Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Read Free Page A

out into the teeth of a howling blizzard.
    Three days ago Hel had sent an army of undead to attack Kozalin, in support of her half-sister Mara’s plan to destroy a mystic artifact hidden in the temple here. We’d smashed the army, and while Mara’s raid on the temple had succeeded she had departed immediately afterward. But the snow had started a few hours later, and it was still coming down hard. I was a bit worried about what that meant for the city, since there hadn’t been time to clean up all the enemy stragglers after we broke their last stand in the Temple District. Even subzero temperatures wouldn’t do much to an animated corpse, and there was no telling what mischief the survivors might have gotten up to with most of the city’s defenders trapped indoors. My own troops couldn’t even get into the city, since I’d been forced to blow up the causeway connecting my island to the mainland in order to keep an army away from my gates.
    There wasn’t much I could do about it until the weather broke, so I’d concentrated on my own problems. I couldn’t afford to let every blizzard completely shut down my operations, especially since this sort of thing was becoming depressingly common. So I’d been forced to spend some time making another round of improvements to the island.
    We had to fight against the wind as we crossed the wide gap I’d left between the dryad habitat and the nearest covered walkway. Elin stumbled and leaned against me, her slender faerie form too light to resist the buffeting. I held her up and anchored myself with force magic until we were across, wondering for the hundredth time if I should enclose that route.
    But leaving it the way it was ensured that the refugees we’d taken in during the battle on the docks wouldn’t accidentally wander into the building and encounter the dryads, and that was rather important. Word of their presence would get out eventually, but I wanted to be a lot better established before anyone showed up at my gate to ask what they were doing here.
    Once we were across the gap the trip was a lot more pleasant. I’d built a roof over the little street that ran between the buildings on the western side of my island, made of conjured iron with large quartz skylights at regular intervals. There were gaps here and there where snow could still get in, but they were small enough that there wasn’t much wind. The self-warming enchantments on the road and buildings actually kept the temperature a bit above freezing, and there was a steady flow of foot traffic along the road.
    The buildings were all built of granite, with thick gray walls and heavy doors designed to resist being broken into by any monsters that might somehow find their way onto the island. One thing I learned from watching zombie movies is that a shell defense isn’t good enough. If you’re facing a real threat you need multiple lines of defense, so you don’t lose everything to one mistake.
    The traffic increased as we approached the square tower that had been the first structure on my new island fortress, and passed inside. The keep was built like a lot of smaller office buildings, with a big open atrium in the middle and a skylight in the roof. Six floors of balconies encircled the atrium, with a stairway zig-zagging up one side and an elevator on the other. A few of my braver citizens had started to actually use the elevator, but most of them stuck to the stairs.
    We took the elevator, and arrived quickly at the coven’s shared living quarters on the fourth floor. A pair of uniformed maids were waiting at the door to take the blanket, and offer us mugs of hot tea before ushering us back to the dining room where the daily staff meeting was held.
    It used to be every other day, but there were too many things going on these days. I made a mental note that I needed to figure out a way to delegate more, but it wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought.
    Avilla and Cerise were already there, of