by Karen Chance
I got a good look around and realized that someone else had been trapped by the spell. Louis-Cesare was huddled in a corner with his back to me. He must have been following right on our heels to have made it through the door before the spell blocked the way. It looked like he was wishing he’d been slower.
I saw him shudder, a slow vibration that started at the small of his back and ran up his spine. His once-pristine leather jacket and slacks looked like someone had been clawing at them, and one glance at his broken and bloody nails told me who. He didn’t appear to have enjoyed the show any more than I had.
He began slowly rocking back and forth, the muscles of his back clenched tight, only the graceful curve of his neck visible under the curtain of hair that hid his features. He was moaning softly, and said something, to some figure from his past, presumably. My French is adequate if not elegant, but he was slurring his words too much for me to understand. Then he began to laugh, a broken, bitter sound, like glass under boots. It hit my raw nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. I reached for him, not thinking, just wanting to stop that awful sound. The minute my hand touched his skin, I was dragged into his little corner of hell.
A darkened cell, where he lay helpless and bound. The jailers stripped him roughly, tearing at his clothes, the knife at his neck a silent threat. It didn’t stop him from trying to fight, from thrashing until they beat him almost senseless, fists and fingernails gouging mercilessly. Eventually his limbs refused to obey him and the taste of dust and straw and the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. The hitching of his breath sounded far away; he could almost imagine that it came from someone else. Until a new pain started, something they had not dared before, that snapped him back into himself in horror.
Clamping his teeth on a scream, he panted in a red haze of pain and fury as his body flinched away from invasion, its desperation beyond his control. He couldn’t master the shaking in his limbs, the reflexive struggle or the half-choked gasps, but he wouldn’t scream. The humiliation settled like stone in his gut, blending with the agony as they took their turns and their time. One of them laughed, and he could feel it in his belly, letting him know this wouldn’t end anytime soon. Bile burned the back of his throat, but an icy calm settled over him. He would find a way out of here, he promised himself, and when he did, no one would ever make him a victim again.
I jerked away, shivering in a cold sweat, damning whatever mages had set this trap all to hell. After my breathing returned to something like normal, I borrowed a handkerchief from Olga and wrapped it around my hand. No more skin-on-skin contact, not here.
I squatted and tried to make eye contact, but I couldn’t see his face until I brushed a snarl of hair back from his forehead. His usual pale perfection had faded to chalk white and his eyes were bruise dark. I felt a surge of unaccustomed compassion. He looked so young, without the superior, closed expression he usually used around me. He didn’t look like Louis-Cesare, Senate member and arrogant bastard. He looked like Louis-Cesare of the auburn hair and the blue eyes and the devastating smile. I reached out, my finger tracing the line of a single tear down his cheek. Then I slapped him.
The first one didn’t have much of an effect, but by the fourth, I’d gotten into the swing of things and his head was thumping the wall each time it rocked back. A slender hand reached out and latched on to my arm before I could deliver a fifth. “Have you snapped out of it yet or should I hit you some more?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t mind. Really.”
His mouth curved into a painful expression that might have been a smile, except for the awful brightness in his eyes. “Dorina.”
“That would be me.”
“Thank you.” There was a quiet gratitude in his voice that made me grin like an idiot, and some of the bleakness in his expression faded.
“You know,” I said, glancing at another Shroud of Flame spell that blocked the door behind him, “you could really make my day and tell me you have something to counter that.”
He blinked at the thick wall of fire as if surprised to see it there. “No.”
“Then we have a problem.” It was an understatement. Now I knew why the mages didn’t bother to waste manpower guarding their backs. Anyone who sneaked in here was trapped until one of them came along and finished him off, or left to rot. Neither option appealed to me, but neither did getting flame broiled. I might survive the Shroud, but I’d spend a month helpless thereafter from having every inch of skin barbecued. Olga might also live through the process—the thinnest troll skin is approximately the consistency of rawhide—but no way could Louis-Cesare manage it. Vamps burn like they’ve been soaked in lighter fluid even without magical help. We needed an alternative.
Louis-Cesare had regained his feet, but was leaning heavily against the wall, resting his head on his forearm. “Merde.” I decided to see if Olga had any ideas; he looked like he needed a time-out.
I eyed the cavern walls speculatively. “Olga, do you think you could hack through that?” She didn’t have a pickax, but then, she hadn’t had one earlier, either.
She shrugged. “In time. But Lars come soon.” Lars hadn’t struck, me as a mental giant, and he’d let Louis-Cesare slip by, but maybe I was missing hidden depths. I must have looked skeptical, because she waved at the wall. “He make new door.” Okay, that I could see. Mages tend to forget that there are other ways to solve a problem than magic. You can put all the spells you want on a doorway, but if someone kicks down the wall and makes a new one, it doesn’t matter much, does it? I just hoped Lars didn’t bring the ceiling down on top of us in his enthusiasm.
“Where are we?” Louis-Cesare had decided to join the conversation.
I turned on him, and for a moment had the disorienting sense of double vision, seeing someone who was the same as ever, and yet so very different. I forcibly squashed the empathy that wanted to dull my edge. I couldn’t afford that now. “I didn’t know I was coming here until a few hours ago,” I accused, my voice harsher than I’d intended. “How do you keep finding me?”
Louis-Cesare’s expression shifted from the dullness of shock to arrogant exasperation. “That is hardly relevant at the moment.”
“It’s relevant to me!”
He apparently decided that answering was easier than arguing. “Because of the cell phone I gave you. The Senate was able to use it to pinpoint your location.”
I fished it out of my jeans and stared at it. The sleek black case gleamed innocently in the dim lighting. I should have known. I ground the traitorous device under the heel of my boot with a scowl.
Louis-Cesare watched, a wry curve to his lips. “I am beginning to understand your difficulties with electronics.”
“Very funny.”
“Lars is here,” Olga suddenly announced, getting heavily to her feet.
“You brought trolls with you?” Louis-Cesare had apparently just noticed the two mountains staring at each other through a curtain of fire.
“It’s more like they brought me.” I left him to his own devices and went to see what Olga thought Lars could do.
“Get the others,” Olga was telling him. Lars obediently turned and lumbered back down the corridor, shaking the floor slightly as he did so. “It not be long,” she said, glancing past me to Louis-Cesare. “You know this vampire?”
“Unfortunately.” Her teeth bared and I hastened to explain. “He’s okay. He just whines a lot.”
Under the drained and the pained and the fed up, Louis-Cesare almost looked amused—until Olga thumped him on the back. The comradely gesture would have shattered a human’s spine. “Good. I hear rumors,” she informed us. “They say the rebel vampires and dark mages work together. When Lars come back, we break through these walls. You,” she told Louis-Cesare like a general addressing a private, “sense any vampires, awake or asleep. We kill them first. Then we take back what is ours.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Louis-Cesare asked incredulously. “The Senate itself wouldn’t dare to attack such a place, at l
east not yet. But you propose to do so with what? A band of trolls?”
He’d addressed the question to me, but Olga answered. “If you afraid, you-go,” she said with a shrug.
Louis-Cesare’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as if he was having trouble processing the fact that a wild-looking bearded lady had just called him a coward, but I didn’t let him get going.
I turned to Olga. “There could be a complication.”
She raised bushy eyebrows and I started feeling guilty. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. “There’s a chance that the mages and vamps are getting a little extra help these days.” I spent the next five minutes filling her and Louis-Cesare in on my recent adventures. “Don’t get me wrong—if you still want to kick some vampire butt, I’m your girl. But I don’t think your crew is ready to deal with Drac just yet.” I managed not to mention that I didn’t feel much like it myself, either, although I think the point came across.
“You knew where he was, even to the room number, and you said nothing?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Do you wish to trap him or not?”
“Not!” I responded heatedly. “That’s Mircea’s thing. I want to kill him. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that. But I’m only going to get one shot at it, and I’m not exactly prepared right now. That was the point of coming here in the first place, to get some decent weapons.”
“The Senate has weapons!”
“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to turn them over to me. Besides, they don’t have the kind of stuff I need. Or if they do, they aren’t likely to admit it.”
“That was why you did not want me with you. You were planning to buy illegal weapons!”
“Until Benny got dead, yeah. That was the plan. The plan now is to steal them.”
Olga’s massive forehead was wrinkled as if thinking was causing her pain. When she spoke, though, it was clear that she’d followed the conversation well enough. “This Drac you speak of, he killed my Bienvior?”
“Yeah. He had mages with him who did the dirty work, but he was in charge.”
Olga nodded, as if that was all she’d needed to know. “If he here, I kill him for you,” she said simply.
Louis-Cesare and I exchanged a glance. “Um, Olga…” I stopped, both because I had no idea how to explain how unlikely that was and because the crew had arrived. At least, I supposed they were behind Lars, but his bulk filled the doorway, making it impossible to tell.
“Take down wall,” Olga told them, pointing to a spot beside the doorway. “Then we kill things.”
What we found after hacking through two walls of solid rock was a warehouse. But it wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Stretching in a long line down either side of a rough-hewn corridor were tiny, shallow cells, barely more than indentations in the walls. Most were empty, but a few were not. And one caught my attention immediately because, although it was at the end of the corridor, the scent emanating from it was unmistakable.
The cell was empty, but the scent was strong. Too strong for the occupant to have been gone long. The trail led to a door, which even before I reached it I realized was heavily warded. I cocked my head, filtering out the sounds coming from behind me, and concentrated. Yeah, I’d thought so.
I ran back to the other end of the corridor, dodging trolls and demons and the assorted creatures they were releasing from the cells, and grabbed some of the larger chunks of rock from around our newly created doorway. Running back the way I’d come, I managed to avoid Louis-Cesare, who was standing in the middle of the corridor watching me with a bemused expression, and reached the door again. I heaved the rocks at the warded door, every nerve ending singing at me to hurry.
The wards held firm, as I’d assumed they would, but the guard on the other side, who had been jingling change in his pocket and humming off-key, suddenly came to attention. He might not be able to hear through the door, but he could certainly hear the strident alarm that had gone off when the wards were tested. “Come on,” I said under my breath. “You can handle this. Probably just some stupid slave got loose. Did you double-check the last door you closed? Because if not, and you go for help, you’ll catch hell. Come on in and check it out on your own. Then no one needs to know.”
I don’t have the kind of mind-control abilities that vamps do, but if I concentrate really hard, I can manage to plant a basic idea in someone’s head. It doesn’t have the compulsion behind it that Mircea’s thoughts do—no one has to act on any of my little doubts, but people often do, anyway. Especially if they sound like something they might have thought up themselves.
Louis-Cesare came up behind me, but for once he refrained from saying anything. A moment later the wards fell—I could feel tendrils dissipating like smoke about us—and the door opened. The guard wasn’t a complete idiot. As soon as he heard the cacophony that a dozen trolls make when ripping apart steel doors, he tried to shut the heavy metal slab again, but my foot was in the way and a second later, my hands were around his throat.
“You have got to be kidding,” I said in disgust after riding him to the floor. Underneath me lay a human, plain and simple. I sniffed him to be sure, but there was no. doubt about it. “A norm? What, are they nuts?”
It shouldn’t have surprised me, since a vamp would have been unaffected by my mind games and a demon would have thrown them back in my face. But I still had trouble believing that the Black Circle had left a norm on guard duty. They’re even more contemptuous of regular old garden-variety humans than most mages. They call them dims and, for the most part, ignore their existence.
Louis-Cesare managed to squat elegantly alongside the norm. “He could be booby-trapped.”
I shook my head. “No.” I’d seen such things before, mages using humans like trip wires, with a spell designed to detonate if the norm’s heart began to race or at some other indication that trouble was near. But I knew the signs, and this one had none of them. He smelled of fear and sweat, of socks that had been worn too long without laundering and of the sausage and onion sandwich he’d eaten earlier. I could tell what shampoo he used and that he’d massaged Ben-Gay onto his left calf today, but there was no stench of dark magic around him. In fact, there wasn’t any that I could detect anywhere, which was more than a little odd in a Black Circle stronghold.
“Look, t-take whatever you want. Just d-don’t eat me, okay? I had garlic for lunch,” he said, so panicked that the whites showed all the way around his watery gray eyeballs.
“Good. I love it when dinner’s already seasoned.” I snatched the creep to his feet. “One chance. What’s going on here? And I’ll know if you lie to me.”
“Th-the auction. It’s almost over, but you can probably get in on a few lots if you hurry.” He looked at something over my shoulder and what little color he had went on vacation. “O-or just take what you want. Anything, really.”
I glanced behind me to see that Olga had joined Louis-Cesare, with a crowd of assorted creatures behind them. One of the smaller trolls had something by the hind foot that I eventually identified as a were cub. It had taken me a minute because the full moon was several weeks away, yet the small snarling creature was in full wolf mode and currently attempting to bite through the troll’s tough skin. The troll cuffed it hard enough to send its head cracking against the wall, leaving it dazed and slightly more subdued.
I looked at Olga. “No eating,” I said, hoping she’d agree since there wasn’t a lot I could do about it if she didn’t. “We have to find out what’s going on.”
She had a muttered conversation with the troll, who scowled through his beard and defiantly bit off one of the were’s toes. The small creature howled in pain and started thrashing about even more, while Olga sent troll boy face-first into the cave wall. She slammed a foot down on him when he bounced off, putting her considerable weight onto his torso, and he let go of the were. Crazed with pain and fear, it began slashing at anything within reach until Louis-Cesare grabbed it by the scuff of the neck and knocked it out.
The tunnel let out onto a much larger one, which in turn led to what looked like a naturally formed cavern, about a story below the mouth of the tunnel. Crude stone steps had been carved into the side, leading down into the gloom. A few lights—some magical, others more prosaic—lit the place in patches, especially the small, cleared area serving as the auctioneer platform. I could see even in the shadows, but was soon wishing I couldn’t.
“The human was right,” Louis-Cesare said from over my shoulder. I nodded, trying to keep a grip. Some kind of illegal auction was going on, and it wasn’t for bootleg cigarettes. A lot of the heavy cages ringing the platform were empty, but some still had creatures in them. The fact that a few of them looked suspiciously like the deformed things in Radu’s laboratory made my stomach begin to sink. But even worse was the fact that I caught two very familiar scents on the air. One was the same as in the holding cells: Claire had been here, probably within the last hour. The other was Drac’s.
Tamp it down, I told myself sternly, sinking fingernails into my palm hard enough to break the skin. I wouldn’t do Claire any good by freaking out, if by some chance she was still here. “An unusual specimen,” a human announcer was saying. “Half-Duergar, half-Brownie—quite the combination. It will protect your property better than a pack of guard dogs and fix you lunch to boot. What am I bid?”
A small, dark gray creature, all of about two feet high, stood in the blinding circle of light, vainly trying to shield its large eyes. It was shaking in fear and making a high, mewling noise that sounded like a cross between a child’s wail and a power saw cutting through metal. It made me wince and apparently the buyers didn’t like it any better, because no bids were forthcoming.
