Of course it did.
Mircea was making some kinds of signs at me, probably afraid the mages would hear if he said anything. Which would have worked great, except that my eyes kept crossing. But I guess he must have meant I’m going to leave you for a minute to go do something insanely stupid. Because the next second, he vaulted around the side of the coach, kicked in the door and disappeared into the small, covered area.
And then things started to get interesting. At least, they did if you consider cursing and kicking and a wildly rocking coach and a spell that blew off the roof to be interesting. It wasn’t doing so much for me, but I didn’t have time to worry about it, because a fist punched through the back of the coach, almost in my face.
Since it was a left one and wasn’t wearing Mircea’s OMEGA watch, I had no compunction at all about slipping off the one shoe I hadn’t yet managed to lose and using the stiletto heel to try to sever it at the wrist. It didn’t work as well as its namesake, but it must have been a distraction, at least. Because somebody cursed and somebody grunted, and then somebody went sailing out the side of the carriage to splat against one thundering along right next to us.
Which would have been great if it hadn’t happened to be Mom’s.
The mage grasped hold of the coach with one hand and flung a spell at me with the other, but it didn’t connect—thanks to the kidnapper, of all people. I could see him, because there was no covered area of the coach anymore, due to the fire. The rain had put it out, or maybe it had burnt out after it consumed all the cloth over the cab. But either way, only the wire frame remained in place, which didn’t hinder the kidnapper at all from slamming his heavy-looking suitcase upside the mage’s head.
That sent the spell flying off course, missing me but setting the hem of my dress alight. Fortunately, the mud puddle I’d just finished wallowing in had pretty much soaked the material, and that and the pelting rain took care of the fire before it took care of me. I was left with a ruined dress, a burn on my thigh and a serious case of Had Enough.
If my mother could shift seven people through most of a century, I could shift five a few hundred yards, like to the next street over. It would get them off her ass, and once Mircea and I shifted back, we’d have only the mage to deal with. I just needed to get the damn war mages all in one place in order to—
And then I didn’t, because Mom did it for me.
She slammed her coach into ours, almost knocking me off my perch. It did more than that to the mage, who had been trying to grab her while the kidnapper tried to grab him. The sudden movement sent him flailing back, and he fell through the missing roof of our coach, splintering the wood forming the back of it in the process. That left me looking at Mircea, who had a mage under one arm and another by the throat, and was trying to get a foot in the new arrival’s stomach.
He looked up at me and I looked at him, and then to the side, where a gap in the buildings showed a nice, broad street running parallel to this one. “Fair warning,” I told him. And shifted.
And immediately regretted it.
It felt like my body was coming apart at the seams, a searing, tearing pain that shot down every nerve. It hurt badly enough to have wrenched a scream from my throat, if I still had one. I didn’t, because it was streaming in molecules across space, like the rest of me, like my brain, which was nonetheless informing me that this was too far, too much. That maybe I should have remembered that the two horses would count as people, too; like maybe I should have thought about how tired I already was; like maybe this would be my last shift ever because my freaking head was going to explode.
At least, it would if I had the energy to rematerialize it long enough, which I wouldn’t if this went on much longer. What was going to happen instead was a quick unraveling of me and the horses and the coach and everyone inside it into particles blowing on the breeze that the r
ain would wash away, like we’d never existed at all. I knew it with the absolute conviction of someone who could already feel it happening, feel pieces and parts beginning to break away from their patterns, to jumble up, to distort—
And then I thought, No.
And then I thought, Stop.
And we did.
Really, really abruptly.
I hadn’t known it was possible, mainly because I’d never had reason to try. But somehow, I had aborted the shift. Right in the goddamned middle.
It had been that or die, so it had seemed the lesser of two evils. Until we rematerialized not a street over, but still on this one. Sort of.
The street was a posh-looking curve of neoclassical buildings fronted by pale stone that the gaslight turned gold against the black sky. Along both sides of the street ran a covered colonnade, which I hadn’t really noticed because I’d been kind of busy. I noticed it now since we landed up close and personal—as in, right on top of it.
That put us well above the street, flying along a narrow roofline barely wide enough to accommodate the coach, the horses and the heads that popped out of the side of the coach to look down at the street below. And then turned to look at me. And then one of the mages managed to get an arm up, and I had absolutely no doubt what he planned to do with it.
But I couldn’t stop him. I could barely even see him, wavering around in front of my blurry vision along with everyone else. Which was why it took me a moment to realize that he suddenly wasn’t there anymore. That Mircea had just bailed with him and the rest, throwing the whole kicking, fighting knot over the side of the colonnade.
Which would have been fine if I’d still been able to shift. But I wasn’t and I couldn’t, and the end of the colonnade was coming up and I was trying to bail, too, because falling from the back of a galloping coach wouldn’t be fun, but it was a lot better than the alternative. But my goddamned foot had gotten wedged behind the goddamned box and it wasn’t coming out, and I didn’t have time to figure out what was wrong with a brick wall staring me in the face and—
And then I was staring into a lovely pair of lapis eyes instead.
I blinked, stunned and confused and more than a little sick, as one of the mages ran up alongside the carriage. It was the one my mother was driving, in the middle of the road like a sane person, and which I was now somehow on top of. The mage grabbed for her and she broke eye contact with me long enough to glance at him, and then he was gone, popping out of existence like Niall had back in the suite. I knew that was what had happened, because a second later he showed up again in the middle of the street in front of us.
And then she ran him down.
“Damn, Liz!” the kidnapper said, staring up at her.
“Who are you?” she asked, turning those amazing eyes on me again.