by Karen Chance
I really wished I’d thought of this before.
I really wished an LED clock would light up all this darkness.
I really wished I didn’t have to pee.
Damn it!
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I scrunched up my eyes, even though there was nothing to see, and concentrated. And fell onto a desk covered with papers, stabby little pencils, and a porcelain vase that rocked back and forth and to and fro and no, no, no, I thought, grabbing it with both hands.
And then breathing a sigh of relief when it didn’t fall off.
Well, that’s a first, I thought, slightly shocked.
Until a glass paperweight hit the floor behind me, bounced across the boards loud as a cannonball, before smacking into the side of a glass-fronted cabinet.
And shattering it.
Damn it!
I grabbed the box, grabbed Red’s coat, and took a flying leap off the desk. And then ran across the room, opened the window, and shoved the box out onto the sill. But it was still visible, so I shoved it onto a nearby stretch of roof instead and hopped out after it. And then dove back into the box, because footsteps were coming this way, and there was no chance they wouldn’t see me otherwise.
I sat there, in the dark once again, chewing my nails—if I had nails in here, which I probably didn’t, but it felt like I was chewing them.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And damn it, Rosier was going to be dead or back in hell by the time I got to him, because Lara Croft I wasn’t. What if I couldn’t get back in the window? What if the wards were smarter than a two-bit crook gave them credit for? What if I got attacked by a bunch of crazy-ass birds as soon as I reappeared?
Because the latter actually happened.
There was a huge flock of them, which had decided to take refuge from the storm on the roof where an overhang gave some protection. To them. I had no protection at all, other than what was offered by the coat, which was damned little when I reappeared and startled them. And they rose up in a clawing, flapping, furious cloud all around me, and I suddenly understood why Hitchcock made that stupid movie, which wasn’t sounding so stupid anymore.
I didn’t scream, but mostly because I couldn’t. There were about a thousand beating wings in my face and feathers up my nose and sharp little bills pecking and sharp little claws digging and I couldn’t see and I could barely breathe and any second now I was going to fall off the roof. And screw this!
A second later, there were no more birds. Just me and the blowing rain and, okay, one last fat pigeon that must have been out of the box’s range and was perched on top of the eaves, staring at me. Before it abruptly flew off, I guess before whatever happened to the others happened to it.
I clutched the box.
And belatedly realized that I’d grabbed the wrong one, the one with the two mages in it. Which now also contained a crap ton of angry birds. But they probably wouldn’t interact . . . right?
I peered back in the window. There were a couple of mages still in there picking up the mess but not appearing particularly alarmed. Maybe because it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. The desk was a wreck, but it kind of looked like it might have been anyway, and most of the papers had somehow stayed on top.
One of the guys bent over and grabbed the paperweight, and said something to the other that I couldn’t hear because of the storm. But he must have been blaming the wind for the calamity. Because he walked over a second later, forcing me to quickly flatten myself against the side of the building.
Right before the window was firmly shut, leaving me out on a rain-slick roof all by myself in the middle of a thunderstorm.
And still needing to pee.
I looked skyward with my eyes closed, letting the rain hit me in the face for a minute, telling myself to calm down. I didn’t want to be Lara Croft, I decided. Lara Croft sucked. I wanted to be home, in a soft bed, with a warm cup of something seriously alcoholic. Like Irish coffee. Yeah. Irish coffee would be really great right now.
But I didn’t have an Irish coffee. What I did have, when I opened my eyes, was an empty room beside me, because the mages had left. And, okay, I’d take it.
I finally got the window up enough that I could get a hand under it, and my body back through it, and my feet onto the slick wood floor. I tiptoed over to the dumbwaiter, because the mages had left the door to the hall slightly open, and was serenaded briefly by some very distinct curses that were starting to float up from far below. At least they were until I stripped off the coat and dropped it down.
The curses stopped. That left me with Red’s wool number, which I hadn’t needed except I was damned tired of being naked. I pulled it on.
And then I went in search of Rosier.
And this time, I found him.
He was in the middle of a large room, surrounded by a circle of war mages, who were busy doing what they probably called enhanced interrogation and I called torture. He had two eyes so black that it looked like he was wearing a mask, the rest of his face was either red or purple, his nose was seriously off to one side, and his lip was less split than pulverized. I felt my hand come up to my own neck; I didn’t know why.
Maybe because I was having trouble breathing.
He had to be.
My other hand clenched on the box.
But there were too many of them and they were too spread out. I’d never manage to trap them all, not before one of them took me out. Or took Rosier out, although they looked like they were well on the way there already. And I didn’t have any weapons, and even if I did, I couldn’t fight them all. So what did that leave?
Before I could figure it out, Rosier went sprawling, hitting the ground with his hands over his head, trying to ward off the mass of steel-tipped boots that were slamming into him like the fists had been a moment ago. And I felt a wash of pure, cold rage hit me, because he hadn’t done anything to them, couldn’t have done anything in his current state. Nothing but die.
And that wasn’t happening.
I took a half second to memorize his location, and then I pushed open the door. Not a lot, just a couple inches. Just enough to throw in an already opening box.
And this time, I didn’t get the wrong one.
A second later, the room all but exploded in caws and screeches and whirling feathers and red demonic eyes. And damn, pigeons were scary up close, particularly when there were about a million of them. I darted into the fluttering mass and suddenly couldn’t see—I defy anybody to have seen shit in there—but I knew where Rosier had been, and a second later I grabbed him.
Or I grabbed somebody, anyway. And God, I really hoped it was him. But I kind of thought it was, because instead of cursing me into oblivion, the guy was hitting and kicking and trying to bite. Or maybe that was the birds, because who could tell in here? But I was getting hammered anyway.
Because he couldn’t see me.
“It’s me! It’s Cassie!” I yelled, right in his face—or what I hoped was his face—but it didn’t help. Because he couldn’t hear me, either.
Hell, I couldn’t hear me, not in the middle of Birdgeddon. But there was no stopping. Not in a room full of war mages, who any second now were going to deploy some spell I’d never heard of and kill us both.
And they probably would have, except for one thing.
Or make that two things, because I hadn’t just released the birds, had I?
And I guessed maybe some interaction had been going on, after all, because suddenly in the middle of the mass of birds was a mass of explosions, a virtual cyclone of curses flung by what I strongly suspected were two formerly trapped and now seriously pissed-off war mages, that caused birds to start dropping like rain.
But the other mages presumably couldn’t see any better than I could, and they didn’t know those were their
buddies, or that they’d just been released from bird hell. They didn’t know that the curses were being fired at the birds; they assumed they were being fired at them. And being war mages, they naturally didn’t stop to find out why.
I hit the floor, jerking Rosier down with me, and started crawling through a hail of blood and feathers and sizzling spell fire back the way I’d come in. Because there was no other choice. This must have been a holding cell and had no other doors or windows.
Which meant that there was nowhere for the now seriously panicked flock to go but around and around in a frenzy of fury.
Although surprisingly, that wasn’t the main problem, since it was mostly going on above our heads. The problem was the fist to my chin that had my head reeling, and the elbow to my stomach that knocked most of my wind out, and the crazed demon lord who at one point I think was gnawing on my arm.
Until I fished the other trap out of my pocket and smacked him upside the head with it.
And God, that felt good.
And so did being able to scurry ahead, burdened only by the trap that I shoved back into my pocket. A second later, I hit the wall, and a second after that, I found the door and grabbed the handle. And almost got trampled by a bunch of mages flooding in from the hall.
Damn it!
I jerked back against the wall, pulled up the hood on my borrowed coat, and waited for a break in the line. And then I bolted through a crowd of boots, staying low and keeping my head down, although I’d have had to do that anyway. Because I wasn’t the only one trying to escape.
The momentarily empty door had provided somebody else a path to freedom—or should I say, somebodies. Because cawing chaos burst out of the room along with me, over my head and around my body, a flapping, screeching, furious storm that almost knocked me down. But that also filled the corridor to the point that one more dark-coated figure didn’t attract any notice at all.
Pigeons, I thought fervently, racing for the stairs.
I loved pigeons.
And then somebody grabbed my arm.
“Here! Where d’ you think you’re going?”
I looked up wildly at a dark-haired mage I didn’t recognize but who must have been more observant than his buddies. Because a second later a cuff clicked shut around my wrist. The one I needed to grab Rosier’s trap and defend myself.
And then a second later, someone grabbed the other one.
“Go ahead, Sergeant, go ahead,” a familiar voice said. “I’ve got ’er.”
I looked around to see Red wearing my old leather coat. And a stern expression. And slicked-back hair, because he was doing a damned fine impersonation of a war mage. Except, you know, for the two feet of leather he was dragging, ’cause the guy wasn’t much taller than me.
Aren’t you a little short to be a storm trooper? I thought hysterically, and bit my lip.
“And who’s got you?” the sergeant asked dryly, because he wasn’t buying it, either.
“Good question,” Red said, and hit him over the head with a heavy-looking vase.
It broke with a splintering crack nobody heard over the din, the sergeant took a nose dive, and I took another kind of dive for the stairs. Only to have Red catch me and drag me back into the office. “What are you doing?” I rounded on him. “This is our chance! We can get out while they’re distracted!”
“Which would be a fine and admirable plan,” he agreed, slamming the door behind us. “If not for one small inconvenience.”
“What inconvenience?”
“They just locked down the building. Why d’you think I’m up here?”
“I don’t know. Why are you here?”
“So your demon can get us both out! Did you get him?”
“I got him,” I said, pulling out the trap.
And then Rosier fell out.
Onto his face.
What was left of it.
Red looked down at the motionless creature, and then up at me. “Now what?”
A minute later, Rosier was back in the box and we were out the window and onto the roof. Where it was still raining cats and dogs—and war mages, by the look of things, because a wave of them were prowling around the streets below in twos and threes. And even if I’d wanted to drop into the middle of that, there were no fire escapes, and the nearby buildings weren’t anything like nearby enough. And they had steeply pitched roofs running with rivers of dirty water that were busy pouring off into the street six stories below.
I’d have had to have a death wish to try landing on one of them.
And I didn’t.
I really, really didn’t.
“Y’know, I’m not trying ter seem ungrateful,” Red commented. “But I’m not seeing how this helps us.”
Neither was I.
Until a cart pulled by a single, sway-backed old horse came trundling down the street. It looked to be full of trash. Smelly, smelly trash that the war mages were ignoring as utterly beneath them.
Fortunately, I didn’t have such high standards.
I looked at Red. “Do you trust me?”
He blinked, like he wasn’t used to being asked that question. “More ’n I trust them.”
“Good,” I said, and bopped him.
A moment later, I’d climbed around the window to the biggest, swiftest-moving waterfall I could reach, which was cascading down to the roofline and off the edge, into the street below. The street filled with war mages. The street that passed right by the front of war mage HQ.
The street the horse cart was going to be passing along in about a second.
And then I reentered what was becoming familiar darkness, praying that I wouldn’t rematerialize in a gutter, or hanging off a building, or splattered on the ground below from an impact the box wasn’t rated to withstand.
Or with a war mage’s boot on my jugular.
But I didn’t. A few minutes later, I materialized half buried in a pile of trash. Along with a wild-eyed fake war mage with an apple peel hanging off his head and an unconscious demon lord.
Who promptly face planted again, into a pile of something nasty.
But a second after that, Rosier was back in his little home, and Red and I were scrambling out of the back of the cart. And pelting through the rainy streets of Victorian London. And trying not to double over in hysterical laughter, which is hard when you’re tripping balls and having to restrain yourself from mooning all the clueless mages milling around the streets behind you.
And then Red did it anyway, while I hugged a light post and laughed and laughed and laughed. Until I couldn’t breathe. Until he looked at me and shook his head. “Yer about ’alf gone, arn’cha?”
“Way, way more than half,” I gasped.
“Then yer orter fit right in.”
“Fit right in where?”
He grinned.
Chapter Twenty-two
I made it back to the suite, hours later, sans Rosier. I’d had to leave him at the pub, in Red’s tender care, because even after some food and rest I hadn’t been able to shift two. I was kind of surprised I’d been able to shift one, which was why I was relieved to see nobody in the atrium when I returned. Except for Rico, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Is it late?” I asked hopefully. Because for once it would be really nice to be able to sneak back inside and change before anyone—read Marco—saw me.
“You mean, is he up yet?” Rico asked, letting out a smoky breath.
I sighed.
“The answer is yes,” he told me. And then flashed a set of strong white teeth. “But he isn’t here.”
I felt my spine relax slightly, and then I felt bad. Marco had a shitty job, and he was only doing his best. I knew that.
“Can you deal with this?” I asked, sticking out my arm, where the mage’s magical cuff still dangled. I could shift out of
the regular kind, but these were a bitch.
Rico took a look at it, and then pulled a little case out from inside his leather jacket. And didn’t even raise a brow at the request. Or at the massive amount of dirt I’d dragged in with me. Or at my naked feet protruding from the bottom of the grimy coat.
I watched him work and wondered, not for the first time, what it would take to ruffle Rico’s perpetual cool. Unlike most of the other guys, I’d never seen him lose it. I’d also never seen him in a suit.
The other guards wore them religiously, probably something to do with keeping up the dignity of their house. Except for Marco, who preferred comfort to pride, and his beloved polos. But Rico preferred a combo of black tee, black jeans, and black leather jacket. It made him look like an updated, better-looking version of the Fonz, right down to the ability with all things mechanical.
An ability that held true again, when the cuff almost immediately sprang off my wrist.
“Where is Marco?” I asked, rubbing it gratefully, because he haunted the suite more than a certain ghost I knew.
“Shopping.”
“Shopping?” Marco was a senior-level master. They didn’t shop. They had people to do that for them. “For what?”
Rico’s lip twitched. “Go in and see.”
I looked from him to the large, ornate door of the suite. And suddenly wished I was back at the Bollocks with Rosier. And how sad was that? When a dirty, smelly, freezing pub was better than my life?
Get a grip, Cassie, I told myself. It’s probably not a catastrophe this time. I mean, what were the odds, right?
But I just kept on standing there, my hand on the door latch, not pushing it. Because I couldn’t deal with another thing tonight; I just couldn’t. The trip back had taken everything I had, and even then I hadn’t been sure I was going to make it. Yet, somehow, I had to come up with more Tears, and I had a court to take care of now, and then there was Jonas and my acolytes and freaking Ares, and I just couldn’t deal with one more thing—
“Not all surprises are bad,” Rico told me gently.
