“Dark or light?”
He concentrated for a second, then shook his head. “Can’t tell.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.” I met his eyes, and his expression darkened. And I knew we were both thinking about Lawrence and the mage he’d followed into hell. “Mages, demons, vampires, smugglers—what’s next?”
“Let’s go find out,” he growled.
Finding out meant finding Slava’s office, which was a process of elimination involving a lot of rooms that looked like they ought to have interesting activities going on—hence the silence spell, I assumed—but that were inexplicably empty. Like the door the men had been coming out of, which proved to be a break room. And the corridor. And everything except a door at the very end of the hall with a light on under it.
I scowled at it.
We’d been up here six, maybe seven minutes by now, with another couple in the elevator. That was plenty of time for Slava to have prepared a welcome, even if he hadn’t already had something in place. And since this had been his base of operations for years, that seemed unlikely.
He knew we were here. He knew there was a chance we would get past his men. Yet there were no guards, no traps, nothing to keep us from waltzing right into his office except a couple of clueless mages who hadn’t even had shields up. It was enough to give me stomach cramps.
“Hold up,” I said.
We were plastered to either side of the office door, about to break in, so Marlowe didn’t look happy at the interruption. “What now?” he demanded, like the previous delays had been my fault.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. But it wasn’t just paranoia coming out to play. Something had triggered an “oh, crap” response in the back of my mind.
I couldn’t pin it down any more than that, because there was nothing to see but empty corridor and, thanks to the spell, nothing to hear. And the only odors coming from the room ahead were pretty standard for an office: printer ink, industrial cleaner, a full ashtray, and feline, because apparently even evil pimps keep pets. There was nothing to explain why the hair had suddenly risen all along the back of my neck.
But it had, and it was a problem. Particularly as my big bag o’ tricks had been confiscated on the first go-round. All I had was a purloined gun with no extra clips and no idea what was behind that damned door.
And I was suddenly finding myself less than curious.
“For fuck’s sake!” Marlowe hissed, as I just stood there. “You’re supposed to be a professional!”
“I am,” I said. “And in my professional opinion, there’s something—”
But Marlowe didn’t want my opinion, professional or otherwise. Marlowe wanted inside that room. “Remember—alive,” he snarled. And before I could stop him, he’d grasped the knob, flung open the door and bolted inside with vampire swiftness.
Which was when things got a little confusing.
A blur even my eyes couldn’t track shot out of the room and then shot back in, slamming the door behind it. It took less time than it takes to say, almost less than it takes to think—maybe a second in all. It took me another to notice that Marlowe was now across th
e hall, splayed against the wall.
Nailed to the tasteful gold wallpaper by the knife buried in his heart.
It would have killed a human, and seriously inconvenienced a regular vampire. But that sort of thing doesn’t work so well on senior masters. Not even with wood, and Marlowe’s bloody hands were slipping on a metal hilt. But it didn’t look like it had done him any good, either.
A thin ribbon of blood trickled out of the side of his mouth as he opened it to gasp, “Wha’?”
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. And because the door suddenly opened again, if you can call it that when a body is flung through it, splintering the wood and sending someone flying back into Marlowe. And plunging the knife he’d just jerked out of his rib cage right back inside.
Judging by his expression, that hadn’t been too healthy, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. Or about the fact that the vamp who had smashed into him was no longer in one piece, or even two. Or that one of those pieces was screaming in a high-pitched wheeze, like a little girl.
Because the thing in the room was now the thing on me.
What followed wasn’t exactly a fight, since a fight implies planning and strategy and execution and this was just the last step, fueled by pure instinct because there was no time for anything else. I blocked a flurry of knives that was really only one but was wielded by a slashing maniac with unearthly speed that I’d only ever encountered from a first-level vamp. But this wasn’t one, because the feel was wrong; the feel was strange, but it was oddly familiar, too, in a way I didn’t have time to grasp before—
Before I had him.
I feinted left and then jerked right with a liquid movement that I guess my assailant hadn’t been expecting. Because it allowed me to grab the neck that was following the knife headed for my heart. I held on to it with one hand while holding the damn knife away from me with the other. And looked past it to see—
Shit.