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“I don’t know who’s crazier,” Ray muttered a few minutes later. “You or me.”
“Me.”
“Then why am I doing this?”
“Because you’re the only one who knows how?”
“God. I hate being useful.”
“First time for everything,” Zheng said.
Ray didn’t even bother to reply, which was how I knew he was bad off. And I really couldn’t blame him. “Just…concentrate on what you’re doing and leave the rest to us,” I said, trying to sound confident.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll…I’ll do that,” he said, as Louis-Cesare got an arm around him. And then Zheng got one around them both. Because there was no obvious route down to the portals from here, and no time to traverse it if there had been.
Ray needed the optimum amount of time at the gates, and we were going to give it to him.
“Just…try to land quietly,” I told him, and got a vicious look in return.
“The Veil masks sound,” Louis-Cesare said.
I looked up. “Really?”
He nodded. “It would be little good otherwise, vampire hearing being as it is. But when under the Veil, I cannot be seen, heard or smelt. Even wards have difficulty perceiving me. I have heard it speculated that it places me slightly out of phase with our world, and that is why—”
“Can we just do this?” Ray asked tightly, clinging to Zheng’s already slightly elongated arm. Because Louis-Cesare wasn’t the only one with a master power around here.
“Let go,” Zheng told him. “I’m the rubber band; you’re the spitball. And spitballs don’t hold on to rubber bands.”
“Die in a fire,” Ray told him savagely. But he let go.
And Zheng’s analogy was, for all its strangeness, pretty apt. He grabbed hold of a protrusion in the rock near one of the portals and braced himself, and I slunk over as near to the drop-off as I dared, holding his hand from something like six yards away. And then Louis-Cesare started backing up, at what would have been the elbow if Zheng had anything left that looked like one anymore.
Instead, it suddenly felt like I was holding on to a thick rubber hose with a hand-shaped glove at the end, neither of which was giving me a lot of traction. The idea was to use Zheng like a human slingshot to launch Louis-Cesare and Ray over the heads of the fey and to the line of portals. But to do that, we needed tension—a lot of it. And there wasn’t anything else to provide it but us.
That wouldn’t normally have been an issue, but right now I was sweating and struggling and still barely holding my position. And then I almost lost it anyway. Because we suddenly got a new complication.
The portals occupied maybe the bottom quarter of the huge wall, with the upper having been empty just seconds ago. But I guess it was showtime, because a long rectangular image had just appeared on the rock face. It was as big as an old-fashioned movie screen, but if there was a projector, I didn’t see it.
What I did see was the interior of the consul’s ballroom, where a massive number of portals had just burst into being on all sides.
And it looked like something had finally gotten the other consuls’ attention. Because Ming-de’s little fans zipped back to their mistress, and Hassani rose to his feet, his eyes narrowing and his hand gripping the hilt of the blade at his side. The other consuls were there now, too, and they were also rising: a South Asian guy dressed like a Bollywood maharaja, and a Spanish-type in enough velvets and laces to give Radu a run for his money. I didn’t see Anthony, but I didn’t have a view of the whole room.
And it wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
Because the consul had just come out onto her balcony, and it was suddenly impossible to look anywhere else.
She was in gold, head to toe, in an outfit that made Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra look like a pauper. And I finally understood how she’d managed to successfully lead a Senate for centuries, when plenty of other, stronger vamps had failed. You might not like her; might even detest her. But there was something there. Call it what you will—authority, command, leadership—it was that indefinable thing that makes men throw themselves at impossible odds because their commander tells them to. And she had it in spades.
Of course, she also had something else: vamps have never had the same problem with bribery as humans. It’s considered everything from a performance enhancer to a loyalty inducer, depending on the size of the gift. And the consul had one of the biggest in history.
And she knew it.
Hard, cold, sublimely beautiful, she coolly surveyed the scene. And then those dark eyes flashed, and the perfect lip curled. And the low, sibilant words got right to the point. “If you wish a seat on my Senate, then bring me the head…of a fey!”
And just that fast, it was on.
An army of fey rushed through the portals; an army of vampires met them. And I turned to catch a split-second glimpse of two more vamps shooting into the fray, Louis-Cesare tucking into a graceful somersault and dragging a very freaked-out-looking Ray right along with him. And then they were gone, shimmering away into nothingness between one heartbeat and the next.
