Harry wins the war

The eldest vampire of the Red Court screamed in his agony as a tide of his creatures came to obliterate us.
And the youngest vampire of the Red Court knelt on the ground over Martin, staring at her hands.
I watched for a second as the skin around her fingers seemed to burst at the tips. Then I saw her fingers begin to lengthen, nails growing into claws, muscle tissue tearing free of skin with audible, obvious torment. Susan stared at them with her all-black eyes, shaking her head, her face a mask of blood. She was moaning, shuddering.
"Susan," I said, kneeling down in front of her. The howl of sorcerous energies filled the temple with a symphony of destruction. I took her face in my hands.
She looked up at me, terrified and tortured, despair written over her face.
"They're coming," she rasped. "I can feel them. Inside. Outside. They're coming. Oh, God."
"Susan!" I shouted. "Remember Maggie!"
Her eyes seemed to focus on me.
"They wanted Maggie because she was the youngest," I said, my voice cold. "Because her death would have taken us all with her."
She contorted around her stomach, which was twisting and flexing and swelling obscenely, but she kept her eyes on my face.
"Now you're the youngest," I hissed at her, my voice fierce. "The youngest vampire in the entire and literally damned Court. You can kill them all."
She shuddered and moaned, and I saw the conflicting desires at war within her. But her eyes turned to Maggie and she clenched her jaw. "I . . . I don't think I can do it. I can't feel my hands."
"Harry!" screamed Murphy desperately, from somewhere nearby. "They're coming!"
Lightning split the air outside with thunder that would register on the Richter scale.
There was a sudden, random lull in the cacophony of sorcerous war, no more than a couple of seconds long.
Susan looked back at me, her eyes streaming her last tears. "Harry, help me," she whispered. "Save her. Please."
Everything in me screamed no. That this was not fair. That I should not have to do this. That no one should ever have to do this.
But . . . I had no choice.
I found myself picking Susan up with one hand. The little girl was curled into a ball with her eyes closed, and there was no time. I pushed her from the altar as gently as I could and let her fall to the floor, where she might be a little safer from the wild energies surging through the temple.
I put Susan on the altar and said, "She'll be safe. I promise."
She nodded at me, her body jerking and twisting in convulsions, forcing moans of pain from her lips. She looked terrified, but she nodded.
I put my left hand over her eyes.
I pressed my mouth to hers, swiftly, gently, tasting the blood, and her tears, and mine.
I saw her lips form the word, "Maggie . . ."
And I . . .
I used the knife.
I saved a child.
I won a war.
God forgive me.


Changes Chapter 48, Page 520-523


Everything changed the night the Red Court died. It made the history books.
First, for the unexplained destruction of several structures in Chichén Itzá. A thousand years of jungle hadn't managed to bring the place down, but half an hour of slugfest between practitioners who know what they're doing can leave city blocks in ruins. It was later attributed to an extremely powerful localized earthquake. No one could explain all the corpses - some of them with dental work featuring techniques last used a hundred years before, some whose hearts had been violently torn from their chests, and whose bodies had been affected by some kind of mutation that had rendered their bones almost unrecognizable as human. Fewer than 5 percent of them were ever identified - and those were all people who had abruptly gone missing in the past ten or fifteen years. No explanation was ever offered for such a confluence of missing persons, though theories abounded, none of them true.
I could have screamed the truth from the mountaintops and blended right in with all the rest of the nuts. Everyone knows that vampires aren't real.
Second, it made the books because of all the sudden disappearances or apparent outright murders of important officials, businessmen, and financiers in cities and governments throughout Latin America. The drug cartels took the rap for that one, even in the nations where they weren't really strong enough to pull such tactics off. Martial law got declared virtually everywhere south of Texas, and a dozen revolutions in eight or ten different countries all kicked off, seemingly on the same night.
I've heard that nature abhors a vacuum - though if that's true, then I can't figure why about ninety-nine zillion percent of creation is vacuum. But I do know that governments hate 'em, and always rush to fill them up. So do criminals. Which probably tells you more about human beings than it does about nature. Most of the nations in South America proper kept their balance. Central America turned into a war zone, with various interests fighting to claim the territory the vampires had left behind them.
Finally, it made the books in the supernatural community as the night of bad dreams. Before the next sunset, the Paranet was buzzing with activity, with men and women scattered over half the world communicating about the vivid and troubling dreams they'd had. Pregnant women and mothers who had recently delivered had been hardest hit. Several had to be hospitalized and sedated. But everyone with a smidge of talent who was sleeping at the time was troubled by dreams. The general theme was always the same: dead children. The world in flames. Terror and death spreading across the globe in an unstoppable wave, destroying anything resembling order or civilization.
I don't remember what happened when the ritual went off. There's a blank spot in my head about two minutes wide. I had no desire whatsoever to find out what was there.
The next thing I remember is standing outside the temple with Maggie in my arms, wrapped up in the heavy feather cloak her mother had left behind. She was still shivering and crying quietly, but only in sheer reaction and weariness now, rather than terror. The shackles lay broken on the ground behind me. I don't remember how I got them off her without hurting her. She leaned against me, using a fold of the cloak as a pillow, and I sat down on the top step, holding her, to see what I had paid for.
The Red Court was dead. Gone. Every one of them. Most of the remains were little more than black sludge. That, I thought, marked the dead vampires. The half-breeds, though, only lost the vampire parts of their nature. The curse had cured them.
Of course, it was the vampire inside them that had kept them young and beautiful.
I saw hundreds of people on the ground aging a year for every one of my breaths. I watched them wither away to nothing, for the most part. It seemed that half-breeds came in a couple of flavors - those who had managed to discipline their thirst for blood, and thus carried on for centuries, and those who had not been half-vampires for very long. Very few of the latter had ranked in the Red King's Court. It turned out that most of the young half vampires had been working for the Fellowship, and many had already been killed by the Reds - but I heard later that more than two hundred others had been freed from their curse.
But for me, it wouldn't matter how many I'd freed in that instant of choice. No matter how high the number, it would need to be plus one to be square in my book.
Inevitably, the Red Court had contained a few newbies, and after the ritual went off, they were merely human again. They, and the other humans too dim to run any sooner, didn't last long once the Grey Council broke open the cattle car and freed the prisoners. The terror the Reds had inflicted on their victims became rage, and the deaths the Reds and their retainers suffered as a result weren't pretty ones. I saw a matronly woman who was all alone beat Alamaya to death with a rock.
I didn't get involved. I'd had enough for one day.


Changes Chapter 49, Page 524-526