by Karen Chance
He said something else, too, but I didn’t hear. Because the front doors went crashing into the main room, followed by fifty thousand pounds of pissed-off war machine. And I didn’t just mean the truck.
Looked like the party had come to us.
Chapter Fifty-eight
I guess the truck hadn’t died, after all, just got hung up on the steps. Because it came barreling into the room, shattering the pretty glass lobby and slinging around. And started off-loading trolls—tons of them.
It looked like a clown car at the circus; they just kept coming. But instead of big red noses and floppy shoes, they were wearing full-on armor: huge helmets, massive breastplates, even shin guards. And it wasn’t just Olga’s usual crew; I didn’t know most of these guys, although I was pretty sure I’d seen a few at the burnt-out-building fight.
And it looked like they were ready for a new one.
“What are they doing?” Ray yelled to be heard over the trolls, who were also yelling. And banging on massive shields and slamming equally massive spears into the floor, hard enough to crack the tile.
Olga got out and clambered on top of the cab, and if I’d thought she looked like Boudicca before, it was nothing compared to this. She was armored, too, including a shining bronze helmet, a breastplate that truly deserved the term, and a sword in her fist that had to be six feet long. She roared, a word that in no way does that sound justice, and which was completely unlike the triumphal noise I’d heard her make at the theatre. This one was full of anguish and fury, a primal, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching cry that had all my hairs standing on end and my knees weak.
The beating and stamping and assorted other sounds abruptly stopped.
And so did everything else.
A couple slot games chimed quietly to themselves and somebody dropped a glass. But nobody moved; nobody spoke. For a space that a minute ago had been loud and boisterous, it was pretty impressive.
And then Olga started talking, and it was more so.
“Trym! Geirröd!” The shout was loud enough to shake the rafters. “Come out and face me. Come out and die!”
Nobody came out.
I didn’t really blame them.
“You go into our hills,” Olga spat. “You lead slavers to hidden villages. You rip children from mothers’ arms, sell like animals. Those you not sell, you kill! You kill my sister’s son, my BLOOD. Now I take yours! Come out and face me! Come out and die!”
Shit. It looked like I hadn’t been the only one doing some investigating, and Olga’s had not ended in good news. For her or the bastards responsible.
“Worse, you sell bones,” Olga said, her voice low and savage, but it went through the room like a shout. “You sell souls. You make weapons from our people to use on our people! You blaspheme and defile! No more!”
There was a sound from the crowd then, a murmur that swept, not through the staring humans, motionless in their gowns and jewels, but through the trolls. Only that isn’t the right word. A murmur implies something soft, and there was none of that here. A low, furious vibration was more like it, one that shook the floor under my feet despite the fact that I was standing on a balcony. If rage had a sound, that would be it.
“What’s going on?” Ray whispered.
I thought about what Blue had told me. “I think . . . six and seven are about to have a very bad day.”
“What?”
I shook my head.
“Come out and face me!” Olga thundered. “Come out and die!”
And, this time, somebody did come out, but it wasn’t White Hair or Gravel Face. It wasn’t trolls at all. But vampires, what looked like a whole army of them, unleashed from doorways on both sides of the ground floor like an unending flood.
And while I was sure Olga’s crew was good, I didn’t think they were that good.
Until somebody else tore out of the truck—literally—grabbed Olga off the cab and then picked it up and threw it across the room. The approaching horde scattered, like pins when a bowling ball smashes through them. And another indescribable sound went up from every troll in the place, including from my throat because it was contagious. Blue roared and we roared with him, a deafening, earsplitting cry that shook the walls.
Then the two armies clashed, and everything was chaos.
“Part of Geminus’ family, my ass!” Ray yelled. “This is the whole thing—it’s gotta be!”
Yeah, it did. Which . . . was not going to work, for a variety of reasons, but I didn’t have time to list them right now. Because we’d been recognized.
A wave of vamps leapt for the balcony, and Ray and I grabbed stakes from Rufus’ suitcase and prepared for a back-to-back, no-holds-barred fight. I was trying to protect Rufus, and get him in between us, until I realized: he didn’t need it. He pushed me off, grabbed his case, and let loose.
For a moment, I just stood there, getting schooled. Because, sure, I bought some stuff to even the field from time to time, but I wasn’t a mage. And the difference between what I did and what a century-and-a-half-old magical arms dealer could do was . . . eye-opening.
Rufus had unfolded a stand from one side of his suitcase, making it into a little table. It looked like something a traveling magician would use, as a platform for card tricks or maybe pulling a bunny out of a hat. Only I didn’t see any bunnies.
What I did see were a flock of bolas made out of light that went sizzling through the air to wrap around vamp legs and then drag them backward, while sinking into their flesh as if trying to eat through it. I saw something scatter from a vial that was almost too bright to look at, a dazzle that strobed the room and caused the vamps heading for us to scream and shield their eyes, while their flesh burned and bubbled off their bones. I saw nets, made out of what looked like the same stuff as the webs at the theatre, that snared half of the oncoming assault. And then, Rufus sent a pulse through them, slammed back against the floor a story below, leaving the snared vamps sizzling and smoking and trolls enthusiastically stomping on their heads.
Yet the vamps just kept coming.
I saw a bunch of magical throwing stars, like mine but incredibly fast, zip through the crowd, flaying a path. I saw a dislocator hit a bunch of vamps, turning them into something that looked like a rat king, a single creature with numerous heads and limbs sticking out at odd angles. I saw a mass of black circles, filmy and indistinct, that fluttered out into the air like they were made out of tissue paper, and didn’t seem to do anything at all.
Until a handful landed on a vamp leaping for me and he suddenly looked like Swiss cheese. Because they weren’t circles; they were holes. And everywhere they touched, something suddenly went missing.
Yet the vamps just kept coming.
I got a stake in my latest problem, ducked under a knife swipe, and took out two more. Then jerked back the head of a guy trying to strangle Ray. Who pulled free, dodged under another assault, spun, and slit the vamp’s throat. And drenched us both in bright red blood, because he hadn’t even been a master.
But there were plenty that were. Enough that, barely a minute into the fight, Rufus switched to the big guns, although they didn’t look like it. They didn’t look like much of anything, just a handful of small silver disks, which put out tiny pincers and glommed on to the mass of shirts and trousers around us.
And then projected what looked like a bunch of quarter-sized swirls of color and light that opened up in front of the vamps, I didn’t know why.
And then I realized: they weren’t in front of the vamps.
“Oh shit! Oh fuck! Oh shit!” Ray said, as one of the nearest masters looked down—in time to see his whole midsection get sucked inside the growing portal.
It was the size of a saucer when it finished consuming his chest in a swirl of angry red flesh and yellowish fat, and a dinner plate by the time it pulled in his legs. And then I guess it ran out of steam. Beca
use it winked out with the guy’s head still here and somehow still alive, with malevolent eyes staring, staring, staring—
Until I kicked it down the hall and looked up, panting.
And saw another wave headed our way.
It’s what people often forget about vamps, and what makes fighting them so damned hard: hurting them is easy—if you’re good and fast, or slow but tricky. But killing them is something else altogether. And if you don’t kill them, they just. Keep. Coming.
And then suddenly I was eating carpet.
Ray screamed, “Troll!” about the time that he smacked me and Rufus to the floor, and I looked up to see a couple thousand pounds of muscle slam overhead and into the wall behind us. The troll appeared to be dead, judging by the fact that half his torso was missing. But the body took out a bunch of vamps anyway, sending them crashing against the stone, and then smearing along the wall under his momentum. They left a bloody swath that stretched halfway down the corridor, but that wasn’t what had me staring.
I’d seen Blue survive a combined spell that would have taken down a platoon. Yet this troll had a burning crater in his chest, and had also been flung from halfway across the building. What the fuck?
And then Rufus suddenly stopped with the magical mayhem and threw up a shield. One that bloomed with angry colors a second later, along with scrabbling, burning vamps. Because somebody hadn’t waited for their allies to get out of the way before lobbing an attack.
“Mages!” someone yelled; it might have even been me. I wasn’t sure because, while the shield had saved our asses, it also acted like a kettledrum, trapping the sound of all those spells inside. To the point that I thought my head might burst.
Rufus did something to tone the sound down, enough that I could hear Ray yelling at me. “Call Marlowe!”
“I can’t call Marlowe!”
“You have to—we’re getting slaughtered here!”
“And half the city will go with us if they set those weapons off! Some pissed-off trolls probably won’t do it, because they’ll think they can take them—”
“Probably because they can!”
“—but Marlowe’s men show up, and it’s over!”
“It’s over anyway if we’re stuck behind this shield!”
He had a point.
I fished out my phone and called somebody, but it wasn’t Marlowe.
“Roberto?” I yelled, barely able to hear myself.
“Dory.” The thick, rounded Italian syllables always made it sound like he was eating. Of course, he usually was. “You got Stan’s truck? He keeps bugging me. Pretty soon, I gotta bug you. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’ll get around to it! I’m partying with my boys over at Oceanid right now—”
“That place closed down.”
“They said that’s what they told you! I said they’d better pay you your percentage, ’cause this is your turf—everybody knows that! But they’re laughing over here—”
“Laughing?”
“—about this being your territory! Said they’re taking over—”
“I got a deal with Geminus!” The wolf growl was starting to eclipse the mellow Italian vowels.
“But Geminus is dead, and they say you’ve run things long enough! They got a little troll problem at the moment, but as soon as it’s over, they’re coming for you—”
“They’re coming for me? I’m coming for them!”
“Better get here fast, then! And remember, the trolls are on your side!”
I hung up.
Ray just looked at me. “You think inviting a crazy were gang boss is gonna help?”
“Can it hurt?”
“Yeah! Like when he figures out that you set him up to—” Ray broke off and stared at something behind me. “Shit.”
“Shit? What’s shit?” And then I followed his gaze. “Shit!”
Because Curly hadn’t gone to the john, after all. I could just make him out, through the psychedelic shield, standing on the third-floor balcony across from us with something in his hands. It looked like some sort of controller, small and black and—yeah. It was controlling things, all right.
Or maybe it was a total coincidence that one of the big, round doorways suddenly opened up like the floodgates had lifted—or like a portal had reversed—to gush water down onto the frenzied crowd. Satins were drenched, silks were ruined, and people went slip-sliding for the doors, those who hadn’t already been headed that way because of the massive brawl going on.
“I knew he was too willing to come along!” Ray raged. “He planned this!”
Yeah, he had. I couldn’t hear him, even with dhampir senses, but I could lip-read. “Payback time, bitches!”
Great.
And then it was. It really, really was. Because it wasn’t just water squeezing through the big, round opening. It was—
“What the fuck is that?” Ray screamed, sounding almost outraged.
I laughed the laugh of the faintly hysterical, because Cthulhu had just made his entrance, or something that looked like him. Well, it would if he were scarlet and three stories tall. As it was, I guessed it was a combatant from Faerie.
And it was pissed.
The creature started laying waste with arms the size of tree trunks—if the trees in question were redwoods—and a maw full of holy hell that could spear a vamp clean through and then fling him the length of the room to splat against the pretty windows.
Okay, I thought.
All right!
Then I realized: we were still losing.
“How are we still losing?” Ray demanded, as half the mages and a good number of the vamps peeled off from us to attack Big Red. Yet Rufus was still sweating bullets trying to maintain the shield. And out in the fray, I saw a mage materialize a glowing spear and run it through three trolls at once.
“What . . . the hell . . . are they doing?” Rufus panted, his dark eyes pained. “How are they . . . this strong?”
“They’re using the merchandise,” I said, staring around.
“What?”
“They have to be.” But I couldn’t see—
And then I did.
“There!” I pointed to a couple vamps with a very familiar-looking crate on the far side of the room by the windows. Another crate was already open and the contents were being passed around, which was probably why a charge of maybe twenty trolls was repulsed like it was nothing, sending them slamming backward what had to be thirty yards. And why a bunch more were already floating facedown in what was now hip-deep water.
“Olga was right,” Ray said, gripping my arm. “They’re gonna kill ’em using weapons made out of their own people!”
“No, they’re not.” I scanned the room again. “Stay here.”
“What?”
“Just guard Rufus for a minute, okay?”
“What are you—no!” And then, when he realized what was about to happen: “No, don’t you dare!”
But I did, because I didn’t have a choice. Another minute of those things, and there wouldn’t be anybody on our side left standing. And it wasn’t going to go down like that.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, and jumped.
The shield Rufus had thrown up was the kind that let people out, but not in. Although, judging by the expression of the vamp I grabbed, nobody had really expected me to leave. Or to use him as a buffer to keep the mages’ spells off me while I leapt over the balcony and into thin air—
And grabbed one of the little black camera balls as it whizzed past.
The sizzling body of the vamp fell into the drink, and I took off—under an enormous, slashing tentacle; through another huge waterfall that had just opened up; and out the other side, drenched and gasping, only to slam into a line of vamps leaning over the railing, one of which grabbed me. And found himself flun
g into the windows a second later, when I popped a leg, and looked around for—
Yes!
“Richard! Richard Kim!”
The shout was unnecessary, because the reporter had already spotted me. He was standing on the balcony below Curly and staring at me with his mouth hanging open, I have no idea why. I waved the ball around at him, and then pointed with my toes, since my hands were busy.
“Over there! Send me there!”
But he didn’t send me there. He didn’t send me anywhere. He just stood there, the controller limp and useless in his hands, while the camera and I went around and around in a little circle.
“Dick!” I said fervently, as a vamp jumped up at me from the floor.
And missed, because Richard suddenly got with the program and swerved me abruptly to the side.
And then sent me careening through a minefield of leaping vampires, slashing water, and a merman that tried to stab me with a trident, because I guess to him all humans look alike. But I did a handstand on the ball and he ended up stabbing the vamp jumping up behind me instead. And then I jerked his weapon out of the vamp and sent it flying into the group around the crate.
What looked like blue-white electricity spidered across the knot of vamps, causing some to fall out and everyone else to look around in shock. Right before I added to the chaos by plowing into the middle of them. I grabbed the crate, hit a vamp in the head with it, got hit back, saw stars, and ended up hanging off the camera ball by my knees with the crate in my hands, while three—make that four—vamps tried to pull it away from me.
But the camera was stronger than it looked, and kept on tugging, and I hung on to the crate with one hand while I used the other to get a stake in the lead guy. He let go, and since the others had been holding on to him, they all fell back, too, and suddenly I was flying.
Straight at someone who had just appeared on the balcony, grabbed the remote from Richard, and used it to jerk me over to him. Somebody with a topknot of dark braids and burning, alien eyes. Somebody who looked like he’d like to rip my throat out like the vampire he wasn’t, but which the damned bitch riding him had once been.
