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“—but, yeah, I think we got a problem. I mean, that attack itself was a little weird, too, if you think about it. Who shows up and attacks Central and just assumes they’re gonna find the password? What if the senior guy on duty gets offed by your crazed killing machines? What then?”
“We know what,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, we do. A total screwup. If they hadn’t overheard us using the password, and if Marlowe hadn’t failed to change it—”
“You heard him.” Zheng said. “He’d just changed it the day before. On a hunch.”
“—then they’d have been SOL. It seems a really slipshod way of doing anything.”
“Well, you know the Black Circle,” Zheng said, obviously losing interest. “Anyway, I’m gonna go turn these in. What about you?”
He was looking at me, but Ray answered. “I’m going to go find Marlowe. And some different shoes. These have been killing my feet all night.”
Zheng was still looking at me.
“I think I’ll hang out for a while,” I said, going for nonchalant.
It didn’t work.
He grinned. “That healer’s gonna have your ass, you go back again before morning.”
“Louis-Cesare will be fine,” Ray told me irritably. “Well, physically, anyway, I don’t know what you did to his head. I still don’t feel so good.”
Me, either. I had a headache that wouldn’t quit, and I was so tired it felt like I was drunk. Which is probably why Zh
eng took pity on me and led Ray away, still fussing.
I looked around. That doc had been a bastard, but he had a point. The makeshift clinic had spilled out from the box seats into the charred remains of the ballroom, and usable space was at a premium. And since Louis-Cesare was in a healing trance, I couldn’t do anything at the moment but sit at his side and be in the way.
I thought maybe I’d go do something useful, and get a little sleep—if I could find a bed that was still intact. Or a couch. Or a chaise. Or considering how I felt right now, any flat surface that wasn’t covered in rubble and broken glass would—
Some sixth sense had my thoughts breaking off, had me turning. And that was all the warning I got before something slammed into me with an almost audible whummmp, knocking me off my feet and sending me sliding.
Into a horribly familiar scene.
Suddenly, the atrium’s half-destroyed walls were replaced by gleaming skyscrapers, the steaming piles of rubble became water lapping against the sides of boats, and the haze of smoke and dust in the air turned into silvery moonlight flooding over—
No.
No! I jumped to my feet and whirled around, hoping I was hallucinating. And maybe I was.
Because somehow I was back in my head once more.
And worse, I was back at that fucking pier.
This time there was no Louis-Cesare, no Radu, no Mircea. There wasn’t even a mysterious assailant trying to gut me. But there was a group of men standing on the bloody concrete, with flashlights in the hands that weren’t holding smoking guns.
Or not, I thought, staring. Because one of them wasn’t a man. Which might explain why I was suddenly looking at a memory that didn’t seem familiar.
And hearing a mental voice that wasn’t mine.
“Hurry up,” the idiot in the dark overcoat said urgently. He was looking around, gun in hand, tensed as if for a fight. And no wonder.
Black scorch marks marred the concrete, and burnt gunpowder hung in the air like a cloud. Even muffled gunshots are far from silent and this wasn’t exactly remote. The fools had probably woken half of Manhattan.
It was typical of the “Black Circle,” Lawrence thought viciously. A bunch of the biggest stoners and losers he’d ever encountered, too strung out on magic to remember the simplest of instructions, and too incompetent to carry them out if they did. He gave the man the response he deserved—none—and knelt by the girl.
She was lying on her side, bloody and crumpled, and for a moment he thought they’d fucked up everything. His fangs dropped, sensing their blood, their fear, the heartbeats that sped up as they watched him. The decision was instantaneous. If they had killed her, they died.
