by Karen Chance
“So that’s what you ripped out of that vamp’s head,” I said, trying not to watch the scene behind him. Where the still-smoking vamp was crawling around the floor blindly, trying to find a way out, but finding only the shield instead. I could smell the burning meat from here.
I’m not normally squeamish, but I really wished the Irin had finished him off. Or that I had one of those vamp killing bullets. Because that was really—
“Listen to me!” The Irin grabbed my arm. “He can’t fight the creature and them at the same time!” He nodded at our attackers. “But if you lead them away, just long enough for him to lose himself in the city—”
“And for us to get dead!” That was Ray, but I was feeling pretty damned simpatico.
“Give me one good reason we should risk our necks,” I said, “when he can just call in the Corps—”
“The Corps is already here! An army of enthralled war mages is currently attempting to take down the city’s eight pillars—”
“What?” That was Ray.
“—and if they succeed, it will knock the city entirely out of phase and send it crashing into the human version of Hong Kong, killing millions of people!”
“What?” That time, it was me. “Why would anyone—”
“I don’t know!” It looked like it physically pained him to have to admit that. “The creature didn’t know so neither do I! But that is what our war mage has been working on, trying to protect the pillars without bringing in more mages to be enthralled, and adding to our enemy’s numbers—”
“While he tries to figure out who’s controlling them,” I finished, cursing the man’s stubbornness. He could have just told us!
“He didn’t trust you,” the Irin said, seeing my face. “Or me. But the time for such concerns is over. The two of you have to work together to have a chance to succeed. The only way to stop disaster is to kill the creature behind all this, and the only one who can do that is him!”
He gestured savagely at the mage, while Ray and I stared at him.
“Okay,” I admitted. “That’s a good reason.”
And before I could ask anything else, a shockwave rumbled underneath our feet, like an exclamation point on the Irin’s comment. Maybe it’s just thunder, I thought hopefully. Maybe it’s just—
The room started shaking like a rocket was taking off underneath, and half the damned roof caved in. To the point that I could see through all three stories. But that wasn’t the main problem.
No, that would be the fact that wards take concentration, and the mage’s had just snapped.
“Fuck!” Ray screamed, which about summed it up, as a couple hundred mages and vamps flew at us, all at once. And no way could we take that many.
This is it, I thought, clutching my little gun, while Ray clutched me, because he was out of ideas, too.
But we’d forgotten one thing.
We’d forgotten Claire.
And it looked like she’d been busy, because a multipronged spear of silver white light erupted from the mirror, bright as the sun off Everest. I didn’t understand what was happening for a minute, because Claire is a null, a witch who absorbs and nullifies the magic in others. She couldn’t cast a spell to save her life—or anybody else’s.
But her bodyguards could.
Because in addition to being the scion of a family of magical healers—which is how she’d known about Dragon’s Claw—Claire was also currently engaged to the heir of one of the three great houses of the light fey, namely the one on our side. And while she was visiting earth, her new family had weighed her down under a mountain of hunky fey warriors. The kind who could throw spells.
And this one was a doozy. Light spilled out in a hundred glittering streams, one from every shard of glass. It was dazzling, eye-searing, almost blinding, and it wasn’t even aimed at us. The boiling wave of hate hurtling our way faltered and broke.
“Up! Go up!” I heard somebody yelling, which didn’t make any sense. We were up. Then someone—the mage presumably—blew a hole in the still-solid part of the roof over our heads, and suddenly there was another level to this thing.
Rain and wind blew in, instantly drenching us, and a vamp flew at me out of nowhere, getting an entire clip to the face. He fell back into the darkness, where all I could see was crazy, crisscrossing beams. I could only hope that everybody else was as blind as me.
“Come on!” Ray said, and hopped onto the balcony railing.
It and the carved wooden pillars supporting it made for a decent enough ladder. At least they did when spell fire started slamming into everything. The army was firing blind, but they were firing a lot, punching holes through all those little drawers, spilling out burning herbs and smashing through cabinets—
I stopped suddenly, and hopped down from the pillar to the balcony again.
“What are you doing?” Ray yelled. “Dory! Get up here!”
“Coming!” And I was, just as soon as I grabbed—well, I didn’t know what I was grabbing, because I couldn’t see a damned thing. But for an instant, propped up in a destroyed cabinet, there’d been something that had looked a lot like a—
There!
I snatched up the vaguely gun-shaped object—vaguely because it was the size of a shotgun but not really the shape—threw the strap over my back and scaled the pillar again, while explosions went off all around me, Ray cursed at me, and streams of dazzling light strobed the darkness everywhere, as Claire fought to give me some kind of cover.
‘Cause you can’t hit what you can’t see.
But the other side realized that, too, and I heard the mirror shatter behind me as I grabbed Ray’s hand and vaulted up into the next story and then onto the roof, where—hell yeah, there was a typhoon!
The wind roared like a wild thing, thunder boomed, the sky was laced with lighting, and lashes of rain so thick they fell like curtains and almost washed me off the roof. If it hadn’t been steeply pitched, given us a handhold, we’d have all been carried away. It was still touch and go, but it didn’t matter anyway, because we had an army on our tail.
And here they came.
Chapter Seventeen
The mage snatched a couple of grenades off his belt and dropped them back down the hole, but they barely held our pursuers up at all. And not just because of vamp healing abilities. But because some of them had been equipped with shields of their own.
They popped out of the armbands that maybe half of them wore, and were roughly the size and shape of those used by medieval knights. They were hazy, like green mist, instead of metal, but nonetheless seemed to do a pretty good job of absorbing the damage. But even those without them kept on coming.
“Oh, shit,” Ray whispered, as vamps with horribly burned faces and limbs sheared off by shrapnel nonetheless crawled toward us, even while their flesh smoked and hot lead ate its way through their bodies. “It’s like a freaking zombie movie.”
I swallowed. Yeah. Only these zombies weren’t shambling wrecks, but had vamp speed and strength and only one goal: killing us. And since they were enthralled, the spell overwrote any concerns about pain and injury.
But then Zheng grabbed two of the wounded and stood over the hole, using them like clubs to smash the others back inside again. And, suddenly, I understood why he’d been running around dressed like a Ren faire character. The dragon on his chest snarled and spewed fire, but—weirdly—that wasn’t the exciting part. The exciting part was all the little trefoils.
They had been snapping and sparking at every blow he took, absorbing the damage, and also the kinetic energy behind it. Which he threw back into the crowd with every strike, increasing his strength tenfold, and it had already been pretty damned impressive. It looked like the Spartans at Thermopylae, only it was just one guy—but against all odds, he was somehow holding.
But he wouldn’t be for long. Because the roof was being destroyed as the vamps made new holes all over the place. Pale fingers clawed through wood and tile, shredding them like paper, while in
other places, fists pumped straight through, and then felt around for someone they could claw back inside.
They didn’t find anyone, because we scrambled back, wind be damned, but it was a very temporary fix.
They were everywhere.
“I hate freaking zombie movies!” Ray yelled, stamping his heel onto a hand that was trying to grab his ankle.
The only good thing was that there wasn’t any spell fire. It looked like the mages were letting the vamps absorb the damage first, or maybe they were just too slow to keep up. But it didn’t matter.
We were about to be toast anyway.
Or maybe not, I thought, as Ray jerked me back and I saw something that had me doing a double take. The mage stood on the peak of the roof, leather coat whipping out dramatically behind him, not that he really needed the help. His eyes were emerald fire, and his hand clutched something that looked a lot like a wand but wasn’t, because mages didn’t use those things.
Of course, I could be wrong, I thought, as he thrust whatever it was into the air and I swear the massive lightning storm suddenly paused, as if surprised. Or as if summoned. The clouds started moving sluggishly, and then faster and faster in the skies above us, and the atmosphere suddenly went electric.
Literally.
Every hair on my body stood to attention as tiny threads of electricity started darting through the now circling clouds, lighting up the dark, olive tinted underbellies, and sending what looked like a giant spotlight shining down on us. Or, no, not a spotlight, I belatedly realized. A target.
Because the next second, what could only be described as a fuck-ton of lightning speared down from overhead, slashed through the air close enough to sear its image onto my eyeballs, and poured into the hole in the roof. Which wasn’t a hole anymore, but the epicenter of a massive explosion. One I barely saw because Ray had just shoved me backwards, and shoved me hard.
It felt like he’d broken every bone in my chest, leaving me gasping for breath as I went flying. I had a second to see him grabbing for me as the sky burned behind him, a look of horror on his face as the mage clamped a shield around the rest of them, one I could no longer reach. Because, by trying to save me, Ray might have just done the opposite.
Then I was falling—
But not onto the street. But onto something that dipped and bobbed and circled wildly around, like I’d landed on a crazy witch’s broom. Or on a crazy flying rickshaw, I realized, when the flapping fabric roof I’d just fallen through blew off my face.
And let me see the remains of the pharmacy, half of which was now in burning pieces flying through the air, while the rest—
Was boiling with vampires.
I was gasping for breath, having just had it all knocked out of me, but I didn’t care. I scrambled to the side of the vehicle anyway, staring. They were everywhere, some lying lifeless on the street or on what remained of the roof; some sizzling on the roofs of nearby buildings, where they’d been blown by the explosion; others on fire, but still moving.
And more, so many more, looking like they’d somehow weathered that just fine, and were still coming.
They looked like ants spreading out of a ruined anthill, madder than hell and looking for someone to sting. And they’d found one. Or, to be more correct, they’d found three: Ray, Zheng and the mage, who were huddled together under a tiny blue bubble in the midst of all the chaos, one that was getting smaller by the second.
I gasped in a breath—finally—and my ears popped. Only to inform me that I was being yelled at. I turned around, a knife in hand, a snarl on my lips—
But it was only the driver, of what I guessed was a taxi, since its little illuminated sign was currently on the floor by my feet. I must have torn it off when I landed, although it might have been there anyway, because this thing did not appear to be in great shape.
It had once been covered in shiny black lacquer, but that was mostly gone now, along with one door and the cage over the fan that provided the thrust. The blades were whizzing around right out in the open, a circle of rusted metal that was deadly enough to turn anything—or anyone—it came into contact with into mincemeat. I stared dizzily at it for a second, because if I’d landed back there . . .
But I hadn’t, I mentally slapped myself, so get with the program, Dory!
I stared around, trying to figure this thing out. The irate driver was still yelling and still had the reins in his hands, but they weren’t connected to handlebars like others I’d seen. They were attached to a couple of long, wooden shafts sticking out of the cab, which I guess a human runner had once grabbed to pull this thing, back when it still had wheels. There was no one there now, of course, but the driver was waving the reins around furiously as he gestured his displeasure at me, which was why we kept slinging about in a circle.
Right over the flat roof of a building.
“Land with bent knees,” I rasped, and pushed him out, and it sounded like he’d done okay. Because Cantonese invective loud enough to be heard over the storm started floating up from below.
Luckily, I don’t speak Cantonese. I also don’t drive floating chariots, but needs must. I grabbed the reins, slung the little craft around, and aimed it straight at the carnage—
And then just stayed there, hovering in space, because where the hell—
Oh. There was a knob on the floor, which I guess controlled the fan in back. I nudged it this way and that, and sure enough, the fan moved side to side with a rusted screech, and also up and down, I guessed to help me maneuver and also to change heights. Okay, then.
I hovered my foot over the little control for another second, hoping this was going to go better than these sorts of things usually did. But there was no time to figure out anything else. The mage was seriously overpowered, but he was also seriously outnumbered—and pooped, judging by the fact that he wasn’t fighting back.
Here goes nothing, I thought, and floored it.
And, holy shit!
The little thing rocketed forward, fast enough to knock me off the bench the driver sat on and into the passenger seat in back. I somehow kept hold of the reins, although I didn’t really need them right then. What I needed was a brake!
But I didn’t know where that was and then it didn’t matter, because I was plowing into a bunch of vamps that had crawled on top of the mage’s shield.
Most of them went flying, but one got her claws into me and came along for the ride as I bumped awkwardly over the shield and then tore ahead, leaving everyone behind because I still couldn’t find the damn brake!
But I knew how to steer and the little craft was responsive, slinging about hard enough to throw the vamp off with a little help from a savage elbow to the face, and to send me in a wide parabola straight back at the roof. Where three shocked faces were looking at me out of the bubble of the shield, which I crashed into again right before it popped. And then three freaked out looking guys were scrambling on board, which would have been fine, but so were about a dozen vamps!
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Ray screamed, and grabbed me, like he’d never let me go.
“Grab them!” I yelled, and a second later he was, joining Zheng and the mage in throwing off clingers-on and stamping others in the face who were attempting to board this ship.
Which should have been called the Titanic, because it was about to founder.
I didn’t know what the weight limit was on these things, but it was safe to say that we’d just exceeded it. Zheng and the others, but mostly Zheng—damn, the guy was a beast in battle—cleared us off enough that we were able to fly away—if flying was what you’d call it. It was more like falling with a few stops and starts along the way, which wouldn’t normally have been so bad. Because the vast amount of crap stretching between buildings around here gave plenty of opportunities for landing spots.
But landing was the last thing we could do.
Because all that stuff also gave our pursuers plenty of paths to follow us.
And follow they were. Anothe
r few vamps went flying and we got a little air. But when I craned my neck to look behind us, I saw the ant colony running and jumping from roof to roof, from junkpile to junkpile, and across various bridges, racing to keep up with us. And they were doing a pretty good job. They had vamp speed on their side, while we had a craft that was straining to do the speed limit, assuming they even had one of those around here.
But we did have a small head start, and we’d better use it.
I pushed the mage, who’d just kicked the last vamp overboard, on the shoulder. “You have to go!”
He just stared at me. He looked like he was having a little trouble keeping up. Maybe because everything was happening at vamp speed, meaning that the whole rescue and flight so far had taken maybe thirty seconds.
“I’m going to crash through there!” I said, slowly and distinctly, and pointed at the trash hung street we’d come in on. “When we get under cover, you two jump out and I’ll lead the assholes away!”
“It could work,” Zheng said. “As long as they don’t see us bail.”
“They won’t,” I told him, and he nodded.
But Ray was not on board with this plan—at all.
“No!” He looked like he was having a fit. “No! This thing’s a hunk of junk, and that guy,” he hiked a savage thumb back at the mage, “blew up all our stuff! We don’t even have weapons!”
I held up the notgun I’d found in the cabinet. “What about this?”
“That? That’s not a weapon!”
The mage grabbed it, and the metal glowed strangely for a moment. “It is now,” he said, and tossed it back to me.
“It is not!” Ray said furiously, but nobody was listening. Because the guys’ stop was coming up and I still hadn’t figured out the brakes—
“Aughhh!” Somebody screamed—full disclosure, it may have been me—and then we were tearing through the line of junk, with bamboo poles battering us, pieces of sheet metal threatening to decapitate us, and junk flying everywhere. A bucket bonked Ray in the face so hard it left an imprint of the handle surrounding his nose.