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And then I was jerked back by the vampire. Its teeth were out and its bloodlust was rising. But I did not think it was about to feed with the flames licking toward us. “Get on,” I told it impatiently, shoving the table at it.
“You get on!” it snarled, and threw me and the small one onto the pitted tabletop. And then through the door. And then down a corridor, which was fast collapsing behind us.
I twisted around in time to see that several of the shifters had somehow made it out also, but they were uninterested in attacking us. They barreled into two of their own who had stayed behind, and then attacked them in their panic to get out. They went down in balls of fur and thrashing limbs and the next second were consumed by the gaping maw of energy behind us.
It was less like glass now, I thought, holding the whimpering small thing as the corridor curled up, concrete, brick and plaster, all the same. As if the scene were merely an image drawn on paper and held to a match.
It was oddly unreal, like the expression on the vampire’s face as it ran, pushing us with inhuman speed, racing the impossible until fire lapped at its heels and I jerked it onto the table with us. The flames followed, crackling like lightning across the width of the tunnel, burning through the vampire’s jacket and searing a wound in its arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, flooded the air. The corridor bucked and buckled. Electricity lifted the hair on my arms and prickled at my exposed skin, the space left to us sizzling with it as we scrambled backward, as the tunnel flamed out around us, as beautiful death reached fiery hands out for us—
—and missed.
The floor bucked wildly one last time, and suddenly we were bouncing into darkness, the table smoking like a flare, the portal behind us burning not orange but bright, incandescent white for one brief instant. Before it exploded like a bomb, picking us up and throwing us through the air and into a large group of people who were rushing through what looked like a warehouse door.
But they weren’t people; they were vampires. Dozens of them, some getting out of the way in time, others somersaulting along with us as we hit the ground, as we rolled toward a street, as I reached for the small one the impact had torn out of my arms and a knife at the same time, because the fight was not over yet. No, the fight was just beginning as I rolled to a stop and surged to my feet and—
“NO!”
The voice tore through me like a hundred knives, plucking me out of the air halfway through a leap and sending me crashing to the ground. My body twisted, but the power wouldn’t let me rise. Not the vampire’s—not this vampire’s. There was only one who could do this to me, and I looked up with no surprise at all to see the diffuse outline of a being made of moonlight, shimmering in the air above me.
“No,” I told it. And “wait” and “child.”
But it didn’t listen. It never listened.
And then the glow faded, and there was nothing but darkness.
Chapter Three
Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. But when an earthquake is doing its best to shake your room apart, you don’t have much of a choice. I blinked open my lashes to find sunlight poking cheerful fingers into my eyes, a wannabe Pavarotti in bird form outside my window, and at least a 5.0 on the Richter scale.
The jam jar of daisies on my dresser was dancing. Little puffs of plaster were sifting down from my ceiling. And my bed was slowly migrating across the worn wooden boards of my floor. I stared around in utter confusion because I was still half asleep, and because the pounding on the door almost exactly matched the pounding in my head. For a minute, I wasn’t sure if it was the room shaking or me.
The room, I decided, when the jam jar danced to the edge of the dresser and leapt to its doom.
“Crap,” I said, and fell out of bed.
The earthquake stopped.
A few seconds later, a gnarled, scarred hand, big as a bucket, squeezed around the doorframe. It was careful, because little things like solid oak doors are notoriously flimsy. But then it stopped without actually coming in.
The pain in my head was fairly astonishing, but it didn’t stop me from recognizing the hand. It belonged to one of my roommates, because my living situation isn’t any more normal than the rest of my life. Ymsi, the donator of daisies, had the slight disadvantage of being a troll. Not that it was a disadvantage to him, by all appearances, but it did cause the rest of us problems from time to time
.
Like when he decided to wake us up by gently knocking on a door.
“Come in,” I croaked, only to have nothing happen.
I hung my head. Of course not.
Ymsi had the usual troll love of beauty, and for some reason, he had decided that I fit the bill. And although he and his twin brother, Sven, had been on earth for a while now, they were still getting their feet wet when it came to the odder facets of human culture. Like the whole privacy thing.
This had resulted in my looking up in the middle of a bath one day to find Ymsi standing hunched in the doorway, staring at me with the same rapt look on his face that he used when encountering a new kind of flower. Or playing with the baby squirrel he had rescued from the backyard after a storm and kept as a pet. Or being introduced to the wonders of chocolate for the first time.
Apparently, in troll terms, that sort of thing was considered endearing.
Unfortunately for Ymsi, I am not a troll.
And I guess my reaction had been memorable. Or maybe Olga, a friend who was also of the troll persuasion, had had a talk with him. Because he had suddenly acquired a Victorian-era level of prudery where women were concerned. These days, he wouldn’t dare to enter a lady’s bedroom, my heavens no. Meaning that if I wanted to know what the deal was, I was going to have to get to the door.
