in his redwood arm leaking red sap and in his Threnium chestplate.
“Sweet baby Jesus, it was fast. Barely tapped the stone in time,” Max said.
“It’s coming!” Alexa sat in the lotus position just outside the ritual circles inscribed in blood on the ground and the brick walls.
Her four, hairless bipedal cat-like familiars were similarly arrayed where the three circles touched and opposite Alexa to form a pentagram.
Such heathenism was one of the hallmark’s of her class.
Rebekah and Max remained standing in the circle careful to avoid touching the blood.
The portal stones arrayed within the circle began to vibrate and glow.
Rebekah got the idea from Vukylokyr’s strength at porting around.
She banked on it getting careless in its haste to get to her.
The blood on the ground and walls was an added lure.
“Out!” Alexa snapped.
They jumped.
Intense pink light filled the alley.
The wound in reality that was Vukylokyr stood inside the ritual circle.
Trapped.
But for how long?
“Alexa?”
Rebekah glanced up at her Watch on the rooftops.
Too many young faces pushed into Quests above their level because of the ones she had sent to the Threnosh world.
No Amber, Basilisk, Hillary, or Trevor along with several others.
Devon was a knightmage, but 15 levels lower than Amber.
He was young for a squad leader, but it had been earned. His mage armor was incomplete, covering his torso and arms in translucent green. The rest of him was covered by standard Threnium plate and chain.
“Commander Court! We re-established contact with Shannon. The detective said we need to send our best to the capitol, Sutter Med, SCC and, well, here, with you, specifically.”
She understood why the other three, but not the community college.
It was a military training base and one of the largest emergency shelters, but the highest levels of command would all be at the capitol unless they had taken Ms. Teacher’s advice and she wasn’t privy to that information.
“Ask for a clarification and tell her I want the one site she thinks is most in danger.”
She focused on the fuzzy white blur in the middle of Alexa’s ritual circle.
Nothing in or out.
Only downside was Alexa and her familiars couldn’t move while they maintained it.
“Turn the lights on and get those autoguns set!”
Her Watch sprang into action.
Sunlight spotlights on the rooftops sparked to life, turning night to day.
Unmanned recoilless guns loaded with unorthodox ammunition were clipped to the rooftop edges and brought into the alley.
They turned it into a nice little kill box in less than a minute.
“Where’s the truck?”
“It’s being brought around the corner, commander,” Devon said.
“Forcefield generators in place. Keyed to your commands, commander,” Paisley said.
The techmage was barely old enough and too low level for this, but those factors wouldn’t have stopped the ancient vampire from sending one of its minions to tear her throat and drink her blood had she been in one of the shelters or over at the foundries where Rebekah had sent most of the lowest leveled Watch to weather the bloody storm sweeping through their city.
She eyed the many potted plants lining the alley all the way down to the other street.
She was proud of her kids.
They had prepared the battlefield well considering they had to do it in a burning city were feral vampires roamed the dark.
Less than 20 Watch with only her, Max and Alexa over Level 40.
Versus Vukylokyr?
“This thing gets around pretty fast, huh?” Max said.
“It teleports.”
“It’s not that,” Alexa said through grit teeth.
The woman’s white hair writhed in a nonexistent wind. Sweat dripped down her face, flowing through the furrows on her brow like water through a vertical maze.
Her small, cat-like familiars were clenched bundles of muscle. Sweat shined on their hairless flesh.
Rebekah checked the ritual circles.
The blood glowed, though the intensity had weakened noticeably.
The readings in her HUD weren’t trending in a positive direction.
She zoomed in.
Red flakes were rising off the ground and walls, disintegrating into nothing.
“It’s in the blood,” Alexa continued. “Or it is the blood. I sense— I don’t know…”
“How much longer can you hold it?”
“Not long.”
“Max, do it.”
“Okay.” He placed his wood hand on the ground and mumbled something she couldn’t understand.
A lattice work of gnarled redwood branches erupted from his arm, stabbing into the ground and walls until the ritual circles were enclosed in a tight cage.
His wood arm was left withered, looking like it had atrophied from years of disuse.
“I don’t know if I’m fast enough, but I’ll try my best, no promises,” Max said.
“We’re slowing down in our old age.”
He grinned. “I thought 50 was the new 40. We know Level 50 is the new 30. Or is that just Hanna’s genetics?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“You’re the one always telling the kids not to count the levels they don’t have.”
“Danger sense!”
Someone screamed.
“Cut it Alexa!”
Rebekah didn’t wait. She grabbed Alexa by the collar of her armor, dragging her like a sack of rice into the aegis of the forcefield.
Her kids started shouting.
“They’re on the roofs!”
“Lights!”
Gun and spell fire turned a relatively quiet area of the city into the middle of a fireworks parade.
Rain began to fall on the forcefield.
Red rain.
As quickly as it started the noise abruptly halted.
Rebekah looked up.
A monster dangled one of her kids by an ankle over the edge of the rooftop.
Not a monster. A vampire.
But so transformed that the recognition software in her helmet failed to get a match with known vampires on file.
A second vampire landed on the opposite rooftop with a thud on leathery wings. It looked like a monstrous version of one of the Bat People. It made the first look down right human.
Notably, the two stayed out of the sunlights.
“Worse than Dracula,” Max muttered.
The first vampire shook her kid.
Autumn?
Rebekah couldn’t tell.
The helmet had been ripped from her head, but her face was covered in a sticky red mask.
“You will turn off all your spells and devices. Place your weapons on the ground. And release the Devourer in Crimson,” the vampire said. His mouth split wider than it had seemed possible to reveal a nightmare forest of thin, needle-sharp fangs.
Bennett had only ever had the four fangs. And he had conscientiously kept them out of sight as much as he could.
“Refuse and your little kids up here, end up as our third dinners of the night. And I have to say that, with new and great power, comes great appetite. Oh, and then they’ll be turned into mindless thralls doomed to death as fodder. Or we could start with some defilement before dinner.”
Death was preferable to servitude and the spreading of Vukylokyr’s evil.
“We are the Watch. You attack our home. Our people. There is only one thing the Watch does in the face of darkness. The Watch Stands, The Watch Fights Like Lions.”
Her Level 40 gave her kids a brief fighting chance while reinvigorating everyone.
“Alexa!”
“On it!”
The eldritch mage dropped the ritual.
Her familiars swelled with suddenly recovered power, growing into human-sized bipedal cat-like monstrosities as they clawed up the walls to throw themselves at the two vampires.
Max filled the empty spaces in his redwood lattice with sudden spikes.
Wood splintered as the wound in reality crashed toward him like an angry elephant.
The sound of sizzling flesh filled the alley along with smoke.
They were working, but not fast enough.
The guns barked, spitting blessed silver projectiles, stakes of living wood or bags filled with the anti-vampire blend powder.
The truck screeched to a halt just outside the alley.
“Hoses on the roofs!” Rebekah roared into the comms.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Her kids followed her orders perfectly despite the fear she saw in their wide eyes.
A powerful gust buffeted the forcefield.
The bat-like vampire took flight with broad wing-arms.
One of Alexa’s familiars rode the vampire’s back, biting and clawing like a rabid animal.
“Devon!”
“Commander!” His voice was a bit higher than she’d like.
“Stay here, protect Alexa and Paisley, back up Max if you see an opening.”
Rebekah disabled the forcefield long enough for the levitate spell module to lift her to the rooftop.
Carnage greeted her.
It was filled with pale bodies interspersed here and there by one of her kids.
What had the vampire called them?
Thralls.
People.
They were people.
Dressed in bloody tattered pajamas or soldier gear.
Had been people.
Now they were truly dead.
Shot, burned and cut beyond recognition.
Autumn, for it had been Autumn, was a bloody mess, yet the knightmage fought the vampire alongside Alexa’s familiars while the remaining Watch kids fought the remaining pale-skinned vampire thralls.
The knightmage lacked conjured armor.
She blocked the vampire’s blurring claws with a large round shield of opaque red light.
She wielded the opaque red long-handled mace in one hand as if it was as light as a feather.
And yet, when the flanged head crashed into the vampire’s side it landed with the crack of thunder and sent him crashing into a smokestack, destroying its ancient brick base.
Autumn had no right lasting this long.
And she wouldn’t have had it not been for Alexa’s familiars.
Three familiars took turns, periodically darting in with claw swipes whenever the vampire went for a killing blow on the young Watch woman.
Then they dashed back into the savage fray with the thralls to support the other Watch kids.
Without the familiars, the holy water rain and her Skill the fight would’ve already been over.
Rebekah, pulled a gun from her bag of holding and shot the snarling vampire in the face.
Fire swallowed him down to his sculpted chest.
“V-neck wearing douchebag,” she spat.
She kept squeezing the trigger while the vampire tried to dance away.
They weren’t regular rounds.
Specifically, the bullets contained white phosphorus designed to explode after penetration.
More specifically, the bullets had also been blessed. Each one by a representative of a different belief system.
The fifth shot really had the vampire howling.
It went from pain and anger to pain and fear, terror even.
Must’ve been a Christian round going by statistics.
There must’ve been levels at play.
Would explain why the blessed rain wasn’t doing much more than reddening the vampire’s pale skin.
It was making many of the thralls smoke.
The vampire disappeared over the far edge.
Rebekah rushed to one of the fallen sunlight spotlights and righted it, shining it on the backs of her kids.
The thralls shrieked and shrank away, scattering as their pale skin sizzled and smoked.
Her kids pressed the advantage.
Shooting spells and bullets, cutting and stabbing with blessed blades, all while staying in the light.
Down in the alley Max was getting fucked up by something he couldn’t even see properly.
It was one giant censor blur that had pinned him up against the wall.
His redwood arm was down to a skeleton, yet he continued to shoot spikes from it.
“Why won’t you die! C’mon, you leech! This is living wood straight from the heart of a thousand year old tree!”
“A sapling.”
Blood splashed from its chest onto Max’s face through the gaping holes in his faceplate.
He spat desperately as the iron tang coated his mouth.
“It is a gift beyond measure. Not a petty prize to be stolen.”
A fang-filled mouth opened wide enough to bite down on the front of his head.
Threnium squealed.
The long, wriggling tongue smeared blood and saliva on his faceplate.
“Sunlight!”
The helmet light shined into the throaty abyss.
Sizzle and smoke.
It screeched, recoiling.
“It’s more vulnerable on the inside!”
Except to the redwood.
That was some bullshit.
Some things worked, some didn’t.
It grabbed his redwood arm and slammed him through the brick wall and into darkness.
Alexa stood.
It slammed into the forcefield.
Cracks spread across the translucent blue surface.
Paisley yelped.
“How many more?”
The white wound in reality struck again.
“Five, maybe six. Then overload and boom,” Paisley whispered.
Alexa kicked a spear-length splinter from Max’s shattered lattice cage over to Devon.
“You know where.”
The young man swallowed the lump in his throat and picked up the redwood spear. The green light of his magic armor flickered, wavering a moment before steadying.
Alexa’s fingers danced.
She slapped one hand on the ground.
“The Binding of Melelith.”
Glowing pink ribbons erupted from beneath Vukylokyr.
It was moving too fast for her to hit with everything, but she hit with enough.
They snaked around blurry white arms and legs, constricting and pulling taut.
“Now! Drop the shields!”
Paisley tapped her tablet.
The blue light winked out.
“Leap Thrust!”
Devon covered ten feet in an instant, plunging the redwood spear deep.
Laughter filled their heads.
Paisley and Devon screamed.
Alexa endured.
Her ribbons didn’t.
They snapped.
She extended her free hand at Devon.
Snagging him with a glowing pink tongue.
She pulled, but Vukylokyr had a hold of the young man’s wrists.
It was too fast.
“Acid Spray!” Devon screamed.
The laughter didn’t abate.
Alexa’s concentration failed.
Her spell fizzled.
The white wound in reality blurred in motion.
Devon landed behind Alexa with a dull thud, nearly crashing into Paisley.
The forcefield reappeared just as Vukylokyr’s claws cut through Alexa’s faceplate.
Her HUD flickered, blaring damage alerts.
The white hand and arm appeared in full.
Pale, sinewy, nails like claws.
She kicked it away as it continued to reach for her like a snake’s severed head continuing to bite.
The green glow around Devon was gone. Just like his arms and one leg.
She cauterized the gushers with a quick spell.
“Pais? Pais!”
“Y— yes, ma’am?” the girl’s eyes were saucers staring down at Devon.
“Healing first. Then Plan Omega Force.”
Some people shouldn’t be allowed to come up with the names.
“Focus on the tasks. Tune out everything else.”
The girl was as white as, well, the wriggling arm on the ground, but she nodded and pulled out a smartphone to lay on Devon’s chest.
“Holy water team,” Alexa said into the comms. “We’re getting really dehydrated here.”
They responded quickly, aiming one hose into the alley.
Vukylokyr blurred around the powerful stream and started killing.
The screams in her helmet shook Alexa more than the bursts of gunfire and spell explosions around the firetruck as Vukylokyr turned the holy water puddles on the street red.
Thin redwood lanced out of the dark hole in the side of the building, skewering Vukylokyr in the back.
Max emerged.
Three wood fingers left.
Thorn Wall.
Dagger-like thorns on thick vines twisted together in a dense mass appeared in front of him.
It exploded a second later.
Grasping Vines—
— torn.
Max drew his spellgun, just to have it knocked out of his hand.
Broken fingers, normal flesh and bone, not wood.
Slammed back into the building, against the brick on the other side.
Biting teeth ripped the front of his helmet off.
Went for his throat.
Armored collar held.
He pushed up on its chin.
Mouth opened wide.
No options.
He shoved his hand down it’s throat.
Seeds.
Mouth snapped shut like a bear trap.
No more natural hands left.
“Quick Growth,” Max hissed.
Vukylokyr screeched as its stomach bulged.
It stumbled back out into the alley.
The seeds within its belly sprouted into a tangle of slim-trunked saplings.
Roots emerged from within, stabbing into the ground, while branches reached for the sky with gore-covered leaves.
Despite it all, Vukylokyr just wouldn’t die.
It struggled, snapping branches and tearing roots as it pulled itself up.
Max cast a clump of healing moss over his stump and mentally prepared himself for one last go.
Until, night turned into day.
Ozone filled the air.
A massive beam of blue-white light burned across the hole in the wall.
The force of its passage knocked him over.
The Omega Force.
A fancy and overly-grand name for a mana laser.
He staggered out into the alley.
Noting remained of Vukylokyr.
Every surface was charred.
Acrid smoke filled the air.
Half the firetruck was gone and a huge hole had been burned through the building on the other side of the street.
The fires would have to be put out, but he wasn’t concerned about that.
“Who authorized that?” Rebekah said.
“I did,” Alexa replied.
“Good job. The rest of them are running. First aid. Stabilize. Then we move.”
The forcefield generators were charred husks.
“Get your ass over here, Max!” Alexa snapped.
She was almost as charred as the generators, but not nearly as bad as Paisley.
The girl’s fingers were blackened crisps.
Her chest armor was riddled with shrapnel, while her face was a mix of blackened skin and wet red muscle.
“I got the helmet off, but not before some of it melted.”
“Her eyes?”
It didn’t look good.
“Hurry up. I can’t work the healing phones.” Alexa held up her hands. Every finger was bent the wrong direction. “The binding didn’t like me trying to cast it twice in a row.”
“Get her armor off.” He cast healing moss on the girl’s face. Then he pulled a phone out of his first aid kit. His eyes darted to Devon.
The young man was breathing and already receiving healing.
“Aw, shit…”
Paisley’s padded shirt was wet with red.
He cut it open and laid a redwood middle finger on her shredded chest.
Barely visible roots emerged and entered through the wounds.
He snapped it off with an act of will.
The powerful life magic in a piece of the heart from a thousand year old tree would hopefully keep her alive long enough for the rest of the healing magic to dig in. Then it was a race to the highest leveled doctor or healing-type they could find. Or a last second level up. The kid certainly deserved one.
He pulled a different smartphone from his kit.
It contained a simple, but strong magnet spell.
He held it above the girl’s bloody chest.
Order of operations.
Remove the shrapnel, then worry about the rest.
Alexa sighed.
“You got this?”
“Yeah, get someone to fix your fingers. We need all the help.” He glanced at the firetruck. Most of the Watch there had been slaughtered and with his helmet ruined he couldn’t see if there were any life signs left.
----------------------------------------
Ambush?
Trap?
One didn’t trap justice without paying the price, which was a trap of its own.
Vee dropped seizure inducing electromagnetic fields all over the fields just south of Sacramento’s walls.
They had been riding the truck back to the city when vampires had come out of nowhere and flipped their truck through sheer numbers.
The vampires had them surrounded, until they didn’t.
Now, the fanged ones were trapped in a donut of electromagnetic fields.
Attack?
Seizure.
Retreat?
Seizure.
Try to jump over.
Also seizure.
“I sense the death magic flowing in their blood, which doesn’t belong to the body,” Vessandrion said.
The teenager sounded excited.
He had come a long way from that unlucky baby they had saved from a dire fate over15 years ago in their first days on the Dominion world.
She’d have never taken him on the team if that scary necromancer lady hadn’t called in the boon.
Still, she supposed it was good for the young High to learn what life was like around normal people.
Being mostly raised by an ancient necromancer and old revenants sorta skewed the perspective a bit.
“I don’t believe it can be reversed, elder sister.”
“You sure? Nothing in that photographic memory about vampires?”
“Histories. Myths and legends. Nothing properly confirmed.”
“Okay, then,” she sighed.
The poor people turned into these monsters.
It just wasn’t fair.
“Well, let’s keep tossing them back until we’re sure killing that thing won’t free them.” She pointed her battered metal staff at the blurry wound in reality trapped in place by the beam of holy light shining from Meneldrom’s mythril mace.
“Yes. I can certainly do this all night while you toss them back like deeplake silverstripes.” The young Stone Lord was clad in only the vestments of their battle priest class. Young members of the species traditionally didn’t wear much armor. Rather, they relied on their naturally tough gray skin. Rough as stone and even tougher. It was how they grew their skin into natural armor over time. Like building callouses.
Priest for them wasn’t like priests for humans.
It was less worship of an outside entity or ideal and more a collective faith in the idea of their people.
Whatever it was, it seemed to be working.
Vukylokyr, Vee presumed, was trapped in the holy light.
Granted that would last only as long as Meneldrom’s faith reserves, which to her basically sounded just like mana.
It had been the same with Bastien.
The thought made her sad as it always did.
She pushed her staff under a vampire and flipped the tactical armor-wearing man back into the area enclosed by her fields.
She had already tried to drop one over Vukylokyr’s head, but it had shrugged it off.
A glint shot into the light.
Vukylokyr exploded a moment later.
Then was perfectly whole a moment after that.
She replayed the sequence in her faceplate at several times reduced speed.
Blurry white chunks flew out.
Blood tendrils pulled them back into place.
“Should I use my best bolts?” Deschaina said.
The human from another world had dark skin, but features closure to someone from East Asia on Earth.
My world, Vee had to remind herself.
Deschaina held an expert-crafted bolt launcher in each hand. Stone Lord craftsmanship and rune magic. The enchanted mythril spring shot the solid metal bolts at hypersonic speeds. Further enchanting protected the wielder from the inherent effects of things like recoil, while also mitigating the shockwaves. The bolts themselves were carved with runes for a variety of effects upon impact.
She had already gone through a sampling of her arsenal.
“Load one, but hold off for now.” Vee regarded the white blur in Meneldrom’s holy light.
“This is the strongest I am capable of creating,” Meneldrom said.
“Didn’t doubt you.”
She eyed Skarga.
The petite cragant at just over 11 feet tall and 750 pounds was using the butt of her hockey-stick like polearm to push the writhing vampires back behind the seizure fields. The bladed end had too many sharp edges and pointed spikes.
She eyed Vessandrion in his dragon bone armor.
“Bone cage when I say.”
“Yes, elder sister.” He inclined his head.
She sighed.
The kid was already well over 6 feet tall.
“Skargs, get ready to till the soil.”
“Yes, leader.” Her high-pitched voice didn’t seem to belong in her body.
“Des, watch Meneldrom’s back.”
Vee burst into action, lunging forward and spearing her staff into where she guessed Vukylokyr’s mouth was.
“Keep it in the light!”
She raised it up and slammed it down, pinning it to the ground.
Meneldrom’s holy light kept it centered.
“You can’t talk in our heads while they’ve got you, huh? Hope you can listen.” She tried to keep her voice calm.
The initial ambush had her head filled with the ancient vampire’s overwhelming presences.
It had been a desperate electromagnetic burst that had freed her and the others long enough to get out of the twisted wreckage of the truck and fight off the initial vampire attack.
They had been lucky Meneldrom got his holy light on Vukylokyr with an assist from Vessandrion locating it amidst a hundred other pale bodies.
“See the gnaw marks on my staff? Go ahead feel them with your tongue… got them? Those were made by the great black-furred beast. Twinklestar himself. He who wrestled with a behemoth carrying a sliver of the Spore God itself. He who carried it off the walls. Who smote an entire stalk tower in his fall. Crimson Era? We’ve faced petty gods stronger than you. Beat them too.” Vee signaled.
Vessandrion gestured.
Bones flew out of his bag of holding and clamped around Vukylokyr’s limbs and body.
“Now, Skargs!”
Vee hit the ancient vampire in the brain with the smallest, strongest electromagnetic pulses she could make, while the cragant beat it with her bladed stick.
Till the soil indeed.
The vampires went wild, throwing themselves into Vee’s fields without care that it just sent them into wild seizures that snapped bones and tore muscles.
“Sense anything?”
“No, elder sister. The powerful presence of death magic is no longer near us.”
“I concur.”
The High and the Stone Lord hadn’t found much to agree upon in their short time together.
It wasn’t a clash of species, but of their classes.
“Alright, let’s finish this then.”
There were plenty of living people in the city that she knew they could help.
To weigh that against the dozens around her that she didn’t know could be helped…
“At least we can free them,” Skarga said sadly as she brought her stick down on a writhing vampire.
“Watch the blood?” Deschaina said.
“My holy light purges, see?” Meneldrom pointed out how the blood burned to ashes along with the flesh.
“Vess, we’re going to need a replacement for the truck,” Vee said.
“Yes, elder sister!” he emptied one of his bags of holding.
Bone horses and chariot made for a fearsome sight.
She had been mindful of protecting him from the fast judgment of the human race.
He had been itching to use his newest spell.
The things a good older sister had to do for a naive little brother.