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But Radu didn’t let go. “When did they become men?” he asked softly.
“What?”
“They’re vampires, Dory. Not too long ago, they would have been things to you. We were all merely things.”
“No.”
“Yes.” The wavering beams of light threw odd shadows across that handsome face, making it hard to read his expression. “You killed our kind—”
“I killed the bad guys, ’Du,” I said impatiently, because I really was tired. And in pain. All the little aches Louis-Cesare had soothed away were coming back, not at full strength, but enough to remind me that he was better at killing things than healing them. “I never went after anybody who didn’t deserve it.”
“Not hurting is a different thing from saving,” he replied quietly. “There was a time when you would have let Raymond burn up in your hallway. When you would not have cared if four strange vampires died. When you would have been like your friend Claire, who says all the right things but looks at us as if we were roaches crawling across her kitchen floor.”
“You…didn’t act like you noticed that.”
“Of course not. I am charming,” Radu pointed out.
“Yeah,” I said, because in his own, extremely weird way, he sort of was. He was also sort of right, but I didn’t think now was the time to go into it.
“Can you go Oprah on me later?” I asked. “If I’m going to do this, I really need—”
“Shit!”
The drop was a bitch. Fourteen feet isn’t fun anyway, but landing on a lot of pointy rocks is even less so. Fortunately, the points were fairly small, leaving me beat up and bloody instead of impaled. Unfortunately, they were also hot as fuck.
“Shit! Shit!”
I jumped up, getting hard boot leather between me and the floor. It looked perfectly normal—beige and rocky, except for clearer bits here and there covered with sand—but the Ray impression I was currently doing said otherwise. The knees of my jeans were burnt out, one sleeve of the leather jacket I’d been wearing was melted to my arm, and my hands—
“Damn it!” The portal’s light showed me palms full of blisters, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the half ton of gravel embedded in them. And the damned stuff was continuing to blister the areas around it even as my body tried to heal. It was like picking up a handful of embers, only these didn’t seem inclined to go out.
After a second, I bit the bullet and wiped my hands on my jeans, leaving blood and skin behind along with the gravel, because I didn’t have time to pick out every individual piece. My soles were already starting to smoke, and when they went, it was time’s up. And since it looked like that would take all of another minute or so, I faced reality and pulled out the big guns.
Or, to be more precise, the big cheat.
Being a dhampir has certain advantages—better senses, rapid healing, greater strength, speed, etc. What it does not have is magic, of any type, kind or variety, which is a problem considering many of the things I fight. But as flat-chested girls and balding guys learned a long time ago, what nature didn’t give you, you can often buy. And mages have to make a living, too.
But the cool toys don’t come cheap. I mentally tacked another grand onto the tally for tonight’s little outing, and pulled a Baggie out of an inner coat pocket. Inside was a cheap-looking bracelet, bronze and cuff style, like the magnetic crap shysters are always trying to pawn off on arthritis sufferers at the mall. Only this one actually worked.
Not for healing, but for making sure you didn’t need any. The thing was a temporary shield, fine as any a war mage could project, which was fair, since I’d bought it off one. But like all shields, it ate magic like candy. And it wasn’t like I could generate more when the reservoir ran dry. A plastic strip on the side showed the drain—fifteen minutes under ideal conditions, which was stupid when the whole point of having the damned thing was that you weren’t in ideal conditions.
Anyway, I could hope for maybe five here. I also hoped that nobody with superfine hearing was paying attention, because the big boy didn’t play well with others. Specifically, it required dropping all other shields, which interfered with it for some reason I didn’t understand since magic theory made my head hurt. But the mage’s instructions had been specific, so the sound shield had to go.
The new spell closed over me, a cool bubble of protection molding to my scorched skin like air-conditioned glass. I gave a—very brief—sigh of relief as the temp dropped a good fifty degrees, allowing me to breathe. I also took a few precious seconds to shoot a line with a grappling hook back through the portal and onto the boat, making sure it caught. It was retractable, so as long as I managed to get back here, and the line hadn’t burnt up, and nobody was shooting at me on the way up, I’d be fine.
Yeah.
So.
The only go
od thing was that I didn’t have to choose directions. Behind me was a wall, and while there was a chance that Lawrence had found a way through it, I wasn’t going to. He was either somewhere ahead or he wasn’t, and I had about four and a half minutes left to find out. I started moving.
SOP in cases like this is to take a couple steps, check for snares, take another couple steps, repeat as needed. But (a) that would get me all of ten yards before my protection gave out, (b) I didn’t see Lawrence’s mangled body anywhere and (c) why the hell bother to put a snare in here? The corridor of the damned was enough of a barrier all on its own.
And not just because of the heat. The tunnel was naturally occurring by the look of it, with some lofty areas—like the one the portal had let out on—but up ahead the ceiling ducked low enough that it looked like I might have to crawl. It was also lumpy and hot and completely lacking in partners, bad guys, or anything else of interest except some fireflies zipping around the darkness over my head.
They weren’t the only source of light. Once I got away from the portal, I started noticing glowing patches in the walls, like mold if it was the color of fire and sent off heat waves so intense they were almost visible. I found that out when I ran into one, causing the line on the shield’s meter to drop like a stone. I hit the ground and flipped over to see the room wavering through the intense band of heat above me.
