by Karen Chance
Shit.
The shiny side of the knife trembling between us reflected a coldly handsome face, so pale that it didn’t look human—which was fair, since it wasn’t. A mass of silver-blond hair obscured most of the features, but I didn’t need them. The eyes glittering between the strands were more than enough. Like twin stars, they were the most unusual color I’d ever seen—solid opaque pewter. And narrowed and angry and terribly familiar as they met mine.
For a split second, until he threw off my hold, vaulted back into the office and slid across the desk.
“What the hell?” Marlowe cursed—from behind me, because I was already moving, hurling myself across the room and reaching out—
And missing, because the damned cat ran underneath my feet. “Shit!”
“I asked you a question!” Marlowe barked, and a bloody hand fell on my shoulder as I leaned out the window—the one his attacker had just thrown himself through. And either Marlowe had forgotten that he wasn’t handling another vamp, or he didn’t care if he cracked bone.
Luckily for him, I was too busy scanning the street far, far below to do more than shake him off. But there was no badly dented car, no body painting the sidewalk red, no sign of his attacker at all. Until I looked up.
And was clipped on the chin by the hard end of someone’s boot.
Son of a bitch.
I went staggering back into the desk, bounced off and started for the window again. Only to stop at the sight of a fey perched on top of a struggling pork chop doing a Superman impression. The pork chop was Slava. The fey was Æsubrand. And they were levitating outside the window like it was no big thing.
Chapter Twenty-three
For a moment, I just stared. Not because of the hovering in midair thing. Levitation charms aren’t exactly rare, although using them in full view of norms is a no-no. But human laws aren’t so easy to apply to a prince of the fey, and anyway, that wasn’t the problem.
No, the problem was that this particular prince hadn’t stuck his charm on a chair, a bookcase or a rug à la Aladdin. No, he’d stuck it on Slava. Which meant that both of them were about to be roadkill because the magic they were using didn’t work that way.
But Æsubrand obviously didn’t know enough about human charms to realize that. Or that he would need a propulsion system, or at least a good push, if he wanted to go anywhere. Which he hadn’t gotten because he’d been too busy kicking me in the head.
Leaving them stranded—for the moment.
I stopped staring up at them and started looking around the office, hoping for a grappling hook—preferably one attached to an M16. But I guess Slava kept the weapons elsewhere, because I didn’t see one. Of course, there was another option.
“Pull us in when I grab him,” I told Marlowe, who had just staggered up behind me.
“Grab who?” he rasped, and then stopped, staring in disbelief at the insanity outside the window.
“Æsubrand,” I said shortly, jerking down the office blinds and stripping off the cord. And thankfully, Slava’s impressively tall windows extended in here, and they had cords to match.
“What? There are fey now?” Marlowe demanded, outraged.
And I had to admit, it did seem a little unfair.
“Looks that way,” I said and threw myself out the window.
I ignored the stream of cursing from behind me because I had about a second to time this right or I’d be a greasy spot on the sidewalk. Luckily, it looked like Æsubrand hadn’t expected company. At least he hadn’t until I grabbed tubby’s belt and held on for dear life.
A pair of silver-bright eyes met mine over a pin-striped mountain for a second, before their owner sent a fist crashing into my jawline. Looks like he remembers me, too, I thought grimly, spitting blood. And then the fist was back for an encore.
I ducked and looped some of the slack of the cord I’d tied around my wrist through Slava’s belt. And waited for Marlowe to jerk him over and plant a fist in Æsubrand’s face. And kept right on waiting, because nothing happened.
Maybe because Slava’s bodyguards had finally gotten a clue that, hey, you know, maybe there’s a problem with the boss. A glance at the office showed that three of them had joined the fun. And while that wouldn’t normally have mattered, they were probably the only senior guys still upstairs. And Marlowe wasn’t having a great night.
Of course, neither was I.
“There’s a reason—oof—that levitation charms aren’t used on people,” I gasped, twisting to avoid the fist of doom, and sending us into a spin that had Slava cursing in Russian and trying to bite me. “Not live ones, anyway. Every time—ugh—the aura fluctuates, there’s a chance—damn it, listen to me!”
But Æsubrand wasn’t. And I didn’t think that was likely to change. I didn’t have a lot of persuasive ability and he didn’t have a lot of respect for humans—or any at all.
But it looked like someone else did.
Slava stopped his attempts to throw both of us into the void long enough to glare at me. “What you say?” he demanded, in heavily accented English.
“I’m saying that every time your aura fluctuates, it stresses the spell,” I told him clearly, hoping the asshole trying to kick my head in might overhear. “We have to get down from here, or any moment—”
“Any moment what?”
“Plop,” I said, indistinctly this time, because I’d just ended up with a mouthful of dirty leather.
I grabbed the damn boot, trying to sling it and its owner against the side of the building. Or the roof, where at least I could shoot the son of a bitch. And it might have worked—if Slava hadn’t started thrashing around like a blowfish out of water.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” I demanded, as he almost sent me flying.
“I know this plop,” he told me violently. “You think I don’t? I have been in this country thirty years! I know this word!”
“Then why are you fighting me?”
“You weigh me down, both of you. Get off!” He punctuated his sentence by elbowing me viciously in the neck.
And then someone started shooting at us.
Of course they did.
I looked up to see Marlowe hanging out of the office window, but he wasn’t the one firing. He was the one on his back getting choked by the vamp trying to push him to his doom, while the vamp’s two buddies took potshots at us. Only they weren’t likely to get any brownie points from the guy they’d just shot in the butt.
“Not me,” Slava sputtered. “Shoot them. Shoot them!”
But Æsubrand didn’t seem to like that idea. Or, rather, he liked it fine where I was concerned, just not for him. Which was easily remedied by jerking Slava around, so that I faced the window full of shooters.
Who promptly drilled me through the shoulder.
It probably would have been through the heart, but Marlowe was giving them hell. The choker’s head suddenly exploded, like a watermelon under Gallagher’s hammer, and Marlowe snarled and threw the bloody stump at the shooter. The result was another miss, but then a backup squad muscled in the door and I decided that maybe it was time to return a favor.
I pulled the gun I’d taken off the mage and drilled one of the guards right between the eyes.
But not with a bullet.
At least, not the normal kind.
A single bullet won’t kill a vamp, even a baby, but they do seriously piss them off. So I’d expected him to lose interest in Marlowe and start firing at us. Which is why I’d jerked us back around so that Æsubrand was facing him.
I had not expected him to turn a weird, all-over white and freeze in place.
Literally, I realized a second later, when Marlowe slammed the butt of a rifle up against the guy’s head and he shattered into a few dozen pieces. Several of which tumbled out the window and smashed against the concrete below. And Marlowe’s head jerked up.
“Where did you get that?” he demanded, looking envious, even while getting hit over the head with a chair.<
br />
“Off the mage,” I yelled back, staring at my new toy in disbelief.
And then Æsubrand tried to kick it out of my hand.
He didn’t succeed, but only because I was gripping it with the fervor of a saint holding a sacred relic. But the blow still hurt like a bitch, turning my whole hand numb. I didn’t get a chance to retaliate, however, because the wind, which had been unusually calm, suddenly decided to pick up.
And why didn’t I think that was a coincidence?
Maybe because I’d seen what Æsubrand could do with the elements.
Most fey were good with one, maybe two. But as far as I could tell, he was good with all of them. His mixed heritage could have been the reason, with two great houses of the Light Fey melded into one. Or maybe he was just talented that way. But I didn’t think it spelled good news for me.
And then I knew it didn’t when what sounded like a freight train came whistling through the space between buildings, gaining momentum on the way.
I started frantically trying to shoot him with my numb hand, since I needed to hold on with my good one. Which would have worked better if he hadn’t taken that moment to start kicking me in the head again. It became a race to see if he could kick me off before I could line up a shot I couldn’t feel and take him out.
I lost.
My neck snapped back, making me wonder if it was broken. And then making me wonder some more as it flopped about randomly when he lashed out again and I went flying. For a second, until the cord jerked me up and pulled Slava’s pants down and we met in the middle, with me hanging off my possibly dislocated wrist from the belt of a pair of trousers that had slid down his chubby legs to puddle around his flailing feet.
And this time I didn’t have a convenient vampire to hide behind. This time I didn’t have anything but a limb that I had grown quite attached to left vulnerable and exposed and useless. And a body being slung around like a newspaper caught in a storm as the two conflicting air streams met and mixed and created a miniature cyclone outside Slava’s ballroom.
And a gun I still couldn’t feel.
Which was going to have to do, I decided, as Æsubrand said something that sounded like a curse and raised a heel. And I managed to get the weapon pointed more or less in his direction. And fired.
It worked. Sort of. Or it would have, if Æsubrand hadn’t dodged at the last second, so that the shot intended for him hit—
Well, crap.
I scowled, Æsubrand cursed, and Slava went white and cold and frosty.
And then the storm hit us, with a force like a closed fist. And when I say “us,” I mean Marlowe, too, who finally managed to grab Æsubrand when we slammed back against the building. Just in time to get dragged out the window when an updraft hit.
On the plus side, getting pounded in the face a couple dozen times by a ticked-off master vamp seemed to be messing up Æsubrand’s control over the weather. On the negative, that made our wild ride even wilder, with nobody steering. Except fate, the evil bitch, who decided to toss us up, up, up and over. And onto the building’s flat roof.
Where a bunch of vamps were pouring out of a rooftop door and running straight at us.
“Oh, come on!” I screamed, because they weren’t Marlowe’s. And they didn’t look too happy at having the boss turned into an icy-pop. Or at being blown back against the door by a pissed-off fey prince.
But that would have actually improved our odds—if a shiny black helicopter hadn’t chosen that moment to loom up over the building. Slava’s ride, I assumed, only it seemed that the guys on board had been brought up to speed by somebody. Because, instead of landing, they started trying to maneuver so that the vamps inside could level machine guns on us.
And that was enough to get even the dynamic duo’s attention. They stopped battling each other long enough to stare, openmouthed, at this new threat. “Are they idiots?” Marlowe asked. “If they hit Slava, he dies!”
Æsubrand’s bloody face whipped around. “He is not dead now?”
“No. Vampire flesh does not behave the same way as human—”
“But he is frozen!”
“He can be thawed,” Marlowe said, wiping his bloody face. “As long as he doesn’t end up in pieces before then.”
“That would not be a risk had someone not shot him!”
“I wasn’t trying to shoot him; I was trying to shoot you!” I told Æsubrand furiously.
“Then you have exceedingly poor aim.”
“You dodged!”
He looked at me like I was slow. “And you expected me to stand still?”
“I didn’t expect you to be here at all! What the hell—”
Æsubrand didn’t get a chance to answer, assuming he’d been planning on it, because the helicopter opened fire. For about a second. A burst sparked off concrete, but came nowhere near us, thanks to the wind that smacked the copter like a giant fist, picking it up and throwing it through the air. Straight at the water tower.
The wooden relic was old enough to be considered an antique, constructed at the same time the building was. It didn’t look like it had ever been updated—no one saw it from the street and it satisfied the ordinance requiring buildings to have an independent source of water. Only this one was about to be in violation, I thought, as the copter smashed into the tower, and the tower fell over and smashed into the ground, and a huge wave of water spilled out and smashed into Slava’s vamps, who had gotten back to their feet only to be washed off them again.
And I decided to keep them that way. I’d finally managed to wrestle my wrist free, allowing me to actually aim two-handed as I raised the mage’s gun. And fired.
But not at them.
There were too many of them and they were too spread out, and anyway, there was a better choice. Like the cresting wave that was breaking over them in a roar and a rush. And that was going to be breaking over them for a while—like until someone chipped them out. Because what I was suddenly looking at was a giant frozen wave with little vamp parts sticking out of it.
It looked like a bizarre modernist sculpture: a fusion of the tower and the huge splash of liquid, with the still-burning helicopter tacked on at one side. Even the fire had frozen, the water vapor congealing around it, giving me the extremely odd sight of flames dancing behind the ice for a moment. Before lack of oxygen snuffed them out, leaving black smoke trapped in their place.
Okay, I thought dizzily, that went better than expected.
Or maybe not. Because when I spun and tried to shoot Æsubrand, nothing happened. Except that his battered face acquired an evil smile and Marlowe’s acquired a dark scowl and then they were at it again, falling to the concrete in a snarling pile of thrashing limbs.
Marlowe must have been too depleted for his super-duper master power to be available, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. And he’d figured out the same thing I had on that wild ride with Slava—Æsubrand’s power didn’t work so well up close, because it caught him, too.
And speaking of Slava—
Where the hell was Slava?
In the few seconds my attention had been diverted, he’d disappeared. Which was stupid; it wasn’t like he could just get up and walk off. Except that that was exactly what he had done.
Sort of.
After a couple seconds of panicked looking around, I finally spied him. A frozen, pantsless vampire drifting out over the void between buildings, like a balloon a kid had just let go of. One that was getting farther away by the second.
But that wasn’t yet quite far enough.
I stuck the empty gun in my waistband, hiked up my skirt and ran, straight for the roof’s edge. I heard Marlowe yell something, but it was lost in the massive gust of wind that was rushing up behind me, trying to beat me to my target, to send him skittering out into the void ahead of me. But either Æsubrand was tiring or I was getting my second wind, because for once, my luck had turned. The gust hit me at almost the same moment that my feet ran out of roof, and actually worke
d in my favor, propelling me up and out farther and faster than I could possibly have hoped for on my own, almost making me overreach my target.
But not quite.
My fingers grabbed the frosty, slippery surface, and my arms and legs wrapped around it, and my head tucked low, and then Slava and I shot ahead, like an odd-shaped bullet barreling through the Manhattan sky.
It was a mad rush, surfing the crest of a wave of wind across the city. No, it was more than mad; it was breathtaking and death-defying and so stupid it made my head hurt. But it was hard to care with the wind whistling past my ears and the city streaming by below and Slava’s building fast retreating into the distance.
I clutched him harder, little half-crazed gasps of something I finally recognized as laughter slipping out from between my lips, because, crazy or not, it was working.
At least it was until the charm suddenly gave out.
It took me a second to realize what had happened, because I’d assumed that the freezing process would have stabilized it. And maybe it had. Maybe it had lasted longer than it should have on a body, although that was cold comfort considering that in a second we had gone from tearing across the sky to tearing toward the ground.
Battery Park was coming up, the greenery a dark swath against the brighter buildings, with the city lights wavering in black water beyond. But it didn’t look like we were going to make it that far. And even if we did, hitting the ocean from this height and speed would be virtually the same as hitting concrete.
I tried to think, in the few seconds I had left, to remember all those rules about what to do if falling from a height. But the thing about those rules is, they were made by someone safely on the ground. And it’s a little hard to take them seriously when your eyes are tearing up and the wind is roaring in your ears and the ground is rushing up at you at a rate that is clearly not survivable unless you suddenly grow wings. And while I have a fair number of skills to call on in an emergency, I don’t number flying among them.
Fortunately, someone else did.