by Karen Chance
A massive crack sundered the air, loud enough to cut through the jangling music still spilling out of clubs, the roaring winds and the whirring fan blades. And to carve a chasm in the street below, big enough to swallow half a hundred cars.
Which wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as the mushroom cloud of fire boiling up from the middle of it.
“Turn! Turn!” John screamed, whilst Zheng stared transfixed, caught in a vampire’s worst nightmare.
It wasn’t exactly John’s favorite, either, considering that it couldn’t be what it looked like, namely a ruptured gas line, because the city didn’t use gas. It didn’t need it, with the ley line sink providing basically an unending power source. One that was constantly boiling away underneath, as if the whole place was suspended over an active volcano, with the fury leashed only by the city’s massive shields.
Ones that were now starting to crack.
Rickshaws swerved every which way, trying to avoid the sudden inferno, and a flying limo clipped the party barge. It went spinning wildly for a few seconds, leaving John clinging to the side and staring at a jangly, candy colored blur. Until the engine fairies got things back under control, giving him a view of a black wall of vampires boiling up behind the flames.
He blinked at it, suddenly realizing that Zheng’s men’s sacrifice hadn’t been for nothing, after all. They’d beaten back or killed the closest part of the army, putting space between the barge and the rest of the horde. One that was now filled with fire.
“They can’t see us past the flames!” Zheng yelled, coming back to himself. “Get us out of here!”
The small craft abruptly zipped through a gap between buildings. They were some of the taller apartment blocks in the area, wide-bodied things with a thousand little balconies jutting off the sides, like towering trees eaten up with mushrooms. And there was a whole forest of them, enough to get lost in.
Which would have brought John more relief if Zheng hadn’t suddenly grabbed him by the throat.
Chapter Forty
I t wasn’t playful this time. There was genuine fury in those eyes, along with something else, something that looked suspiciously like tears, although with all the rain it was impossible to tell. But whatever it was, it was serious.
“What the fuck did you do?”
John tried to break the vampire’s hold and failed, partly because Zheng’s grip was crushing his windpipe. And it didn’t look like he planned on stopping anytime soon. John managed a silent spell that was supposed to push them apart, giving him some room to maneuver, but only caused them to stagger into the side of the barge when Zheng held on.
The vampire finally released him and stalked away a few steps, before abruptly whirling back around. “What did you do?” he demanded again, while John clutched his throat and tried to remember how to breathe.
“About what?” he finally gasped.
“About this!” Zheng gestured savagely. “About all of this! About the army who wasn’t following me, they were following you. Every eye back there was fixed on you the entire damned time! I’m beginning to believe they followed me to that damned pharmacy hoping I would lead them to you!”
“Possibly,” John rasped, since plenty of people had seen him and Zheng together before they split up.
“You admit it!” The grabbing recommenced, but at least this time it was on John’s shoulders. Until he broke the hold, and danced back a few steps. Because he still couldn’t breathe goddamnit!
“Admit what? What is wrong with you, you complete lunatic? I told you about Dagon—”
“Yeah,” Zheng’s eyes flashed. “You told me some dead demon lord wanted revenge—”
“Yes!”
“—so what the hell is he doing, huh?”
John stared at him. “Getting it?”
“Why? The city is dying and you’re about to go with it! He’ll get his revenge by doing nothing at the rate things are going, yet he has an army chasing us down? He could be using that on the towers—another one of which we just lost, by the damned way!”
John shook his head. It was hard to think with blood from a near choking still pounding in his ears. And the fact that their crazy ride was running a maze through the buildings, trying to make sure they lost their pursuit, didn’t help. But Zheng wanted an answer, and he wanted it now.
“Vampires couldn’t help with that,” John croaked. “Other than attacking the triads—”
“Which would help a damned sight more than chasing us around the city!”
“Perhaps. But the Corps is perfectly capable of defending themselves and attacking at the same time. They don’t need assistance—”
“And yet he pulled them off the job to attack you, too. Or have you forgotten?”
John flashed back to that mad chase across burning rooftops with Zheng’s boys. And the hundreds of war mages moving heaven and earth to try to kill them. Or should that be to try to kill him? Had that been when Dagon first realized that he was in the city? Or had he realized earlier, when John arrived towing a monster of a vortex, and was almost immediately been set upon by the triads?
Would he have been murdered in that alley if Zheng hadn’t found him? And promptly carried him away to the last place on earth anybody would expect to find a war mage? His gut said yes, but his brain didn’t understand.
If this was about revenge, Zheng was right: Dagon should be concentrating on destroying the city and John along with it. He didn’t need to be doing this. And yet he’d been chasing him for hours, mentally as well as physically, and for what?
So, he could kill him five minutes faster?
“Why is he after me?” John asked.
“That’s what I want to know! He’s been throwing everything he has at you, all bloody day, and I want to know why!”
John did, too, but he didn’t have an answer. He was going to try to kill the creature, he was going to try hard. But even he had to admit that his chances . . . weren’t great. Dagon was likely well protected, whereas John was wounded, out of ammo, and his only back up was an equally wounded master and a bunch of crazed advertisements!
Dagon couldn’t seriously view him as a threat, so what was the point?
He didn’t know. But it felt like he should have. It felt important.
And it seemed that Zheng thought so, too. Because he abruptly jerked John up to his face, literally nose to nose. Close enough that John could feel angry breath on his face that smelled like blood. It matched the splotches on the creature’s skin, and the broken blood vessels surrounding those angry black eyes.
“Listen to me, war mage, and listen well. I don’t know how to kill a demon lord. You do. I am therefore going to keep you alive and get you to him, so you can take this fucker out. For me, for my family, and for my goddamned city. And if you fail, I’ll kill you myself!”
If I fail, we’ll all die anyway, John didn’t say. But not because of a sense of self-preservation. But because of where they’d ended up.
Son of a bitch, he thought, blinking in wonder.
They’d just sailed into a huge open area with no bridges, because none were long enough to cover the massive gap. This was clearly one of the wealthier parts of town, with the surrounding apartments charging a premium for the unobstructed views and tasteful plantings down below. But with several large, busy roads cutting through the scenery, because this was Hong Kong, after all.
The roads formed an X shape, easily visible in the darkness. But although they were clogged with the non-levitating type of transport, the big story was in the skies. The entire great, open area was filled with vehicles, flying so thick and so fast that they were little more than a multicolored blur.
Until they ran into each other, that was.
In less than a minute, John saw no fewer than three mid-air collisions, two being glancing blows that sent overloaded rickshaws spinning away from each other, their occupants’ screams quickly lost to the wind. And one that was a full-on, mid-air crash, leaving burning vehicles shudd
ering apart overhead and shrieking bodies falling. John lunged for a plummeting woman, but missed, catching only a glimpse of her terrified face as she fell into darkness. And as they zipped by, into what looked like a full-on battle in the sky.
And not just because of the collisions.
A strafe of bullets tore past his head, coming from a nearby building. A fight was taking place on a balcony, with an encumbered rickshaw floating alongside. And just below them, one rickshaw was chasing a second, with the one in back lobbing spells hot enough to set a third vehicle alight when it happened across their path.
The traffic laws clearly weren’t the only ones that nobody was following anymore. It was everyone for themselves, including the criminal element. Who didn’t seem to understand that plunder wouldn’t do them any good if the city died around them!
But they very obviously did not understand that. In the middle of the big open area, two huge, flat-topped platforms, each large enough to cover half a football field, were levitating opposite each other with a gap in between. They controlled a lot of the surrounding airspace, forcing traffic to flow around them—where it was being shaken down by triad members jumping onto speeding vehicles and throwing valuables back onto the platforms.
It looked like they were playing a huge game of sky basketball, only with plunder instead of balls.
“I thought the triads were fighting for the city!” John yelled at Zheng, pointing ahead.
“Damned pirates!” Zheng yelled back, and grabbed the little dancer as the barge scraped alongside another repurposed boat. “Go around! Go around!”
“Tell them that!” she yelled back, as their craft all but stopped in the air.
The other vessel had a smoking engine that was providing nothing in the way of propulsion, and unfurled sails that were doing more harm than good. They were rocking it back and forth but not actually helping it go anywhere, because it had nothing to push off of. Apparently, no one had ever told its owners that the water under a boat was just as important for its movement forward as the thrust provided by the sails.
But it looked like they’d figured out an alternative.
“Damned pirates!” Zheng yelled again, as the barge was suddenly swarmed.
“Oars!” John shouted, pointing at the moldy old things sticking out of the barge’s hull, while elbowing a would-be invader back onto his own ship.
Their crew grabbed the oars. Somebody also set off the cannon, which spewed confetti all over the deck of the opposite craft, but did fuck all otherwise. But the oars were a different story. John and the rest of the crew used them to knock the invaders back onto their own vessel, and to shove at the hull, trying to get some distance between them.
And unwittingly did more than that.
Their actions finally provided the other craft with the resistance it had been lacking. A gust of hurricane force winds caught the sails at just the right angle, and the ship went racing off in the opposite direction. Until it plowed into one of the surrounding buildings, that was, in an explosion of wood and engine oil.
John leaned against the side of the ship, heart hammering, vision pulsing, and stared at the falling men, who had likely just been trying to get out of here like everyone else. And wondered if he was still the good guy. But there wasn’t time to debate the point.
“No! Not that way!” Zheng was yelling, as their barge headed straight for the middle of the triad’s little game.
“It fastest route!” the dancer said, her eyes huge.
“It’s not fast if we’re dead! Get us out of here!”
“Then get out the way! I can’t see!”
But Zheng obviously could. “Go up! Go up!” he suddenly screamed, causing John’s head to whip around.
He didn’t see anything. Or, rather, he saw too much. The automated searchlights that typically lit up wayward vehicles were strobing the sky, but doing little except adding to the chaos. One blinded John for an instant as it followed a wildly flipping two-seater, before the out of control vehicle plowed into the ground. But that wasn’t where Zheng was looking.
John finally noticed a line of smaller craft abruptly swerving to one side or the other, leaving a large cleared path behind them, as if a giant was muscling his way down a sidewalk.
But it wasn’t a giant coming at them.
He managed to focus on what appeared to be an entire roof flying through the air. It had been ripped off an unfortunate house and sent sailing by some sort of vortex, because it was spinning about and slinging tiles everywhere. It looked deadly, and apparently the dancer agreed, because their small craft abruptly shot up out of the way.
And hit a bus zipping by overhead, filled with panicked people, who were even more panicked when a party barge suddenly slammed into their underside.
People screamed, somebody almost fell out, and John hit the boards again, his warded parasol the only reason his brains hadn’t just been turned to mush.
Zheng grabbed the dancer. “Go down! Go down!”
“You make up mind!” she yelled, but the little boat went down.
Right into the path of the roof.
“Look out!” She screeched, as John staggered back to his feet—at the worst possible moment. The heavy projectile landed like a hundred fists, popping the parasol and sweeping him out into the storm-tossed air, almost before the words left her lips.
And then he was falling.
Chapter Forty-One
J ohn didn’t see if anybody else fell with him; he didn’t see much of anything at all. Except for wind and rain and a blur of wildly skewing headlights. He tried to deploy a shield, but the blow had left him disoriented and it didn’t work. And a second later he went splat—but not onto the ground.
There hadn’t been time to fall fifteen stories, although he had fallen far enough that he didn’t immediately get up again. Which appeared to be a problem for the people whose craft he’d dropped onto. Maybe, he realized through stabbing pain, because he’d landed on one of the triad platforms.
And it looked like they remembered him.
A group of vampires, some with burn scars still on their faces, lunged for him, and John got a quick flash of a story he’d heard somewhere. About how, if you’re in a burning building, you should jump out a window. Sure, you might fall to your death, but that was better than the alternative. And you might think of something on the way down.
John thought of something.
He hooked an end of the sari onto a protruding nail and jumped, using the scroll of silk as a lifeline. It unrolled around him, leaving him twisting and turning in the air like a confused caterpillar—for a moment. Until he ran out of sari and was stuck there, being buffeted by the winds and almost run down by the dozens of speeding objects flying past him.
One of which he dropped onto a second before the sari was jerked back up, leaving a pissed off vampire holding a wad of sodden silk and John riding on the back of a produce lorry—
One heading straight for the other damned platform!
He got his wobbly legs back under him and started half jumping/half falling from one vehicle to another, as if he was on the world’s weirdest staircase going every which way. In the process, he tried to locate the party barge, and to judge which of the vehicles whizzing past was most likely to take him back to it.
But it was impossible. His head was wonky enough to give him double vision, the storm felt like it was lashing at him with a firehose, and he was pretty sure he’d broken his right arm at some point. It was everything he could do to avoid mimicking road kill, to keep from getting blown off his latest perch by gale force winds, and to dodge the blows of people whose vehicles he was not trying to steal, goddamnit!
But they didn’t know that, and they were as wild-eyed and panicked as he was, slashing at everything that moved. John jumped onto the back of a rickshaw, got pistol whipped by a granny sitting on a pile of luggage, fell onto a motorcycle’s loaded sidecar, and got kicked off onto the less than sturdy roof of a mobile café. Whic
h he promptly fell through before he could get back to his feet, landing in the midst of a trio of startled cooks.
John had seen Hong Kong’s version of food trucks the last time he was here. They were hard to miss, being elongated tin or plywood-sided things lumbering along the miles of bamboo scaffolding in front of under-repair high-rises in order to feed the workers. He hadn’t noticed them having quite so many knives.
Ones that were now being turned on him.
Son of a bitch!
He got his legs up, sending two of the cooks stumbling back against the counter, and elbowing the other in the face as he got back to his feet. It bought him a moment to rip off the damned bra, fold the two ends together, and use it—and the coconuts it somehow still contained—like a cudgel to fend off his assailants. It worked surprisingly well, judging by the cooks’ gob smacked expressions.
As if the strangest thing they’d seen all day was a bra wielding madman!
Somebody else landed hard on what was left of the roof, causing them all to look up. At a ring of very unhappy triad members, whose expressions turned positively gleeful at the sight of John. And then changed again when somebody grabbed two of them and knocked their heads together, before throwing them into darkness.
“Zheng!” John said, a surge of relief coursing through him.
Right before somebody drove a knife in his eye.
At least, that’s what it felt like. It was so excruciating and so sudden that he staggered, knocking over a pot of boiling noodles that scalded the laminate countertop. And the vamp who’d slipped down the outside of the café in order to assault him.
The pain was so bad that John barely noticed the screaming vamp, or the massive battle now going on over his head, or the knife wielding cooks. Who didn’t appear to know who to stab first, but were going with John because he was handy. He couldn’t see well enough to use his makeshift cudgel, but managed to get a large pot lid up for a shield. Because he couldn’t raise his magical ones with his head feeling like it was about to split in half!