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e no effect on dhampirs.”
“I will be sure to tell her that, my lord. As soon as my vocal cords knit back together!”
“What about Lawrence?” That was the first voice again.
“I found him at the dock. He is dead.”
“You are sure? He’s first level—”
“Quite sure.” The vamp’s mental voice was dry. I got another flash—this time of a vampire, or what was left of one, the pieces arranged almost artistically on a patch of bloody concrete—and then it was gone.
Someone cursed. Maybe one of them, maybe me. I couldn’t tell anymore. The longer they talked, the more my head ached. By now waves of pain were stabbing my brain with every word, like needles through the eye.
“Where are you?” the voice asked. “We were tracking you, but lost the signal—”
“Because they took her into one of their labs.”
And suddenly I was in freaky visual number three, running through what looked like a time-lapse film of a city at night. For a couple of seconds, my brain took me on a crazy ride over mangled fences, under trash-strewn bridges and through a maze of alleyways that zipped by so fast, all the graffiti streamed together into one long, obscene snarl. It ended in what looked like a warehouse out of some dystopian nightmare, except even postapocalyptic ruins don’t usually feature a bright orange hell-mouth swirling away in the middle of a wall.
“What is that?” the English guy demanded.
“The other problem,” the vamp rasped as the cage blinked into view again.
The transition left me dizzy and nauseous, and royally pissed off. Whatever kind of trick this was, it wasn’t going to work. I growled and got serious.
“That is why we have had difficulty finding their test sites,” voice number one said. “They’ve begun hiding them outside our world.”
“Yes,” the vamp strangled out. “It would appear that the Black Circle…is somewhat more inventive…than we had thought.”
“Are they folding space?” the English guy asked. “Or did you actually pass through to another—”
“Do you know, my lord, somehow I haven’t had time to look!”
“Don’t take that tone with me when we’re trying to—”
“We will have operatives at your location in ten minutes,” voice number one cut in smoothly. “Attempt to contain the situation until then.”
“Under…stood.”
Great. The guy was like freaking Teflon; every time I thought I had a grip, he slithered out of it. He should have been dead a couple times over by now, but he didn’t even seem to be getting tired, while I was panting like a steam engine and sweating like a pig. And now he was about to have backup?
Of course, that might not matter, since I was going to be dead from an aneurysm soon if they didn’t shut the hell up.
“And Louis-Cesare—be careful.” That was voice number one again, sounding grim. “I can control her fits, but not until she reenters our world. And the fact that she does not recognize you is a bad sign—”
“Oh, do you really think so?”
“Listen to me! The two halves of her nature do not communicate. Therefore the fact that she does not know you may indicate that her vampire nature is perilously close to assuming control—”
“Yes, I have seen it before. I can handle—”
“You have not seen it before! You have seen it nearer the surface, perhaps, but still partly diluted by her human side, which tends to be—”
“Lord Mircea—”
“—dominant mentally. But when she perceives herself in mortal danger, her vampire half—”
“Lord Mircea!” The vamp had somehow managed to croak that out loud, but it didn’t help. The needle was an ice pick now, jabbing merrily around the inside of my skull. I made a sound between a snarl and a mewl, and smashed the vamp’s head into the floor again.
