“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—”
/> Me, I assumed, judging by his expression. At least, the one he’d had a second ago. Before the gun I’d thought into existence blew it away.
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.