by Karen Chance
He quickly stuck them in the water, half expecting them to combust. Instead, they remained just fingers, ghostly white under the dark surface of the ocean, and wiggling about a bit, as if they were confused, too. He swallowed, and looked up at Jerome.
"How what?" he repeated, only this time, it sounded as bewildered as he felt.
"How did you curse that witch?"
"I . . . didn't?" But it came out more as a question.
"Don’t lie! I saw. Even underwater, I saw!"
Yes, it had been rather hard to miss, Mircea thought. But he didn’t answer, because he didn’t have one. He felt dizzy.
And then Jerome grabbed him. "Think, man! It's important!"
And, yes, it was, only Mircea didn’t know how he'd done it. Or even if he had. There were spells streaking about everywhere now, as the fight intensified. And as Hieronimo's men were driven back toward the shore.
They were losing, Mircea realized. Of course they were. No matter how good they might be, they had one kind of magic, while their opponents had two. It was the same reason the consul's forces were losing in his homeland. And were going to continue to do so unless something changed.
Something soon.
Mircea spied a piece of wood, part of a broken mast by the look of it, jutting above the waves, and thrust out a hand. And saw it leap out of the water and shoot across the heavens, still burning. Like a falling star in reverse.
He blinked, looking from it to his hand and back again.
The tingling was back, he thought vaguely.
And so was the shaking.
"I knew it!" Jerome yelled. "I knew it!"
And then a whole group of vampires jumped them, because of course they did. Mircea had just sent up a fiery signal and Jerome was screaming his head off. But, while Mircea's witch might not have understood or cared about a distant threat to Jerome, she was a snarling wildcat when it came to protecting Mircea himself.
Who didn’t need it because he had magical powers, too.
Only, suddenly, he didn’t.
Mircea watched the witch turn on the vampires, who might have had her abilities but lacked her know-how. And reduce them to floating cinders in the time it took to blink, some still with a shocked look on what remained of their features. And, suddenly, things came together.
The witch went back to cuddling up behind him, and Mircea snapped his fingers.
And then quickly plunged them underwater, before he self-immolated, because a flame had just appeared in the air above them.
He floated there for a moment, slowly treading water.
"Mircea?" Jerome said after a moment, looking concerned.
"We need to find more witches," Mircea told him.
"Uh, yes, we do, but . . . how do we keep them from killing us?"
Mircea looked at his friend, and felt an odd smile spread across his features. "I don’t think that's going to be a problem."
* * *
I came around slowly, sluggishly. Like this had happened once too often lately and my body was starting to rebel. My limbs felt like noodles, my eyes kept trying to cross, and my hearing was wobbling around, as if a toddler was messing with a TV remote. But then I saw a foot—
Just a foot.
But a very familiar one.
I sat up abruptly, drawing in a lungful of air, preparing to scream—
Only to notice a couple things: nobody was attacking us anymore, and the foot wasn't disembodied, as I’d first thought. Just pale, so much so that it was almost the same color as the tile it rested on, allowing the dried blood around the ankle to stand out sharply. And to give the optical illusion that it wasn't still attached to the leg behind it—the one connected to the rest of my boyfriend, who was naked and bloody and sprawled in some sort of cell. And alive!
A second later, I was getting my nose fried as I tried to press it to something that definitely wasn't glass.
"Don’t touch the damned ward!" Marlowe said, as I was blown back on my ass, clutching my face. And still grinning stupidly.
Louis-Cesare grinned back, but barely. He looked as bad as I’d ever seen him, the usually glorious auburn hair straggling around a pinched, exhausted face, the blue eyes shadowed by heavy circles. I knew the feeling.
I crawled back over to the ward, but stopped just short. "Are you all right?" I asked, and heard my voice echo weirdly. Because we were in some kind of big room I didn’t care about right now. I only cared about him.
"Oh, fine, I assure you, thanks for asking," someone said who was not Louis-Cesare.
I glanced over to Louis-Cesare's right, where Anthony, also starkers, was sitting by the same brick wall. No wonder Claude's spell hadn't worked, I thought. It was designed for use with clothes, and somebody had taken all of theirs.
"Well?" Anthony said, expectantly.
"Well what?"
"Are you not pleased to find me alive?" It was pure patrician pique, that I hadn’t immediately started fawning all over him.
I frowned. "I guess?"
He gave me a purely evil look. "I suppose I should be grateful to have been kidnapped along with your lover!"
"Yeah. You should." I sure as hell hadn’t taken the potion express for him. "What’s going on?" I asked Marlowe. "Why can’t you get them out?"
He shot me a look only slightly less intense than Anthony's. He was fiddling with something in a box on the wall, something that caused him to jerk his hand back abruptly. "I'm talking to your uncle. He's walking me through this." He scowled at the air above his head. "Or he would be, if he knew what the hell he was doing!"
"Why not just get him down here?"
"Oh, what an excellent suggestion. That's why!" He flung out a hand at something behind me, and—
Well, shit.
The ward was transparent on this side, giving me a perfect view of the room beyond. Or it would have, except that it was packed—shoulder to shoulder to yet another shoulder—with vamps. There must have been three, four hundred guys out there, jammed together like sardines or people who no longer needed to breathe. And that was just in the part I could see, wedged between the walls and crowding what was left of the stairs.
Most of them were guards, judging by the outfits, but a small knot near the door were not. There was the female senator in red, Heinrich—sans veil but with a steadily flushing face—and a couple of guys in black—
And a very familiar blond.
"Jonathan," I said, and I swear the cold-eyed bastard looked up, as if he'd heard me, despite the fact that I couldn’t hear anything from outside. Although I probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway, over the sudden rushing in my ears.
"Grab her!" That was Louis-Cesare, his voice hoarse and barely there, thanks to whatever that creep had done to him this time.
For the last time, I thought, and snatched up my pack—
And then had somebody grab my arm, before I could decide what the most painful way would be for him to die.
"Let me go!"
"So you can what?" Marlowe demanded. "Let them in?"
"They’re coming in anyway! Get the damned force field down and we'll take them—"
"All five hundred? And likely twice that many upstairs?"
"Yes! We have three first-level masters—"
"And they have three. And two of ours are out of commission, and our resident dhampir is . . . at less than her best."
I stared at him, caught off guard, because that hadn’t been a yell or a curse or any of his usual bluster. It had been a cold, calculated tone that somehow made it just that much more clear how bad this was. "What do you mean, out of commission?"
"He means they drained us," Anthony said. "The one you call Jonathan obtained that pernicious spell from my so-loyal security chief, but spells are like anything else: they have ranges. And my significant other is halfway around the world."
"They'd have killed him a week ago, otherwise," Marlowe said, nodding at Anthony. "But while they had the spell, they didn’t have the magic. Hei
nrich pulled the trigger and snatched Anthony before Jonathan was ready."
"Told him I planned to go back to the U.S. early, due to a request from my lady." Anthony grimaced. "He didn’t like that."
"So they had to finish gathering the magic while they sat on him," Marlowe continued. "It was a risk, but less so than having the spell not be strong enough to take out the consul."
"Otherwise, she might realize that someone was attacking her," I said, catching up. "And come after them."
"And when her life is on the line, well." Anthony smiled slightly. "Scorched earth doesn’t really do it justice."
"We'd have burned the fucking city to the ground to find them!" Marlowe agreed, which made Anthony roll his eyes.
"Still so loyal. How touching."
"She deserves it, unlike some others!"
"If you mean me, why not just say so?"
"I thought I just did!"
"Can we talk about this later, like after the force field is down?" I asked, a little tightly. Because the guys outside were obviously working on the same thing, and if they managed it before we did—
I didn’t think it would be good if they managed it before we did.
I guess Marlowe didn’t either because he went back to work. I looked at Louis-Cesare, who had his eyes closed and his head resting back against the bricks. He hadn’t contributed to the conversation at all, and considering how . . . vocal . . . he could be, that was worrying.
"They drained you repeatedly, didn’t they?" I asked Anthony.
"All week. While they were preparing for their damned party. From what Louis tells me, that's Jonathan's modus operandi."
"Yeah." I stared at Louis-Cesare, who had been caught and tortured by this son of a bitch twice before, once for months. Jonathan had drained him over and over again, stripping him of magic and of life, while gorging himself. Each night his victim had died, only to be reborn the next day.
Just to go through it all over again.
I felt my fist clench. I didn’t care what else happened tonight, I decided. Just so long as Louis-Cesare lived and Jonathan died.
And died screaming.
Anthony was talking again, because he never shut up. Something about how he'd tried to communicate with his people, but was drained so low he couldn’t. Drained so low he couldn't even pull power from his family, the same way Mircea had been once, when Radu had had to manually feed him power-laced blood because he could no longer do it himself. And how the shield around the cells had also done something to interfere with mental communication.
"Cells?" I said.
And then I realized that there was another cell. It was about the same size as the invisible box that surrounded Louis-Cesare and Anthony, but on the other end of the room. And crowded with vampires.
There were dozens of them in there, all looking a little crazed, which was how I’d noticed them. They weren't saying anything, but they kept bumping into the ward, every few moments. And the sizzle, sizzle, sizzle was noticeable.
For a second, I got excited, thinking we had backup.
And then one of them started to cry.
He was the latest to hit the ward, but he hadn’t been pushed into it like the others, by a stray elbow or knee. He'd done it on purpose, crashing into the surface, and then staying there, clawing at the invisible mass and sobbing. More desperate to get out than he was afraid of the not-inconsiderable pain.
"What are they doing here?" I asked Anthony, feeling a weird sense of deja vu.
"Oh, them." Anthony shrugged. "Lab rats. Heinrich's group changed a bunch of locals and dragged them in here to test out the spell. Had to be sure it worked."
"Locals?" I looked at them, and sure enough, there was young and old, wealthy and poor, chic and tacky tourists all equally represented. With most of the desperate, frightened people clinging to their significant others, because of course. Heinrich hadn’t cared who they were, just that they were paired up.
"They're babies; they can’t help us," Anthony said, sounding dismissive. And annoyed that I wasn't paying attention.
And I wasn't. I was seeing another closed, confined space, another group of clueless baby vamps, and me, sitting on the floor, wondering why Dorina would cage them up like that.
Now, I knew. Or I knew that her better-than-average mental powers had allowed her to glimpse something of what was going on. She'd known Louis-Cesare was in trouble before I did, but our communication was also in its infancy, so she couldn't just tell me. So she'd done . . . what, exactly?
Kidnapped a bunch of babies and shoved them in a closet, and then sent me a series of crazy visions she'd yanked from Mircea's head. None of which I’d understood until the spell showed up, and even then . . . I didn’t get it. I still didn’t. I didn’t understand what she so badly wanted to tell me.
But I would.
I looked around, but there was nothing except cold tile. Fortunately, I trained my body a long time ago not to need feather pillows and silken duvets. I laid down on the tile with my pack under my head, and closed my eyes.
"What the hell are you doing?" Anthony demanded. "Kit! What is she doing?"
"Taking a nap."
Chapter Sixteen
1457, Mircea/Present Day Dory
Still burning in the Lagoon, Venice, Italy/Amour
It was easy to tell the two warring groups apart, Mircea thought. Hieronimo's mages were dark, darting shapes among the blazing hulls, able to pass through the flames while shielded without danger. The vampires, on the other hand, had been avoiding the fire from the start, which is why they'd used magic to throw it at him. They'd acquired shields, too, with their purloined power, but weren't able to overcome their instinctive fear enough to use them.
And now, they didn’t have the choice, with all their newfound abilities suddenly gone. Mircea could see them through the blue-black darkness, flinching away from blowing orange embers, and looking around in confusion. Could hear them whispering to each other over the crackling flames and the creak, creak of another ship about to scupper. Could almost feel the tension in the air as they turned on their dark mage allies, demanding to know what was wrong.
Somebody really ought to show them, Mircea thought, and let loose.
But the flame he hurled this time wasn't a shooting star, it was an inferno, an eruption half as wide as the ship they had congregated on, because it was the only one not yet burning.
Well, until now.
Mircea heard gasps and exclamations from the small crowd that had gathered on the beach, as the mighty torrent of flame snapped like a great whip, exploding the mainmast into a thousand fiery splinters, and killing half the vampires in the process.
The rest of them dove overboard, while the dark mages, after a confused moment, turned their combined fire on Mircea.
Ah, but that was the problem, wasn't it, Mircea thought, jerking the great whip back around, and popping their shields like so many soap bubbles. Joining your power individually meant that each man still stood alone. Whereas he had the combined power of all the witches in the Lagoon, making him virtually invulnerable.
Not that anyone was testing him on it at the moment.
They were too busy burning and jumping and diving and dying, because protection spells do little good when the power of several dozen magic workers hits you all at once.
Mircea glanced behind him, to where Jerome was sitting among a bevy of magical beauties on the side of the overturned hull. And watching the show with stars in his eyes, or at least reflected flames. He was probably thinking how the consul could use the spell, aptly called Lover's Knot, to transfer the power of any magic workers she chose to her vamps.
All that was needed was for the witches to fall in love.
Mircea didn’t know how, but the spell used affection to tie a knot in two people's power, allowing each to use the talents of the other. That was why the witch had been able to drain him earlier. Her lover was a master vampire, so when she'd borrowed his power, she had essenti
ally acted as a master, too. Meanwhile, the vamp had been able to run amuck with her magic.
Like Mircea was currently doing.
Of course, she had been an accident. He had stolen her affections, no doubt engendered by vampire mental manipulation in the first place, when his befuddled mind mistook her for Dorina. Giving him access to her power, when a new knot was formed.
The other witches, however, had been on purpose. For someone with his abilities, it had been easy to unravel the knots connecting them to the enemy vamps, and to reconnect them to him instead. Leaving him with access to all of their power.
"Mircea!" Jerome said, drawing his attention to the group of mages battling with Hieronimo's people near the beach. It didn’t look like they were as intent on continuing the fight as making it to shore, but that wouldn’t do. These men had information their side needed, and couldn’t be allowed to escape into the city.
"Ladies," Mircea murmured, and explained the situation to the one Italian in the group.
A moment later, he was almost run down by a gaggle of girlish enthusiasm, as the witches jumped into the water and hurried to the aid of Hieronimo's people. And thereby also delivered themselves into their hands, just as the mage had wanted. Sometimes, Mircea thought, watching the girls gleefully lay waste, things actually worked out.
And then he went back to lashing the surfacing vampires some more.
* * *
"Dory! Dory!"
I awoke to pounding noise, the smell of sizzling meat and a weird sort of high-pitched whine. The first was due to the spells the mages were lobbing at the ward. It seemed they'd given up trying to bypass the system, and were attempting to bring it down the old-fashioned way. And from all the bouncing around it was doing, visible whenever another brightly colored spell hit it, they appeared to be succeeding.
The second distraction was on our side, as the babies threw themselves at their own shield, desperate to break through. Not because they were scared; they were too far gone to be scared. But because they were hungry.
I stared at them, my brain trying to play catch up even as somebody continued shaking me.