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“Yet you called him master,” Louis-Cesare pointed out.
Hassani nodded. “It was an unusual situation, I admit. The consul before me was a despicable man who started life as a Canaanite mercenary in the Amarna period by the name of Dalilu. He ingratiated himself with Setep-en-Ra by his willingness to do literally anything his pharaoh asked. I will . . . spare you the details.”
“Thank you,” I said fervently.
“I hated him for his depredations, his dissolute behavior, and the harshness of his rule. It was only once I took his place that I realized: he had never really ruled at all.”
“Setep-en-Ra did,” Louis-Cesare guessed.
Hassani inclined his head. “Of course. As he always had. He had followed the trade routes west to Rome, and taken the consulate there, as well. But to him, that wasn’t abdicating a throne, but simply adding another land to the ranks of his worshippers. The “consul” he left behind was merely his deputy, ruling in his stead while he was away. He considered himself to be the rightful ruler of the world, you see; he simply hadn’t officially claimed the more far flung lands as yet.”
“Some of those lands might have had something to say about that,” Louis-Cesare said dryly.
“Indeed.” Hassani looked thoughtful. “Although whether they would have triumphed, had it come to a contest, is an open question. I think he was a bit mad, even then, but madmen often succeed. They take chances that saner ones will not.”
“They get themselves assassinated, too,” I pointed out.
I should know; I’d killed a few.
“Sometimes,” Hassani agreed, “although it was not so easy, in his case. Many tried before anyone succeeded, and even then, had he been in his right mind, had he not underestimated his opponents, had your father not been there, to assist at just the right moment . . . he might rule still.”
“But he doesn’t. So, what were you saying about Dorina?”
Hassani glanced sharply at me, probably because that had been less than diplomatic. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I didn’t see what any of this had to do with her, and it had been almost a day since she was taken. I wanted to chase something; I wanted to kill something. Not sit here looking at pretty colors and talking ancient history!
Fortunately, he was too well mannered to point out my rudeness.
“Do you know of my master’s power?” he said instead.
“No,” I lied. Most vamps liked to keep that kind of thing under wraps, in case they needed to use it in a duel, and that was especially true of consuls.
He smiled slightly, as if he knew I was lying. “I see truly,” he said, “and clearer than most. As with many masters, I can also see through the eyes of my Children—and share it.”
And I guessed my impatience might have annoyed him, after all. Because that was all the warning I received before I was suddenly back there, dumped abruptly into the crazy streets of the Khan-el-Khalili, with multicolored lamps swinging, people screaming, and shops exploding. Only this time, I was watching myself from afar. And jumping over the gap in between buildings, trying to catch up with a crazed cartoon carpet and the two mad types riding it.
“Get her!” I heard myself yell.
It was in Arabic, but I somehow understood, maybe because I was borrowing someone else’s brain.
Another vamp looked at me, his eyes wild. “You
get her! I can barely keep up!”
My vampire—one of Hassani’s men, I assumed, since I was seeing through his eyes—cursed, and then cursed again as a jackal-headed fey sprang from a higher rooftop, right down on top of us. But the new arrival didn’t attack. He was too busy throwing himself off the roof at Dorina, who was zipping past down below.
And, damn. I knew what had happened, of course; I’d been there. But it looked a little different from this angle. She was standing, perfectly balanced, on a tiny scrap of carpet, despite the fact that Ray was slinging it all over the damned street. And while one of her hands was clenched white knuckled around the graffiti gun, the other was slicing and dicing fey almost casually—
And there were a lot of fey.
I remembered maybe half a dozen or so jumping at us, which were the only ones who’d gotten close enough to snag my vision. But there were so many others that I hadn’t seen. And while the handful of Hassani’s people following us had taken out a few, the vast majority—maybe three or four dozen fey warriors in all—had been dealt with—
By Dorina.
I blinked, but no, I wasn’t seeing things. Or, rather, I was, and through the eyes of a vamp as nonplussed as me. It was all happening so fast, and he was busy leaping and occasionally fighting his way through it, so he might have missed something. But what he saw was plenty good enough.
In short succession, Dorina grabbed a passing line of bare light bulbs, held it long enough to stretch it out, then released it to spring back and knock a trio of fey off our backs; shoved another fey away hard enough to impale him on a piece of wood sticking off a roofline; then grabbed a poster advertising a museum exhibit on Nefertiti and—shit.
“Did you see that?” I asked Hassani, because she’d just created the world’s worst paper cut, slitting a fey’s throat with a poster.
