by Karen Chance
She was lying on her side, bloody and crumpled, and for a moment he thought they’d fucked up everything. His fangs dropped, sensing their blood, their fear, the heartbeats that sped up as they watched him. The decision was instantaneous. If they had killed her, they died.
But then he saw it, a faint, ever-so-gentle aspiration, and he unclenched the hand he couldn’t remember closing. He pushed her over onto her back and checked out the damage. Two bullet wounds, a few too many contusions—damn it, he’d told them to avoid the head! But she would live. Long enough to do the job, anyway.
It was about time something went right.
It had been the perfect plan—his plan—calculated down to the last detail. Others had played their part—Geminus had come up with the idea for the weapons, the damned Black Circle had put him into contact with the man who could bring the idea to life, the fey had provided the army to use them. But he had been the one to stitch it all together, the one to watch Kit like a hawk, the one to steer the investigation away from their activities for what felt like forever.
He who was poised to pull off the greatest coup in vampire history.
But the sheer moronic incompetence that surrounded him was threatening to bring it all down. Geminus managing to get himself killed after two millennia of avoiding it, just when the lazy son of a bitch was actually useful for something. Then Varus suddenly gaining a conscience and Mircea—devil take him—being put in charge of the Senate’s smuggling investigation instead of Kit.
Mircea, whose family Lawrence didn’t know and over whose actions he had no influence. Mircea, whose skills with the mind rivaled his own, and whose secrets were closed to him. Mircea, who had charmed away the best investigators from a dozen families and formed them into a unit that was closing the noose tighter every damned day…
Sometimes Lawrence thought it was a wonder he was still sane.
The only thing that kept him going was the thought of what he was going to do to his allies once this was all over. He felt his face crack into a smile, felt the men tense and shift uncomfortably. And then he slid into the girl’s mind as smoothly as a fish into water.
The easy pathways and uncomplicated patterns of the human brain opened up before him, like an unfolding flower. Such a relief after the twisty, dark paths of the vampire mind, where barriers were everywhere and hidden traps could suddenly lunge out and grab you, threatening to shred your consciousness if you weren’t nimble enough to get away.
Like Varus, who had proven impossible to read. Or Mircea, who had almost trapped him the one and only time he’d ventured into that quagmire of a brain. He thought it fitting that the freak Mircea had sired and inexplicably continued to shield was Lawrence’s way out of the mess her bastard of a father had made. All Lawrence had to do was to plant a few memories, adjust a few others and—
What the hell?
Lawrence stopped abruptly, gazing in disbelief at the…thing…at the center of her mind. If “mind” was even the right word. But all of the others—“maze” and “jungle” and “labyrinth”—that he’d used to describe some of the more unusual minds he’d encountered fell completely short. It was a gigantic snarl of impossible patterns and massive barriers and odd dark places and strange duplicated synapses and…
And it was like nothing he’d ever encountered.
It wasn’t human. It wasn’t even vampire. He didn’t know what the hell it was, or how she functioned with it at all. It was…insane, he thought, horrified.
And then jumped at the feel of a hand on his physical arm.
He pulled back abruptly, the jumbled-up mess retreating, to be replaced by another mess, in the form of one of his allies’ faces. “Are you almost done?” the idiot asked, looking anxious.
Lawrence reminded himself that he couldn’t kill him. Not yet. “If I was done, I would have said so,” he hissed instead.
“It’s just…you’re needed at the third site. Jonathan’s having trouble with one of the masters.”
Lawrence glared at the man, furious. “I instructed him to wait for me!”
The man shook his head, and glanced at his partner. “Jonathan doesn’t take instruction well. Not from anybody. He does what he wants.”
“Then he’s a fool, and he can die as one. Danieli has mental gifts. He’ll resist the compulsion.”
“He is resisting. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You gotta get over there or this is all going south—tonight.”
“As it will if I leave the woman’s memories intact!”
The man’s partner, who was slightly more intelligent, if no more capable, uttered an expletive. “What is taking so long? You said she wouldn’t be a problem.”
“She isn’t.”
“Then what—”
“Her father,” Lawrence said viciously. Of course it had been Mircea; of course it had. Cobbling together some form of bastardized consciousness for his pet. Why, Lawrence couldn’t even begin to imagine. The man gave him the fucking creeps sometimes.
“That vamp isn’t here,” the partner said sharply, challenging him.
And causing Lawrence to have to clench a fist to keep from dropping the SOB, then and there. “He’s done something,” he said shortly. “Something I’ve never seen before. I don’t know what it is, or how to counter it.”
“You’re saying you can’t manipulate her memories?”
“I’m saying I can’t do it right now, in some hatchet job on a pier!” Lawrence retorted, shoving damp hair out of his eyes.
Half of it was salt water, the other half blood splatter from the girl mixed with his own, because this had to look real. Ten to one, Mircea would be extracting her memories, and he would recognize a wholesale implantation. So Lawrence had had to take a few bullets, after already taking a portal to one of the nastier hell dimensions. And now he learned it might have all been for nothing?
God, he wanted to kill something.
“But she has to remember the ship, or they won’t go to Slava’s!” Idiot #1 said. “And that you died, or Marlowe will change the passwords and then we’ll really be screwed—”
“We’re going to be screwed anyway if you don’t come on,” Idiot #2 said, a phone to his ear. “Jonathan says now.”
“Jonathan can—” Lawrence cut himself off. Soon. Very damned soon, he’d deal with Jonathan and the rest of them. He would deal with them slowly. He stood up. “Take her.”
“Take her? Take her where? If she’s no use to us, we gotta clean the scene. We gotta—”
Lawrence shoved the man’s hand away, the one he’d raised with the gun in it. “We need her!”
“Not if you can’t—”
“Put her in one of the labs. The girl got off a call for help, right at the end. I have to wait here for a few minutes, in case anyone comes, and then bail out that fool of a necromancer. Then I’ll deal with her.”
“And if she wakes up before then?”
“She won’t. And even if she does, she’ll be weak from blood loss and mentally confused. I did enough when I knocked her out for that. She won’t be going anywhere until we release her.”
“But she’s supposed to be found here,” the man argued. “Bleeding out. If we take her away, how are we supposed to explain—”
“Leave that to me! Do as you’re told; I’ll handle the rest. This is a minor setback.”
“And it would have been,” Lawrence said, shivering into existence beside me. “Except for you and your father. And my old master, who changed the damned passwords anyway, for no reason!”
“He has gut feelings sometimes,” I said, cursing myself.
I don’t read minds, much less those of powerful mentalists. I should have known I wasn’t picking somebody else’s brain on my own. Should have realized that Lawrence was showing me the scene on the pier, the scene he’d withheld for so long, for a reason.
So he’d have time to find me.
“I’ll gut him,” Lawrence said cruelly. “Just as soon as I finish with—”
He’d forgotten that I’d learned that much, at least, from our former encounters. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed, since I hadn’t been able to use it very effectively. And it didn’t look like that had changed, because he was healing before he hit the ground, make-believe bullets apparently not carrying quite the punch of the real thing. Or maybe he knew some kind of trick to minimize his damage in here.
Too bad I didn’t.
And he didn’t give me time to come up with anything. In a liquid movement that blurred my vision, he surged to his feet and caught my wrist. And then broke it so viciously that I thought for a second he’d ripped my hand off.
He hadn’t, but the pain was so excruciating that the whole wharf wavered as I emptied the clip into him anyway, as I stumbled back, as I stared around for somewhere to run—and came up empty. I didn’t know how to access Louis-Cesare’s memories, and besides, that hadn’t worked so great last time. And there was nothing else in sight except the scene on the wharf, frozen in place, and the skyline with its missing chunks of sky and—
And the rift.
The breech in the wall between Dorina’s consciousness and mine was still there, and still frightening. But I didn’t hesitate, because things couldn’t get any worse. I threw the gun at him and ran, straight into the enveloping clouds around the entrance. Straight past the gaping pink maw, a fluttering tentacle brushing softly over my face. Straight through the flickering scenes of a life I had lived but didn’t know. Straight into—
Darkness.
Chapter Forty-seven
It wasn’t wholly dark.
The pinkish light from before had faded, but other, brighter sources had taken its place. Pieces of memory flickered against the gloom, but not like last time. Before, they had been vague, washed out, wavering oddly. Like a hundred projectors turned onto someone’s laundry. Now it was more like walking down a dark street in Chinatown, assaulted by glowing neon signs on all sides. Or maybe holograms would be a better analogy, because they floated in the air as well as clinging to the rift, like flattened portals to other places, other times.
And there were more of them—a lot more. I glanced behind me, trying to spot Lawrence, and saw bits and pieces I recognized, as well as a lot I didn’t. It looked like the memories were colonizing this new ground, washing in from both sides to jumble up in the middle, creating an obstacle course of ever-changing light and shadow.
A little too much light, all things considered, with the brighter scenes shedding a haze of illumination for several feet around them. But it was still better than outside. I darted behind the darkest one I could find, slammed back against the skin-slick wall of the rift, and watched a younger me crawling through a trench, knee-deep in muck.
The visual was stark, almost like a film shot in black and white, although it wasn’t. That’s just how the place had looked: dark coils of barbed wire pushing up into a washed-out sky. A dead tree. And an unburied bone, possibly animal, possibly human, poking out of the mud.
Flanders, First World War.
And no, no way was I hiding in that one.
Or in any of the rest of them. What had Radu said? Something about people getting lost in their own minds, wandering around aimlessly from memory to memory, trapped forever in their past?
I swallowed, feeling an involuntary shiver ripple over me.
My past hadn’t been that great, frankly.
“Nice try.” Lawrence’s voice filtered to me in strange echoes. “But bullets don’t have quite the same effect on me as on most of my kind.”
No, I didn’t guess so. Like it wasn’t a problem to fake death when you came apart anyway. Son of a bitch.
But there’d been more than just the one reason to suspect him. Mircea had told me that Lawrence had three master’s abilities, but I’d seen him use only two: the Hound senses and the dissolving trick. I had never thought to wonder about the third, despite Marlowe’s saying that mental abilities had gotten Lawrence out of trouble before.
And me into it.
“You may as well come out.” Lawrence’s voice came again, sounding so close that it had me whipping my head around violently. Only to see nothing there. “You can stall all you like, but you forget that we’re in the mind. Outside time is meaningless. Weeks could pass for you here before anyone even realizes you’re in danger.”
I didn’t answer. He could be telling the truth, for all I knew. But he could just as easily be lying. I didn’t know how this mental stuff worked. I just knew I needed to stay near the pier, or as close as I could manage, where Mircea might eventually come looking for me. If I went too far in—
“And then there’s the small fact that you don’t have a choice,” Lawrence informed me. “Neither of us does. I am your only way out, just as you are mine.”
Okay, that got my attention. But he didn’t elaborate. Even when I waited he didn’t. He was going to make me ask, going to try to use conversation as a way to zero in on my location.
I didn’t give much for his chances. The walls seemed to trap some sounds and magnify others. His voice was simultaneously nearby and distant, with some words so far off I could barely make them out, while others sounded like they were coming from only a few feet away. It was spooky as hell—but it might also be useful.
“Meaning what?” I demanded harshly, and heard my own voice coming back at me in receding echoes.
“That neither of us has a guide; neither of us has a way to resurface. Unless one of us dies.”
“And then the survivor wakes up.”
“Yes. As would have happened last time, if your father hadn’t cheated and come after you,” he said, sounding annoyed.
And for a second, all I could see was Mircea’s bloody face, stony and white and resolute as he let this bastard carve him up to give me time to get out. All I could see was Louis-Cesare lying on the floor, unconscious and worse, because he might be Europe’s champion but he didn’t know how to fight this way.
Neither did I, but I wanted to. I felt my fangs drop, and for the first time, it didn’t bother me. It felt good, like his flesh would feel under my teeth, the way his blood would taste on my lips, the way his screams would—
I swallowed and looked away.
“But it didn’t matter. He had to be removed in any case,” Lawrence added, and stopped again.
Baiting me.
I told myself to shut up. To concentrate on finding a way out of this. Only I didn’t see one.
Even if Lawrence was lying, and a competent mentalist could have brought me out, where was I supposed to find one? The only one I knew about was Ming-de, and I had no way to contact her. Or reason to believe that she would help if I did.
And say he was making that stuff up about time being perceived differently in the brain. I could still lie there in the rubble a long time before anybody noticed me. And even then, if my rescuer wasn’t one of the handful of people who knew me, he’d just assume I was one of the human guests and put me wherever they were keeping the others. It might be hours before anybody realized I hadn’t just been knocked out cold.
And I didn’t think I had hours.
“Was that your job? To betray the Senate?” I asked, taking the bait. And starting to search the shadows for the one searching for me.
“Betray?” Lawrence’s voice was mocking. “Was it betrayal for those fools to gut each other nightly on the arena floor? Fools fight; winners think.”
“So you planned to get on the Senate this way?” I asked in disbelief.
“No, I planned to rule the Senate this way,” Lawrence said. Because he was obviously crazier than I was.
“If you’re so strong, you could do that anyway,” I said, watching a shadow slink along a wall. “Challenge the consul. As far as I know, she isn’t a mentalist.”
“No, but your father is.”
“Ahh.” Thin
gs started to make sense. The consul could fight her own battles, but she could also call for a champion when challenged. And obviously, Lawrence didn’t think he could take Mircea.
So he’d just decided to murder him instead.
“Is that what the fey promised you?” I rasped. “The consulship?”
“No, that is what they promised Geminus. He’d discovered that a Senate seat is merely another form of slavery. The only way out of bondage in our world is to rule.”
“And that’s what you think you’re going to do?” I demanded. “Rule? Because I got the impression that’s what the fey want. And their godly buddies.”
“The fey care about Faerie, not Earth. And what gods?”
“The gods the fey plan to bring back! Or didn’t they share that tidbit?”
He laughed. “Oh yes. I think it was mentioned a time or two. But you forget—the gods are not here. And will not be here until the Circle falls.”
“And isn’t that the idea? Take out the Senate, then destroy the Circle?”
“That’s their idea,” he said condescendingly. “Mine is to remove the consuls and to consolidate rule of the six senates in my hands. Once I have it…Well, both sides will need my favor then, won’t they? And with the odds in the war nearly even, the vampires will be poised to make the difference.”
“And you’ll throw your weight behind the Circle,” I said slowly.
“Who will then owe me their victory, further cementing my position.”
“So this is just another vampire power play.” It shouldn’t have surprised me. Mircea had guessed as much, and it was certainly nothing new. Where vamps were concerned, it was the oldest story in the book and I’d seen a thousand examples. But for some reason, this one seemed particularly—
I belatedly realized that memory-me had started climbing out of the trench she’d been slogging through. And that the trench had been in shadow and outside was a whole lot brighter. And suddenly, so was I, as light from the scene spilled over into the surrounding area.