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He and his attacker disappeared from view, hidden by the wall that separated the two boxes, but only for a moment. A mage was getting choked out on this side and started wildly throwing spells. One set the curtains on fire, another hit a couple vampires that had been leaping for us from the theatre floor, sending them flipping backward into darkness, and a third slammed through the partition, obliterating most of it.
That left Louis-Cesare staring at me through the burning wreckage, a vampire under each arm and his hair alight.
“You’re on fire!” I yelled, because vamps had the flammability of kerosene-soaked rags.
And then I realized that I’d just said that aloud.
I jumped back to my feet, staring around in confusion, because I was suddenly back in charge of my body and I didn’t know why.
Then I noticed: those few vamps had been merely the vanguard—of a legion. They were leaping up from the floor of the theatre, despite the fact that we were two stories high, and crawling over the fronts of the boxes like humanoid spiders. Dozens of them.
The first group had mostly avoided our box because of the crazed mage. But he’d gotten thrown over the side, and now they had a clear field. And even trolls couldn’t fight with no blood in their bodies.
As several demonstrated almost before I’d finished the thought, huge living boulders suddenly falling to their knees. And to drain a fey that fast, we weren’t talking rank and file here. We were talking—
“Masters!” Ray screamed.
Shit.
The only good thing was that the destroyed wall had left a mass of flaming bits lying around. Shards and splinters of old hardwood, still burning merrily, including on a sheet of paneling directly in front of me. And then in the air after I picked it up and flung it with everything I had at the approaching lineup.
The weight of the slab knocked several of them off the box, the burning shrapnel set more alight and one piece caught a guy straight through the heart. He wouldn’t die—his head was intact—but he was out for the count. Unlike several others, including one blond-haired master who I danced with all across the box, weaving in and out of the battle going on inside, and stabbing him three different times while he tried to drain me.
But you need line of sight for that, and I kept dodging behind trolls. I finally saw an opening, slashed hard across his throat then stabbed directly downward. I was using a wooden shard, not a knife, so that should have been it. But he dodged at the last second, so the blow missed the heart. And then, with an elegant somersault backward into the darkness, he was gone.
I leaned ove
r the edge of the box, panting and light-headed, with a snarl on my lips, because I don’t let prey walk away! But he was nowhere to be seen. But something else was. I realized I was wreathed in a faint yellowish green glow, spreading out from where the master had just been.
Geminus’ family aura, Louis-Cesare confirmed, before I could ask. I was still getting used to seeing auras, the power signatures all vamps gave off that told their family histories at a glance. They’d been invisible before the wall fell in my head, because the skill for seeing them was on Dorina’s side of the brain. But now I could—
And this one made no sense at all.
Why? Louis-Cesare asked. Geminus’ family was huge. The Senate thought they killed all of his masters who were involved with the smuggling trade, but it’s reasonable that they missed a few.
This isn’t a few! And Curly just said—
But I didn’t have time to go into what Curly had said. Because the next wave was about to hit, with mages as well as vamps. And these didn’t look like the pansy-ass guards.
The mages couldn’t jump two stories like the vamps, but that didn’t seem to be slowing them down any. They threw glimmering strands of magic at the top of Louis-Cesare’s box, where they clung like Spidey’s web—and acted like it, too. A ripple of white light tore through them, they abruptly tightened, and the mages went flying through the air like they were riding huge rubber bands.
Allowing them to hit Louis-Cesare with half a dozen spells, all at once.
I felt my heart stop, because even a master could go down under something like that. But the spells didn’t seem to work. They hit, but he didn’t so much as flinch, and nothing happened.
Except that the wounds he’d been healing suddenly started seeping again.
That included a large gash across his stomach that he’d closed so fast it hadn’t even had time to stain his shirt. It was staining it now, in a bright red flood that made my heart clench, even before I started to run. And found that my legs had other ideas.
No! Damn it, let me go! But Dorina didn’t listen. Instead, she threw me back at the wall, where the bicycle was propped up on its little kickstand, the shiny blue and silver paint job reflecting the fighting and the fire and my desperate face.
Because antihealing spells were a bitch. They’d make a human bleed like a hemophiliac until he bled out, and even for a vamp, they could be deadly. They wouldn’t kill you themselves, but they’d slow your healing down enough that an obliging enemy could do it for them. I didn’t know how badly they’d affect a first-level master, but it was safe to say that the field had just gotten a lot more level.
But I couldn’t do anything about it, because I was busy playing with the damned bike!
My hands moved expertly over it, without any input from me, while Louis-Cesare began ripping chairs from the floor and throwing them and everything else he could find at the mages. It seemed to be working. Half of them were knocked over the side, with several getting tangled in their own safety nets, like butterflies trapped in cocoons. And the rest couldn’t seem to dodge and also concentrate well enough to throw a spell. But it left him unable to help Ray.
Who looked like he needed it.
