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the stalwart men charged with holding them in place. Lucian watched with dismay as armed humans began scaling the castle walls.
    “Death to the demons!”
    Lycan eyes turned to him for guidance. “Deploy the forks!” he called out resolutely. The safety of every vampire and lycan within the castle, he knew, depended on their swift action. He thanked the Elders that silver weapons, at least, appeared to be beyond the economies of this peasant rabble.
    “Bring those ladders down!”
    The other lycans hastened to obey. Crouching low in order to present smaller targets to the archers below, they took up long poles with forked metal ends and used them to push the tops of the enemy ladders away from the battlements. Lycan strength overcame the weight of the climbing mortals, and Lucian smiled as first one, then another ladder toppled over backward, sending shrieking humans crashing to the ground.
    His gaze swiftly turned to a large copper vat sitting above a quantity of dry kindling. The vat rested on a wooden hoarding draped in wet animal skins. Stepping out from behind the protective merlon, he snatched a flaming arrow out of the air and hurled it into the kindling, igniting a fire under the vat. “See to the pitch!” he ordered Nasir. “I want it hot as hell!”
    Another fiery missile thudded into the northwest turret, only a few yards away, setting a pair of sealed wooden shutters ablaze. “Someone put that out!” he shouted. Buckets of water were fetched and hurled against the crackling flames. “Make certain every fire is doused!” he bade his lycan brothers. The last thing he needed was for a conflagration to spread out of control. “Water! We need more water!”
    The sun’s rays beat down on him, making him sweat beneath his doublet and hose. Lucian cursed the radiant solar orb for emboldening the mortals—and trapping the Death Dealers indoors, where they could be of little assistance. If only he could somehow transform the infernal sun into a full moon instead; a battalion of werewolves would make short work of these bloodthirsty varlets!
    Still, even by day, each lycan possessed the strength of many mortal men. Under Lucian’s direction, they now hefted goodly chunks of broken masonry, stockpiled for just such an occasion, and hurled them at the besiegers. As though propelled by catapults, boulder-sized fragments of limestone arced through the air before crashing down on the screaming humans.
    Wooden shields provided no protection against the rain of masonry. Lucian watched with satisfaction as a weighty stone block flattened a cross-waving villager. Blood spurted from beneath the rubble like juice from a winepress.
    For a moment, he dared to hope that the devastating bombardment might break the spirit of the attackers, sending them back from whence they came. But an impassioned voice boomed out from the rear of the mob, urging the mortals to press on.
    “Do not lose faith!” the zealous voice exhorted. “Remember your wives and children! Do not suffer these spawns of Satan to contaminate our land one day more, endangering the lives and souls of all you hold dear! God commands that we rid the earth of the Devils obscene progeny—and he will lead us to victory in His holy name!”
    The incendiary words bolstered the spirits of the teeming mortals, who came at the castle with renewed fervor. A barrage of flaming arrows came soaring over the battlements, driving the lycan defenders back. A blazing shaft struck Imre, the carpenters apprentice, just as he was lifting a ponderous stone fragment above his head. Imre lost his grip on the heavy block, which crashed down on himself, shattering his skull and spine. Hot lycan blood gushed across the wall walk, splashing against Lucian’s boots.
    A tremendous crash seized Lucian’s attention, yanking it away from the mangled apprentice to the gatehouse below. To his dismay, he saw that a horde of straining humans, wielding ropes and hooks, had successfully pulled