Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  “Then what are you doing about it?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Living with it. The theory is that the excess magic will become less and less of a problem as each pillar comes back online. They’ll be sucking up most of the overflow like sponges, just like before, and what little is left over will be grabbed by the government or hijacked by people like me.” He grinned. “Until then, we’re stuck dealing with the consequences—and so are you.”

  “Us?” Louis-Cesare said sharply. “Why us?”

  Zheng took out the little golden charm again, and weaved it in and out of his fingers. “This is the Chinese symbol for eternity. It’s also the calling card of a new triad that started up recently. Nobody knows much about them, except that they operate in there,” he nodded at the cloud again, “and that they deal in stolen power. The consul worries that they’re maybe selling it to the wrong people.”

  “Are they?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. If so, they’re keeping it quiet. None of my contacts have seen massive new amounts coming onto the market—”

  “But if they’re selling it to the other side in the war, you wouldn’t,” Louis-Cesare pointed out.

  Zheng nodded, looking vaguely surprised that there was a mind inside that pretty head. “Yeah, that’s the worry. But they could also just be stockpiling it, waiting for the price to go up as the war progresses. Like I said, it’s hard to say. Everybody skims some; it’s almost expected. But if they’re trying to turn it into a big-time operation . . .”

  “Is there any evidence of that?” I asked.

  “Not . . . directly, no, or we’d have already moved against them. Well, if they ever come out of there, anyway.” He grimaced, looking at the fog. “But one of the new pillars was sabotaged the other day, and some think that the new guys may have been behind it. Like they weren’t happy about the pillars going back up and ruining their business—”

  He broke off as a two-seater rickshaw drew up alongside us. A window went down, but the expected blast of sound did not follow. The silence spell wasn’t linked to the windows, it seemed.

  A bored looking official poked his head in. And then he saw Zheng and his eyes blew wide. He started bowing excessively, almost hitting the window frame in the process, and talking a mile a minute. I didn’t know what he said, but a moment later, we were being ushered to one of the inner circles of hovering vehicles, with an excellent view of the ring.

  “I know one of the show runners,” Zheng explained. “He owed me a favor.”

  “Meaning we get a good view?” I asked, as Louis-Cesare and I rearranged things, so that we could both see.

  “No, we get the order changed.”

  “The order of what?”

  “Who fights the ‘monsters’. I want you to see the squad I’ve been using to poke around inside the dead zones. They’re one of only three groups crazy enough to go in there, and they’ve managed to narrow down the location of the Eternity gang’s headquarters to within a couple of blocks. They’d probably have found it outright by now, but they waste part of their time on this shit.”

  He shook his head in apparent disgust.

  “Can’t you use one of the other groups instead?” I asked. “To finish the job?”

  Zheng made a moue. “Could if they weren’t all dead or in traction. Anyway, if you want to check out Eternity, these are your guides.”

  The crowd gave a sudden roar that was so loud it rattled the limo, sending us rocking a bit in the air. I held on and watched as, down below, a small group of people emerged from under a covered walkway. It connected to one of the skyscrapers, where I guessed the green room was located for waiting fighters.

  There were four of them, none of whom I could see very well from up here. But then, I didn’t have to, as a couple of large billboards suddenly flashed with their faces. Electronic confetti and fireworks went off behind them, as if they were sports figures being introduced, which was fair, I guessed.

  They kind of were.

  A woman was shown first, who looked vaguely Asian with slanting hazel eyes and long, straight dark hair. But she also looked partly something else, possibly European, with olive skin and a Roman nose that was a little too large for her face. She was pretty, though, and knew it, with the brilliant smile of someone comfortable in her own skin.

  She had on a leather catsuit, which I thought a bad choice for combat, but the crowd seemed to like it. She blew them a kiss and they went wild again, sloshing us around on the sound waves until Zheng knocked on the partition to the front and said something to the driver. We stabilized, right around the time that the second face came up.

  This one looked like a male version of the girl—black hair, warm brown eyes, and tall, maybe a few inches over six feet. He was dressed more casually, in jeans and a hoody, but with enough firepower draped over his person to count as a platoon all on his own. I smiled approvingly. This was a guy who brought a knife to a gun fight—and some throwing stars, and a bazooka, and a dozen more guns.

  He was also the kind of guy who walked out alive from a gun fight.

  The next couple of faces weren’t so nice, not that the crowd seemed to mind. A tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and a sallow complexion was next, with greasy black hair that matched the color of his worn and potion-stained robes. If he’d had “dark mage” tattooed on his forehead, it couldn’t have been any more obvious. I was surprised that he hadn’t been rounded up with the others, but maybe he’d been smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing and join the right side.

  Didn’t make him any less creepy, though.

  His buddy was a bit more of a mystery, reading as magical human to me, but as something else, too, something other. If I’d encountered him in a fight, I’d have kept my eyes on him above any of the others, although it wouldn’t have been a fun experience. He had the face of a pugilist who’d been hit one too many times, knocking things out of whack to the point that they couldn’t be set right anymore. There wasn’t a feature on his face that wasn’t skewed, and he also had some pretty impressive scars, as if something had gotten claws into him at some point.

  Interestedly, he hadn’t bothered to cover anything up with a glamourie. Maybe he liked looking like a tough guy. The crowd certainly seemed to approve, roaring in support when his face was shown.

  But their biggest roar of all, the one that had us rocking again and Zheng cursing, was for the fifth member of the group, who had just emerged from under the walkway. Only, in his case, I wasn’t sure whether the cheering was for his fighting prowess or his good looks. He could have been the lead on a telenovela: cheekbones high and sharp enough to cut you with, only you’d take it smiling because they were paired with golden skin, short, well-styled, dark hair, and movie star good looks. Not to mention a lithe, muscular body that filled out the jeans and casual black button up he was wearing to perfection.

  He was the kind of guy who turned heads. He turned mine, but not for the usual reasons. I tensed up, with every dhampir sense I had suddenly blaring away.

  In contrast to the other guy, he didn’t have a weapon on him, but that didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that a first-level master vampire was hanging out with a bunch of pit fighters, because that was undoubtedly what he was. The flood of his power was unmistakable even this far away, making my skin crawl with the energy he was sending off.

  And I wasn’t the only one to notice. Louis-Cesare had been watching casually from beside me, drinking his whisky and chatting with Zheng. But he was suddenly sitting up, was staring out the window, was opening the car door—

  “What are you doing?” Zheng and I asked, simultaneously.

  I doubted that Louis-Cesare heard the question, even with vampire hearing. Because cracking the door did what the window going down had not, and cancelled the silence spell. A wash of pure sound blasted over us, so loud that it was like being struck by a fist. I actually felt my head go back for a second, which is how I saw Zheng echoing my own question. And then I
grabbed hold of the back of Louis-Cesare’s trousers, because a fall from that height could kill even a master.

  He turned around, detaching my hand. “I have to go down there.”

  I saw the words, rather than heard them, but either way, they made no sense. “What are you talking about?

  He said something, but I still didn’t hear, and my lip-reading capability is limited.

  “What?”

  “I said, I have to go down there!”

  “I got that much! What I didn’t get was why!”

  He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. But I decided that that was beside the point at the moment. “Do you remember what happened the last time you went running off?” I demanded.

  “You don’t understand! It’s—”

  The crowd roared, drowning him out.

  “What?”

  Louis-Cesare repeated himself once more, but the crowd was still going crazy, and I didn’t hear.

  “Did you say Jonathan?” I asked, and grabbed my purse.

  He shook his head. “No! I said—”

  Another roar, goddamnit!

  “He said Tomas,” the attractive pit fighter said, appearing out of nowhere, and clinging to the side of the car like Spider Man.

  He grabbed my husband, threw him off the car, and leapt into open air after him, while Zheng and I just stared. “Don’t!” Zheng said, grasping for my arm.

  But he missed, because I was already throwing myself into the void.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Dory, Hong Kong

  I didn’t make it far, but not because I slammed into the ground. I hit a party barge instead, landing near a crowded bar and causing a bunch of beautiful people to pull back and slosh drinks everywhere. There probably would have been more of a reaction, but Zheng smacked down beside me a second later, and people tended to give him a wide berth.

  And because I didn’t stay put.

  “Dory! Damn it!” I heard Zheng yell, but I was already running and then leaping to the next vehicle in line, a large platform which I tore across in record time, because Louis-Cesare and his one-time captive were battling on the other end of it.

  But vamp reflexes are as good or, in the case of these two, better than mine, meaning that they were gone again by the time I skidded to a stop at the edge of the platform, and looked around frantically.

  I spied them after a moment, impossibly far away, leaping and fighting their way across the stadium. That would have been less terrifying if the “stadium” hadn’t had huge gaps in between sections. And if the vehicles comprising much of it hadn’t been constantly moving, jockeying for position, and making the spot I was trying to jump to suddenly not there anymore.

  I managed to snag a bright red rickshaw before I plummeted to my death, being driven by one of the stadium ticket enforcers who I pushed off onto a bus. That made following the guys easier, or it would have if two hundred and fifty pounds of master vamp hadn’t suddenly landed on the back of my ride, sending us spinning out of control. I managed to compensate after a moment, swerving around a floating house and ducking under a sashimi place. But it meant that I’d lost Louis-Cesare again.

  Damn it!

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, looking over my shoulder at Zheng.

  “I could ask the same of you. What the hell?”

  “Tomas, the guy with your guide group?”

  “What about him?”

  “He was Louis-Cesare’s prisoner for something like a century.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a long story. All you need to know is that Tomas hates him and is probably trying to stake him!”

  “And you’re going to do what about that?” Zheng demanded.

  “Stake Tomas first!”

  I spotted the two battling masters on the opposite side of the arena, and decided to take a short cut across the large open space. Which . . . probably wasn’t the best plan I ever had. Zheng yelled a warning, half a second before a four-story-tall, bright crimson devil, complete with horns and a pointed tail, leap out in front of us—

  And grabbed the squid monster in a headlock before they both fell into the ring.

  I didn’t know what had happened for a second, and then realized that Louis-Cesare and Tomas had been fighting near the devil’s cage. They must have damaged it enough to release him, just about the time that the squid thing was let out for the match that was supposed to be taking place right now. It wasn’t, because something better was happening instead.

  The crowd roared approval, louder than ever, as two titans faced off. I guessed they didn’t usually see the monsters fighting each other. And for good reason, I thought, because things almost immediately got out of hand.

  “Shit!” I yelled, as a flashing aqua, green and bright orange tentacle slashed through the air, barely missing us. And then another one clipped us, sending our ride spiraling toward the dirt, before the devil’s tail punched through the back of us. And we suddenly found ourselves being used like a brick to pummel the squid.

  “Every time!” Zheng was yelling. “Every goddamned time—”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and cared less. I felt my fingers slipping; felt an arm the size of a tree trunk go around my waist. And then we were leaping, straight at a man in a smaller, one-person rickshaw.

  It was the only vehicle close enough, as everyone else was rocketing away from the fight. But the man—the mage, as it turned out—didn’t want company. He saw us coming, cursed, and got a lasso on us. And, holy shit!

  For the record, magical lassos are not fun when you are the recipient. It hurt like hell, burning whatever skin it touched, but it didn’t touch us for long. Because he whipped us over to the side of the great space, onto a grassy bit of land. And as soon as we hit down, he went buzzing away again, to join a dozen more who were attempting to regain control of the situation.

  Only that . . . wasn’t going so well. And neither was this, I thought, as Zheng got me into a headlock while the squid screeched loudly enough to threaten my eardrums, and the devil laughed, a great, sonic boom type of thing that made hearing impossible. Except for a master vamp yelling in my ear.

  “—not happening! Do not stake my damned team!”

  “I’m not staking your team,” I said, thrashing, and really putting my all into it. “Just one.”

  “Yeah, but he’s the best one!”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of!”

  I had been playing fair, which was why I wasn’t going anywhere. I decide to remedy that, and elbowed Zheng considerably below the belt. He didn’t let go—gotta give the guy credit—but he did loosen his grip slightly as well as snarl. “You’re going to pay for that.”

  “Maybe, but not now,” I said, and stuck my head in my purse.

  The mouth of the portal grabbed me, sucking me inside, and leaving Zheng literally holding the bag. Until I re-emerged with a warded tab of the type that I’d used on Hassani, and slapped it onto his torso. “What the—”

  I grabbed my bag and sprang away, and Zheng went into Asian Ken doll mode, trapped in his little warded cell. Or maybe not Ken, I thought, seeing the frozen snarl on his face, which was showing a lot of fang. The tab would probably hold him about as long as it had Hassani, but I hadn’t had a whole lot of non-lethal alternatives.

  I took off, knowing that I had seconds at best.

  Make that a second, I thought, as he tackled me.

  Son of a bitch!

  I flipped over, about to give him a piece of my mind, and found myself looking at Tomas instead.

  “You’re really . . . pretty,” I gasped, surprised.

  He blinked. “Thank you?”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and tried for a repeat of the trick with Zheng, but the damned vamp was in the way. So, I sucked him into my purse, instead.

  I stood up, feeling dizzy and slightly unwell, because my stomach and brain had no idea where we were right now, and were arguing about it. Zheng and Louis-Cesare s
howed up a second later, and stared at me. “Where is Tomas?” they demanded.

  I still couldn’t talk properly, and just held up the bag.

  “You put him in there?” Louis-Cesare asked, in disbelief.

  “What?” Zheng looked from me to the large expanse of black leather. “Wait. You have a master vamp in your purse?”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t know what they were complaining about. He was contained.

  “How?”

  “Why?” Louis-Cesare demanded.

  “Because I didn’t have . . . a lot of options?” Talk about gratitude!

  “Dory. The armory is in your purse!”

  Oh.

  Yeah.

  And then Tomas was back, having figured out how this worked in record time. He was also loaded for bear. “Shit,” I said.

  He smiled.

  And then, just as fast, he was gone, plucked off the earth and into the jaws of the giant squid.

  “What the—” I said.

  “They’re attracted to power!” Zheng yelled. And then he frowned. “I think I’ve been insulted!”

  Louis-Cesare grabbed me, jumping us out of the way of a snarl of huge tentacles headed this way. Zheng ran in the other direction; I didn’t know why. We landed behind a small building that looked like a closed shrine of some kind, and wasn’t very sturdy, but one of the skyscrapers wasn’t far off. We could take shelter there, find a rickshaw, and then get the hell out of here!

  I wasn’t the only one to have that idea. The ground was suddenly streaming with headlights, as hundreds of vehicles took off, getting away from the now completely out of control fight. The mages were doing their best, but they had obviously not planned on this, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.

  Except that Tomas was about to get eaten.

  The massive squid had a huge tentacle wrapped around the arm of the devil, and a smaller one squeezing its neck. But its mouth was full of vampire, with the fang-rimmed hole only being kept from closing by a master’s strength. But I doubted that that would work for long.