Maybe she was thinking about how good their blood would taste.
“Bronwyn said she made an exact copy from his memory, but he still detected it,” the shorter Fae said.
“And the vampire woman ate Eigar,” the first Fae said. “Foolish of him to let that happen.”
“Hard to believe Eigar is gone. And he owed me money!”
“More fool you.” And they went on their way. They had not noticed the two escapees. Octavian, who was feeling stronger by the second, became aware with a thrill of pleasure that he had cast a concealment spell over them without conscious thought. He kindled the embers of magic inside him, reached out and felt a more solid connection to the power in this world than he had before. The magic he knew and the magic of the Fae were beginning to communicate with each other—to translate. He thought of cell phone signals and how frustrating it could be to have only one bar. This felt like three bars, now. Not great, but better.
Nonetheless, they needed to proceed with great caution.
The corridor came to a nexus where several others also met, a roughly circular space with a ramp leading up on one side and what appeared to be an elevator on another. The idea of an elevator in Faery seemed odd and somehow funny to Octavian, but now wasn’t the time to ruminate on Fae architecture. There were several Fae in sight, some traveling up and down the ramp, and a pair emerging from the elevator. With a growing sense of urgency, Octavian whispered, “Our guards.”
Dahlia nodded. “Elevator,” she whispered back.
After a second, Octavian nodded. The ramp was obviously a major thoroughfare. People moved along it in a steady stream. Octavian couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to be below the surface when they could be under a real night sky. He pushed the idea away and took Dahlia’s hands to keep them in sync, reinforcing the glamour that kept them invisible with a gesture and a muttered phrase.
The elevator was similar to all elevators Octavian had ever used, except the doors did not close from the sides but from the top and bottom. He and Dahlia pressed against the rear of the box, which had room enough for eight people, more or less. The doors opened again after one level.
Three Fae got on. One had a crutch and a bandage on his leg, and he was complaining loudly that the fight had been thrown. The other two, both women, were skeptical about this and began to jibe at the male Fae.
Octavian was just beginning to relax when the paler of the two women said, “What is that smell?”
The man swiveled on his crutch and said, “I smell blood. Are you having a human menses, Adelphi?”
“Watch out or you’ll lose your other leg,” Adelphi said. “Seriously, what is it?” She began to examine the floor, perhaps looking for drips of blood. “That’s weird,” she said. “I can’t see...”
And then her throat wasn’t there.
The male Fae bellowed, the woman shrieked, and Adelphi fell dead to the floor, only to be yanked back up by invisible hands and held, moving, about the height of a small vampire’s mouth.
Octavian killed the male with a spell that paralyzed his breathing, and then used the same magic on the remaining female, but not before she drew a dagger and made a determined effort to cut his throat. She might have managed, if only she’d been sure where his throat was.
They arrived at the final level. According to Dahlia, this was the level where Ripley was being held. Dahlia dropped the corpse she’d been drinking from, beamed at Octavian, and stepped over the other two as she left the elevator. With some disgust, Octavian followed her, pushing a head back into the elevator and punching several buttons on his way out to stall their inevitable discovery. The guards should have reached the demolished cell doors by now, in any case.
Still weak from days of feeding Dahlia his blood, Octavian had been operating on adrenaline up to this point. Now to his chagrin he stumbled and would have fallen if his companion hadn’t gripped his shoulders.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit. Hold the illusion, sorcerer!”
Octavian struggled to maintain his consciousness and to hold their invisibility. There were Fae around, he knew, he could sense movement and hear voices, though dimly. He heard a little fleshy sound, and then Dahlia’s grimy wrist was at his lips.
“Drink this, now!” she said, in what he could only think of as a commanding whisper. To his astonishment, he obeyed. The second the blood hit his own bloodstream, his strength surged, and he felt smarter and faster and more wonderful than ever before. He was truly a great sorcerer, and he knew he would succeed. And he was moving so fast he thought anyone watching would only see a blur. He was also bouncing up and down.
What the hell did she just do to me? he thought. But really, he felt so damned good that it hardly mattered at all.
The thoughts nagged at him, though. When he could bring himself to stop drinking from her, he said, “I feel you influencing me. You have some kind of power over me?”
“Just a little mental influence because I’ve taken your blood a few times,” she said. “It’s going to wear off, Octavian. Don’t worry, you’re not my human puppet,” she said as she took off the ridiculous boots.
“Where are we?” With her blood buzzing in his head, he had been in a kind of fog.
“We’re in a bedroom of the residence of Niall, the king,” she said.
“What?”
“Yeah, I know, dangerous. But we were in a public place, and I knew someone would hear us or smell us again,” she said, in a rapid whisper. “Pay attention! You are strong enough now even without your sorcery to blow these Fae out of the water, but it won’t last long. They’re inherently magic, while you acquired yours.”
Octavian nodded.
“So we’ve got to move while you’ve still got the extra strength I just gave you. We have to get Ripley out of here and to the portal. The thin place. In my Louisiana.”
Octavian still buzzed but his thoughts were not so clouded that he was blind to how that scenario would likely end. “No. To my thin place. The one I created on my property in Italy. It opens right in the courtyard in front of this palace.”
“Which is why you ended up in the dungeon with me,” she said, waving her hand. “And I’m betting they’ve shut it down by now. But let’s worry about step two after we’ve accomplished step one, which is to get the bastard out.”
“Agreed,” said Octavian, with deep distrust. “Where is he?”
“He’s three doors away. But we are in Niall’s palace, and if we encounter the king, we are dead. Niall is cold and incredibly strong.” Dahlia was a fan, it seemed. “There are guards at Ripley’s doors and windows. They want to keep him sweet until they decide what to do with him.”
“I thought they were going to kill him?”
“Or they might use him. They might decide to sell him to us. Or to you.”
Octavian threw up his hands. “We can’t wait for them to decide. We’re here. Let’s get him.”
“Oh, sure,” Dahlia said. “If you take care of the guards inside, I’ll take care of the guards outside the window of Ripley’s room. We have to be quick, and we have to be quiet. If I am killed, you will find my portal to the west. Run three miles due west through the forest. You won’t encounter many Fae in the forest at night. After that, you’ll pass through a thick gray mist and you won’t be able to see anything around you. That’s their buffer zone. But if you follow your nose, and let’s hope your nose is good for a human’s, you’ll smell roses and vegetation if you keep going west. That’s the garden we need. There’s a spot in the mist that looks almost like a picture frame, and the picture will be a rose bush. That’s the portal. Just leap through with Ripley, if you still have him by then.”
“It took days to weave the spell to create my own portal...” he said. “I didn’t know where it would lead in Faery. When it opened into the courtyard I knew I was in trouble. They had me the minute I came through. The shift from my world’s magic to the…I guess the wavelength of magic in this wo
rld had me disoriented and they swarmed me, beat me unconscious. But it’s right there, so much closer. Are you sure they’ll have closed it? I think I’d have felt it.”
“Bad luck,” Dahlia said briskly, “but yes. Almost certainly. The portals are all supposed to be sealed forever. So when you created one, it probably set off some kind of alarm.”
“What about the one you came through?”
“Ha! That’s Niall’s only remaining portal, his personal one,” Dahlia said. “And if I told you how I found out about it, I’d have to kill you.”
It didn’t make any difference to Octavian how she’d found out about its existence, he realized. “Okay,” he said. “So I end up in another world, in Louisiana, but still not home.”
“Better than being here,” Dahlia said.
He couldn’t argue with that, and there was no time to come up with a different plan.
Dahlia nodded at him as if he’d agreed out loud. Without further ado, she turned and went to the windows, which had curious handles shaped like hands. She gripped the hand on the right window as though she were going to shake, turned it, and the window opened inward. Then she did the same with the left. She gave Octavian a brilliant smile and stepped over the sill gracefully, looking to her right.
Octavian knew she would be visible to others the moment she left his proximity, and he waited for the shouts of discovery. Apparently, when you were as fast as Dahlia, invisibility wasn’t at such a premium. though. He heard a deep moan, realized Dahlia was doing her part, and shook himself. The surge of power he’d felt still rode him. He took a deep breath, opened the bedroom door, and entered.
Two male warriors in leather pants stood on each side of the door. These weren’t the casual guards of the prison level. These Fae were sharp and wary, and they drew swords at the sound of the door swinging, but it took an instant for them to recognize Octavian as an enemy. He’d already summoned the magic inside him, magic bolstered by the strength of Dahlia’s blood. He hit them with a blast of percussive force that knocked them unconscious on impact, then caught them with a levitation spell before they could slam to the ground. He lowered them gently and soundlessly to the floor.
He didn’t have such luck with the young Fae woman who stepped out of a room farther down the hall; she caught sight of him and let out a piercing scream, waxing and waning like a siren. Screams in Faery attract just as much attention as screaming anywhere else. Octavian could hear the sounds of doors opening and voices exclaiming; the noises echoing over what felt like a huge area. Maybe one of those voices was Niall’s, and that would be bad. Even Dahlia was afraid of Niall.
Octavian stepped over the guards to open the door of the room with a little flick of his hands, stepped inside, and resealed it with a spell that might keep the room tight until kingdom come. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so confident, so determined, in his use of magic. He wasn’t at all surprised to see Dahlia holding a knife to the throat of a burly man in his twenties. Octavian didn’t know where the knife had come from, but that was not what surprised him.
“Ripley?” he said.
“Uh. Yeah,” said the burly man.
“I confess, I’m disappointed,” Dahlia said.
“Everyone is,” said Ripley. He sounded as philosophical as a man could with a knife to his throat.
The tumult outside the room was growing louder, and Octavian said, “We have to move.” He found himself trying to estimate how many liters of blood a big man like Ripley might contain, and was not proud of himself. But when he thought of his dead friends, and those who were dying, he knew he needed Ripley’s blood, all of it. Dahlia’s needs were frivolous compared with his.
“Here, I’ll carry him,” Octavian said.
“Are you serious?” Dahlia snorted, a strange sound to come from her haughty little nose. “I could carry a rhinoceros.”
Octavian realized that was true, and he also realized they should have left two minutes ago. “Out the window, then,” he said. “I’m tethered to my magic and I’m sure my portal is still open. It’s closer than yours in the woods.”
“That’s no guarantee. Even if it’s open, your portal in the courtyard is undoubtedly surrounded by a million Fae,” she said, and he could tell she was barely holding onto her temper. To stop the argument, she leaped through the window with Ripley over her shoulder and took off running like a deer. It was a ridiculous sight, but Octavian, hard pressed to keep up with her, did not feel like laughing.
Ripley was bouncing in great discomfort on Dahlia’s little shoulder, and he bellowed in protest. At the sound of his cry, Octavian felt a hush fall over Faery momentarily, and then he heard the pursuit.
Ripley, who did not seem to want to be rescued from Faery, bellowed louder. Octavian used some of his free-flowing power to knock the demon-Fae out, and he saw a mad grin spread over Dahlia’s face when Ripley fell silent.
“Throw something behind us,” she yelled, and Octavian, thinking quickly, cast a spell which turned the leaves of all of the low-lying brush on the path behind them into razored metal.
He felt he’d been running a marathon by that time, but the screams he heard as the foremost Fae hit the spikes encouraged him, and he managed to muster the speed to run abreast of Dahlia and her burden. “How much farther?” he gasped.
She seemed to be calculating. “Probably another mile. Or two,” she added without pity. “I am so glad I got to drink the blood of more Fae.” She shot him a wicked smile. And she accelerated. “Otherwise the smell of the bleeding ones behind us would have rendered me useless with hunger.”
Eyes wild with the scent of Fae blood, she put on another burst of speed. Octavian ran even faster. He would keep her in sight or die.
He quickly began to believe he would die.
But the thick mist she’d warned him about came into view and that gave him the strength to keep up with the little vampire for one more spurt of speed. The sounds of pursuit had not abated. In fact, he was sure he could hear voices calling closely. He was right behind Dahlia and her bouncing burden when they went into the mist, which was the thickest fog he’d ever encountered.
It was obviously magical in origin, and he opened himself to it. Dahlia had the strength that came with being what she was, and that had been amped up immensely by the Fae blood. But he had the magic that powered the existence of the Fae, and for the moment he could tap into that. He listened to the magic, and it told him where to go.
The portal created and maintained by the king of the Fae was ahead and to his left, and he was just in time to see the faint oval in the air outlining a landscape view into a yard – without the sunlight or roses Dahlia had described. It was raining and it was night. Of course, Octavian thought, and dove through after her.
He turned and threw the magical equivalent of gray paint over the portal, confident that would conceal the shape of it and render the portal opaque to the pursuers...at least for a while.
He sat down abruptly, his legs having simply given way. Yes, it was raining, and luckily for Dahlia, it was night. They were sitting in a backyard, as best he could tell by the one security light that shone over the screen door on the back porch. The house was old, but not dilapidated. From what he could see, it was a farmhouse that had been added onto, but not significantly remodeled. No vinyl siding or hot tubs here. Just rain, and roses. Dahlia had been right about that.
Dahlia was sitting on the ground a yard away, even her strength temporarily exhausted. Ripley sprawled beside her, struggling to sit up.
“Listen,” the demon-Fae hybrid said. “I appreciate you all helping me, but you didn’t ask me what I wanted to do.”
“We don’t care.” Her voice was so cold that a shiver went up Octavian’s spine. Absurd, because the rain was warm. Evidently, it was summer here, and summer in Louisiana meant the same thing as it did in Octavian’s world.
“It’s not fair,” Ripley said, with a surprising amount of passion and in too loud a voice.
“Dammit, I liked being with the Fae!”
“Too many people were counting on you getting out of there,” Octavian said. “People are dying, and you can help.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Even if that’s true, why should I sacrifice what I want for a bunch of people I’ve never met?”
Octavian felt an old, savage anger rising in the back of him, the vampire he’d been once upon a time. The vampire who’d lived for eons in Hell.
“We need you, Ripley,” he said. “But we only need parts of you. Think about that before you speak again.”
“What?” Ripley’s eyes went wide and his round, stubbled face grew alarmed.
“He means your blood, idiot,” Dahlia said, sounding almost bored. “The doctor should be here at any moment.”
“We’re going to do this here in the rain?” Octavian asked.
“There are people asleep in that house,” Dahlia told him. “They’re not all completely human. Let’s keep our voices down...if we don’t want to imperil them. And we don’t, do we?”
“No,” Octavian agreed, though he was tired of Dahlia having the last word. She was an infuriating woman.
A small figure limped past the house and into the backyard. As it drew nearer, Octavian could see it was a tiny (even tinier than Dahlia, who was normal-small) hunchbacked woman who was at least in her sixties. The years had been harsh for her, and she was not happy. Nodding toward Ripley, she said, “Is this lump the one I take the blood from?” She put down the heavy case she’d been carrying. “And fuck all of you for getting me out on a night like this.”
Even Dahlia seemed taken aback. “Dr. Ludwig? I thought I would have to call you,” she said.
“I knew when you came through,” a voice said, and another vampire followed the little doctor into the security light. He looked like a contemporary of Dahlia’s, and to Octavian he had the same feel of age. He was Asian and slender and obviously quite fond of Dahlia.
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