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It looked like a bizarre modernist sculpture: a fusion of the tower and the huge splash of liquid, with the still-burning helicopter tacked on at one side. Even the fire had frozen, the water vapor congealing around it, giving me the extremely odd sight of flames dancing behind the ice for a moment. Before lack of oxygen snuffed them out, leaving black smoke trapped in their place.
Okay, I thought dizzily, that went better than expected.
Or maybe not. Because when I spun and tried to shoot Æsubrand, nothing happened. Except that his battered face acquired an evil smile and Marlowe’s acquired a dark scowl and then they were at it again, falling to the concrete in a snarling pile of thrashing limbs.
Marlowe must have been too depleted for his super-duper master power to be available, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. And he’d figured out the same thing I had on that wild ride with Slava—Æsubrand’s power didn’t work so well up close, because it caught him, too.
And speaking of Slava—
Where the hell was Slava?
In the few seconds my attention had been diverted, he’d disappeared. Which was stupid; it wasn’t like he could just get up and walk off. Except that that was exactly what he had done.
Sort of.
After a couple seconds of panicked looking around, I finally spied him. A frozen, pantsless vampire drifting out over the void between buildings, like a balloon a kid had just let go of. One that was getting farther away by the second.
But that wasn’t yet quite far enough.
I stuck the empty gun in my waistband, hiked up my skirt and ran, straight for the roof’s edge. I heard Marlowe yell something, but it was lost in the massive gust of wind that was rushing up behind me, trying to beat me to my target, to send him skittering out into the void ahead of me. But either Æsubrand was tiring or I was getting my second wind, because for once, my luck had turned. The gust hit me at almost the same moment that my feet ran out of roof, and actually worke
d in my favor, propelling me up and out farther and faster than I could possibly have hoped for on my own, almost making me overreach my target.
But not quite.
My fingers grabbed the frosty, slippery surface, and my arms and legs wrapped around it, and my head tucked low, and then Slava and I shot ahead, like an odd-shaped bullet barreling through the Manhattan sky.
It was a mad rush, surfing the crest of a wave of wind across the city. No, it was more than mad; it was breathtaking and death-defying and so stupid it made my head hurt. But it was hard to care with the wind whistling past my ears and the city streaming by below and Slava’s building fast retreating into the distance.
I clutched him harder, little half-crazed gasps of something I finally recognized as laughter slipping out from between my lips, because, crazy or not, it was working.
At least it was until the charm suddenly gave out.
It took me a second to realize what had happened, because I’d assumed that the freezing process would have stabilized it. And maybe it had. Maybe it had lasted longer than it should have on a body, although that was cold comfort considering that in a second we had gone from tearing across the sky to tearing toward the ground.
Battery Park was coming up, the greenery a dark swath against the brighter buildings, with the city lights wavering in black water beyond. But it didn’t look like we were going to make it that far. And even if we did, hitting the ocean from this height and speed would be virtually the same as hitting concrete.
I tried to think, in the few seconds I had left, to remember all those rules about what to do if falling from a height. But the thing about those rules is, they were made by someone safely on the ground. And it’s a little hard to take them seriously when your eyes are tearing up and the wind is roaring in your ears and the ground is rushing up at you at a rate that is clearly not survivable unless you suddenly grow wings. And while I have a fair number of skills to call on in an emergency, I don’t number flying among them.
Fortunately, someone else did.
Slava and I were heading straight for a hard ribbon of sidewalk snaking through the park when something caught me. For a second I thought the charm had suddenly reengaged, until the force of being jerked skyward again almost bisected me, and caused me to lose my grip on the frozen bullet. Which continued on our former trajectory, plowing through the air and then—
“No!” I yelled, but it was too late. Slava hit the ground at something like eighty miles an hour, with a sound like a gun going off. And he didn’t shatter like the other vamp so much as disintegrate. Some larger pieces hit the ground here and there, but a good third of the body went up in a cloud of sparkling, icy particles that melted on the hot August breeze, shimmering away into nothingness as I watched.
I cursed silently, too out of breath for anything else, but someone heard.
“You’re welcome,” a rich voice said behind me.
My feet gently touched down on springy grass a moment later, and I whirled drunkenly around to see Slava’s floor show standing in front of me. He looked a little different, with those huge wings outspread, blocking half the sky. Until they folded up against his back again, somehow managing not to tangle in the long black hair.
The eyes were the same color, darker than mine, to the point that they didn’t seem to have a pupil as they regarded me quizzically. “For such a small creature, you cause a lot of trouble.”
“So people…keep telling me,” I said, dizzy and weaponless, and wondering what this new hell was.
But hell wasn’t looking particularly threatening. If anything, hell looked vaguely amused. “Those people would be correct. But you are, if you’ll forgive me, playing a tad outside your league.”
“And what league…would that be?”
