by Karen Chance
I think the captain was trying to jiggle his stowaways loose, and he was doing a damn good job—on me. Mircea grabbed me as my grip started to slip and swung us over the side just as the rounded hull came into view. “No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “You aren’t suggesting—”
“I have you,” he assured me, setting my feet down onto the very uneven planks of the hull. “Think of them as small steps.”
“To where?”
“Up there,” Mircea said as the ship slowly began to rise back toward the balcony.
“The people trying to kill us are up there!”
“They’re down here, as well,” he pointed out. “And we have more allies there.”
“One of whom could be a traitor!”
“No. The suspects have been given the night off and instructed not to return before dawn. If one of them does, we’ll have him.”
We’d almost reached the keel, but the mages were right behind us and the balcony looked very far away. And unless I was imagining things, the rotation had picked up speed. “Wait. What if the traitor decided to go with a bomb instead?”
“We’ve checked. The apartment is perfectly safe.”
“Yeah. It looks it!” I said, and then the flat deck was coming up at us again and there was suddenly nowhere to put my feet. Not that it mattered because the ship’s rotation jerked to a halt, with my toes hanging off the edge. “Mircea!”
He didn’t answer, just swept me up and jumped down to the mast, which was sticking out of the deck like a bridge. The mages had nowhere near good enough balance to follow along the curved, polished surface, and so they decided to start flinging spells instead. One of the furled sails went up in flames right beside us and then Mircea put on a burst of speed and we were suddenly out of mast and jumping.
“Did you have to carry her?” Pritkin demanded, as we landed back on the balcony.
Mircea ignored him, beckoning the Chinese barge closer. “Come with us!” I said, gripping his hand.
He shook his head. “If Saunders gets away tonight, he’ll go into hiding. It may be months, even years, before we have him again.”
“You don’t have him now! He has you!”
The Chinese barge slid alongside, and Mircea picked Pritkin up and handed him over the side into the arms of the waiting captain. He said something in Mandarin, and the vamp nodded, setting Pritkin on his feet and reaching for me. I ended up over the side and on the deck before I quite realized it was happening.
“Mircea! Don’t do this!”
It was like he didn’t even hear. He turned and disappeared back into the thick, choking column of smoke that was now billowing out of the apartment. He didn’t look back.
I turned to Pritkin as the barge slipped rapidly away. “We have to get him out of there!”
“I’d be a bit more worried about us, if I were you,” he said as a large white ship appeared in the sky.
I knew it must have come from the ley line, but it had merged with real space so quickly that it looked like a magician’s trick. That made sense, as there were a few hundred mages lined up along the railing—the ones Saunders had boasted about, I guessed. “Tell me again that they don’t want us dead,” I said as a fiery blast exploded out of the side of the vessel, passed a yard in front of us and hit the clipper broadsides.
The ship went up like a Roman candle. The explosion of burning wood, rope and sail hit us, causing our craft to swerve precariously in a wide arc. I held on to the railing and watched burning pieces of the clipper ship plummet to the parking lot below. They crashed onto the rows of employee cars, sending half a dozen somersaulting skyward and setting off a chorus of car alarms. I didn’t see any of the crew make it off.
Even worse, the Lord Protector’s ship was heading straight for the penthouse. If it got there with that number of reinforcements, Mircea was dead. There wasn’t even a question.
I grabbed the captain by the collar. “Stop them!” He didn’t seem to understand, so I shook him and pointed at the ship. “They can’t be allowed to dock!”
He just pried my hands off his silk tunic. Not a word was said, but the idea was conveyed anyway—he wasn’t crazy. Luckily, I was on board with someone who was—or at least gave a fair impression of it most of the time.
“Hold on!” Pritkin told me, and threw his weight onto the long rudder pole hanging off the back. Our course corrected with a lurch that sent me and the captain staggering to the other side of the barge. The only reason we didn’t fall off was the railing, which was sturdier than it looked. And then we were plowing straight into the side of Saunders’ ship.
Chapter Twenty-six
The impact slammed me into the railing and the reverberation hit the inside of my skull like cannon fire, unbelievably loud and echoing. Saunders’ ship tilted, sending a few mages overboard and making the rest very unhappy. The Chinese captain was screaming orders to his men as war mages swarmed over our deck. There were too many of them to fight, but the crazy staggering course of the conjoined ships was making that pretty much impossible anyway.
The initial impact had thrown us almost beyond Dante’s property, but something seemed to be wrong with the navigation system, because the two ships had no sooner reached the highway than they lurched drunkenly back toward the building again. The captain was desperately trying to free his ship, but the dragon masthead had crashed through a porthole on Saunders’ ship and it seemed to be stuck.
The weight was dragging down the other vessel, and tilting it dangerously. “The other side! Get to the other side!” someone yelled, and a large number of mages ran to the opposite half of the ship, trying to compensate. But it was too late.
Dante’s was rushing toward us, we were at least ten stories up and there was nothing underneath but burning cars and asphalt. The captain took a final look at the situation, said something that sounded pretty profane and pulled a gigantic ax out of his belt. A second later, the massive dragon’s neck was in two pieces and we were sliding away from the other ship.
The efforts Saunders’ ship had been making to compensate for our weight backfired when we suddenly departed. The other ship flipped completely over, spilling mages across the parking lot like salt from a shaker. Shields bloomed everywhere and then Pritkin was yelling in my ear. “Brace for impact!”
He threw his shields around us, and a second later, while I was still looking down at the parking lot, we plowed into the side of Dante’s.
The barge crashed through a window, into a bedroom, out into the corridor and through another wall separating the hall from a stairwell. We hadn’t even stopped moving when Pritkin grabbed my hand, towed me off the side and down the stairs. Unfortunately, the mages had pretty good reflexes, too, and ten or more had still been on the barge when it took the plunge.
A spell sizzled overhead, slamming against the concrete wall directly in front of us. Pritkin still had shields up, but he couldn’t maintain them long and no way could we fight so many. We hopped over the railing to the next level, and I spied a number six on the stairwell door.
“Get us to the fourth floor and I can get us out of this!” I told him as a spell evaporated his shields. He nodded, looking a little gray in the face, and we ran full out.
Two flights of stairs had never seemed so long. We didn’t worry about safety, about bruised knees when we tripped or scraped flesh when we couldn’t stop in time and slammed into a wall. We just kept going: past number five, dodge a spray of bullets, around the bend in the stairs, jump to the next flight to avoid being fried by a fireball, down another flight and finally through the door to four.
“This way!” I yelled, and we pelted down the corridor and into the tiki bar.
I hauled him through a side door and into the tiny storage room I’d been calling home. “Now what?” he demanded as feet pounded into the club.
“Now this,” I said, and gave him a shove. He fell backward through the portal, and at the same moment, a mage flung open the door. He was young, with
brown hair and glasses and a wash of freckles over his nose. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and for a moment, we just stared at each other. Then I jumped for the portal, he threw a spell and the world exploded in pain.
I tumbled out into the Old West saloon and rolled into Pritkin. I stared up at the out of order sign on the telephone and gasped in pain. My whole body was wracked with it, but my left leg felt like it was on fire.
The sound of clinking glasses, laughter and music drifted through the red velvet curtains, like there wasn’t a war going on upstairs. Pritkin caught sight of my face. “What happened?”
I just stared at him, tears flooding my eyes, and shook my head. If I tried to speak, I was going to scream. But as bad as the pain was, we couldn’t stay there. The mage had seen me disappear. He’d be right behind us.
Pritkin seemed to get the idea. He looped an arm under my shoulders and around my back, and he pulled me up. I put as much weight as possible on the good leg and we limped out into the club. People were everywhere, but thankfully the lighting was so dim, mostly from strings of lanterns overhead, that we didn’t attract as much attention as our looks probably warranted. Of course, the vision onstage might have also had something to do with that.
Dee Licious was lying in the spotlight on a shiny black baby grand, her dress a blinding mass of skintight fuchsia sequins, complete with matching boa. She was belting out a Liza montage and flirting with the handsome pianist at the same time. We turned toward the street, putting the stage at our backs, only to see two war mages stroll by outside.
“This way,” Pritkin said brusquely, pulling me back the other way. We hobbled through the forest of little tables toward the darkness at the side of the stage, where a red exit sign beckoned like a lifeline. We’d almost reached it when Pritkin stiffened. “What is it?” I asked.
“We have company.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see a group of dark shapes spill out of the alcove, looking around blindly while their eyes adjusted. Then Pritkin threw us through a door beside the stage, closing it firmly. There was no lock, but considering who was chasing us, that was kind of irrelevant anyway.
Dee Sire paused in front of a lighted mirror to stare at us. It looked like this was the performers’ dressing room. In addition to the table Dee was using as a vanity, there was a rack of colorful costumes in a corner and a towering pile of shoe boxes on a chair.
Dee smiled at me a lot sweeter than on our previous meeting. “Well, hello there.” Then she caught sight of Pritkin. “Damn, girl. And I thought you couldn’t look any worse than last time.”
He glanced at me, but I just shook my head and fell onto a chair beside the door. There was no way to explain the fabulousness that was Dee Sire in a couple of words, and I wasn’t up to any more. “Nice dress,” I gasped.
It was about eighty acres of cheap white satin, cut low and short and festooned with a train covered in fat white roses. More were tied into a careless bundle on the dressing table and another pile adorned her towering wig—bright red this time—anchoring a frothy veil. A wedding dress, drag queen style.
“It’s courtesy of that cow Licious,” Dee said, turning back to her mirror. “She knows damn well I do Liza. But we drew for the opening spot, and what does she decide she just has to sing? Sticking me with the tired old ‘Like a Virgin’ shtick. Although I will admit, it’s getting a little ridiculous at her age—”
“We, er, we’re kind of in a bind,” Pritkin said, cutting her off. “Is there a back way out?”
“Are you kidding? There’s back, front, and sideways,” Dee said, checking me out in the mirror while she slathered on the lipstick. “But your pretty friend there doesn’t look like he’s up to doing much running right now.”
I stared back at her, agony racing up my leg to my spine, and had to agree. If we had to outrun anyone else, I was toast. Not to mention the fact my foot in Pritkin’s boot was sliding on what felt like a lot of blood.
“Yes, well, there’s no other option at present,” Pritkin snapped.
Dee levered up her nine feet of satin and platforms. “There’re always options, sugar,” she said, and pushed him through the wall. “You, too,” she told me, pulling me up and copping a feel of Pritkin’s ass at the same time. “Ooh, nice,” she said, and pushed.
I expected a portal, but ended up merely falling through a ward that had hidden a small room. It seemed to be used by security. It was dark except for the light from a bank of televisions lined the wall in front of a small desk. Most of them showed the street outside, but one was trained on the stage. There was only one chair, and I took it.
Dee followed us in and turned the sound up. Licious was still in the spotlight, but she wasn’t singing. A handful of war mages had clustered around the stage and appeared to be trying to question her in front of the audience. Pritkin rolled his eyes. “Trainees,” he muttered, tugging at my boot.
“What was that?” Licious asked, bending over to push the microphone into the nearest mage’s face.
“I said, that sharp tongue of yours is going to get you in trouble one day!”
She laughed, a rich, full-throated purr. “Oh, but honey. It’s not sharp. It’s flexible.”
The audience roared, causing the man to flush angrily. He looked her up and down contemptuously, taking in the towering black wig, the sequins and the chandelier earrings. “Are you gay?”
“That depends. Are you lonely?” The audience erupted in jeers and catcalls. The man’s fellow mages jostled him out of harm’s way while Licious rose to her usual towering height. She whispered something to her pianist. “In honor of my new young friend, my last number tonight will be ‘I’m Coming Out,’ by Miss Diana Ross. And, baby, if you can dump your jealous friends, call me!”
Dee turned the sound back down. “I’m on next. Don’t worry; I’ll tell the girls to say they saw you run out a couple minutes ago. If you’d like to show your appreciation, there’s a charming pink number in Augustine’s window that would look divine on me.” She blew us a kiss and left.
“You have strange friends,” Pritkin said, finally wrestling my boot off.
I expected to see half the calf gone, judging by the pain. The khakis were soaked red to the knee, and slick streams of brilliant blood cascaded over the flesh of my bare foot. But when he pulled a knife out of my belt and slit the fabric, the actual wound was an ugly gash extending from the knee halfway to the groin.
“It’s a progressive curse,” Pritkin said grimly. “If left untreated, it will literally consume you.”
Consume him, he meant. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I hesitated. A mage came in the door and I didn’t jump in time—”
“You aren’t battle trained,” Pritkin said, dismissing it with a lot more composure than I’d have shown if the circumstances were reversed.
The wound was deep and bleeding heavily. He tried to hold it closed, causing me to bite the sleeve of his coat to keep from screaming. And it only caused more blood to well up between his fingers, the hot spatter soaking the front of his capris.
He stared at it for a long second, his hands gripping my thigh, and then looked up at me. “We have to switch back.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now! My body can heal this, but you don’t have the necessary knowledge and I don’t have time to teach you!”
“Have you forgotten . . . what’s circling this hotel?” I gasped.
“No.” He licked his lips. “But we have to risk it. You’re losing too much blood.”
I’d have preferred to wait until Billy Joe caught up with us, but that could be a while and I was already cold and shaky. I didn’t think this body had a while. “I’ll push you out,” I panted. “Just . . . don’t panic.”
Pritkin nodded, looking pale but relatively calm. I only hoped that lasted because as close as the Rakshasas were, we wouldn’t have much time if anything went wrong. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, and the next moment, I was sitting up with Pri
tkin’s body beneath me.
I put a ghostly arm out and no shields were in evidence. My hand went right up to his chest, and a couple of insubstantial fingers slipped inside his skin. I felt him start at the intrusion, but he didn’t shy away, although I could feel him trembling. I could feel something else, too.
Unlike most ghosts, his spirit was warm and almost solid against my hand. I’d never thought to ask Billy how ghosts feel to each other. But now that I thought about it, the times I’d possessed someone who was still in-house, so to speak, they hadn’t felt like Billy Joe normally did. They’d been a warm, solid presence. Like Pritkin.
I started rummaging around in his chest, trying to get a grip, and he began to look very nervous. “Calm down. I have an idea,” I told him.
“Whatever it is, can you hurry up?”
I nodded. This was either going to work or it wasn’t, and hesitating could be fatal. I gripped his spirit as tight as I could, stepped into my body and thrust him back into his. The whole thing took a couple of seconds, and suddenly, we were home.
He blinked at me blankly for a moment and then winced as the pain hit. “That was it? That’s all it took?”
“I guess,” I said dizzily. The sudden absence of pain made me a little light-headed.
“Why didn’t you just do that before?”
“Because I didn’t know about it before!” I snapped, sticking my head through the ward over the door.
I borrowed the least sparkly thing I could find—a plain white cotton blouse—to rip up for a bandage and ducked back inside. A glance at the monitors showed that the mages had spread out, with a few left in the club to guard the portal and the others doing a systematic search of the street. I wondered how long it would be before they decided to retrace their steps.
“I’m going to owe Dee big-time,” I said, shredding the cotton with the help of Pritkin’s knife. “I just hope this was off the rack.”
