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Only to reposition it onto his head.
She scowled. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said, got a leg over her spear, and snapped the heavy shaft in two.
She looked from it to me, and the scowl grew more pronounced. “Bitch, that was my favorite spear.”
“Not anymore,” I said, and went for her with the jagged end, which made a quite serviceable stake.
Because vamps and wooden weapons don’t mix, no matter how good they think they are, but I didn’t have a chance to demonstrate the point.
But not because of her.
Because I was suddenly hit with a jumble of slurring, cloud-filled skies, clawing talons and sharp, tearing beaks.
Pain ripped through me, and I looked down at my side, expecting to see a jagged wound, but there was nothing there. Just like there was no sky full of feathers, and strong flapping wings, and blood spurting as two predators fought it out, somewhere above me. Which was going to get me killed down here, because my brain wasn’t used to doing a freaking split screen!
And because my opponent didn’t have that problem.
Fortunately, she did have another.
One that reached down with a huge, hoary hand and grabbed her, right before she could shove the shiny end of the spear through my eyeball. And snatched her off the ground and into the air, maybe thirty feet, maybe more. Whatever the height of the copse of tall trees just behind us.
Of course, her buddy was no help. He crawled out from under the car he’d just jerked on top of himself, in time to see another tree branch curving like a giant’s hand and reaching down for him. Then the two vamps were getting introduced to the ground by the treetops swaying violently this way and that, as if in hurricane-force winds, grabbing them up and smacking them back down, over and over and over and over.
I could watch this all day, I thought dizzily.
And then a couple of birds splatted onto Claire’s windshield, and the split screen became one seriously messed-up brain again.
One that was no longer even trying to keep up.
Well, shit, I thought.
And passed out.
Chapter Nineteen
Mircea, Venice, 1458
“Damn it, Mircea!” The praetor’s color was high, but not from embarrassment. She stepped out of her lovely gown, giving Mircea a glimpse of a beautiful bronzed figure, lean of thigh and high of breast, the opposite of the Venetian preference for rounder, paler forms.
The Venetians were idiots, Mircea thought, as the praetor’s ladies hurried to help her into her bath.
It was unusual, too. The Venetian norm was the same as everywhere else: a high, wooden tub lined with cloths to reduce splinters, and, for the wealthy, soft, scented soaps and thick towels. He hadn’t had a bath like that in a while, being relegated to the local public bathhouse when he had the fee, and to an overlarge bucket Horatiu had found that left his knees up around his ears whenever he didn’t.
This was like an indoor fountain, a depression in the floor decorated with mosaic tiles and featuring streams of fresh water coming from decorative fittings in the walls. It was ridiculously pretentious in a town that received its water exclusively from rainfall caught in sand-filtered wells. Behind the luxurious facade, some poor servants were laboring to carry buckets up four stories so they could fill some reservoir that allowed her to pretend she was still in Rome.
Mircea remained stoic, but the sheer waste colored his appreciation for her beauty.
That, and her cruelty.
“I had one in sight tonight,” he told her. “I saw one boy taken and the trap set again. If the skies had stayed clear—”
“But they didn’t, and you lost him. Leaving me precisely where I was before.”
She paused to summon a maid mentally. Goat cheese, and pears stewed in red wine. The girl hurried to bring her mistress a late-night snack that Mircea couldn’t taste, thanks to his age, not that he was likely to be offered any. He hadn’t even been offered a chair.
This was not going to be a long audience.
