I had no weapons, and there was no time to get inside his head. I saw the queen glance at me as I started to run, not for her but for the creature clothed in the flesh of a man. I failed to reach him, but not because I was too slow. But because I was thrown backward, not slapped this time but belted, so hard and so fast that I hit the wall again, a dozen yards away, before I could blink. And the jolt of the blow—
* * *
* * *
&nb
sp; Put me back in charge.
But the tag team handoff was a little abrupt, like me face-planting onto the nice marble floor when I bounced off the wall. It left me feeling like a punching bag that somebody had beaten all the stuffing out of at the gym. I somehow managed to get my shaky arms underneath me, to raise my head—
And then just stayed there, blinking in confusion, as what looked like a desert storm blew up in the middle of the room. It engulfed the man leaping at the queen, which would have been strange enough, because that’s not something you see every day. But then the whirling winds hardened into what looked like a shell of earth, a large globe behind which another storm broke with blinding fury.
I saw what looked like a hundred spells hit the sides of the shell, all at once, in bursts of color and light. Saw the consul blink, a tiny thing, a half expression. Saw her power spike as she fought to keep the fury contained. And heard Dorina tell me that she couldn’t sustain that level for long.
No shit, I thought back groggily.
I’d no sooner had the thought than the great shield cracked and buckled and shattered, exploding in a thousand pieces that lashed my face, even this far away. I saw something fall out of the other side, in swirls of dissipating magic. Saw it crash against the bottom steps of the dais and shatter like glass. Realized that it was the man, who was nothing but a collection of charred bones now.
The sand-laced winds had scoured him clean.
The consul was untouched, but not unscathed. I saw her stagger back against her throne, and the fact that she’d actually show weakness told me what the man had been carrying. Those explosions must have been caused by more of the superweapons we’d encountered, hundreds of them, enough to leave even a consul vulnerable.
And somebody was prepared to take advantage of it.
Through half a dozen doors, vampires surged into the room, all but flying at the dais. But they weren’t wearing the clothing of just one family. They weren’t from a single clan, and several were from competing ones. Which told me that this wasn’t—
—a normal assassination. They were being—
—controlled, by that creature who had attacked us at Claire’s—
—and who was here, riding someone new—
—but who? There was no way to know—
—except it wouldn’t be one of the controlled, lest we attack them and the creature lose its focus—
—but there was no one else! No one still conscious—
—no one except—
My eyes widened.
And then I grabbed the knife my last assailant had dropped, jumped up and threw—
Straight at the consul.
Chapter Forty-seven
This time, I woke up alone.
The bed was the same as before, so I was still at the consul’s. Oh goody. Even better, someone was bitching.
“—don’t care! I need to talk to her!”
Oh, damn it all to hell. I threw an arm over my face, because that was Marlowe and seriously? I hadn’t lived an exactly perfect life, but what had I done to deserve this?
I lay there for a while, contemplating various vile things I could do to the consul’s stooge. But I honestly wasn’t up to any of them, and repressed aggression would only give me a headache. I got up.