by Karen Chance
“Yes, they can!” I insisted, furiously dodging through the crowd. And yet somehow meeting Marlowe coming the other way.
Crap.
“And just how do you expect them to do that?” Ray demanded, as a hard hand grabbed me around the throat.
But not so hard that I couldn’t talk.
“What if Cheung happened to mention to his would-be employers just how you got your network?” I asked Ray, as I was jerked up. “And what if they decided to take a page out of your playbook? You said it yourself—it’s easy enough once you think of it, only nobody ever does.…”
Marlowe’s hand tightened, almost to the point of strangulation. Which didn’t stop him from demanding information. “What are you saying?”
I looked up at the mirror, looming huge at the far end of the room, and a shiver went up my spine. Or maybe it wasn’t just me. Because for a second, it looked like the whole room was shivering. And then I realized why, when another ripple—tiny, tiny, like a single drop of rain on the surface of a lake—shimmied across the supposedly hard glass.
“I’m saying…what if they hack it?” I gasped, just as the whole surface exploded outward.
Marlowe threw me to the ground and fell on top of me, as hard shards of glass erupted across the combat oval, tearing at my skin and sending the crowd into panic mode. Or maybe that was more about what was coming through the now quite visible portal. From under Marlowe’s arm, I watched five huge, shaggy creatures break off from the horde and make straight for us.
They looked kind of like werewolves—in the same way that saber-toothed tigers look kind of like kitties. They were huge—at least twice the size of normal werewolves, but with none of the elegant lines and dignified bearing of the Clans. Who would probably have run screaming at the sight of them.
I kind of felt like that, too, until Marlowe threw out a hand.
And their heads exploded, one after another, like gory firecrackers.
The bodies thudded to the ground, still sliding forward on their own blood and past momentum, almost reaching us before Marlowe jerked me back. “How sure are you?” he yelled, to be heard over the screaming and the yelling and the whoosh of the vampire guards descending on the rest of the horde like a blurry wave.
“About what?”
“The fey!”
“Pretty sure. But—” I looked at the more immediate problem. “What are they?”
“Cannon fodder,” Marlowe said grimly. “The real army will be behind them.”
“And when it gets through?”
“It won’t. I have a group on the way to the basement now. Stay out of the way; this won’t take long.”
“The basement—what?” I asked, but he was already gone.
I didn’t have a chance to pursue him, because I had to hit the deck again to avoid the chandelier that came crashing down like a ball of ice. Literally, I realized, as it shattered against the floor, and some of the pieces flew up and hit my arm. And left marks on my skin, because they were cold enough to burn.
And I didn’t have to ask why. Bullets were flying everywhere, prompting me to jerk Ray to the ground as several whistled by overhead. Because a new group had joined the party. And if I’d thought the other Weres were strange, they were nothing compared to the new arrivals.
They looked like Hollywood’s idea of the wolf man, with grotesquely elongated hands, talon-like claws and weirdly distorted faces. And vaguely human bodies, because I guess it’s hard to carry that much hardware in full wolf form. And they were armed to the teeth.
Fortunately, cannon fodder didn’t seem to aim too well. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter. Because every place one of their rounds landed turned into a winter wonderland.
The floor was suddenly mostly ice, crackling around my shoes and threatening to freeze my feet through the soles. Mirrors cracked and shattered on all sides, fissures appeared in the walls where marble slabs had been adhered to the surface, and a few slid off to detonate in thunderclaps against the floor. The consul’s balcony was hit, carving off a chunk, and causing one of Ming-de’s servants to abruptly meet the ground. And to then shatter into a hundred pieces, because he must have been caught in the spell, too.
The fey spell was wreaking havoc, but the wards were doing exactly bupkes about it. So either they were down, which seemed impossible this fast, or the spell was so alien that they didn’t recognize it. And either way, we were—
“Come on!” Ray said, tugging on my hand. “There’s nothing we can do. We gotta get out of here!”
“How?” I yelled, to be heard over the din.
It was already threatening to become a mass stampede, with the people who hadn’t slipped on the icy floor starting to trample each other in a desperate bid to get out. This wasn’t helped by the late arrivals, who obviously didn’t realize what was going on. They were still pushing from the opposite direction, trying to get in before they missed the excitement and managing to create even more.
And then the lights blew out, and everything went dark.
The crowd issued a collective scream and panicked. And the resulting chaos made it impossible to hear any directions that might have been given. Not that anybody appeared to be bothering.
I could still see, after a moment, due to the glistening blue light coming from the portal. It wasn’t much, but it lit the consuls, who were watching the events occurring below as if they were spectators at a play. A not very interesting one.
Hassani looked bored and vaguely irritated, and wasn’t doing anything that I could see, although a few of his vamps were using the creatures for target practice. But Ming-de must have been annoyed about her shattered servant. Because she was peering over the edge of the balcony, a slight smile on her pretty features as she watched her apparently knife-edged fans decapitate creature after creature.
For his part, Marlowe had delegated some of his boys to try to corral the crazy by the exit and to hunt down the creatures who were thrashing around here and there. The rest were grouped around the portal, systematically decimating the cannon fodder still coming through. Most of which weren’t even making it completely out before being cut down.
Despite the initial pandemonium, things were slowly getting back in hand, and I breathed a brief sigh of relief. It looked like maybe Marlowe had been right after all—this wouldn’t take long. Someone even seemed to have gotten the lights back on, although they must have been the emergency variety, because they were blue, too.
Blue and swirling, I realized, a second before I threw Ray to the icy floor and dove after him, as what looked an awful lot like another portal opened up almost on top of us.
I jerked him back, into the maybe three-foot gap between the portal and the wall, as a wash of slime started vomiting out the other side.
“What the hell is that?” Ray shrieked, which might have been a problem if the things pouring out in front of us had had ears. But they didn’t—or hands or feet or anything except gelatinous, squid-like bodies that squirted around underfoot harmlessly for a moment, to the point that I wondered what they were even doing here.
Until one of them a few yards away began to quiver. And to shake. And to explode, sending a familiar burst of acid-laced pus shooting into the air and setting a nearby guard’s clothes on fire.
And it was only the first, like the initial kernel in a bag of popcorn. A minute later, gelatinous bombs were going off everywhere, setting little fires across the dark. Which would have had normal vampires in hysterics, but the nearby area was mostly filled with guards, who had been better trained than that.
Until they realized that the fire didn’t go out.
As bad as the blood of Slava’s vamps had been, the gel-like bodies of the creatures were worse. Because they stuck like glue, and the fire burned like phosphorus, and any guards who couldn’t whip off a piece of affected clothing before the poison reached their skin began to burn like living candles.
One ran past us, screaming and flaming and flailing—and slamming stra
ight into the crowd. Which was also largely composed of vampires. And although he was tackled by two of his fellow guards a split second later, it was too late. “Panic” wasn’t the word for what broke out, with crazed people even jumping for the consul’s balcony in their terror, only to be smacked right down again by the guards.
Until one of Hassani’s men smacked a guard in return and somersaulted over the balcony, decapitating a Were with one sword stroke and grabbing a nearby girl who had been about to be lunch. He threw her up to one of his fellow soldiers, and then started grabbing random guests, plucking them off their feet and tossing them after the girl, with no regard for fine clothes or hurt feelings. Not that anybody seemed to be complaining; in fact, after a second he was all but mobbed, although his fellow soldiers didn’t look real interested in—
“Dory!”
The voice came from above, and I looked up to see Radu’s blond hanging over the edge of the balcony, dangling something. It was red and twisty—the curtains, I realized, a split second before I grabbed it. And then Ray grabbed me and a moment later, we were airborne again.
We were hauled over the side of the balcony, not by the blond, but by Anthony. He was back in his clothes, a bright purple toga in this case, and back in charge. “Go, go, go!” He had a sword in one hand and used the other to slap the shoulders of a double line of vamps pouring over the side of the balcony and into the fray—the guards from outside, I assumed.
He caught my eye. “Having fun yet?”
“No! What the hell is going on? I thought we only had one portal to worry about!”
“So did I. I just sent Radu’s man after him to make inquiries. Radu knows about portals.”
“And what about you?”
“I know about killing things,” he said, before being plucked off his feet by the talons of a huge birdlike creature that came out of nowhere.
Anthony’s sword flashed, gutting his ride halfway across the arena, and then he and it both fell. I didn’t see what happened after that, because of the darkness, and because the fighting had just increased by about a thousand percent. And then Ray was dragging me off to the side.
“We don’t need Radu,” he told me quickly. “I know what’s happening.”
“That makes one of us,” I said, grabbing a sword off a wounded vamp. It looked like somebody had designated the private boxes and the hallway and stairwell behind them as the triage area, because lower-level vamps were running up the stairs with makeshift slings filled with casualties. Most looked like other low-level types, along with some humans in evening attire—people caught in the stampede, as a guess.
I didn’t see any masters.
But then, other than the guards, I hadn’t seen many masters in the fight at all.
So what the hell were they doing?
“It’s the shield,” Ray was saying. “The place was secure until it went down. After that, anything goes.”
“Come again?”
He sighed. “The shield…Look, it doesn’t just protect a portal. It shields an area of a line. Because a portal is just a tunnel cutting through a ley line, and without a shield—”
“They can cut as many as they like.”
“Yes.”
“Then why were they so concentrated on this portal?”
“Because it was the only way through the shield. It’s like…a gateway in a wall, okay? Why do you think those old castles always went to so much trouble to shield their gateways? Because that’s where they were vulnerable. The wall—or the shield in this case—keeps the bad guys out. But there has to be a door for the good guys to get in.”
“And our door is the portal.”
He nodded. “That’s why they call it a gate.”
My head hurt. I wasn’t good with all this metaphysical crap. I was like Anthony; I was good at killing things. Or rescuing things, only I had no idea where Louis-Cesare was, and I’d never even seen Mircea’s room from the outside. It could be anywhere in the labyrinth of corridors running through the interior of the consul’s house.
And even if I could find them, they might be better off where they were. Rather than being dragged unconscious through the thick of the fight by someone who wasn’t likely to be much protection right now. Especially with a sword that my arm didn’t feel strong enough to wield.
I passed it to Ray and took a gun from a guard who had just been brought up—the first master I’d seen. Something had all but bisected him, and yet he was still trying to crawl off the pallet, to get back to the fight. Unlike the rest of them.
Where were they?
“Stay down,” someone told him, and I looked up to see the brunette senator Anthony had been with earlier. She’d found her clothes, too, only to have the front of her pale blue evening gown smeared with dark blood, since she seemed to be the one serving as hospital manager.
“You are Dory?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Kit said to tell you that the men he sent to the basement earlier have not reported in. He wants you to check on them.”
“He wants…” I looked at her incredulously. “What is going on? Where are your masters?”
“Those sworn to the North American Senate are in the fight, those who were here, in any case. And more have been summoned. But they cannot use the portal, and therefore will take time to arrive.”
“And the other senates? What are they doing—sitting on their hands?”
“Yes,” she said, bitterly. “Except for Anthony’s. But he had few masters with him, as most of his were knocked out of the competition early. He is doing what he can, but he does not have the numbers—”
“But there’s a metric ton of master vampires here!”
“Belonging to other senates. Who do not wish to waste their resources on a fight which is not theirs.”
“Not…Then whose fight is it?” I demanded. “The fey are coming to slaughter them, or didn’t they get the memo?” Marlowe would have had more than enough time now to flash a thought around, telling everyone what was going on.
“They heard, but they do not believe. The fey have never attacked us, they say; why should they do so now? Undeclared?”
“Because that’s the best way to win?”
“They do not believe a king of the fey would be so dishonorable.”
“Then what do they think is happening?”
“That our consul is staging this, to force them to do what they have been avoiding, and to put their forces under her control.”
I just looked at her for a moment. “What?”
She nodded. “Our kind can sometimes be too suspicious. It has hurt us before.”
“Fuck hurt; it’s about to kill you!” I snarled, before Ray dragged me away.
“I think I know what’s in the basement,” he told me.
“What?”
“The shield’s power source. Marlowe must have sent his people to reactivate it, once the other side brought it down.”
“But they haven’t.” And I couldn’t think of a single reason for that that didn’t involve something nasty.
“No. But as soon as they do—or as soon as someone does—the shield goes back up.”
“Trapping us in here with the mutant squad!” I pointed out.
“But keeping out the fey army,” he pointed out right back.
He won.
And even better, this was something I could do. Exhausted or not, I could activate a freaking shield charm. We had one in the basement; it wasn’t hard.
“All right, I’m going,” I told him. “Stay—”
“We’re going,” he said, cutting me off.
“You—” I stopped checking the master’s pockets for ammo. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do,” he said, crabby as ever. “What if there’s a problem with the shield? You don’t know anything about that stuff. But I can jury-rig something out of almost nothing.”
That was true.
“It could be dangerous.”
“Like
this isn’t?”
“Okay, it could be more dangerous.”
Ray crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at me. “I’m coming.” It was flat.
It was also something else.
I thought about all the senior masters, sitting on their hands or taking a few potshots here and there, and refusing to join in the fight. I thought about how much more power they had than a small, chubby, low-level little guy who was nonetheless willing to put his neck on the line. And then I thought that maybe the Senate’s method of choosing new members was screwed.
“I guess maybe you are Batman,” I told him roughly. “Come on.”
Chapter Forty-four
We’d reached the bend in the stairwell when Ray suddenly grasped my arm, his grip tight enough to bruise. “Wait.”
I froze, looking around for a danger I didn’t see. Just bare marble walls, with what sounded like an epic battle raging on the other side. “What?”
“Just…hold on.…” He was fumbling around in his coat with his free hand, and finally pulled out his wallet. And from that he took—
“What’s this?” I asked, staring blankly at the mushed-up granola bar he gave me.
“Just eat it.”
“Why?”
“Did you have dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, dinner, dinner! Did you eat?” He waved a hand. “No, don’t bother to answer that. I already know. You never eat.”
“The food at my house was drugged!”
“Yeah, you always got an excuse. But then you end up bottomed out of energy and we almost die.” He pointed a slightly shaking hand at the bar. “Eat it!”
I ate it.
It was good.
I held up sticky fingers. “Happy?”
“Not for longer than I can remember,” Ray said fervently, and gave me a little push. “Let’s go.”
We went.
And found portals opening everywhere when we hit the great hall, and I do mean everywhere. One appeared in the floor almost under our feet, even before we managed to exit the stairwell, swallowing up the last few steps and almost swallowing us. We leapt across as creatures started crawling out, clearing them by inches, only to hit the ice rink the floor had become and slide into the thick of the fight.
