Done here.
The creatures came along as I jumped for a nearby roof, slashing and hacking at me while we were still mid-air. I received an impromptu haircut from a razor-sharp sword, watched the inch-long fringe arc against the starlight, and got my own knife in my attacker as I hit down, rolling. And saw the creature pull eight inches of steel out of its side and throw it away as if it had been a splinter.
All right, then.
A little-known fact about dhampirs is that we are fast. Not Louis-Cesare fast, but compared to almost anybody else . . . yeah, I could move. Which I proved by taking off like a bat out of hell.
And had one of them pass me in a classic flanking maneuver, without so much as breaking a sweat.
Son of a bitch, I thought, ripping up one of the ubiquitous satellite dishes and flinging it at the nearest snout. Only to have it be caught midair and snapped back, so fast that I ended up bending over backwards to miss it and fell off the building. I grabbed a laundry line on the way down, which would have been more of a comfort if one of my attackers hadn’t immediately started reeling me in.
I began overhanding it for the other side—fast—only to find that there was a jackal on that end, too.
Why they didn’t just skewer me on one of those huge spears I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t matter in a minute.
Dorina, I thought, some help here!
And I wasn’t talking to myself.
Well, okay, I sort of was, but . . . it’s complicated.
My name is Dory Basarab, daughter of the famous vampire senator and general Mircea Basarab, and recently a member in my own right of the North American Vampire Senate. I’d been promoted for two reasons: it was assumed that I’d vote the way that daddy wanted, thus giving his faction on the senate additional power. And because of Dorina—my “twin” as she called herself—which I guess was a reference to Siamese twins.
Only instead of being joined at the hip, we were joined everywhere.
We’d been born one person with a duel nature—half human, half vamp—but a single consciousness. Until, that is, our father Mircea—a master mentalist—had decided to put a barrier between our two halves when I was just a girl. The idea had been to give the human side of me a chance to grow up separately from my vampire nature, which had already been stronger than I could handle.
That was why so few dhampirs lived for very long: their two sides ended up at war with each other, and ripped their minds apart. Mircea had helped Dorina and I to avoid that, but at the cost of remaining separate people for something like five centuries. And a division like that . . . tends to be permanent.
I hadn’t even known she existed until recently, when Mircea’s barrier finally failed, since we had never been awake at the same time. I’d just thought I had fits of dhampir-induced madness when I bl
acked out and killed everything in the room. It had kept me apart from society for most of my life, under the assumption that I was a dangerous monster.
It didn’t help that I was sort of right.
Not that Dorina was a homicidal maniac, but she had all the ruthless practicality of a vampire, blended with centuries of being a virtual prisoner in my mind. Mircea had left human-me in charge of our union, which allowed her limited freedom, mainly when I was asleep or freaked out and my control lessened. She was therefore both very old and yet also strangely naïve in how she thought about things, with much less real-world experience than I had.
And, like a child, anything that startled her was likely to get beaten up.
But damn, if I couldn’t use some of that ferocity right now.
However, Dorina had the ability to leave our body behind for mental jaunts on her own, and this looked like one of those times. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass handed to me—possibly literally in a minute—by creatures faster and stronger and more numerous than I was. And my damned purse, which had some items that might have evened the odds, was back on the terrace, assuming there was a terrace anymore.
I was starting to find Egypt less romantic.
And then somebody grabbed me—from behind, just as I was being hauled over the edge of the roof.
“If you stake me, I swear to God!” Ray shrieked, before I could retaliate. Or figure out what was happening. Because we were going up, I realized, as one of the jackal-headed bastards jumped for me—
And missed.
I saw the creature flail in the air, its fingertips just missing the fringe of what appeared to be a rug from somebody’s living room, which I’d been slung across. It was an ugly rug, and its fringe was an unraveled mess. Even stranger, it appeared to be the only thing underneath us at the moment.
“Hold on!” Ray yelled. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!”
That’s reassuring, I thought, as we took off, soaring over the rooftops of Cairo on what appeared to be a flying carpet. At least as far as I could tell with the wind throwing what remained of my hair in my eyes and my fisted hands clutching the hard-to-grasp surface for all I was worth. I almost fell off three times anyway, felt my stomach lurch alarmingly when we jackknifed around a building, and then we stopped—abruptly enough that I did hit the ground.
Or another dusty rooftop, at least, with my head spinning and the stone underneath my hands feeling like it was undulating while I stared up at Ray. “What the—”