by Karen Chance
And there it was, why my hubby had no more business on this mission than I did. ‘King to peasant,’ I’d heard my father say, when describing Louis-Cesare’s more aggrieved tones, and it had not been approving. Mircea had been a king once, too, or something very close, but he had learned how not to sound like it.
Louis-Cesare had not, and the vamps clearly thought so, too.
“Ah, malik, do forgive your humble servant,” the big, bald vamp said, giving the most sarcastic salaam I’d ever seen. The ‘malik’ was sarcasm, too; it meant ‘lord’ or ‘king’, and from what I understood, was once a common designation across the Middle East. But this group didn’t strike me as people who liked kings.
The female version was ‘malikah’, meaning queen, which I’d been called frequently since I got here.
It hadn’t been meant kindly, either.
“You’re forgiven,” Louis-Cesare said coldly.
I rolled my eyes.
“Perhaps we should ask your woman,” the big, bald vamp said, glancing at me.
“My wife,” Louis-Cesare snapped, and okay, things were heating up.
“Can I move yet?” I asked the healer.
“No.”
I sighed.
“Don’t ask me what’s going on,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “He ran off, leaving me at a court where I’d just been attacked, to chase an old enemy who may or may not be dead—”
“I had every reason to assume that you would be safe here!” Louis-Cesare said.
“Yeah, feeling real safe right now.”
“They were supposed to be our hosts!”
“And you were supposed to be guests! Not assassins!” the big, bald vamp said angrily.
I laughed.
“You think this is funny?” he demanded, and started towards me, only to find Louis-Cesare in the way.
“Not really.”
“You laughed!”
“At the irony. You’re a cult of assassins, or you started out that way, but now you accuse us—”
“With reason!”
“Rashid,” Zakarriyyah said, cutting off big, bald and hairy, who stayed almost nose to nose with Louis-Cesare, but didn’t try for me again. “You were saying?” Zakarriyyah asked me politely.
“I was saying . . .” I didn’t actually remember what I was saying. Oh, yeah. “He abandoned me,” I said, flapping a hand at Louis-Cesare.
Who frowned. “I would never abandon you—”
“You left me to run after Christine.”
“Who is Christine?” the healer asked.
“His old girlfriend.”
And now we were both looking at him accusingly.
“It . . . wasn’t like that,” Louis-Cesare said.
“And then when you stole Ray’s head—”
“He stole a head?” the healer looked appalled.
“It was my head,” I clarified. “I mean, I’d chopped it off—”
“You cannot take another’s trophy,” the big, bearded vamp said reprovingly. “Even a filthy dhampir’s.”
“Call her that again—” Louis-Cesare threatened.
“Why do you care? You abandon her and steal from her.”
“Mostly abandon,” I agreed, looking at my old man. “Like when you ran off with that fey queen—”
“I was possessed!”
“Still. It’s a pattern.” I didn’t know what the healer was doing, but it had wrapped me in a warm, fuzzy blanket of a feeling, which was not enough to mask a stab of pain. I suddenly remembered why I was mad at him. “My sister was taken, leaving me alone for the first time in my life, and what do I find when I wake up? You’re gone, too!”
“I was trying to protect you!”
“I didn’t need protecting. I needed you.”
The healer put a soft hand on my shoulder.
Louis-Cesare looked conflicted. He clearly didn’t want to talk about this now, which was too bad, because I did. “What is it?” I demanded. “You think that, with Dorina gone, I can’t handle myself? You leave the little dhampir to drink tea and look at pyramids because she’ll be a drag on you?”
“That’s not—”
“Then what was it? I mean, you didn’t even talk to me—”
“He didn’t talk to you?” the healer repeated, sounding appalled.
“Stay out of this!” Louis-Cesare snapped.
“No,” I said. “No note, no anything—”
“I gave Hassani a note,” Louis-Cesare said defensively.
“Yes. Hassani. Not me.”
“I wanted to make sure that it reached you—”
Okay, now I was pissed off, because that was a lie. “You wanted to make sure you didn’t have to face me. You left Hassani to do your dirty work and ran off—”
“I did not run! I was following a lead—”
“Yes, without me! And without telling me what it was so I couldn’t follow you.” I sat up and, this time, the room stayed mostly steady. “Do you know what I was doing down here in the first place? Hassani was taking me to the morgue so I could try to figure out—”
“Dory—”
“—what you’d seen and where you’d gone. Because somebody hadn’t bothered to tell me anything in that damned note that wasn’t left with me in the first place. Despite the fact that this is about my sister!”
“Okay, this is getting good,” the big, bearded vamp said.
“Bahram,” Zakarriyyah reproached.
Louis-Cesare ignored them. “You’re being unfair,” he told me.
“Unfair?” I stared at him. “What about that was unfair?”
“All of it!”
“Then give me a reason—a better reason—”
“I don’t have to give you a reason!”
The healer gasped.
“Oh, son,” Bahram said, wincing and shaking his head. “How long have you been married?”
“At least not here,” Louis-Cesare amended.
I narrowed my eyes at him, and got unsteadily to my feet.
“Here.”
“Dory—”
“Now.”
“You can’t ask me—”
“I damned well can.”
“You shouldn’t need to!” The blue eyes, pained a moment ago, suddenly blazed. “Look at you.” He grasped my shoulder, the one that still had clothes covering it, but carefully, as if he was afraid that I might break. “Look at you! Mon Dieu, have you seen yourself?”
“No, and that’s not the point—”
“It is exactly the point!” I found myself crushed to a chest that was breathing hard, despite the fact that he didn’t have to. His hand started to cradle my head, and then jerked away. “Your hair,” he whispered. “Half of your hair is gone.”
Was it? Shit. “It’ll grow back—”
He did not seem to find that very reassuring. “I could have lost you.”
“Then I was right. You think I’m not strong enough—”
“No—”
“That I can’t do my job without her—”
“You’re taking this the wrong way—”
“How else am I supposed to take it? You think I’m weak!”
“This isn’t . . . you’re taking this the wrong way—”
“Then how should I take it? You said—”
“I know what I said!”
“Then what else could you have meant?”
“That I’m weak!” He pulled away suddenly and turned his back on me. “I’m the weak one! Is that what you want to hear?”
I stood there, feeling seriously unwell but also nonplussed. “What?” I finally said.
There was silence for a moment, and when his voice finally came, it was rough. “When I was with Jonathan, I thought that he had done his worst, that there was nothing else he could take from me. I was sure of it—and I was right. Until I met you.” He turned around, and one look at his face and I understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk about this here. “Now, I am afraid all the time, and it is affecting m
y judgment. I left, thinking I was protecting you, and then I realized: what if he came back?”
And, finally, I got it. Louis-Cesare hadn’t told me everything that had happened with Jonathan, but I’d gotten the gist. But despite that, his worst nightmare wasn’t falling back into that monster’s hands. It was having me do so, and him be unable to stop it.
“He isn’t coming back,” I said softly, walking over. “He has what he wants. He left me lying in the street—”
“He didn’t. The fey did. Their interest may be in Dorina, for whatever reason, but his—”
“You think he might try to get at you through me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he might do. I just—” he looked at me, and there was no deception on his face this time. None at all. If I’d wanted honesty, I was getting it. “I only know that I left for the right reasons, and that I returned for the wrong ones. Because I was afraid, and I am weak.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re weak, all right,” Rashid said sarcastically.
The healer smacked him.
“No,” I said, putting my arms around Louis-Cesare’s neck and pulling him down to me. “You didn’t come back for that.”
“Then why did I come back?” The blue eyes were haunted.
“For the same reason you left. For love.”
And then, right there, in front of them all, I kissed him.
Chapter Thirteen
Dory, Cairo
“This is all very touching,” Zakarriyyah said dryly. “But can we please get back to the point?”
“Which was?” I asked, still hanging onto my lover.
“To discover who sent our attackers. If it wasn’t the two of you—”
“What attackers?”
He looked irritated, probably because he’d already explained this to Louis-Cesare while I was out. But I hadn’t heard it. And I still didn’t.
Because someone cursed and someone screamed, and every vamp in the semi-circle surrounding us suddenly looked like they’d seen a ghost. Several fell to their knees and several more fled, dropping their weapons and running for the exit. And the rest were staring in what looked like horror at something behind me.
I turned, but all I saw was an elongated shadow flickering in the firelight and rippling down the stairs. It didn’t look like a man; it didn’t look like anything, at least not from this angle. And before I could look up and see what had cast it, the healer’s pretty face was in my way.
“Do it,” Louis-Cesare said roughly. “Now!”
“What?” I asked, turning back toward him.
And never completed the motion. A soft, cool hand slid onto my shoulder, and I realized what was going on—half a second too late. “Don’t you da—” I began.
Then I was out.
I woke up furious—and disoriented, because I was staring up at a huge dwarf. He had to be three stories tall and was carrying a basket filled with giant emeralds. He looked like he’d tripped, and some of the stones were tumbling out and cascading to earth like the world’s costliest waterfall. I was lying right underneath, and the view up the glimmering cascade was seriously trippy with only half my brain working.
Bes, the demon fighter, I thought vaguely. God of war and parties, which didn’t seem to go together to me, but the ancient Egyptians had liked him. One of our guides had said that dancing girls often had a tattoo of him on their upper thigh . . .
Then the rest of my brain came online, and I abruptly sat up.
Son of a bitch!
The world went violently swimmy as soon as I moved, as if I was in a boat on the high seas. I clutched the cold stone underneath me and stared around, waiting for my eyes to adjust and my stomach to settle down. I didn’t get any help with that, because the healer—damn her—was missing, although that might have been her screaming somewhere in the distance. I couldn’t tell. It was a woman, but there were men’s shouts, too, and bangs and crashes and—
I grabbed my head, feeling cold hair on one side and bumpy, burnt flesh on the other. It was concerning, but less so than the pain. What had that bitch done to me?
I didn’t know, but I slowly realized that I’d been moved into the shadow of the great stairs, as had Hassani. He was lying nearby, with the remains of his smoke blackened robes still white enough in places to show up in the gloom. He was out cold, but since he hadn’t dusted away, I assumed he was in a healing trance.
Lantern Boy was there, too, standing a little way off and bisected by a jagged backdrop of half-light, half-dark from the slant of the staircase. It lit up his own white and blue robe and the hand he was using to clutch the stone. I couldn’t see his face, but his body language read “freaked out” loud and clear.
Makes two of us, I thought, and rolled to my knees. This did not improve the massive migraine that the vamp hereafter to be known as That Bitch had given me. But I somehow managed to drag myself back to my feet.
The fury helped. It helped a lot. I’d been left with a half dead consul and a kid who couldn’t be more than a couple years into his vampy life.
“I’m the weak one,” I heard Louis-Cesare say again.
Sure, asshole.
Which is why you stuck me at the kiddie table.
We were going to have words about that, oh, yes, we were, but first I needed to find out what the hell was going on. And there was only one person to ask. I tried a few steps, managed not to fall on my face, and limped over to junior. Only I guessed he hadn’t noticed.
“Hey,” I croaked, and had to jump back to avoid his swinging fist.
He recognized me after a second and stumbled back against the stairs, a hand clutching the fabric over his no longer beating heart. Vamps are hard to sneak up on, but this was one was clearly not doing well. The huge, liquid dark eyes were wide and panicked, and the already mangled lip had been bitten all the way through a couple of times. He had one fang up and one down, and was looking frankly deranged.
I frowned at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
This was not the right question. The result was some more bruises courtesy of a pair of slender hands that forgot to be gentle when they grabbed my upper arms, and a panicked torrent of part English, part Arabic, and part something I couldn’t identify with my head swimming and people screaming and what sounded like a full-on battle happening on the other side of the stairs. But my lack of comprehension seemed to disturb him even more, because after a moment, he shook me.
“Do you understand?”
“No.”
And then something flew by overhead, big as a small airplane, and briefly blocked out what little light there was. Lantern Boy ducked with a shriek, his hands over his head, and something hit the far wall of the chamber like a bomb. It rocked the room, sending shrapnel flying everywhere, and dust billowing like a desert storm had blown up inside.
“The hell?” I coughed, and hugged the side of the stairs myself.
I didn’t get an answer. Not that I really needed one. A piece of stone the size of a VW Beetle had hit the wall beside the dwarf and spun to a stop, showing a curved shape with familiar carving on it.
I stared at it, slowly coming to terms with the fact that one of the massive columns that supported the roof had just been launched across the room. I had no idea how, and wasn’t likely to get one with my only informant huddled and incoherent. I decided to see for myself.
There was a lot of dust floating around beyond the stairs, and some large piles of rubble that had probably been pillars a little while ago. A torch still burned over the closest heap, on the side of a still intact column that the rubble had washed up against. It was sending flickering shadows to lick the floor, although they didn’t help much since the torch was guttering, and the debris blocked much of my view.
I glanced around, but didn’t see anybody brandishing weapons, or anybody at all. This area seemed completely deserted. I took a chance and ran, reaching the bottom of the rubble pile safely, and intending to climb up for a better vantage point.
&
nbsp; That turned out to be harder than I’d thought. My hands were fumbling and clumsy, and my feet were no better, acting as if the rubble was on some kind of conveyor belt. Which wasn’t far from the truth, as it was loose and moved every time I did. Damn it, how could this simple thing be such a royal pain in the—
There!
I felt an inordinate sense of accomplishment after finally surmounting a hill that had started to feel more like Everest. The damned torch was right overhead, searing my eyes and making it impossible to see anything. But I instinctively hugged the rocks, anyway, staying low, staying out of sight.
Battlefields were no place to poke your head up.
Not that I could hear much fighting anymore, come to think of it. Or any, really. Things were suddenly, eerily quiet.
I shifted position, putting myself in the flickering shadows along one side of the heap, next to the still intact column. The dimness helped my vision, but not my mood. Because the huge room was littered with corpses.
And some of them were still stumbling around.
There was a burned and blackened . . . thing . . . nearby that I only identified as a man by the overall shape. The skin was flaked up, like black, crispy shingles, the left arm was mostly gone and the head was on fire. It looked like a human torch, burning brightly enough to actually light up some of the surrounding rubble. One of the cheeks flared as I watched, and I actually gasped, a lifetime of shit still apparently not enough preparation.
It was a small sound, but the thing’s head immediately turned my way.
It didn’t have eyes, it didn’t have ears, it didn’t have most of a head, but it was coming. And it was coming fast. Fortunately, it seemed to have as much of a problem with the rubble mountain as I had. Unfortunately, its struggle had attracted the interest of a couple buddies, who headed over to help.
And I finally caught a clue.
The human torch was tall, maybe six feet or more despite missing most of a head. But the backup guys were shorter, were wearing identical black outfits, and did not look like they’d been hanging out in a bonfire. They were very clearly dead, with slack features and obvious wounds, with one still having a knife sticking out of his eye. They were also familiar.
