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“I told you this would work,” Mircea breathed at the witch.
Who whacked him with her stick, very hard, several times.
And then they were gone.
* * *
—
“Dory! Dory!”
I opened my eyes to hardwood floors, a puddle of drool, and Claire kneeling beside me. So were Stinky, Olga, and the troll boy, whose smock was now truly a sight to behold. A handful of fey guards stood on the steps, all looking spooked.
But not half as much as I was.
“Are you all right?” Claire demanded.
“No,” I said, my head spinning as everything finally came together. “None of us are.”
Holy shit.
Chapter Fifty-six
An hour later, Coffee Lover was standing in the kitchen doorway, trying to get my attention, but I couldn’t hear him over all the screaming. “What?”
His mouth moved some more, but it didn’t help.
“Can you shut up for a minute?” I asked Marlowe, only to have him round on me.
“As soon as you start making some goddamned sense!”
“I have been. I told you—”
“That an ancient fey queen turned praetor turned . . . whatever the hell . . . is rampaging around New York wearing a war mage’s skin! Do you have any idea how that sounds?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“No, it means you’re crazy!” Marlowe snapped his fingers at his vamps. “We’re leaving.”
And found his arm caught by a pissed-off senator with flour in his hair.
Louis-Cesare had shown up just before the chief spy, and he hadn’t been baking. But Marlowe had been doing a lot of fist pounding on the kitchen table and, as a result, we were all a little starchy. Louis-Cesare just made it look good.
“You’re going to listen to her.”
“I have listened! And been fed the biggest pile of horse—”
“Then you can listen again. Perhaps with your mouth closed this time.”
Well, shit, I thought, as Marlowe turned puce. In fairness, he’d already been pretty close, since he didn’t seem to like my Alfhild-as-the-villain theory. And while I normally wouldn’t have cared what Marlowe liked, in this instance, we needed his help.
Which is why I didn’t respond in kind when he grabbed me. Even though it left me, him, and Louis-Cesare facing off on three sides of the kitchen table, and me bent halfway across it because I was too short for this. Like the room was too small for a conference.
“Release me!” Marlowe barked, ignoring the fact that he had me in the same grip.
Louis-Cesare did not release him. The tension ratcheted up a few more notches, and it had already been pretty high. Because some of the guys Marlowe had dragged along looked vaguely familiar.
Like I-might-have-recently-shot-a-few familiar.
