by Karen Chance
But I liked leaving Lawrence to face him on his own even less. I could call in, explain what had happened and wait for backup—which is what sane people did, Lawrence—but by the time it got here, he would have already dealt with or been dealt with by whoever was down there. There would be nothing left but picking up the pieces, assuming we could find them all, which in his case wasn’t that likely.
“I never leave a partner behind,” he’d said. Except when he did. Or when he assumed the crazy dhampir would be right on his heels. And I guess he was right, because the next thing I knew, I was slipping down through the middle of the portal and feeling the not-water closing over my head.
Chapter Nine
“What are you doing?” a voice demanded, causing me to bite my tongue on a scream. It was extraordinarily bad timing, because I hit the ground a second later, jarring my jawbone and causing my fangs to pop out. And then plunging them into my own flesh.
Which was just as well, as it kept me from uttering any of the comments that were trembling on the tip of my mangled tongue. I pried my teeth out and spat blood. It took a few seconds, because there was a lot of it, and then I looked up to find Radu hovering over me.
Literally, since his feet weren’t touching the floor. “How are you doing that?” I demanded when I could talk.
“How should I know?” he asked, looking like a testy angel with that long dark hair floating around that beautiful face. “I told you, this is new to me, too. But at a guess, the laws of physics don’t work when it’s all in your head.”
“Tell that to my jaw,” I said, rubbing it.
“Well, I’m sorry, but Mircea wants—” He stopped, tilting his head. “Mircea wants me to take you out, but Kit is arguing against it.” He winced.
“What is it?”
“Louis-Cesare is…objecting…to something Kit said,” Radu told me diplomatically.
I hoped the objecting hadn’t involved any thumps, because the day that happened I damned well wanted to be there to see it. But right now there was something I wanted more. “I need to finish this.”
Radu shook his head. “It isn’t a good idea, Dory. We can come back—”
“And the missing vampires?”
“You know they’re…” Radu looked uncomfortable. “Well, you know the odds.”
“And you know how tricky first- and second-level masters can be.”
He sighed. Considering who his brother was, yes, he did. “It would be best to be able to go after them sooner rather than later,” he admitted. “But—”
“Then get out of here.” I’d gotten to my feet and now I tried to push past him, but a pale, long-fingered hand gripped my arm. It was always surprising to remember that ’Du was a vampire, too, and also second-level. He didn’t look it, didn’t act it. But the strength of that hand was unmistakable.
“There are four missing men, ’Du,” I said, because I couldn’t break his grip. I might have, on a good day, since fighting isn’t only about strength and I know a hell of a lot more about it than Radu ever bothered to learn. But he was right—I was getting tired. Trying to fight my way out would just end this all the sooner.
But Radu didn’t let go. “When did they become men?” he asked softly.
“What?”
“They’re vampires, Dory. Not too long ago, they would have been things to you. We were all merely things.”
“No.”
“Yes.” The wavering beams of light threw odd shadows across that handsome face, making it hard to read his expression. “You killed our kind—”
“I killed the bad guys, ’Du,” I said impatiently, because I really was tired. And in pain. All the little aches Louis-Cesare had soothed away were coming back, not at full strength, but enough to remind me that he was better at killing things than healing them. “I never went after anybody who didn’t deserve it.”
“Not hurting is a different thing from saving,” he replied quietly. “There was a time when you would have let Raymond burn up in your hallway. When you would not have cared if four strange vampires died. When you would have been like your friend Claire, who says all the right things but looks at us as if we were roaches crawling across her kitchen floor.”
“You…didn’t act like you noticed that.”
“Of course not. I am charming,” Radu pointed out.
“Yeah,” I said, because in his own, extremely weird way, he sort of was. He was also sort of right, but I didn’t think now was the time to go into it.
“Can you go Oprah on me later?” I asked. “If I’m going to do this, I really need—”
“Shit!”
The drop was a bitch. Fourteen feet isn’t fun anyway, but landing on a lot of pointy rocks is even less so. Fortunately, the points were fairly small, leaving me beat up and bloody instead of impaled. Unfortunately, they were also hot as fuck.
“Shit! Shit!”
I jumped up, getting hard boot leather between me and the floor. It looked perfectly normal—beige and rocky, except for clearer bits here and there covered with sand—but the Ray impression I was currently doing said otherwise. The knees of my jeans were burnt out, one sleeve of the leather jacket I’d been wearing was melted to my arm, and my hands—
“Damn it!” The portal’s light showed me palms full of blisters, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the half ton of gravel embedded in them. And the damned stuff was continuing to blister the areas around it even as my body tried to heal. It was like picking up a handful of embers, only these didn’t seem inclined to go out.
After a second, I bit the bullet and wiped my hands on my jeans, leaving blood and skin behind along with the gravel, because I didn’t have time to pick out every individual piece. My soles were already starting to smoke, and when they went, it was time’s up. And since it looked like that would take all of another minute or so, I faced reality and pulled out the big guns.
Or, to be more precise, the big cheat.
Being a dhampir has certain advantages—better senses, rapid healing, greater strength, speed, etc. What it does not have is magic, of any type, kind or variety, which is a problem considering many of the things I fight. But as flat-chested girls and balding guys learned a long time ago, what nature didn’t give you, you can often buy. And mages have to make a living, too.
But the cool toys don’t come cheap. I mentally tacked another grand onto the tally for tonight’s little outing, and pulled a Baggie out of an inner coat pocket. Inside was a cheap-looking bracelet, bronze and cuff style, like the magnetic crap shysters are always trying to pawn off on arthritis sufferers at the mall. Only this one actually worked.
Not for healing, but for making sure you didn’t need any. The thing was a temporary shield, fine as any a war mage could project, which was fair, since I’d bought it off one. But like all shields, it ate magic like candy. And it wasn’t like I could generate more when the reservoir ran dry. A plastic strip on the side showed the drain—fifteen minutes under ideal conditions, which was stupid when the whole point of having the damned thing was that you weren’t in ideal conditions.
Anyway, I could hope for maybe five here. I also hoped that nobody with superfine hearing was paying attention, because the big boy didn’t play well with others. Specifically, it required dropping all other shields, which interfered with it for some reason I didn’t understand since magic theory made my head hurt. But the mage’s instructions had been specific, so the sound shield had to go.
The new spell closed over me, a cool bubble of protection molding to my scorched skin like air-conditioned glass. I gave a—very brief—sigh of relief as the temp dropped a good fifty degrees, allowing me to breathe. I also took a few precious seconds to shoot a line with a grappling hook back through the portal and onto the boat, making sure it caught. It was retractable, so as long as I managed to get back here, and the line hadn’t burnt up, and nobody was shooting at me on the way up, I’d be fine.
Yeah.
So.
The only go
od thing was that I didn’t have to choose directions. Behind me was a wall, and while there was a chance that Lawrence had found a way through it, I wasn’t going to. He was either somewhere ahead or he wasn’t, and I had about four and a half minutes left to find out. I started moving.
SOP in cases like this is to take a couple steps, check for snares, take another couple steps, repeat as needed. But (a) that would get me all of ten yards before my protection gave out, (b) I didn’t see Lawrence’s mangled body anywhere and (c) why the hell bother to put a snare in here? The corridor of the damned was enough of a barrier all on its own.
And not just because of the heat. The tunnel was naturally occurring by the look of it, with some lofty areas—like the one the portal had let out on—but up ahead the ceiling ducked low enough that it looked like I might have to crawl. It was also lumpy and hot and completely lacking in partners, bad guys, or anything else of interest except some fireflies zipping around the darkness over my head.
They weren’t the only source of light. Once I got away from the portal, I started noticing glowing patches in the walls, like mold if it was the color of fire and sent off heat waves so intense they were almost visible. I found that out when I ran into one, causing the line on the shield’s meter to drop like a stone. I hit the ground and flipped over to see the room wavering through the intense band of heat above me.
Fun.
I was a little more cautious after that, ducking and dodging to avoid draining the shield even faster, until I hit the crawling part. It didn’t have as much of the freaky mold but also didn’t have a floor after a dozen yards or so, thanks to letting out straight into an enormous cavern. Which was when everything started to speed up.
In rapid succession I saw Lawrence all the way at the bottom, near crevices filled with some type of round things in clumps, like golden caviar. A man—or a mannequin, judging by the way the head fell off when Lawrence touched it—was on a chair in front of him. And a huge swarm of what I guess weren’t fireflies, after all, was flowing out of openings in the walls and fissures in the rocks into a spinning, glowing tornado in the air between us.
I showed up right before it dove—straight at Lawrence.
I had a half second to see him turn, his face and body illuminated with hundreds of swirling golden dots, like a disco ball. And then he shattered, coming apart in the time it took to blink. And damn, that was impressive. So much so that for a second I thought he was going to be okay. But then the golden cloud noticed the darker one rising through its middle.
And tightened up like a closing fist.
For an instant, there were two swirls, dark and light, circling each other in a graceful ballet in midair, a living yin and yang. And then Lawrence pulled away, scattering himself in a wide arc, which I didn’t understand until I noticed. The dark ashes were burning.
It was like a fire in reverse—ash catching alight and burning gold, then orange, then red and then nothing as it flamed out, disintegrating entirely. Lawrence scattered further, maybe losing control, maybe trying to minimize the damage, I couldn’t tell. But even if it was the latter, there were too many of them and he had too far to go and—
He wasn’t going to make it.
I tore the cuff off my wrist, glanced at the bar—and shit. It looked like even my cynical estimate had been a little optimistic. Because there was all of thirty seconds left when I hurled it into the heart of the swarm and yelled, “Lawrence!”
I didn’t wait to see if he caught it; I was already turning the instant it left my hand. I’d done what I could and my only job now was to report in and let the other groups know what they were walking into. But for that, I had to get out. Or crawl and scurry and flail and stumble out, because without the shield—
God. It wasn’t like an oven. Ovens had even heat and this wasn’t even close. That damned lichen or whatever it was formed a deadly lattice across the tunnel, shimmering in lines where the 130-degree air suddenly shot up, 20, 50, 100 degrees in almost invisible waves.
There weren’t as many in the low area of the tunnel, but there was also less room to avoid them. I took one of the “cooler” bands across the face and felt it sear my skin, didn’t quite miss one of the hotter ones and smelled my hair start to burn. But I didn’t bother to put it out because there was no time. I reached the part of the corridor where I could finally stand up straight and tore ahead, my half-melted soles barely touching the ground.
I didn’t try for pretty; didn’t care about form. I ducked and rolled and ran halfway up one wall before throwing myself to the hateful floor and rolling another few yards forward, under the worst of the bands. Not that it seemed to help.
In seconds, my hands were a mass of blisters, my jacket was smoking, my eyes were watering so badly I could barely see the deadly heat shimmers. Hell, the whole room was shimmering. Including a watery patch of ground up ahead, glowing like a beacon and wavering like a mirage in the middle of the desert.
My burning hand closed on the burning cord I’d left behind, and a second later I was flying through the portal and smacking face-first into the gently rocking hull. And staggering off. And realizing that anything I could pass through, something else could, too, which was a problem since I didn’t know how to shut this particular portal down.
I didn’t waste time waiting for Lawrence. If he was going to make it out, he’d be right on my heels. And if he wasn’t—
Then he wasn’t. Partner or no, releasing that burning swarm on the city wasn’t in the job plan. I wouldn’t have expected him to risk it for me, and I wasn’t going to do it for him.
There are explosives that work specifically on portals, but I didn’t have any. What I did have was a sawed-off shotgun and a lot of spare clips, and I used them, shooting the boards around the portal with slug after slug, at almost point-blank range. Plexiglas flew, some kind of Styrofoam-looking guts were gouged out and my ears felt like they might be bleeding. But within moments, water started bubbling through and then spilling over. Faster than I would have believed possible, I was up to my knees and there was what looked like a sinkhole doing its best to siphon the Atlantic into wherever-the-hell.
Which was good, because something was doing its best to come through from the other side. I scrambled out of the trapdoor, watching as something bloomed under the water, something massive and glowing. But while passing through a portal is usually instantaneous, whatever it was seemed to be having a little trouble. Maybe because of the tsunami currently slapping it in the face.
Burn that, I thought viciously, and fired again, sending both barrels straight into the glowing heart.
And then tried to duck as something flew out at me, something huge and black and smoking. I staggered back, hitting the flooded hallway with a splash and a yelp, because whatever was on me was hot, hot, so fucking hot. But I couldn’t see because steam was rising from the water and the damned boat was sinking and the explosion must have done something to the electrical, because the lights were blinking on and off—
But I didn’t need them when I found myself staring into a pair of glowing red eyes.
“Lawrence!”
“Did you have to fucking shoot me?” he snarled, and then we were running and splashing and half drowning—at least I was—back down the hall and through the living area, and out onto the dock, which was within easy reach now that half the craft was underwater.
I pulled up, gasping and choking, having swallowed almost as much as the portal, and dragged myself onto the pier. My half-melted jacket was still smoking, but at least the dunking had put out my hair. I ripped the damned leather off, what parts weren’t already welded to my hide, as Lawrence collapsed beside me.
“It was a trap,” he gasped.
No shit, I didn’t say, because he looked bad. Not bullet-wound-bad, which he didn’t have because he’d still been half dissolved when I shot him. But he was gasping and retching and generally looking like a guy who might have left some important bits behind.
And
carried a few others along for the ride. The suit had mostly burnt away, allowing me to see bright spots moving under pale skin, as if someone was shining tiny flashlights through him. One thigh disintegrated in a cascade of black ash, isolating something that twitched and writhed in a puddle of seawater for an instant before flaming out. Others blinked out inside him, probably choked by the fluids in his body, but one—
A brief burning scent was all the warning I had before something burst out of the flesh on his arm. It shone against the blue darkness like a living ember for a second, still smoking from the blood sizzling on its body. I jumped up, getting a glimpse of fine, fire-lit traceries of wings, a solid golden carapace and black, opaque eyes—before it disintegrated under what remained of my left boot heel.
“Fuck!” I said, breathing heavily as Lawrence struggled to sit up.
“Those were…Varus’s clothes…” he rasped. “But on…a dummy. We were…”
“Shut up,” I told him, checking my cell phone because he was in no shape to call for help himself. And neither was I, thanks to the latest in a long line of busted pieces of crap having drowned along with me.
“Have to…warn the others—”
“I said shut up!” I rasped. He needed his strength if he was going to last until I got back. “I’m going to find a phone and call in. Just stay—”
“Dorina!”
I didn’t need the warning. The look on his face told me it wasn’t good even before a bullet slammed into my shoulder. It was large enough caliber to send me sprawling over Lawrence for half a second, before I was rolling, trying to raise a gun with an arm that no longer worked, and then switching hands and still not getting a slug off because the powder was—
Another bullet tore the gun out of my hand as I scrambled back, trying with my left hand to find a weapon that wasn’t soaked, which would have been easier if I could have reached my damned jacket. But I couldn’t even see it; someone had a light blazing in my eyes, bright as a—