by Karen Chance
And then suddenly stopped.
And made a very strange face.
And crumpled to the ground like a busted toy.
A toy with no head, I realized a second later when it came off and rolled a few feet away. And despite the fact that there were bones and tendons and veins and assorted other things in there, the wound was so clean that it didn’t even bleed at first. Like a rapier had sliced through a candle.
And then heads were popping off everywhere, all around the circle, and bodies were falling and I was wondering if the consul had some wicked new ward I’d never heard of that didn’t like Weres.
But no. Because a moment after the last huge shaggy body collapsed on the pile, a very familiar redhead staggered out of absolutely nothing. It was like he’d stepped out of a portal, only there was no portal there. Just a shimmy of air and then a very confused-looking master vampire.
His hair was everywhere, he was barefoot and swaying slightly, and he appeared to be wearing only a blue bathrobe. But he was holding a rapier so thin and sharp that it was barely even bloody. And okay, I thought.
I guessed I knew what Louis-Cesare’s master power was.
He looked at me, pupils blown huge and dark and vague, like his vampires’ had been earlier. “Who…” He swallowed, and finally managed to focus on my face. “Who am I?”
He sounded a little desperate.
“My boyfriend, come to get me out of this?”
Louis-Cesare blinked. “That’s right.”
And then he pulled me to him and kissed me.
For a second, until Ray pushed us apart. “Can you do that again?” he demanded.
Louis-Cesare looked at him haughtily. “Of course.” And he gave me another kiss, this time with tongue.
“No! I meant that thing you just did.”
“The Veil,” Zheng added enviously.
“Yeah, yeah, that. Can you do that again?”
Louis-Cesare looked up, blue eyes narrowing. “Why?”
“Because I think I have an idea.”
Chapter Forty-five
The balcony was occupied when we slipped back through the portal, but only by a couple of mages. They were looking surprised at not seeing anyone there. But not half as surprised as when they did.
“All right,” Zheng said, after they hit the floor. “Let’s hear it.”
Ray licked his lips, suddenly looking less sure of himself. But then he straightened his shoulders and met Zheng’s eyes. “Okay,” he said briskly. “The fey have to go through the portals to get to us, right?”
“Obviously.”
“But they haven’t cut them all the way through to the other side yet, or we’d have been seeing a lot of gates with nobody coming out of them, and I haven’t.”
“Of course not,” Zheng said impatiently. “They don’t want to telegraph where they’re coming, in case we booby-trap the area.”
“Right. Which is what gives us a chance.”
I was looking at Louis-Cesare, who was still swaying and appeared slightly cross-eyed.
He caught my eye. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere in Faerie. Svarestri lands, I think.”
“Oh.”
“What chance?” Zheng was demanding. “Unless you can collapse a bunch of portals on the fly—”
“Well, yeah.”
“What?”
“Closing a portal is easy,” Ray said impatiently. “It’s cutting it to begin with that’s hard. But that won’t do no good, because if we close ’em, they’ll just open more. They gotta have the people here to do that, given how many—”
“Pardon,” Louis-Cesare interrupted politely. “But you did say Faerie?”
“What’s wrong with him?” Zheng demanded.
I sighed. “He’s brain-fried. He shouldn’t even be here.”
“That makes two of us.” Zheng looked at Ray. “Get to the point.”
“I’m trying! Look, destroying the portals won’t work, ’cause then they’ll know something’s up and just cut more. But what if we reroute ’em?”
“Reroute them how?”
“With this. I—”
Zheng snatched the little device Ray had just pulled out of his wallet. “What’s this?”
“My own invention,” Ray said, snatching it back. “I use it to cut into portals. And to link them.”
“Holy shit,” I said, catching up.
The little thing didn’t look like much. Just a basic charm, like the kind people used for everything from opening warded doors to hanging around their necks for a quick glamourie: flat, gold, vaguely roundish, like an old-fashioned watch fob. Only this one had a couple metal prongs sticking out of it.
Ray was looking smug. “I cut into the Senate’s line, remember? To link up some of my portals. So it’s in my network, so to speak.”
“So you’re going to do what?” I asked, wanting to be sure I got this.
“The same thing Olga does when she wants to make more than one stop on the same line,” Ray explained. “You gotta tell the portal which destination you want, don’t you? Or you could end up at any gate along the line.”
“So you’re going to use that thing to tell the fey’s portals to let out…somewhere else?”
He nodded.
“Like where?”
“Do you care? Somewhere that isn’t Earth, okay? I got a lot of locations preset—”
“Wait,” Zheng said, his forehead knitting. I didn’t think it was from lack of intelligence; he’d always struck me as fairly bright. But it didn’t look like portals were his thing any more than they were mine. “You’re saying you can link the fey’s portals…and then…reroute their army somewhere else?”
Ray sighed. “For like the third time. Yes, that is what I’m saying.”
Zheng looked skeptical, but he nodded. “Okay. Go for it.”
“Well, I can’t do it from here,” Ray said, as if it was obvious.
“Why not?”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Do you see that line of portals? There’s gotta be twenty of them—”
“Twenty-four.”
“—so I’m gonna need all the juice for linking them, not for straining across half an acre of space. I have to be close.”
“How close?”
“The closer the better. Preferably right next to one.”
“Right—” Zheng looked at him like he was crazy, which, okay. Couldn’t really argue with that.
“We can’t get over there,” I told Ray, wondering how this wasn’t apparent. “The fey are facing the portals.”
He scowled. “Like I don’t see that? What am I, blind?”
“No, but you intend that they should be,” Louis-Cesare said, sounding slightly more alert.
Ray nodded. “See that? The crazy guy knows what I’m talking about.”
“There’d be a reason for that,” Zheng muttered.
“I am not crazy,” Louis-Cesare told Ray. “But your plan may be.”
“But you just said you can do it—”
“I can—for a limited amount of time.”
“Wait,” I said, looking at Ray. “You want him to work that thing for you? When he’s never done it and in his condition?”
“No, I want him to get me over there so I can!”
“Which is the problem,” Louis-Cesare said. “I can shield another, but it decreases the amount of time that I can hold the Veil even further.”
“How much?” Ray asked, starting to look worried.
“Under the circumstances?” Sculpted lips pursed. “Thirty seconds.”
“Thirty—”
“Perhaps. Certainly no more.”
Ray looked outraged. “Well, what the hell kind of a master power is that? What good is that to anybody?”
“In a duel?” Zheng asked sardonically. “A lot.”
“Yeah, but we’re not in a duel! And we’re not gonna be, even if they see us. A massacre would be more like—”
“How much of the thirty do you need?”
I cut in. Because this was no time for Ray to get going.
He looked at me incredulously. “How much? Like all of it? If I can even—”
“It could work,” I said, looking from Zheng to Louis-Cesare and back to Ray. “Just.”
“How?”
I told them.
“I don’t know who’s crazier,” Ray muttered a few minutes later. “You or me.”
“Me.”
“Then why am I doing this?”
“Because you’re the only one who knows how?”
“God. I hate being useful.”
“First time for everything,” Zheng said.
Ray didn’t even bother to reply, which was how I knew he was bad off. And I really couldn’t blame him. “Just…concentrate on what you’re doing and leave the rest to us,” I said, trying to sound confident.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll…I’ll do that,” he said, as Louis-Cesare got an arm around him. And then Zheng got one around them both. Because there was no obvious route down to the portals from here, and no time to traverse it if there had been.
Ray needed the optimum amount of time at the gates, and we were going to give it to him.
“Just…try to land quietly,” I told him, and got a vicious look in return.
“The Veil masks sound,” Louis-Cesare said.
I looked up. “Really?”
He nodded. “It would be little good otherwise, vampire hearing being as it is. But when under the Veil, I cannot be seen, heard or smelt. Even wards have difficulty perceiving me. I have heard it speculated that it places me slightly out of phase with our world, and that is why—”
“Can we just do this?” Ray asked tightly, clinging to Zheng’s already slightly elongated arm. Because Louis-Cesare wasn’t the only one with a master power around here.
“Let go,” Zheng told him. “I’m the rubber band; you’re the spitball. And spitballs don’t hold on to rubber bands.”
“Die in a fire,” Ray told him savagely. But he let go.
And Zheng’s analogy was, for all its strangeness, pretty apt. He grabbed hold of a protrusion in the rock near one of the portals and braced himself, and I slunk over as near to the drop-off as I dared, holding his hand from something like six yards away. And then Louis-Cesare started backing up, at what would have been the elbow if Zheng had anything left that looked like one anymore.
Instead, it suddenly felt like I was holding on to a thick rubber hose with a hand-shaped glove at the end, neither of which was giving me a lot of traction. The idea was to use Zheng like a human slingshot to launch Louis-Cesare and Ray over the heads of the fey and to the line of portals. But to do that, we needed tension—a lot of it. And there wasn’t anything else to provide it but us.
That wouldn’t normally have been an issue, but right now I was sweating and struggling and still barely holding my position. And then I almost lost it anyway. Because we suddenly got a new complication.
The portals occupied maybe the bottom quarter of the huge wall, with the upper having been empty just seconds ago. But I guess it was showtime, because a long rectangular image had just appeared on the rock face. It was as big as an old-fashioned movie screen, but if there was a projector, I didn’t see it.
What I did see was the interior of the consul’s ballroom, where a massive number of portals had just burst into being on all sides.
And it looked like something had finally gotten the other consuls’ attention. Because Ming-de’s little fans zipped back to their mistress, and Hassani rose to his feet, his eyes narrowing and his hand gripping the hilt of the blade at his side. The other consuls were there now, too, and they were also rising: a South Asian guy dressed like a Bollywood maharaja, and a Spanish-type in enough velvets and laces to give Radu a run for his money. I didn’t see Anthony, but I didn’t have a view of the whole room.
And it wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
Because the consul had just come out onto her balcony, and it was suddenly impossible to look anywhere else.
She was in gold, head to toe, in an outfit that made Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra look like a pauper. And I finally understood how she’d managed to successfully lead a Senate for centuries, when plenty of other, stronger vamps had failed. You might not like her; might even detest her. But there was something there. Call it what you will—authority, command, leadership—it was that indefinable thing that makes men throw themselves at impossible odds because their commander tells them to. And she had it in spades.
Of course, she also had something else: vamps have never had the same problem with bribery as humans. It’s considered everything from a performance enhancer to a loyalty inducer, depending on the size of the gift. And the consul had one of the biggest in history.
And she knew it.
Hard, cold, sublimely beautiful, she coolly surveyed the scene. And then those dark eyes flashed, and the perfect lip curled. And the low, sibilant words got right to the point. “If you wish a seat on my Senate, then bring me the head…of a fey!”
And just that fast, it was on.
An army of fey rushed through the portals; an army of vampires met them. And I turned to catch a split-second glimpse of two more vamps shooting into the fray, Louis-Cesare tucking into a graceful somersault and dragging a very freaked-out-looking Ray right along with him. And then they were gone, shimmering away into nothingness between one heartbeat and the next.
It was impressive, but not half as much so as the number of fey streaming through those portals. I guess Zheng must have thought so, too, because he was suddenly behind me. “Too many getting through.”
“Ray will have the portals rerouted in a few seconds.” I hoped.
“We don’t have a few seconds.”
“Yeah, but what can we do?”
“This,” he told me, and the next time I blinked, he was holding a fey warrior.
I hadn’t even seen him twitch, much less snake a long Gumby arm down into the pit and snare one, like a guy fishing off a dock. I saw it the second time, though, and saw the two fey go limp and collapse, their hair a bright spill against the dark rocks. Zheng had grabbed them by the neck, and he hadn’t bothered being gentle.
Neither was I as I frisked them for the weapons I knew I’d find: suspiciously human-style guns, because they were far better at delivering a payload in hand-to-hand combat than bows and arrows. Especially when complete with three rounds each of what I could only assume were spelled bullets. At least, I really hoped so, because this was going to look pretty stupid otherwise.
It didn’t look stupid.
I fired off a shot at the portals, and suddenly that whole end of the room was engulfed in a blizzard that—
“Whoa,” Zheng said.
“I guess the fey didn’t trust the help with the good stuff,” I said, watching blinding bands of snow lash the fey lines. “Too afraid it might fall into our hands.”
“Yeah. That’d be a shame,” Zheng said, and fired a round directly into the wall just below us.
We didn’t get a blizzard that time, but the effect was pretty spectacular just the same. The whole long expanse of rock iced up, like we were suddenly perched on top of a glacier. And sent the couple dozen blonds who’d spotted us, and started scaling the cliff like mountain goats, sliding right back into the crowd.
Zheng got another salvo off after them, but I didn’t see what good it did. Because I had to stop and deal with a group coming through the archway. You really can’t fault their reaction time, I thought, and shot the leader square in the face.
His skin turned blue and he staggered back, which I’d expected. And then an ice storm started up in the close confines of the hallway, which I hadn’t. In all of a second, the whole door had iced over, with a bluish white slab so thick that it looked like a glacier had suddenly decided to park itself there.
I laughed, because if you’re crazy, you may as well live up to it, and turned back to Zheng. Who didn’t appear to get the joke. Or maybe he was just concerned about the fac
t that fully half the freaking army had just broken off and were coming for us.
Because yeah, they couldn’t see us and didn’t know how many were up here, I realized, as Zheng fired his last bullet directly into the crowd.
Who, without missing a beat, raised long, shiny black shields above their heads, like they’d been expecting it. And maybe they had. Because the shields locked together, creating a slick, solid surface that gave the ice nowhere to go but out. And it did, spreading like frost over the dark water of a pond and creating an almost flat, hard surface.
Which another group of fey promptly jumped on top of.
“Shit!” Zheng said, grabbed my gun and fired again.
But not at them. Because even though they were climbing fast, something else was more urgent. Louis-Cesare and Ray were in trouble.
I could tell because I could see them, not clearly, but in fits and starts, little glimmers like a couple of ghosts, if ghosts made “oh shit” faces on the one hand and agitated French gestures on the other. And that sort of shit wasn’t going to go unnoticed for long.
Aaaaand it didn’t.
One of the fey in line for the portal nearest them let out a very inelegant squawk, and pointed. And Louis-Cesare and Ray looked up from arguing over Ray’s device to stare at the soldier in shock, as if they hadn’t realized they could be seen. And yelled at. And shot at, only the latter didn’t go so well because of Zheng’s bullet, which hit the floor near the line of soldiers the pointer was standing in and—
Yeah, that’s better, I thought, as a new blizzard tore through the lineup.
Except for the fact that that had been our last bullet. And that the fey below us had now achieved something that looked like a cheerleaders’ tower, composed of three tiers of black-armored warriors with death on their faces. And that the blizzard that was supposed to be helping Louis-Cesare and Ray was fizzling out for some reason, just like the other had.