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“I understood perfectly.” A drip of mud oozed down my temple, and I took a second to wipe it off.
“Then release my servant.”
“Or what?” I demanded. “I’m fair game. Ray’s fair game. But you can’t hurt ’Du, and you know it. It would break the truce, and even if it didn’t, Mircea would kill you. Slowly.”
“What are you talking about?” Radu demanded, his embroidered satin bed slippers slowly sinking into the lawn. “We’ve already been out here half the night! Give the man what he wants, Dory!”
“No can do,” I said while flipping through the key-chain for the front-door key I never used. “But don’t worry, ’Du. I’ll inform Mircea about this, next time I see him.”
“Next time you—” He broke off, staring at something over my shoulder. I turned to see Christine floundering around in the mud. Her delicate little slippers didn’t appear to have much traction, and every time she got up, she fell down again.
“Is that… Christine?” he asked, looking appalled.
She slowly got to her feet, hands spread out on either side of her, like a toddler learning to walk. “Lord Radu,” she said tremulously, before her foot slipped and she fell backward into a puddle. The resulting splash rained muck down on me and ’Du.
“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.
“You think I am bluffing,” Cheung said evenly.
I sighed. “You’re either bluffing, or you’re an idiot, and that’s not your reputation,” I said, finally locating the house key. “Hurt ’Du, and you’ll die for it. Let him go, and Mircea may let you off with some groveling. I don’t know.”
“I see I need to prove my sincerity.” Cheung didn’t move, but two of his boys ran up with sledgehammers—and started taking apart the Lamborghini.
Radu just stood there, mute in horror, as a beautiful piece of Italian engineering was quickly reduced to scrap. It didn’t take long. I opened the front door, hauled Ray’s mud-covered self inside and then went back for the duffel and Christine.
“This does not move you?” Cheung demanded, as one of his boys sent the steering wheel flying off into the night. Radu made a small whimpering sound.
“It’s ’Du’s car,” I told him, before shutting the door in his face.
The house might be repairing itself, but it wasn’t getting there in any hurry. There were still holes in the floor, the walls and the ceiling, giving a three- story atrium effect to the front hall. Moonlight cascaded down through the now much more open floor plan, flooding the old boards in a pale light that was strangely otherworldly.
It provided enough illumination to allow me to thread my way through the stacks of worm-eaten furniture in the vestibule. I didn’t topple a single piece over, even while dragging Ray. That was lucky, because something else otherworldly was in the hallway, flitting through the far end of the corridor, near the back door. I stopped dead.
Everything else looked normal. The house was dark, quiet, still. But that wasn’t surprising. Claire had to have given up on me a while ago and gone to bed. And while my roommates tended to be active at night, they weren’t exactly homebodies. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home to a mostly quiet house.
But not to one that smelled like a deep cave, dank and chill, with that curious sharp underbite that my brain had filed under “Oh, shit.”
Svarestri, although I couldn’t see them. Not that that meant a damn. I suddenly wondered if there was anyone left alive for Cheung to attack.
“Hey, can we—”
I clapped a hand over Ray’s big mouth and grabbed my new iron sword out of the duffel. It felt good in my hand—a cold, solid weight with some serious heft behind it. I just hoped the fey hadn’t come up with another way of fighting without actually being there. If they’d hurt Claire or the kids, I wanted something that could bleed.
Christine caught my arm. She didn’t say anything, but her face spoke volumes. “Stay here,” I told her softly. Normally, a three- hundred-year-old vamp would be an asset in a case like this, but I didn’t think she was going to frighten the fey by crying at them.
The dress was already ruined, so I wove a knife through the silk at the small of my back and tied another to my thigh with one of the stockings. I stuffed the duffel under a table in the foyer and left the rest of Ray on guard over it. Then I moved carefully into the hall, keeping close to the tattered walls.
The house must have prioritized wallpaper pretty low, because
pieces of it still fluttered everywhere, brushing my cheeks as I slipped past. It was like being in a forest of slowly moving tree branches, heavy with moss. The dried paste on the back felt like scaly fingers brushing over my skin, and the constant movement gave my eyes too much to watch.
Not that they were doing so hot. Light cascaded down three stories, through the ruined roof. But it was dim antique silver—a combination of moonlight and the vague radiance from the street. The city had recently installed new, energy-efficient streetlights that saved money by not actually illuminating anything.
The situation wasn’t helped when a thin, cold rain began to fall. It sent odd, rippling shadows down the windows and across the squares of gray they cast on the floor. I felt my heart rate speed up, my skin prickling. The damned Svarestri were giving me a complex about the weather.
The white backing on the wallpaper glowed under the moonlight, waving across my vision like long silver blond hair. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw fey for a split second. But I hadn’t. Because there was no mistaking when I finally did glimpse one. Something black twisted down through me at the sight, from head to feet, colder than the night air at the bottom of a ravine.
It was only a brief flicker in my peripheral vision, vague and indistinct. My shadow ghosted along at my heels as I slowly moved forward, but the fey cast none. Around him there was only a quivering nothing, like negative space.
