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He opened his mouth. Magic ripped from him like a tidal wave and snapped, catching me. A power word.
The right side of my face turned hot. A pale gold light spiraled around me. Next to me, Ghastek jerked, caught in an identical glowing tornado.
On the wall behind me, Christopher screamed, “Mistress!”
Hugh smirked.
Whatever was happening, he would die before it was over. I dashed to him across the snow, sword out. The light moved with me, streaming around me in bright sunny ribbons. I leaped over the thorns.
Hugh slid off his horse.
Curran sprinted to me, his eyes pure gold.
I struck. Hugh’s blade met mine. He bared his teeth at me.
The tornado of light around me pulsed with red, slicing through Slayer’s blade where it touched Hugh’s sword. The blade snapped in half.
No!
The field, Hugh, and Curran vanished.
13
SOMEONE JERKED THE ground from under my feet. I hurtled through empty air, weightless, my arms transparent. Bricks flashed before me. I was falling through a round shaft. Directly below me a thick metal grate blocked dark water.
I’m going to die.
I hit the grate and passed through it, as if it were air. My body plunged into the water.
Lukewarm. Wet.
My body turned solid. I kicked, surfaced, and stared at half a sword in my hand. Hugh broke my sword. He broke Slayer.
He broke my sword.
I curled into a ball around my saber, plunging into the water. I’d had Slayer since I was five. Voron gave it to me. I had slept with it under my bed almost every night for the past twenty-two years. Slayer was a part of me and now it was broken. Broken in half. It felt like someone had cut my arm off and it just kept hurting and hurting.
I would kill him. It wasn’t an “if.” It was a “when.”
He broke Slayer.
Above me someone else was falling down, through the grate, and into the water. I choked and swam up. A moment later and Ghastek surfaced next to me with a gasp. He splashed around in panic. I gave him room. About ten seconds later, he stopped thrashing and stared at me.
“It was that water. It marked us and made us vulnerable to d’Ambray’s magic.”
“Yes. Hugh must have bribed one of my people. Or blackmailed them. Or threatened.”
It was Jennifer. It had to be, and if that was the case, Hugh wouldn’t have had to threaten very hard. She must’ve sat there with that bottle in her hands and tried to scrape enough courage together to throw it on me. She couldn’t.
This would not break me. My sword might snap, but I couldn’t. I would win. I would get out of here. I would live. I would see the people I loved again.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. I slipped into a quiet, cold calm. Voron’s voice murmured from my memory and I leaned on it like a crutch. “Exits first.”
“Yes. I remember.”
I bent in the water, trying to slide what was left of my sword into the sheath while staying afloat. I missed.
I fucking missed. I hadn’t missed in two decades.
“You were the target,” Ghastek said. “I’m an unfortunate bystander.”
“It looks like that.” I finally managed to slip Slayer’s stump into the sheath.
“Where are we?”
“I have no idea.”
“He knew we would be teleported here. He knew, and he did nothing to stop my teleportation,” Ghastek said.
“It appears d’Ambray believes you’re expendable.”
Ghastek looked at me for a long moment. A muscle in his face jerked. With a guttural snarl, Ghastek punched the water. “That’s it. That’s fucking it!”
Uh-oh. In all the time I’d interacted with Ghastek, he never swore. Ever. The “premier” Master of the Dead was about to throw a tantrum. I braced myself.
“He comes into my city, he throws away my people, he orders me around like I’m his servant and now this? How dare he!”
I sighed. “How dare he!” came out. Could “Does he know who I am?” be far behind?
“I’m not some illiterate he can push around. I won’t be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that fucking Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms.” Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. “Ooo, I’m Hugh d’Ambray, I’m starting a war!”
Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.
“A war I’ve been trying years to avoid. Years!”
He kept saying that.
“Does he think it’s easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can’t understand elementary concepts?”
Good to know where we stood with him.
“I won’t tolerate it. Landon Nez will hear about this.”
Landon Nez was likely in charge of the Masters of the Dead. My father liked to divide his delegated authority. Hugh ran the Iron Dogs, the military branch. Someone had to run the People, the research branch. It was a position with a lot of turnover. Landon Nez must be the latest.
“Troglodyte. Dimwit. Degenerate!” Curses spilled out of Ghastek. “When I get out of here, I’ll throw every vampire at my disposal at him until they drain him dry. Then I’ll cut him to pieces and set his disemboweled body on fire!”
“You may have to get in line.”
He finally remembered I was there. “What?”
“I’ll give you a piece of Hugh to play with when I’m done.”
He didn’t appear to have heard me. “Nobody does that to me! I’ll rip his heart out. Does he know who I am?”
“Okay,” I told him. “Get it all out of your system.”
Ghastek dissolved into a torrent of obscenities.
I turned away. We had to get out of this mess and I had to check the place for the possible exit routes.
The grate above us was a pale color that usually meant the metal contained silver. Above the grate a shaft, about twenty feet across, rose a hundred feet straight up. Blue feylanterns thrust from the walls at regular intervals, illuminating the bricks. Too sheer to climb.
The grate itself consisted of inch-wide bars set in a crisscrossed pattern. Usually grates like this had crossbars that were welded or locked in by swaging, but this one showed no seams at all. It had to have been custom made specifically for this shaft.
The ends of the bars disappeared into the wall. I kicked to propel myself up, stretched, and caught the grate with my fingers. So far so good. I brought my legs up and kicked the grate with all my strength. Not just solid. Immovable. Well, at least the holes between the bars weren’t tiny.
