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“What does that have to do—”
“She exerts a dampening effect on my fits. Without her, my control is slipping. Fast. Now let me up!”
He paused, but his eyes held what looked like genuine compassion, the earlier humor dissipating in the face of my distress. After a moment, he reached for the restraints. “I did not realize that the woman was so important—,” he began; then both of us swiveled toward the door. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t heard it open, but the cooler wash of air from the hall had gotten my attention.
“I hate to interrupt,” Radu said, “but I was wondering if either of you did anything to cause the wards to fail just now?”
Chapter Nineteen
“My lord… I can explain—,” Louis-Cesare began, looking less than certain that he could do anything of the kind.
Radu held up a hand. “I am sure there is a perfectly good reason why my niece is naked and tied to her bed. I am also equally certain that I do not wish to hear it.”
Louis-Cesare’s hands fumbled a little, but they managed to get my wrists loose. I snatched up my jeans. “What’s wrong with the wards?”
“They went down a few—” Radu stopped as the windows abruptly darkened, almost like night had decided on an encore. “Well, that’s not right,” he said crossly.
I got to the windows a half second before Louis-Cesare. The view wasn’t encouraging. The sky boiled with greenish black clouds, laced through with silver streaks. The air pressure built in palpable waves, like a snake drawing its coils in closer and closer. A flash hit a decorative planting of three palms near the driveway, splitting one in half. The reverberation rocked the floor, sending vibrations up through my feet straight into my skull.
“This isn’t the right time of year for storms,” Radu was saying behind me. I didn’t answer, being too busy watching shadows shift in the vineyards beyond the house. Dark shapes unfurled leathery wings like tattered cloth in a breeze. Cold little pinpricks started running up and down my spine.
“ ’Du—when you say the wards fell, which ones exactly did you mean?” The shapes converged on the house, sweeping toward the window with the heavy wingbeat of large black birds. Below, I could hear something scrabbling with swordlike claws for purchase on the stucco.
“Why, all of them.” He moved closer to see what had caught my attention. “They’re on a common power source. I—”
A birdlike head on a serpentine neck smashed into the window, the glass distorting its face into a grinning rictus. Radu stumbled back with a small cry. The head disappeared and a talon-ended claw smashed through the window, reaching past me to grab at him. I beat at the thing with a bedside lamp, but it bounced off the leathery appendage without even leaving a dent, sending a throbbing pain up my arm to my shoulder.
Louis-Cesare grabbed the thing’s leg and jerked it inward. Its wings stuck in the space between the window and the small cast-iron balcony beyond, keeping it from advancing. It also blocked its buddies from getting inside—at least for the moment. I got a good look into its greenish yellow eyes, but only animal intelligence looked back. I wondered where the smart one was.
Louis-Cesare had spun Radu out of reach. “You must raise the wards—quickly!”
“That will trap us in here with them!” The thing in the window began to scream and vibrate. A look out of the small side windows explained its problem—its buddies had started to rip into it with the viciousness of a pack of wild dogs, rending the great wings as easily as black cobwebs.
“Better that than allowing them to escape into the surrounding population! They are only dumb animals—we will corral or destroy them.”
Radu shook his head, and the flash of fear over his face told me that I wasn’t the only one to have noticed something odd about a few of those experiments. I found the peasant tunic half-hidden under the bed and pulled it on. “Is there something you want to tell us, ’Du?”
He swallowed. “I can’t. The Senate—” The thing fell out of the window, screaming, released by its buddies ripping off a wing. It was immediately replaced by several others, their claws scrabbling for purchase on the delicate balcony railing, their teeth snapping as their great wings pummeled the air.
“The Senate isn’t here!” I reminded him. “It’s our butts on the line! Come on, ’Du—give.”
Louis-Cesare beat the things back with an armchair, which he stuffed in the hole left by the shattered window. I looked at it dubiously, doubting that wood and leather would hold them for long. I’d barely had the thought when the makeshift plug exploded through the room, wedging in the open door to the hall, blocking our retreat. One of the smaller creatures managed to scramble inside the room, only to have Louis-Cesare grab it around the throat and squeeze hard enough to cause its eyes to bulge.
“La salle de bains, vite!” He gestured at the bathroom door, and I shoved Radu through with no ceremony. There was a connecting door to the adjacent room, which turned out to be Louis-Cesare’s.
Unfortunately, a similar assault was taking place at his window. A gust of rain-laden wind slapped me in the face from the shattered panes as I pushed Radu toward the hall. I didn’t make it. A long claw snaked in and plucked me off my feet.
I had a confused moment of disorientation as the bird creature launched itself off the balcony. Then one of my feet came into contact with the railing and I managed to get one hooked under an iron scroll. My leg was almost wrenched from its socket when the thing began trying to dislodge me, beating the air with its wings, throwing arcs of rain into my face, screeching in fury. Then its other claw struck me in the chest, hard enough to drive the air from my lungs and to fill my throat and sinuses with acid. Lightning crackled, the sky trembled and I couldn’t breathe.
I let go, but before the creature could make any headway, someone jabbed a long shard of broken glass into the thin, leathery hide stretched over its rib cage. A long, red gash appeared on the black skin for an instant, before the drenching rain washed it clean. I had a moment to see Radu grasping for my hand; then the claw retracted an
d I was falling.
Halfway to the ground, I suddenly stopped. The pain of talons sinking into my calf let me know that I hadn’t been miraculously saved. A bony claw held me suspended twelve feet over the ground, dangling helplessly. I had exactly a second to think about what I could do about it with no weapons when white-hot agony spiked down my back. Another set of claws had descended on my shoulders, talons sinking deep. I clenched my teeth on a scream as the two creatures began pulling in opposite directions. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that much more of this would solve the argument by ripping me in two.
A long-handled knife came out of nowhere, severing the throat of the creature holding my calf. Unfortunately, it didn’t retract its claw before plummeting to the ground, its weight taking me and the bigger creature along for the ride. We landed with a teeth-rattling crash, with me on top of the dying one. I ripped the knife out of the remains of its throat, but even though I had a weapon, it’s hard to hit something you can’t see. The talons sunk deep into the muscles of my shoulders ensured that I couldn’t turn around to deal with my other attacker.
Luckily, one of the other creatures decided that the position also ensured that my attacker had limited movement, and tore into it. Its claws ripped out of me and I turned, sinking the knife deep between its ribs, angled upward. I felt the resistance as the knife cleaved the heart in two, heard the great muscle stagger and begin to fail; then the creature spasmed and fell, almost crushing me beneath it. I pulled out the knife and jumped back, just in time to meet my new attacker. How the hell many of these things were there?
