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Maybe it was time to get serious.
My brother was lying curled up in a fetal position, naked and shockingly thin, as if he’d lost forty pounds of muscle in the past day. He looked better and worse—the bruises were gone, as was the blood. His hands still looked knotted and horrible, but his face was recognizable again. Being a vampire has its privileges, even if his skin looked like it needed to be a couple of sizes larger, drawn tight against what remained of his formerly muscular frame.
It was his expression that sickened me. He looked up with mercury-colored eyes, dull and glazed with simple animal pain.
“Thomas,” I hissed. “It’s Harry.”
He blinked up at the light without speaking.
“Can you hear me, man?”
He stared and made a small choking sound.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. There was no ladder waiting for me below. So I grimaced, swung my legs over the opening, and then dropped down into it as quietly as I could.
It was a bit of a drop, but I managed not to land on Thomas or fall on my ass.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”
For a long beat, nothing happened. Then he moved, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My brother was alive.
But there wasn’t much left of him.
Stars and stones, the svartalves had worked him over badly. They hadn’t put him in irons. They’d just beaten him until there was no possibility of him effecting his own escape. I wanted to be enraged about it, but among the supernatural nations, their actions would be considered effective, not sadistic. Hell, it would have been a simple matter for them to simply kill him out of hand and then announce that an assassin had made an attempt on Etri and been killed before he could do the job. But instead they were holding to the Accords.
He was alive. But his Hunger had evidently cannibalized his own body to keep him that way.
“Thomas, we haven’t got much time,” I said. “Get your lazy ass up. We have to go.”
He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. I wasn’t at all confident that he understood me.
“Of course,” I said. “I have to do all the work myself.”
I lifted my amulet and looked around the room, and my heart hurt. It was my old lab. I’d spent countless hours there, working, studying, brewing, casting, summoning, setting my hair on fire—you know, wizard stuff. So had Molly. There were smoke stains on the floor, and I could see the squares and rectangles where my old furniture had been, the feet of tables, the bases of bookshelves, the holes in the wall where I had screwed in the wire-frame storage shelving. My old copper summoning circle had survived, somehow, at the far end of the room. Maybe the floor of my old living room had collapsed over it, shielding it from the worst of the flames.
But it offered me no help.
I wouldn’t have any trouble reaching up and grabbing the lip of the opening, then hauling myself out. But climbing out while carrying my brother would be a hell of a trick. Damn, I wished I had spent more of my time on earth magic. Altering gravity for a few seconds would make this really simple—but doing it at my current level of skill would take time that we did not have.
I’d have to go with the alternative and hope I didn’t kill us both. Go, me.
I stooped down, wrapped exposed skin in towels as best as I could, and got hold of Thomas’s arms. He hissed out a breath, but he didn’t move, his body putting up all the resistance of boiled pasta. He was shockingly light, but even light, limp people are a pain and a half to move around. It took me a minute to get him up and over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. After that, I positioned myself under the exit, turning my body to, hopefully, make sure I didn’t take any of Thomas’s skin off on the way out.
“I should make a cloak of levitation,” I muttered. “Doctor Strange would never have this problem.”
I felt a flash of guilt at wasting time with smartassery and shoved it down. Time for that when my brother was safe.
And then I crouched, made the best guess I could, gathered my will, and thrust my right hand down at the floor while snarling, “Forzare!”
Raw kinetic force lashed down at the floor below me, and because of Sir Isaac Newton, it also propelled me up. I flew through the air, but I’d misjudged the amount of force needed. Magic is more art than science, and it was considerably harder to work with precision without a few tools to help me. So instead of gracefully sailing up to the level of the hallway’s floor, I sort of lurched up to the level of my belt and then started to fall back down.
I grabbed at the floor of the hallway and desperately levered a knee up into the opening to give me a couple of points of tension—but it was hardly a solid position. I pushed as hard as I could with my right arm, but it was out straight, and there was only so much power in my shoulder and upper back. I strained to lift my brother onto the floor, but I had no leverage, and my position was too precarious to apply much of my strength. My muscles burned and then began, slowly, to falter. I ground my teeth, reaching deep, and strained to gain a few fractions of an inch that began to fade almost at once.
I started preparing to drop in a controlled fall that would, hopefully, protect my brother—but then his weight suddenly vanished from my shoulder.
Lara dragged him to one side with quick efficiency, blue eyes bright, cheeks still flushed, and then seized the guard’s heavy leather jacket and tossed me one sleeve. I took it.
“You’re taking forever,” she said, and hauled me out of the hole.
“And yet you’re the one literally fucking around on the job,” I countered.
“That?” she asked, bobbing her head back toward the guard station and flashing me a wise, wicked smile. “No. That was just feeding. The other thing takes much, much longer. And preferably candles and champagne.”
I pulled my legs out of the way, barely, before she shut the trapdoor—my trapdoor—and threw the bolt.
“How is he?” she asked.
I held up my amulet so that she could see her brother better.
“Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”
White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: They were born bound to a demon that existed in immaterial tandem with them, called a Hunger. It was the demon who gave them their strength, their speed, their long lives, their capacity to recover from injury. In exchange they had to feed on the life force of others, to sustain the Hunger. My brother was, I knew, a rather potent example of the breed. That meant that his Hunger was strong, too.
And now he was paying for it.
“What can we do?”
She shook her head, her face hard. “This is how White Court vampires die. How my father will die, sooner or later.”
“Justine,” I said.
That word got through. Thomas lifted his head, mirrored eyes on me. He reached out a weak hand toward me in a gesture that died of exhaustion halfway.
“No,” Lara said, her eyes intent on his face. “By the time a Hunger turns on one of us, it’s mad, uncontrollable, insatiable. Even if we could redirect the Hunger, it would kill her and the child, and he’d die anyway.” The muscles in her jaw tensed. “There’s still part of him in there. I might be able to reach him if we get him out of here—if we hurry.”
