by Karen Chance
The two vamps who had grabbed hold of the passenger door hit the invisible shield around the house head-on as we passed safely through. They were still sliming their way down it, like juicy bugs on a windshield, when several more ran forward and grabbed the left bumper of the car. It had remained just outside the wards, providing them with a convenient handle to use to drag us backward.
I hit the gas, but after days of rain and an unexpected blizzard, the front lawn had turned into a mud field. I had zero traction. I did get the satisfaction of seeing Cheung’s men completely drenched in mud, but they were going to have the last laugh if they succeeded in dragging us back out.
Christine was scrabbling at her seat belt, trying to get it undone. I tossed the duffel onto the front steps and started helping her, while keeping my foot glued to the gas pedal. I was hoping the car would dig itself far enough into the muck to buy us a few seconds, but no dice. The vamps managed to get the whole rear end out just as the seat belt finally gave way
There was no time to exit gracefully. I grabbed Christine with one hand and Ray with the other, and dragged them over the hood. We jumped free even as the car was being yanked out from under us, and landed—of course—face-first in the sea of mud. But it was a sea of mud inside the wards, and that was all that mattered.
I got to my feet, dripping in muck. The beautiful dress was ruined, and I hadn’t even gotten to wear it anywhere. And somewhere along the line, I’d lost one of the shoes.
I was royally pissed, and that was before I saw the guy coming to talk to me in my mud- slimed finery. He was wearing a suit that would have made Mircea jealous. The fine black wool fit him like a dream, the burnt orange silk tie adding just the right amount of spice. It also matched the orange-and-black tiger tat leaping from his neck to his right cheek.
And the dressing gown of the very bedraggled figure he was leading by one arm.
“Radu!” I blinked. “What the hell?”
“Yes, yes, thank you! My point exactly,” he said, obviously livid.
“You said you’d be okay.”
“I would have been, if not for this madman!” he said, struggling uselessly against his captor’s hold. No introductions were made, but then, I didn’t really need any. Radu, despite appearances, is a second-level master. Pissing him off is a very bad idea—unless you happened to be a first-level.
“Mircea will kill you for this,” I said conversationally, as Cheung’s polished shoe tips stopped just outside the wards.
“Had he not interfered in my business, there would have been no need to inconvenience his brother.” The voice was a low, pleasant tenor without a trace of an accent. It didn’t match the looks, which were anything but bland: bronze skin, high cheekbones, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a hawklike nose with a proud tilt.
“Inconvenience? Is that what they call kidnapping these days?”
“You kidnapped my servant first,” he pointed out. “Return my property and I will return yours.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said, checking ’Du out.
His dressing gown was ripped along one seam, his hair—usually so sleek and shiny—was everywhere and he had somehow acquired a smear of mud on his nose. He looked pathetic and miserable. I smiled at him sympathetically.He smiled back.
“Ray’s the Senate’s property now,” I told Cheung. “If you want him back, you’ll have to petition them.”
“What?” Radu’s expression faded.
Cheung’s forehead acquired a slight wrinkle. “Perhaps you did not understand me.”
“I understood perfectly.” A drip of mud oozed down my temple, and I took a second to wipe it off.
“Then release my servant.”
“Or what?” I demanded. “I’m fair game. Ray’s fair game. But you can’t hurt ’Du, and you know it. It would break the truce, and even if it didn’t, Mircea would kill you. Slowly.”
“What are you talking about?” Radu demanded, his embroidered satin bed slippers slowly sinking into the lawn. “We’ve already been out here half the night! Give the man what he wants, Dory!”
“No can do,” I said while flipping through the key-chain for the front-door key I never used. “But don’t worry, ’Du. I’ll inform Mircea about this, next time I see him.”
“Next time you—” He broke off, staring at something over my shoulder. I turned to see Christine floundering around in the mud. Her delicate little slippers didn’t appear to have much traction, and every time she got up, she fell down again.
“Is that… Christine?” he asked, looking appalled.
She slowly got to her feet, hands spread out on either side of her, like a toddler learning to walk. “Lord Radu,” she said tremulously, before her foot slipped and she fell backward into a puddle. The resulting splash rained muck down on me and ’Du.
“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.
“You think I am bluffing,” Cheung said evenly.
I sighed. “You’re either bluffing, or you’re an idiot, and that’s not your reputation,” I said, finally locating the house key. “Hurt ’Du, and you’ll die for it. Let him go, and Mircea may let you off with some groveling. I don’t know.”
“I see I need to prove my sincerity.” Cheung didn’t move, but two of his boys ran up with sledgehammers—and started taking apart the Lamborghini.
Radu just stood there, mute in horror, as a beautiful piece of Italian engineering was quickly reduced to scrap. It didn’t take long. I opened the front door, hauled Ray’s mud-covered self inside and then went back for the duffel and Christine.
“This does not move you?” Cheung demanded, as one of his boys sent the steering wheel flying off into the night. Radu made a small whimpering sound.
“It’s ’Du’s car,” I told him, before shutting the door in his face.
The house might be repairing itself, but it wasn’t getting there in any hurry. There were still holes in the floor, the walls and the ceiling, giving a three- story atrium effect to the front hall. Moonlight cascaded down through the now much more open floor plan, flooding the old boards in a pale light that was strangely otherworldly.
It provided enough illumination to allow me to thread my way through the stacks of worm-eaten furniture in the vestibule. I didn’t topple a single piece over, even while dragging Ray. That was lucky, because something else otherworldly was in the hallway, flitting through the far end of the corridor, near the back door. I stopped dead.
Everything else looked normal. The house was dark, quiet, still. But that wasn’t surprising. Claire had to have given up on me a while ago and gone to bed. And while my roommates tended to be active at night, they weren’t exactly homebodies. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home to a mostly quiet house.
But not to one that smelled like a deep cave, dank and chill, with that curious sharp underbite that my brain had filed under “Oh, shit.”
Svarestri, although I couldn’t see them. Not that that meant a damn. I suddenly wondered if there was anyone left alive for Cheung to attack.
“Hey, can we—”
I clapped a hand over Ray’s big mouth and grabbed my new iron sword out of the duffel. It felt good in my hand—a cold, solid weight with some serious heft behind it. I just hoped the fey hadn’t come up with another way of fighting without actually being there. If they’d hurt Claire or the kids, I wanted something that could bleed.
Christine caught my arm. She didn’t say anything, but her face spoke volumes. “Stay here,” I told her softly. Normally, a three- hundred-year-old vamp would be an asset in a case like this, but I didn’t think she was going to frighten the fey by crying at them.
The dress was already ruined, so I wove a knife through the silk at the small of my back and tied another to my thigh with one of the stockings. I stuffed the duffel under a table in the foyer and left the rest of Ray on guard over it. Then I moved carefully into the hall, keeping close to the tattered walls.
The house must have prioritized wallpaper pretty low, because
pieces of it still fluttered everywhere, brushing my cheeks as I slipped past. It was like being in a forest of slowly moving tree branches, heavy with moss. The dried paste on the back felt like scaly fingers brushing over my skin, and the constant movement gave my eyes too much to watch.
Not that they were doing so hot. Light cascaded down three stories, through the ruined roof. But it was dim antique silver—a combination of moonlight and the vague radiance from the street. The city had recently installed new, energy-efficient streetlights that saved money by not actually illuminating anything.
The situation wasn’t helped when a thin, cold rain began to fall. It sent odd, rippling shadows down the windows and across the squares of gray they cast on the floor. I felt my heart rate speed up, my skin prickling. The damned Svarestri were giving me a complex about the weather.
The white backing on the wallpaper glowed under the moonlight, waving across my vision like long silver blond hair. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw fey for a split second. But I hadn’t. Because there was no mistaking when I finally did glimpse one. Something black twisted down through me at the sight, from head to feet, colder than the night air at the bottom of a ravine.
It was only a brief flicker in my peripheral vision, vague and indistinct. My shadow ghosted along at my heels as I slowly moved forward, but the fey cast none. Around him there was only a quivering nothing, like negative space.
Some kind of camouflage, I guessed, and it worked pretty well. I couldn’t seem to see him at all if I looked directly at him. He only showed up in the corner of my eye in glimpses, wavering in and out of the rain shadows and the strands of gently waving wallpaper.
The fey was joined by another and then another, the air around them practically sparkling with the ghostly light around their bodies. Until it flickered and went out, dimming down to the nothingness of the first. And whether it was a spell or that almost weightless gait they all seemed to have, my ears couldn’t pick up a thing. Not a footfall, not a single breath, nothing. Silence filled the old house like cold water, broken only by the soft sound of the rain.
A fourth intruder joined the growing crowd. And unless the fey were as ghostly as they appeared and could walk through walls, I knew how they were getting in. He’d come from the pantry, through the door that led out into the hall. They’d entered through the portal.
Pip had the big boy in the basement, but he’d littered other portals throughout the house for security and convenience. They didn’t go anywhere exotic; that one just let out into the backyard, by Claire’s old compost heap. We’d mostly been using it to take out the garbage.
But it looked like the fey had found a better use for it.
There were no wards guarding it because it didn’t exist when not in use. At least, that was the theory. Somehow, they had figured out it was there and had tinkered with the spell enough to get it to open from that end, giving them free access to the heart of the house.
What I couldn’t figure out was why the damned internal wards weren’t working. Pip hadn’t been content with just exterior wards. He’d added a bunch of nasty interior ones as well, which I’d seen in action on one memorable occasion. And Olga and I had recently placed another layer over the top of that.
With four fey in the hall and who knew how many coming, there should have been a hell of a fight going on. Yet the wards hadn’t so much as twinged. Damned useless things, I thought viciously. Spend all that money and time, and what did we get? Not so much as a warning siren when the bad guys showed up. If I lived long enough, I was going to tell Olga exactly what I thought of—
I was grabbed from behind and yanked backward into the kitchen. We hadn’t even stopped moving when I slammed an elbow back into my attacker’s gut, and came down on his foot with my heel. And had to stifle my own curse. I’d forgotten I was barefoot, and that had hurt.
But he let go and I spun, bringing the short sword up in a stabbing motion—and hit wallpaper. Whoever it was had moved like quicksilver, dodging the blade before darting back in to grab me and shove me against the refrigerator. He pinned me there with his lean, hot weight, grabbing my arms, trapping me.
So I brought up a knee, hard, and heard another grunt, just as I recognized a familiar scent. Fey didn’t smell like butterscotch and whisky—at least, none I’d ever met. I looked up into a pair of furious blue eyes. Louis-Cesare.
“How the hell did you get in?” I whispered.
“Through the door,” he said quietly, his voice a little strained.
I moved my knee. “Sorry.” And then what he’d said registered. “What do you mean, through the door? The wards are set to exclude all but family.”
“I am family, Dorina.”
Oh, yeah.
I didn’t ask him why he was here instead of where he was supposed to be because right then I didn’t care. “They’re after Aiden,” I told him. “We need to get them before they go upstairs.”
He didn’t ask me what I meant. I guess he’d gotten a look in the hall, or maybe that keen nose had scented something off, too. “I counted eight of them. And there may be more,” he told me grimly.
“Eight?” Wonderful. Not that it made a difference. “It doesn’t matter how many there are. We’ve got to stop them.”
I started for the hall again, or tried to, but that iron grip didn’t budge. “We will not stop eight fey warriors by brawn alone,” he told me harshly. “A little planning may be the difference between success and failure.”
“So might delay!”
I wrenched away, but he moved to block the door to the hall, and trying to budge him would have been like going through a brick wall. Harder, actually: I’d been through a wall, but I’d never managed to dislodge Louis-Cesare when he was in a mood. I spun on my heel and flung open the kitchen door instead, intending to circle around back and hopefully take the fey by surprise.
And then I just stood there, staring.
I’d been hearing a weird noise coming from outside, but hadn’t had time to focus on it. It had sounded like someone bouncing on a trampoline, which was a little odd at three a.m. But the reality wasn’t that far off.
“What is it?” Louis-Cesare came up behind me.
I thought it was sort of self-explanatory. He was just in time to see another group of Cheung’s boys throw themselves at the wards. A few of them must have had some serious power, because they actually managed to dent the surface a few inches, distorting their faces horribly as they pressed up against the invisible skin.
And then the wards corrected, throwing more power at the point of contact, and they went staggering backward. Or flying, depending on how far in they’d made it. The reaction seemed to be in direct proportion to the threat.
I could have told them that they were wasting their time. The house wards weren’t run off a talisman that could be exhausted if enough force was applied. They were powered by a ley-line sink, which had unlimited energy. Cheung’s boys could batter themselves bloody, but they’d never get through that way.
“Idiots,” I said with feeling. “It would serve them right if they did get in. I’d like to see how they’d deal with—”
I stopped, staring at all the power expending itself uselessly against the wards.
When it could be in here helping us.
I watched the mud-splattered attackers for a moment and wondered if I was going crazy. No way could the two of us handle a couple dozen senior- level masters. But then, weaker ones wouldn’t be any use againstsubrand’s thugs. And when Cheung’s boys stormed the house, there was a good chance the fey were going to assume they were coming to our aid, and vice versa. If they tore into one another, it might buy me time to find Claire and the boys.
Of course, if they didn’t, I was screwed. But I was screwed anyway, and between the devil and the deep blue sea, the devil starts to look pretty good. At least he can be bargained with. The sea will just kill you.
I felt a hand suddenly tighten around my bicep. I looked up, and saw the same id
ea dawning in Louis-Cesare’s eyes.
“Can you do it?” he whispered.
“Yes. But Cheung will run as soon as he sees the fey.” If he had any sense.
“He won’t run,” Louis-Cesare said, with a slight smile.
I followed his line of sight out into the yard, where I saw Cheung’s head jerk up. He stared at the house, a scowl spreading over his features. “What did you do?” I demanded.
“I suggested to him that he might have his servant, if he was not too much of a coward to come in and take him.”
“You called a first-level master a coward?”
“Among other things.”
“And they say I’m crazy.”
I mentally felt around for the bright web of power flowing about the house. There should have been a corresponding interior web as well, but it was conspicuously absent. Someone had taken down the internal wards, cutting the link between them and their power source, the ley-line sink. But they’d left the external ones intact, either because they’d wanted to fool me into thinking everything was fine or—more likely—because they just hadn’t cared.
It took only a second to wrap the filaments of the external wards around my mental hand and give a hard tug. Within seconds, the long skeins of energy had unraveled to nothing, leaving the old house bare and defenseless. “I hope this works,” I said with feeling. “Or we just went from bad to—”
I didn’t get a chance to finish, because I was suddenly slung over a shoulder, carted to the pantry and shoved headfirst down the portal. It happened so fast that for a second, I didn’t understand what was going on. Until it spit me out the other side.
Right atsubrand’s feet.
“—tragic,” I finished blankly.
CHAPTER 25
I thinksubrand was almost as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but he recovered fast. His boot came down in the middle of compost and wet leaves, right where I’d been lying. I wasn’t there anymore, because I’d flung myself backward into the now two-way portal.