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A very frightened one.
For a long moment, Mircea simply knelt there, listening to the skies, which sounded like they’d had some of Horatiu’s infamous garlic torta. He didn’t want to spook the witch more than she already was, but they couldn’t stay here. They couldn’t stay anywhere.
They were being hunted, and the noose was tightening.
Because their little ruse hadn’t worked.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. They’d managed to float away from the pier under a bit of flotsam, while everyone else stared at the burning gondola or ran for cover. The latter had been the popular choice, since vampires are even more flammable than humans, and they’d just seen two people incinerated.
But while the distraction had helped him and the witch get away, it hadn’t done much else. By the time they’d swum a safe distance, they’d barely had the strength to drag themselves onto dry land again. But they’d nonetheless been forced into a mad scramble through streets still teeming with vampires—too many of them.
Their pursuers should have been heading for home or for the taverns and betting parlors where hunting was still to be had. And some of them were. But those were mainly the locals who had been pressed into service while the praetor mobilized her coterie of guards, who were suddenly everywhere.
Because she wasn’t as stupid as her creatures.
She hadn’t bought the lightning bolt story.
Mircea and the witch had stayed alive this long only because of the storm, with the rolling thunder covering their footsteps, the pounding rain masking their scent, and the lightning causing so many helpful shadows to flicker and jump that even vampire eyes had trouble knowing where to focus. But it couldn’t last much longer. They were going to die unless they got out of this city, and did it soon.
“I have an idea,” he said, in between thunderclaps.
The witch had been staring at the water with a blank look. The same one she now turned on him. Her moods had ranged wildly during the chase, from defiance to desperation to strange euphoria to . . . whatever this was. But at least the panic was gone.
“That was you,” she rasped. “In my head.”
“Yes.”
“The praetor . . . she used to talk to me like that. I thought”—she licked her lips—“I thought she’d found me.”
“No.”
The “not yet” remained unsaid, but floated almost tangibly in the air between them.
She slowly got out of the canal, dragging heavy, waterlogged skirts behind her. And then squatted, dripping, on the muddy bank beside him. She was shivering, and he wished he had his cloak to offer her. But it was long gone, and would have been drenched in any case.
“I have an idea,” Mircea repeated.
She didn’t say anything for a long moment, just stared at the rushing water of the canal, which was wholly black in the absence of any lightning. It was almost mesmerizing, a river of ink, with only its movement making it visible at all. It felt strangely cozy, sopping wet though they were, under this tiny bit of shelter, while the wind howled down the alleys and the little river rushed inside its banks, masking any sign of them.
It was so easy to imagine that they could just stay here forever, shut away from the world.
But they couldn’t, something the witch seemed to realize, because she slowly turned her head to look at him.
“You’re not going to like it,” Mircea admitted.
“I know.”
* * *
—
Light flashed, impossibly bright, and a waterspout exploded on a nearby building. That and a crack of thunder, loud as cannon fire, almost caused Mircea to lose his grip on the windowsill. And it did cause the witch to lose hers.
He scrabbled for purchase on water-slick stone, and she screamed and started to fall, her eyes wide with terror, her hand reaching for him desperately—
And snagged the hem of his shirt.
Gah!
