by Karen Chance
Until recently, that is, when Louis-Cesare had gotten tired of playing bodyguard for an amiable tyrant and defected to the Senate’s North American counterpart, where his new role had yet to be determined.
But it wasn’t likely to be in central intelligence.
Not that he was a dumb jock, or dumb at all. But he was honorable—to a fault. And honest and decent and straightforward, none of which were traits that adapted well to the world of court intrigue. Not in Europe, where scheming Anthony ruled with an iron fist, and not at the court of courts that our own consul was putting together. Which, as luck would have it, had just become the focus of the entire vampire world.
The usually somewhat-turgid and uber-traditional vamp society had gotten a shake-up recently, when the long-running war in Faerie spilled over into Earth. And quickly became enough of a threat to cause the unthinkable: an alliance of the world’s six vampire senates for the first time ever, since for the first time ever they had a common enemy. Other than themselves, of course.
Nobody knew how this was going to work, or if it was, since the senates mostly hated one another. So, normally, I’d have been worried about Louis-Cesare in that unholy snake pit, which was now more like an unholy canyon filling up with opportunists from all over the world, eager to make whatever they could out of the war and the chaos it provided. Because they wouldn’t get another chance like this.
Opportunities for advancement were pretty damned rare in vamp society, since immortal butts don’t often vacate seats. That was especially true for the highest positions, which had waiting lists that could span centuries. But the war had changed all that, causing previously despised outcasts with useful skills to suddenly be looked at with new eyes.
Outcasts like me.
It was why I wasn’t as worried for Louis-Cesare as I might have been, since I was right down there in the snake pit with him. Because, believe it or not—and I still mostly didn’t—the newest member of the illustrious North American Vampire Senate, the ruling body of millions of vampires at home and the leading force of the coalition abroad, was . . .
Me.
No, seriously.
No, seriously.
Okay, it was actually Dorina, who Mircea had somehow managed to convince people was a first-level master vamp wearing a human suit.
And, yeah, under normal circumstances, that sort of carefree manipulation of the facts would have gotten him a padded cell—or a stake, since vamps don’t bother warehousing their problems. But these circumstances weren’t normal. The war had taken the lives of half of the old Senate members and new ones had been needed stat, preferably ones who might be useful in the upcoming fight.
Of course, there were plenty of people who fit that description and would seem a more logical choice than me. Hell, the garbage boy would have seemed a more logical choice than me. Dhampirs and vampires are natural enemies, and while I’d recently come to have a slightly more . . . progressive . . . view on the matter, most of them still hissed at the sight of me. Yet the consul had given me the nod anyway, for the same reason that she’d snapped up Louis-Cesare: daddy dearest had promised her that I’d vote the way she wanted.
And with a bunch of new senators on board and not all of her choosing, and with rival consuls and their entourages flooding in to discuss the war, and with everybody watching her every move, just waiting for a chance to replace her as the newly appointed leader of the vampire world . . .
Well, even a dhampir’s support had started to look pretty good.
Of course, I could have declined the honor and the Mack truck of excrement probably headed toward the fan of my life as a result. But the family had needed help, Louis-Cesare had needed an ally, and I had kind of wanted to go on living. Something that wasn’t likely if the fey flooded through a bunch of illegal portals and murdered us all.
So I’d said okay.
I just hadn’t stopped to wonder how a chick who’d spent most of her life as a pariah, scrounging up a living on the fringes of vamp society, was supposed to fit in at the court of courts.
Where people were tipped in gold.
“You’re going to need some friends, too,” Louis-Cesare told me, as if he’d been following my thoughts. And the next thing I knew, my hands were full of coins, old ones with a smirking guy on the front with a big nose and a wig. And before I could respond to that, a roar went up, one that made the former bedlam sound like a day at the park and seemed to be coming from directly overhead. I looked up—
And promptly forgot everything else.
Holy shit, I thought, caught flat-footed for the second time in one night.
We’d reached the ruined lobby, which was a working sea of people below, and above . . . was crazy town. It was also mostly missing. The fire damage hadn’t looked that bad from outside, where the sturdy exterior walls had masked the carnage within, but now I could see that the entire center was gutted. As if it had acted like a chimney, pulling the fire up and out, and leaving us staring at fifteen floors of mostly open space, bisected by half-fallen girders and ropes of electrical lines, forming a giant echo chamber.
And it had plenty to echo. Hordes of spectators were clustered in working knots on the floors that could still support their weight, jostling for space on the cracked and burnt remains of people’s apartments. Thousands had already beaten us to the punch, staking out prime spots while we were goofing off outside, and now they were shouting and stomping their feet and banging on things, which I didn’t think was too smart considering the state of this place. And which was sending siftings of black ash down like evil snow, covering everything in drifts of soot nobody cared about, because the fight was about to begin.
Although where it was I had no idea. I didn’t see anything that even vaguely resembled a ring, or so much as a cordoned-off section of floor. Of course, it was possible that it was buried somewhere under the massive crowd, which covered every square inch of the lobby, and seemed to want ours, too, judging by the amount of abuse we were taking.
“Dory!” I somehow heard the shout, which seemed to be coming from a towering pile of ruined furniture by a wall.
There were some more stalls over there—the usual T-shirts, hats, and water bottles. And one selling nothing but flashlights in all shapes and sizes, along with ropes of batteries in garlic-string-like bunches festooned everywhere. I almost bought one; it was gloomy as shit in here.
Which was why I couldn’t tell who was calling me.
“Dory!”
I finally noticed that the spray-painter had been at work here, too, with neon green arrows flickering in the scattered torchlight, high on smoky black walls. They pointed the way to everything from booze to food to areas designated as toilets that I didn’t want to know any more about. To a dripping line that said merely FIN.
There was no further explanation offered, but then, one wasn’t needed. The hoi polloi of bookmakers might have set up outside, in the mud and muck, and managed to nab some business. But those in the know had bypassed them, because they knew better odds were to be found within.
They knew to look for Fin.
And, sure enough, the face peering at me over the side of the furniture pile was familiar. It was also full of nose, because Fin was of the troll persuasion. But unlike the mountain variety, who sort of resembled their namesake, he was an itty-bitty forest troll. One with a serious admiration for Olga, and no, I didn’t know how that worked, but I assumed it was the reason he was beckoning us over.
Fin usually operated his business out of his bar, where you could get a bet down on anything from human and nonhuman sports to how fast a spider could traverse a girder. Fin covered it all, and had a rep for paying up promptly when he lost, which was probably why his makeshift perch looked like it was being besieged. We fought our way through to him anyway, using the bears as battering ram and buffer in one, which allowed us to reach the bottom of the pile m
ore or less intact.
“Been trying to reach you all day!” Fin yelled, while continuing to accept money and write slips. “You kill another phone or what?”
I held it up. “Got it on me!”
“Well, turn it on once in a while! I got news!”
“A job?” I yelled, because Fin had been known to shoot work my way. And while I didn’t think moonlighting was normal for a senator, neither was starvation. And nobody had bothered to mention before I took my shiny new Senate job that it didn’t come with a salary.
A girl needed to get paid.
“No! A warning!”
He made a disgruntled sound and handed the bookmaking off to his senior associate. And clambered down the mountain, although not all the way. He found a perch that left him approximately chest high on Olga, which seemed to be a view he liked. Because he simpered at her while she gazed around the lofty space above us, probably searching for the albino.
I poked him. “What warning?”
“There’s a rumor going around—some of my competition are already giving odds.”
“On what?”
“On how long you’ll last!”
“What?” It felt like I was saying that a lot tonight.
Fin nodded. “I’m not taking them, of course, us being friends and all, but others—” He broke off, eyeing the gleaming stash I was still clutching. “Of course, if you want to get a bet down on something else, I can—”
“Fin!” I pushed the gold at Louis-Cesare, who indicated with a grin that his hands were full of bear. Bastard. So I shoved it in my pocket for the moment. “What are you talking about?”
“Just that you’re a senator now, and nobody saw that coming!”
“So they think I’m going to get fired?”
“No. They think you’re gonna get dead!” he yelled, because some enthusiastic drumming had started from somewhere behind us, loud enough to tear through the din and my head.
I glanced around to see a bunch of trolls emerging from a room across the lobby. They were threading their way ponderously through the crowd, not that they had to work too hard. Everyone was practically trampling one another to get out of the way.
I didn’t blame them.
They were the biggest damned trolls I’d ever seen.
The nearest was what I called shadow-on-a-rock, a mostly gray skin tone with purplish highlights in the crevasses, and had to be at least twelve feet tall. He had a torso like the Hulk’s and arms thicker around than Olga’s entire body. I’d never thought of her as a dainty, sylphlike creature before, but if these were what full-grown male trolls looked like, I was revising my opinion. And he was one of the smaller ones.
The biggest was fortunate that the ceiling was mostly missing, because the bits that remained were well below chin height, and that was despite the lobby having had a vaulted ceiling. He was a colossus with sun-kissed-mountain-range skin, mostly indigo with a scattering of orange-copper highlights. They gleamed in the torchlight, along with a map of scars, some new and vivid, some old and stretched, scrawling across the massive chest and back and arms. Advertising just how many of these contests he’d already survived.
I licked my lips uneasily. I’d thought the duo living in my basement were big, but I now recognized them for what they were: scrawny adolescents. And understood a little better why Olga had wanted an entire truckload of backup.
Not that we were looking so formidable, all of a sudden.
There seemed to be two groups, distinguished by the red or blue bandannas they wore on bulging biceps. Or, more likely, repurposed tablecloths, because just look at them. Most of the crowd didn’t even come up to their waists, including some of our garden-variety green-brown boys, while some of the smaller beings scuttling around were in danger of being turned into a greasy spot with one misplaced step.
I didn’t see anybody get crushed, but one obviously drunken ogre a few stories above us threw a bottle, and had the good aim or bad luck to have it bounce off the biggest guy’s head. I doubt it hurt—the rock-hard cranium was encased in a helmet it didn’t need—but I guess it made him mad. Because a split second later, maybe fifteen hundred pounds of muscle had jumped up, grabbed the offender, and landed back on the tile, with enough force to shudder it under our feet and to crack it around his giant ones.
And then he casually flicked the guy through a wall.
It looked like that was what the crowd had been waiting for, because they started roaring and stomping even harder than before, giving every impression of enjoying the pregame show.
I barely noticed. I was too busy wondering if maybe I couldn’t see a ring because we were standing in it, and how it might be a good plan to, you know, get out, which was what everybody else appeared to be doing. The groaning stairways were suddenly flooded with people trying to get to higher levels, and crushing us against the wall in the process.
“Are you listening to me?” Fin demanded, as even Olga ended up hugging brick.
“No,” I breathed, and doubted he heard it. But he must have seen it, because the wrinkled forehead acquired another one.
“Dory! I’m trying to tell you that you’re in danger!”
“No shit,” I said, as the trolls started scaling the burnt brick, pulling themselves up ruined floor after ruined floor, until the blue and red teams were facing each other, not on the ground, but on the walls.
And, finally, I understood. The fight—a free-for-all between a dozen massive guys on each side—was to take place in the demolished open space in the center of the building, up and down fifteen stories as combatants leapt and dove and swung through open air, getting assists from a few dangling ropes the showrunners had provided while dodging the pots and pans, broken bottles, and burnt, ragged-edged table legs many of the fans were wielding. Which they clearly planned to use to help their favorite team by clobbering the hell out of the other guys.
“Interesting,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes shining.
Because he was insane.
Like Fin, apparently, who had leaned over to grab me and yell something in my ear.
“What?”
“. . . warn you . . . word on the streets . . . seat.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“Heard . . . want . . . seat!”
“What seat? It’s standing-room only!”
Fin was starting to look frustrated, but not nearly as much as I was, because how were we supposed to find anybody in this? We’d be lucky to avoid getting pancaked by a falling troll. Like, really lucky, I thought, staring upward at thousands of pounds of muscle hanging off barely-holding-together walls as a sound like a thousand trumpets pealed through the air, loud enough to make me actually nauseous. And to drown out whatever the hell Fin was yelling.
“I don’t want a damned chair!” I told him, ears ringing, as I tried to pry him off. Which should have been easy, because forest trolls are a lot less butch than their mountain counterparts, only this one was determined.
And now he was shaking me. And screaming in my already-wounded ear. “Not a chair! A seat! They want your Senate seat!”
I frowned at him. “What? Who does?”
“Hello.” It was the girl with the purple hair and the catsuit, appearing out of nowhere and giving me a little wave.
And the next thing I knew, I was flying.
Chapter Four
For a moment, everything was darkness and disorientation and the disturbing feeling of no longer being properly attached to earth. And thunderous noise, because the crowd was on all sides now, since I’d just been thrown something like three stories straight up. And flipped head over heels in the process, to the point that I only knew where I was by the torches burning in the lobby below, a ring of fire slinging around me as I tumbled through space, getting farther away by the second.
Gravity being a thing, I fully expected to be
reacquainted with them shortly, when I hit the floor in a puddle of used-to-be-dhampir. And maybe I would have—except that I hit the side of a moving mountain first. To whom I clung like a limpet, because literally all I could see were thrashing bodies and flailing fists, all of which were bigger than my head.
Way bigger.
And aimed at us, I realized. Team Immovable Object and Team Irresistible Force were meeting with a crash like two freight trains coming together, with me in the middle. Because I’d happened to catch hold of the big boy, whom everybody seemed to agree had an unfair advantage.
So they were trying to take him out first.
Half of the opposing team jumped him, most of them having already found weapons consisting of whatever the fire had spared. Kitchen knives, heavy pieces of furniture, and what appeared to be part of a solid steel girder all came at us at the same time. Causing my ride to do a 360 flip in midair, coming off the wall and going straight up, amazingly fast and balletic for someone his size.
Leaving the would-be attackers to crash into the wall below.
“All right,” I breathed, grinning in shock and relief as we righted again, on a broken ledge another story up. “All right! Yeah!”
Which, in retrospect, wasn’t the best idea. Because troll hearing works a lot better than troll eyesight, and Big Blue realized he had a hitchhiker. And flicked me off his shoulder like an annoying insect, one headed straight at the opposite wall, which was about to serve as a flyswatter.
But I wasn’t a fly, and I grabbed one of the hanging ropes in passing, somehow getting my knees up and my feet out. And managed to push off from the wall instead of splatting onto it. And ended up—
Right back in the thick of things.
The next few seconds were a kaleidoscope of impressions more than thoughts, because I didn’t have time for thoughts. Bodies were tumbling, bricks were flying, blood was spurting—green, oh good. And I was getting smacked around by both sides, because I couldn’t see well enough to find a way out.
