I wasn’t getting back there.
I wasn’t sure where I was going, but there was something very, very important I had to—
Oh, yeah.
I spied Louis-Cesare under a couple tons of fallen concrete—and tasteful sandstone and parquet flooring and another goddamned chandelier—and scrambled toward him over mounds of rubble. It wasn’t easy; my legs didn’t work right, and the debris was studded with fallen draperies, half a piano, a dust-covered settee, and Radu, standing by a bar. And making himself a drink despite the fact that most of his hair was burnt off and a chunk of his torso seemed to be missing.
I did a double take while he belted back a stiff one, and I almost ran into Marlowe, who still hadn’t found any pants. But who had swathed himself in a curtain and was doing his best Caesar impression. Which seemed to mostly involve yelling at me.
I ignored him and finally reached Louis-Cesare, who was bleeding, bleeding everywhere, and my hands were shaking and someone was crying, but it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, because I was yelling now, too.
“Help him! Help him!”
Someone was pulling on me, which wasn’t going to work, only it did because I was weak as water.
“Will someone put her the hell out?” Marlowe demanded.
Nobody did.
“I said, does anybody have the power left to put her—”
Someone touched my arm, someone other than Crown Royal, who was still tugging from behind. I looked up to see Horatiu’s kindly old face. Unlike everybody else, he looked pretty much like always, in a dapper, if dust-covered, tuxedo, and peering at me myopically from under a fall of thick white hair.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I told him.
“Sleep, child,” he said, and put a heavily veined hand on my forehead.
“No, I can’t sleep. I have to—”
* * *
* * *
I felt the unmistakable scrape of steel on bone, the frisson up the spine it always caused echoing through me. But the bone wasn’t mine. A mage in front of me hadn’t been shielded, and the arrogance proved fatal when I slipped a knife between his ribs.
A second and third went down, their hamstrings cut, and then their throats as they fell. Another died when an upstroke, coming off the last two, gutted him like unzipping a coat, and a fifth—the last easy one—died trying to warn the others that they had another problem. And kept on trying, his mouth still moving even as his head bounced across the floor.
It had taken perhaps a few seconds, one stroke flowing into another, a familiar, deadly dance, the blood painting streamers in the air around me. But it was enough for the other mages to stop attacking and shield. My knife slid off one; stuttered against another; failed to puncture a third, even so much as dent it, despite the fact that all my strength was behind it.
That wasn’t normal.
But then, neither were these shields.
* * *
* * *
“Like I give a damn what you want!”
Crown Royal was yelling at somebody, I didn’t know why. And then I noticed that she was facing off with Marlowe and I understood. He just kind of brought that out in people.
I looked around. We were in Mircea’s apartment, sort of. I mean, there were still some walls left; and a window, somehow pristine despite standing almost on its own; and the ceiling—
Okay, forget the ceiling, I thought, staring up into what had been a very nice ballroom and was now a skylight.
“I was planning to renovate anyway,” Radu said.
It concerned me that I could see through his stomach.