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“Louis-Cesare! Please!” That was Dory.
I could hear her pain, her anguish. Not only for us, but for him, what this would do to him when that thing let him go. And something of that must have gotten through, because for a split second, I saw him falter.
But the creature was too strong, and reasserted control almost at once. The blue eyes, confused and horrified one second, were suddenly resolute once more. And the sword was being raised and we were out of options.
But somebody else wasn’t.
Louis-Cesare was swarmed by a bunch of flying cameras, perhaps twenty or more, all hitting him at the same time. One smashed into the back of his head; another punched the side of his jaw. And then more and more at various angles, until the little things had kamikazied their guts out, like big, black, wildly swinging fists.
They didn’t hurt him, but the surprise bought us a second to tear away, and I didn’t hesitate. I landed back in the frothing water, disoriented and desperate. And somehow grabbed a shield.
It was a long wooden thing, heavy and unwieldy. A fact not helped by the depth of the water, which was now over my head. My foot couldn’t reach the bottom of this newly formed lake, and I was off-balance and rapidly losing blo
od from the leg. I nonetheless managed to get the shield up, and block the next strike of the blade. Only to have the wicked, curved steel sink deeply enough that it caught in the wood, allowing the vampire to use the sword as a handle.
And rip our only protection away.
Dory! I yelled mentally. Help me!
One second!
She was doing something with the hand under her control. Then she dunked us underwater, swimming for the bottom, and how was that supposed to help? I didn’t get an answer, and the next second we were jerked back out of the tide. I’d been expecting it, and closed my hand on the wrist holding the sword as it slashed down. But even though I was putting everything I had into the fight, the blade kept coming closer and closer, a relentless, deadly weight, until the shiny surface reflected my strained face and startled, disbelieving eyes—
And something else.
I had half a second to see a giant mass of muscle, fur, and fury leaping for us, before it was gone—and Louis-Cesare along with it. For a split second, I watched him being dragged through the fight by a were the size of a car, and then the view was obscured as the rest of Roberto’s creatures appeared, a river of fur parting the water and immediately taking the fight to a new level.
But not for long.
Not where the vampire was concerned.
I saw him across the fray, battling the were, and knew we had seconds at best. Not enough time to get away, not enough time to do anything. He was relentless.
But so was Dory. She’d found the controller the vampire had dropped, and apparently it went with the fritzing, sparking wreck of a camera ball speeding toward us. The thing could barely fly, and was listing hard to one side, but when the up button was pressed on the controller, that’s where it took us, straining and fighting, but unerringly UP.
Toward the weapons, I realized.
And then we shot through the doorway and into a vortex of light and sound that grabbed us like a fist, jerked us through, and spit us out . . .
Somewhere else.
Chapter Sixty
The pain made it difficult to concentrate, but some things you just don’t miss. Like Caedmon trapped behind some kind of ward, throwing his body against it uselessly. Like the fact that we were in a huge cave, like football-field huge, with a long slit of an entrance providing a vista of snow-covered peaks that went on for miles. And like the fact that a mass of what looked like the rock monsters the fey made were headed this way, only they’d gotten an upgrade.
In spite of everything, I just stared. They were shaped like manlikans, but the size . . . I had no idea how large they were, but if they’d been standing still, I would have mistaken them for mist-covered mountains. Mist-covered mountains with a tiny man—or fey, I guess—riding on the shoulder of each of them.
It was completely bizarre and strangely intimidating.
And then things became more so.
A woman turned to look at me from across the expanse of the cave, her diminutive blond beauty on display in a gossamer white gown. It blew in the breeze coming through the crevasse, like her long, unbound hair, perfectly complementing the snowy mountains and brilliant blue sky behind her. My thoughts screeched to a halt and then fell all over one another, like a multicar pileup.
Because that . . . wasn’t Alfhild.
I stared at Efridis, Caedmon’s beautiful sister, and wondered how we got it so wrong.
And then Louis-Cesare appeared, jumping through the portal, and I realized: we hadn’t.
