It was a pretty impressive bit of acrobatics, and apparently everyone else thought so, too. Because suddenly people were barnacling onto the only handhold available by grabbing whatever part of him was closest. Including something that made his eyes pop and his face go crimson and—
And then an angry cloud of darkness loomed up behind his head, blotting out the stars.
Tag, you’re it, I thought but didn’t say, because he couldn’t have heard me over the yelling and the crashing and the ship’s horn. But it must have shown in my face, because he wrenched his neck around and took a look—
And then he let go of the rail.
It wasn’t so much a slide this time as a fall. The ship was fast approaching the perpendicular, leaving us tumbling and flailing helplessly into a dam of people and furniture around a wrecked lifeboat. And then over it, as the impact threw us into the air and through some spray and into—
A big steel door that hadn’t been there a second ago.
And neither had the dark street and the cracked sidewalk and the shiny black, bulbous car that rain was pattering down on the top of.
“Word?”
I went from looking dizzily at the street to looking dizzily at the large guy with the nicotine yellow teeth who had appeared behind a small window in the door.
“Titanic,” Louis-Cesare told him grimly, and the door opened and we were through.
There was a pretty Asian hatcheck girl in a tight red dress on the other side, but we didn’t have any hats. Or shoes, in my case—not that anyone seemed to notice. Maybe because the place was so smoky; I could barely see my hand in front of my face, much less my foot.
But I could still talk, so I did, pulling Louis-Cesare—who was now wearing a standard black tux for some reason—over to the wall. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying option two.”
“What?”
He licked his lips. “Once we realized that I could not take you out, your father told me to evade until he could come up with a plan. He said there were three ways to do that.”
“Which are?”
“Hide—”
“Which didn’t work out so well!”
“No.” He grimaced. “We are therefore attempting to lose her. If she isn’t right on top of us when we transition from one memory to the next, or if she becomes distracted by what else is happening, she will not know where we went.”
“But if she figures it out?”
“Then we go to option three.”
“Which is?”
He said something that I didn’t hear because the door opened again and a fat cat with a bunch of squealing girls blew in. Along with a gust of rain and the sound of lightning. And Louis-Cesare took the chance to pull me into the main room.
It was loud, with someone playing bad jazz and someone else trying to sing over the sound of drunken laughter, the call of a croupier and the click click of a roulette wheel. It was all utterly, completely real, like my first mind-trip to the wharf. Only there were no disturbing holes in this picture.
There hadn’t been any on the ship, either, but I hadn’t been in a headspace to notice it then. Maybe it was because vampires’ senses were better? I wondered, staring at the silver shimmy of a showgirl’s costume on a small stage. So maybe their sense memory was, too. Or maybe he was filling in the blanks?
Or maybe I was nuts for thinking about this now.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
Louis-Cesare had snagged two glasses off the tray of a passing waiter, and handed me one, which turned out to be straight bourbon. “You might want to drink that now,” he said grimly, and bolted his own.
I didn’t even ask. I just threw it back, managing to choke most of it down before a bell rang out, harsh and discordant. And had me jumping reflexively and spilling the rest.
And I wasn’t the only one. On all sides, people jerked to attention, glasses sloshed, cigarettes fell from holders and hands disappeared inside coats. And then everything stopped—music, talking, gambling, drinking. And every head in the place swiveled around.