My impact knocked the gore from the murderer’s mouth.

Our tight quarters meant my momentum slammed us both into the wall. The white-haired man cursed me in preclassical Greek as he tried to bite me with a mouth now stretched to impossibly large dimensions. I leapt back, avoiding his snapping jaws.

Not a demon or a vampire. Ghoul, to use the modern word. They normally ate the dead, but from the state of the four bodies strewn like rubbish in the tunnel, these victims had been eaten alive. And I’d arrived too late to save any of them.

“Murderer,” I spat in the same preclassical Greek dialect.

“Dead walker,” he replied in a hiss.

An ancient slur against vampires. Another hint that he was not from this era. “The world has no shortage of dead for your kind to feast on. You ate these people alive. Why?”

He smiled, showing that he still had chunks of viscera in his teeth. My stomach heaved. “The dead do not make beautiful music with their screams.”

Some of the souls that were released are very dark, my father had warned me about the people Dagon had trapped inside himself. No shit. This ghoul was cruel enough to be Dagon’s best friend, if he was one of the resurrected ones.

I had to find out.

“Did you wake up and find that the world had vastly changed since the last time you saw it?” I asked as I avoided his next attempt to grab me. With the tight confines of the tunnel, I had to bash into the walls to do it. The ghoul grinned, enjoying the sight of me in pain.

“Everything I know is gone.” Confusion and rage thrummed through his tone. “Now, metal horses bring strange-tongued invaders to gawk at my city’s bones, so I feast on theirs!”

He was one of the people I was looking for, all right, and he’d chosen to squander his second chance at life by eating innocent tourists. I couldn’t kill him fast enough, but I’d packed my satchel only with knives, and I needed a sword for ghouls. My car had a sword in it. Could I get it and return before the ghoul fled?

Ghouls couldn’t fly. I had a chance.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, and flew out of the tunnel.

Silver was growling when I got back to the car. He probably smelled the blood from my close contact with the flesh eater. I didn’t have time to reassure him. I grabbed the sword, slammed the door, and flew back toward the cistern.

The ghoul was emerging from the tunnel. His sneer changed into a frown when he saw my sword. That was something he recognized, despite missing the past several thousand years. Swords pre-dated even me.

“For the crime of murdering innocents, I sentence you to death,” I said, and flew at him.

Before I reached him, two large forms slammed into me from either side. Bones crunched and my head rang as I was smashed between them. The impact left me so dazed, it took me a few seconds to fly away. Those seconds cost me deep, agony-inducing tears into my shoulders and almost allowed the ghoul to pin me to the ground. I flew away just in time. Then, from the safety of my higher vantage point, I finally saw what had hit me.

“Oh, come on!” I said with a groan.

Two huge pale-gray lions paced near the ghoul beneath me. That would have been shocking enough as lions had long ago disappeared from Greece, but these lions were made out of stone. I could taste the magic that turned ordinary rock into the prowling, deadly cats, and it was so foul, I wanted to gag.

The oldest souls will be slowest to regenerate, my father had said. But when they do, the power they consumed from Dagon’s essence will make them formidable . . .

No shit again. How was I supposed to defend myself against creatures made of magic-infused stone?

Chapter 7

“I suppose asking you to reconsider the lions and fight fair is out of the question?” I said, more to give myself a chance to think than any belief that it would sway the ghoul.

“Fight fair?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard of the concept.

“Didn’t think so.” I sighed, eyeing the lions.

My sword wasn’t much defense against solid stone, and stone also didn’t contain water that I could rip out to incapacitate the lions. Granted, most spells ceased when they ran their course or the person casting them died, but in order to kill the ghoul, I had to be on the ground where he—and the lions—were.

If only I could freeze time to slay the ghoul! But I’d just used that power, so it would take days before I could utilize it again. No, I had to do this the hard way. I rocketed myself at the ghoul, trying to catch him off guard. He ran faster than I expected to the shelter of the cistern’s entrance. I pulled up at the last second to avoid bashing into the rock wall, then lunged at the ghoul again.

The lions tore into my back before I could reach him.

I whirled, sparks flying from my sword from how hard it clanged against their stone bodies. It didn’t penetrate, but their teeth did. Those long stone teeth might be blunter than a lion’s real fangs, but they ripped into me as if they were the predators their magic-infused bodies mimicked.

Something smashed against my head, causing me to see stars. I half staggered, half flew away, avoiding the ghoul’s next blow. He chased me, but not far enough. He was too smart to leave the protection of the cistern’s entrance for long.

If I couldn’t get him away from the cistern to ambush him from above, then I had to make that location work for me.

Pain won’t kill you, I reminded myself as I stared at the remarkably flexible stone lions below. Only decapitation or silver through the heart will. So, time to be a chew toy.

I pretended to charge the ghoul again. He retreated into the tunnel, and the lions jumped me as soon as my feet hit the ground. This time, I let them drag me between them for a short distance before I fought back and got away. My ruse cost me two hunks from my legs and a gaping hole in my side before the wounds healed with vampiric swiftness, but the ghoul was now at the entrance of the tunnel instead of inside it.

I charged him and the lions mauled me again. This time, I dropped my sword as if I could no longer hold it while fighting off the great beasts. The ghoul said he liked to hear his victims scream before he killed them . . .

My gamble worked. The ghoul ignored my fallen weapon and edged toward me instead. I kept staggering back as the lions drove me toward the entrance of the cistern where the ghoul was. When I reached it, I darted past him, then pretended to trip on the steps. The lions fell on me at once. Their weight was crushing, but between the slant of the staircase and the great stone beasts, I was now invisible to the ghoul.

I pushed past the pain to channel all my magic into creating an unbreakable barrier over my body. The lions’ roars sounded like rocks smashing together as their fangs met resistance instead of ripping through more flesh and bone. But this spell wouldn’t last. Magic against magic was unstable.

Come on, murderer. Come and get me . . .

The ghoul commanded the lions to let him pass. They did, and he squeezed by them to enter the narrow tunnel where I was sprawled. I waited until he was close enough for me to clearly see his smile. Then I smiled back—and leapt at his head.

I held on with all my might, ignoring his screams and the brutal pounding he gave my unprotected torso. The lions roared again, coming to his defense. I flung the ghoul and myself backward, the steep stone steps adding more punishing blows as we tumbled down into the stygian darkness. All the while, I held on to the ghoul’s head, using every bone-crunching jolt of our fall as added momentum while I lodged my arm under his chin and twisted.