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And looked at us.
“Now what?” I muttered to Louis-Cesare, who had gripped my arm.
“Rien.”
“Then why are they staring at us?”
“They’re not,” he said, pulling me to the side as a fist started pounding on the door.
It was loud enough to cut through the din and make me jump again, although I’m not a jumper. But my nerves were a little frayed at the moment. A fact that wasn’t helped when a line of bullets suddenly strafed the door from the other side.
“So I guess we’re going with distraction, huh?” I yelled, as the room went wild.
Louis-Cesare didn’t answer; he just grabbed my hand and pulled me through a horde of waiters beating it with trays of illegal booze, good-time girls fighting croupiers for cash and tough guys pulling guns. And then the door gave way and a bunch of blue-coated cops burst in, yelling orders we couldn’t hear over the din.
Louis-Cesare grabbed my hand and pulled us onto the stage along with the ensemble, who had packed up their instruments and were disappearing behind a cheap red curtain. And down a hall. And behind a set of stairs.
Until we got hung up behind the bass player, who couldn’t get his huge instrument through a narrow exit.
I looked behind us, but there was nothing there. Not even the cops, who had probably assumed that the curtain fronted a wall. “I think we lost her,” I told Louis-Cesare breathlessly, who didn’t look convinced.
Maybe because the lights took that moment to flash out.
“Shit!”
He didn’t say anything. He just picked up the bass, with musician still attached, and threw it behind us. And then jerked me through the doorway. And then on a breathless trip through a stream of memories that went by so fast, they made me nauseous.
I found that the only way to deal was just to concentrate on my feet, which w
ere running over surfaces that changed between steps: scuffed hardwood to mossy stone to cigarette-strewn concrete to inlaid marble to rocky seashore to—
Fire-lit dirt?
I looked up, blinking, when the scene stayed constant for a few seconds. And saw a slur of dark greenery and bright stars that didn’t make sense because I was dizzy and really confused. Like part of my brain was still trying to catch up.
“Where are we?” I slurred, grabbing Louis-Cesare for info and balance.
And got neither. He didn’t answer, and then we lurched and almost went down. I stared at him stupidly for a minute, because Louis-Cesare was a master swordsman; he didn’t stumble. The man practically looked like he was dancing just walking across a freaking room.
Or going to one knee.
Or leaning heavily against me.
Or crumpling to the ground in my arms.
Chapter Thirty-six
I let him down to the ground, and went into a defensive crouch over him, looking wildly around for our attacker. But all I saw was a tree-strewn hillside under a huge black sky, the Milky Way glittering overhead like a starry rainbow. A small, tumbledown shack stood near the bottom of the hill, and a bonfire was burning at the top. But nothing moved, except for a cool breeze rustling the treetops, a rogue meteor burning up along the horizon and the firelight flickering down the hill.
It looked like we’d outrun her—for the moment.
The bonfire was a ways off, but it was still bright enough to send shadows to play over Louis-Cesare’s face, giving the illusion of movement. But that was all it was. Because he just lay there, even when I shook him.
I pushed up his shirt, which had gone from fine linen to rough homespun, thinking maybe she’d caught him between one transition and another. It doesn’t take much time to slip a stake between the ribs, or to run a knife edge over a neck. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had enough practice.
But there were no wounds, no blood. No obvious problems at all that I could see. I ran my hand around his throat, then down through the lacings on the front of his shirt. And encountered only fine, unbroken skin. And sat down abruptly, feeling dizzy again from sheer relief.
For a second, I thought seriously about passing out. But I couldn’t afford to do that. Not when it looked like he’d beaten me to it.
