I looked toward the main dais, where the queen sat, smiling at something one of her courtier’s had said.
I was after bigger prey.
* * *
* * *
Jolt, jolt, jolt.
Duck, bend, augghh!
Jolt, jolt, jolt.
I woke up to the sensation of being carried . . . painfully . . . somewhere I couldn’t see. Because I couldn’t see anything. The only light came from little squares of haze that broke the blackness here and there, but they flashed by so quickly that they didn’t help much. In fact, it was mostly the opposite: they acted like strobes in a nightclub, brightening things just enough to fool my eyes and make me dizzy.
And I was already dizzy enough.
Damn it, what was happening?
I struggled the rest of the way back to consciousness, cursing the darkness. But then a bullet whizzed by and sparked off the floor in front of us, and I decided I didn’t mind so much. And then it didn’t matter, because whoever was carrying me made a movement so fast that, even as part of it, I couldn’t follow.
And, suddenly, we were running through light.
Not bright light. Most of it was provided by huge candelabras dripping wax everywhere and looking creepy. But they showed me enough to realize that Louis-Cesare was carrying me, that we’d just darted out of one of the hidden passages around here, and that we were currently tearing through a library.
And that somebody was shooting at us.
Make that a lot of somebodies.
Annnnd I was caught up.
“Put me down,” I told him, struggling.
“In a moment.”
“Why? What are you waiting for?”
“That,” he said, as we burst into a narrow hallway and leapt over a line of masters who’d just knelt in front of us.
I thought I recognized one of them.
“Mircea’s?”
“Mircea’s.”
I craned my neck around, because we were now running down the hall, so fast that it was almost a blur. But I was in time to see another squad of vamps—the ones who I guess had been following us—get held up the hard way. The two groups crashed together as we rushed in the other direction, into another room, through a fireplace, down a passageway, and out—
Into Mircea’s suite of rooms.
I knew them because I’d been here before. What I didn’t know was that they’d gotten an upgrade. Or maybe the portal swirling on the far wall had always been here, because trust Mircea to have a plan B—and C and D and E—for every occasion.
Except this one, because I wasn’t going in there.
“Let me down—”
Louis-Cesare wasn’t letting me down.
I twisted and managed to get loose, hit the edge of a table, and bounce off onto the floor.