by Karen Chance
The only reason I could think of for the suicidal passivity was Radu’s imprisonment. Maybe they had threatened him if Louis-Cesare fought back? It didn’t make a lot of sense, as he knew perfectly well what Drac had planned for his brother, but it was the best theory I had. I grabbed the mage standing guard at the door, who had been too caught up in the little torture session to notice the wild-looking woman sneaking up on him. His neck snapped almost silently, any tiny sound covered by Jonathan’s thick voice.
There was blood under the mage’s fingernails as he caressed his prize, toying with the purple bruises and crusty blood around the older wounds. It slicked his hand and stuck his fingers together, thicker than honey as it dried. The urge to snap the thin man’s neck made my fingers twitch sharply as he leaned in, staring at Louis-Cesare with a hungry look. “Do you remember how inventive I could be?”
I ignored the dull beat of anger throbbing behind my eyes and stowed the mage behind the sofa. I slipped into the entryway, careful to keep close to the wall. It was dark in the shadows, away from the chandelier’s light, and my coating of black mud was good camouflage—for both sight and scent. Another mage was a few feet in front of me, watching the show.
In a sudden, savage motion, Jonathan pulled out the poker and was rewarded with a barely audible gasp, just a brief inhalation that was soft even to my ears. But the mage heard.
He smiled at Louis-Cesare tenderly, approvingly, his hands stroking down the long torso, smearing the spattered blood that stained his skin. “He died every day, and was reborn every night,” he crooned, his voice a sing-song, “like an ancient god, like Mithras himself.” Without warning, he slid his finger into the gap left by the poker; I could see it moving under the flesh of Louis-Cesare’s side. “I never killed him twice in the same way.”
“You never killed him at all,” Dracula said testily. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to see the madness in those gray eyes.
Jonathan didn’t seem to hear. “He died so beautifully, every time. Mostly in silence, but occasionally I would bring him to screams of agony, to passionate death throes.” His free hand caressed Louis-Cesare’s bare flank while his finger sank farther into its sheath of skin, to the base of his knuckles. “Will you scream for me one last time?”
Louis-Cesare shivered in revulsion, but he lifted his head to stare at him, haughty, defiant. I thought that’s how the French aristocrats must have looked, going to the guillotine on the order of a middle-class bureaucrat, the blood of Charles Martel flowing in their veins. Then, over Jonathan’s shoulder, he saw me.
He gave a sudden jerk and his eyes widened. The mage in front of me must have seen, because he stiffened and started to turn. I strangled him with his own scarf before he could sound an alarm. Only, if Louis-Cesare continued to look like that, no other warning would be needed.
Fortunately, Drac had never been known for patience. He knocked Jonathan out of the way, grabbed a poker sticking out of Louis-Cesare’s thigh and twisted it cruelly. “Enough of this! Tell me where Mircea is, or I will let this creature do his worst!”
Louis-Cesare said nothing, but he turned his face away from me as Radu’s outraged tones echoed across the room. “I told you already—he isn’t here! Let him go, Vlad. Your quarrel is with me!”
Vlad whipped his head around, almost as if he had forgotten Radu was there. But before he could answer, the front door opened, flooding sunlight over the bloody tiles. “Nonsense, Radu.” At the rich, familiar tones, I stiffened. My head turned, very slowly. “As you know quite well, Vlad’s quarrel has always been with me.”
Mircea stood there, rapier in hand, smiling an antique smile. Like a glint of sunlight on an edge of broken glass, it was unmistakably a duelist’s expression, with no hint of warmth. “Ahh.” Vlad’s hands dropped away from Louis-Cesare as if he had suddenly disappeared, which for him, I suppose, he had.
I had to give it to Caedmon—he was good. With all the blood and the carcasses of several of Radu’s half-breeds scattered around, I couldn’t tell if he’d gotten the scent right, but everything else was perfect. He might have fooled even me. My opinion of Fey glamourie shot up exponentially.
The vamp nearest me turned to say something to the now dead mage, and saw me. He wasn’t a master, but the ragged-edged cry that tore from his throat before my makeshift stake cleaved his heart was enough to draw every eye in the place. Every one except Drac’s. “Kill her,” he ordered, his eyes never leaving Mircea.
I leapt for the chandelier to escape a barrage of spells and more mundane attacks. I wasn’t sure I would make it. Caedmon had undone the worst of the Fey’s attack, but my strength was still at a low ebb and I ached everywhere. But crystals chimed under my hands as I grabbed hold, just as an explosion hit the wall where I’d been standing, blowing out a chunk of plaster and brick.
Caedmon darted out of the doorway toward me, but Drac intercepted him. They flowed into combat without a pause, evenly matched and darkly beautiful. There seemed little to choose from between them—Caedmon the more cunning, Drac the more savage. Then my attention was torn away by a spell hitting the chandelier, sending a whirlwind of tangled light dancing crazily around the room and causing the fixture’s heavy ironwork to run like melting butter.
I dropped to the ground, leaping aside to avoid the slash from a vamp’s knife. “Louis-Cesare!” I broke the arm of the vamp, but his weapon skittered across the floor, out of reach. “Some help here!” The chandelier fell, shattering in a thousand sparkling pieces that scattered like ice across the floor. Underneath it was the vamp who had attacked me, the molten metal of the fixture searing to his flesh as he lay screaming.
And still Louis-Cesare just hung there. Power was curling upward from every wound now; my skin prickled with it even halfway across the room. The mage seemed almost drunk on it, scooping up those coils of mist as fast as they flowed outward from his captive’s body.
There were three mages and every vamp that wasn’t busy holding down Radu converging on me. I was about to be toast if I didn’t move, so I did—straight toward Louis-Cesare. I was hit halfway through my leap by something that felt like a club but, since I didn’t see anything, was probably a spell. I smashed onto the tile, but somehow kept hold of my stake. Then two vamps were on me.
One was a master, but the other was not. The baby practically fell on the stake, puncturing his gut, by the smell. His shrieks added to those of the vamp still frying under the chandelier, and the clash of swords.
The baby vamp fell away, but the master had his head buried in my throat before I could move. I thrashed and struggled, but it was more the casing of dirt I still wore that kept his teeth out of my neck than anything I did. He bit down, but got only a mouth of dried mud for his trouble. And then he was sailing through the air, his head lolling at an unnatural angle. I looked up, ready to tell Louis-Cesare off royally, and met Radu’s blazing eyes instead.
They turned amber, just like Mircea’s when he was angry, I noticed. And at the moment, he was furious, with power sputtering around him like an electric field. Vlad might still think of Radu as his inept younger brother, but that was an image distorted by time. A second-level master could do a lot of damage, especially if the alternative was a sure death. I was glad to see ’Du finally putting some of those centuries of accumulated power to work, but what the hell was up with Louis-Cesare?
Radu helped me up, but tightened his grip on my arm when I started toward the balcony again. “I can feel the pulse deep within your body,” Jonathan was saying, heedless of the carnage around him. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were fever bright. He had widened the wound in Louis-Cesare’s side to a gaping hole. His hand disappeared in it up to the wrist. “That heart of yours, trembling against my fingertips. Beating, just for me.”
The pain must have been excruciating. Louis-Cesare’s neck arched backward until it looked as though his spine would break. The glittering mist of power around him had grown, forming a thick shroud of pale silver light th
at threatened to hide him from view.
I fought against Radu’s hold. “Are you crazy? Let me go!”
“It’s a spell,” he said quickly. “They’re behind a ward. Break it and it will destroy Louis-Cesare!”
“He’ll die anyway!” I’d met Jonathan’s kind before. Radu released me and snatched up the sizzling vamp from the floor. He slung him, and the melted, smoking metal attached to him, at another, who had come at us so fast he was little more than a rush of air.
“Claire!” I realized that somewhere in all this was the one person who could bring down any ward, half the time without even realizing it. I grabbed Radu’s arm. “Have you seen her?”
“Who?” He was watching Drac’s troops, who were circling us warily. Their master had disappeared—I assumed from the ring of steel on steel coming from the dining room that he and Caedmon had taken their fight in there.
“A woman—tall, red hair, young—have you seen her?”
“No. But Chef was saying something about a girl invading his kitchen earlier—”
“Get to the kitchen. Find Claire and—”
Radu grabbed my stake and threw it at an advancing vamp. It hit the approximate center of his chest—not a heart blow—and although he skidded in the blood, he didn’t fall. The second master, I assumed. Radu snatched the sword off the dead vamp and got it up in time to meet the one headed straight for him.
I crouched, stripping the vamp’s body of a shorter weapon, but had to throw it at a trio of mages trying to get close enough to cast a net spell. Above my head, Radu’s blade slid against the master’s down to the hilt, twisting his wrist at an awkward angle. In the half second it took him to adjust, Radu pushed past his defensive plane and got inside his reach, driving an elbow against his throat. His sword work looked like it had improved through the years.
The vamp staggered and we were on him. Radu pulled the stake out of the middle of the vamp’s chest and plunged it into his heart while I hacked at the neck. It wasn’t a pretty job, but I got the head off.
It bought us a little time, as everyone paused, waiting for someone else to attack first. “You go to the kitchen!” Radu said, looking a bit crazed. “I’m needed here.”
“I thought you said you weren’t a fighter?”
“I’ve no desire to face my brother. Others I can manage. Now go, and tell Chef I said to let them loose. We could use a diversion.”
“Let what loose?” I didn’t get an answer because Radu was attacked by the two remaining mages with the magical net. If I’d had my backpack, I could have taken care of them in a second; without it, the best I could do was to avoid getting caught myself. Luckily, the mages seemed to view Radu as the bigger threat. I turned on my heel and ran.
The back of the house was an even bigger mess than the front. The hallway to the kitchen had been trashed, to the point that large pieces of it were missing. I leapt through a crack in the broken wall, thinking to save time by cutting through the pantry, since it was now open to the hall. But I had to immediately slow down. I already had several cuts in my bare feet courtesy of the chandelier, and the scene ahead of me seemed specially designed to add more. Broken bottles, smashed cans and crumbled shelving were everywhere. There was so much shattered glass littering the white tile floor that it looked like frost.
There were people, too. A lot of them had to be Drac’s, because I didn’t know them. But the handsome young human who had fed Louis-Cesare after we’d arrived was lying across the doorway to the kitchen. It looked like something had been feeding from him, because his rib cage was open and half his bones were licked clean.
I stepped over him and someone hit me in the head, hard. I grabbed the weapon and smashed the wielder against the wall, only to find myself face-to-face with an outraged human in chef whites, clutching a marble rolling pin. He did not seem to understand even after seeing me that I wasn’t an enemy. I caught a glimpse of myself in the shiny stainless-steel fridge: mud-matted hair sticking up in all directions, wild eyes and a grimy body streaked with blood and sweat. Okay, maybe he had a point, but I didn’t have time to explain.
“Where is she? Where’s Claire?” He pointed the rolling pin at a steel-covered door across the room. “You put her in the meat locker?” I slammed him against the wall again. “Tell me she’s alive!”
“Sh-she was when she went in. It was her idea,” he babbled as I dragged him across the once pristine kitchen floor. It was now covered with dirty foot, paw and claw marks. Of course Radu’s pets would find the kitchen. But they must have been there and gone, because none were in evidence.
I kept one hand on the chef, who was going to experience a world of hurt if he’d lied to me, and yanked at the door. The heavy seal parted only reluctantly, so I tugged harder and it flew open. Claire looked out at me through fogged-up glasses. She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by some of Radu’s menagerie. I started forward with a shout, then stopped. Many of the half-breeds were dead, but one or two crawled through the wreckage of the locker, some missing limbs, others dragging blood behind them.
“Claire!”
She looked up, and her glasses slipped down her nose. Her eyes were huge, and she’d obviously been crying. “These poor things were just thrown in here together and when I got here, they were eating each oth—”
“Claire! Bring down all wards within this building! Do it now!”
“What?” She looked confused. “But the chef said the vampires were trying to rebuild—”
“All of them! Now! Claire, please—”
“But these things, Dory—they’re all magic! I’m shielding as hard as I can and I’m still making them sick.” She looked around miserably, tears trembling on her lashes. “I didn’t know. I killed most of them when I—”
I caught my breath and screamed. “Claire!” I shook her by the shoulders. Jonathan or Louis-Cesare: one of them was going to die tonight. Louis-Cesare couldn’t be that one. Because I hadn’t liked Jonathan’s “one last time” comment. I had a very bad feeling that, whatever he intended for Louis-Cesare, it wasn’t something Louis-Cesare was going to walk away from. Not this time. “Listen to me! A person will die—very soon—if you don’t bring down the wards. All of them. Now.”
She looked lost, and more than a little shocked, but she nodded. Several of the creatures nearby tottered over and lay still. “Okay.”
“Get on with it!”
She straightened her glasses. The creature closest to her crumpled to the ground. It looked like the rat thing that had taken a swipe at me in the arbor. “I just did,” she said sadly. “Dory, what were these—”
I didn’t hear the rest—I was halfway back across the kitchen and flying for the entrance. I avoided the mine-field of a pantry and took the hall instead. It was longer, but would probably be faster. And it would have been except for the claw that snatched me off my feet and lifted me through a hole in the wall.
There was a brief moment of being airborne, giving me time enough to wish that I’d asked Claire to kill all the damn things, and then I was dropped onto the red-tiled roof. I hit with a thud, but didn’t roll off despite a steep slant, which was good because a mage somewhere below began firing spells either at me or at Big Bird. I assumed it was me, since the creature was suddenly nowhere in sight. A spell burst against the window over the entranceway and sent a cascade of glass into whatever was happening there.
The tiles were still wet and slippery from the rain, but I managed to scramble for cover behind a chimney. I had to get into the entry. The ward the mage had put on Louis-Cesare was hopefully down, but I had no idea if that would be enough or not. He’d lost a lot of blood and God knew what had been done to him after I left. And Radu had too much to handle already to be much help.
The chimney looked like it connected to the living room fireplace, but there was no way I was doing a Santa impression. A cat couldn’t have fit down there. I was eyeing the broken window above the entry, wondering if my posterior could squeeze through; then
a beaky head peered over the peak of the roof. I stared at its chartreuse, oddly human eyes, and cursed myself for a moron. I should have remembered—in the fight at the pen, the leader had waited until the others exhausted themselves before it waded in. Like it had done now.
As soon as the one lidless eye on that side of its head got a good look at me, it let out an ear-piercing shriek and took off half the chimney with a swipe from its claw. I scrambled down the tiles backward, that wicked beak slashing down all around me, cracking any tiles it hit clean in two.
The creature’s tail snapped and skidded across the tiles, sending a cascade sliding toward the roof edge with me along for the ride. Grabbing for something, anything, to break my fall, my hand encountered the rain gutter. Already overstrained from the flood, it ripped away from the roof, leaving me dangling over the courtyard right above the mage.
It was good to see that my luck was holding true.
A stream of dirty water flowed out of the pipe directly onto the mage, temporarily blinding him. I let go of the pipe and hit the ground, close enough to the man to get my arms around his waist. A dark shadow fell over the courtyard as the leader spread huge, leathery wings; then it was on top of us, its weight and momentum sending us crashing to the ground. I waited until I heard the mage’s scream when the talons latched on to him, then scrambled out from underneath and bolted for the entryway.
Chapter Twenty-two
The heavy wooden front door was hanging off its hinges, letting in a flood of light, but there was no one to see. Bodies had fallen everywhere, but a quick survey told me that none were Louis-Cesare or Radu. The sounds of a sword fight echoed distantly.
