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“So did I. I just sent Radu’s man after him to make inquiries. Radu knows about portals.”
“And what about you?”
“I know about killing things,” he said, before being plucked off his feet by the talons of a huge birdlike creature that came out of nowhere.
Anthony’s sword flashed, gutting his ride halfway across the arena, and then he and it both fell. I didn’t see what happened after that, because of the darkness, and because the fighting had just increased by about a thousand percent. And then Ray was dragging me off to the side.
“We don’t need Radu,” he told me quickly. “I know what’s happening.”
“That makes one of us,” I said, grabbing a sword off a wounded vamp. It looked like somebody had designated the private boxes and the hallway and stairwell behind them as the triage area, because lower-level vamps were running up the stairs with makeshift slings filled with casualties. Most looked like other low-level types, along with some humans in evening attire—people caught in the stampede, as a guess.
I didn’t see any masters.
But then, other than the guards, I hadn’t seen many masters in the fight at all.
So what the hell were they doing?
“It’s the shield,” Ray was saying. “The place was secure until it went down. After that, anything goes.”
“Come again?”
He sighed. “The shield…Look, it doesn’t just protect a portal. It shields an area of a line. Because a portal is just a tunnel cutting through a ley line, and without a shield—”
“They can cut as many as they like.”
“Yes.”
“Then why were they so concentrated on this portal?”
“Because it was the only way through the shield. It’s like…a gateway in a wall, okay? Why do you think those old castles always went to so much trouble to shield their gateways? Because that’s where they were vulnerable. The wall—or the shield in this case—keeps the bad guys out. But there has to be a door for the good guys to get in.”
“And our door is the portal.”
He nodded. “That’s why they call it a gate.”
My head hurt. I wasn’t good with all this metaphysical crap. I was like Anthony; I was good at killing things. Or rescuing things, only I had no idea where Louis-Cesare was, and I’d never even seen Mircea’s room from the outside. It could be anywhere in the labyrinth of corridors running through the interior of the consul’s house.
And even if I could find them, they might be better off where they were. Rather than being dragged unconscious through the thick of the fight by someone who wasn’t likely to be much protection right now. Especially with a sword that my arm didn’t feel strong enough to wield.
I passed it to Ray and took a gun from a guard who had just been brought up—the first master I’d seen. Something had all but bisected him, and yet he was still trying to crawl off the pallet, to get back to the fight. Unlike the rest of them.
Where were they?
“Stay down,” someone told him, and I looked up to see the brunette senator Anthony had been with earlier. She’d found her clothes, too, only to have the front of her pale blue evening gown smeared with dark blood, since she seemed to be the one serving as hospital manager.
“You are Dory?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Kit said to tell you that the men he sent to the basement earlier have not reported in. He wants you to check on them.”
“He wants…” I looked at her incredulously. “What is going on? Where are your masters?”
“Those sworn to the North American Senate are in the fight, those who were here, in any case. And more have been summoned. But they cannot use the portal, and therefore will take time to arrive.”
“And the other senates? What are they doing—sitting on their hands?”
“Yes,” she said, bitterly. “Except for Anthony’s. But he had few masters with him, as most of his were knocked out of the competition early. He is doing what he can, but he does not have the numbers—”
