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“But these are enemies I do not understand, who come from a land I do not know. I have only one card against them, and I am playing it. Find them for me. You know all that we do, and you know her better than any of us. And she knows you. You are two halves of one soul, yearning to be reunited. You will find her.
“And you will call me when you do.”
“I’ll call you,” I said. “If she’s left any of them alive.”
And for the first time, Hassani and I shared a look of perfect understanding.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dory, Hong Kong
Supernatural Hong Kong was looking a little worse for the wear these days, having been through a major battle recently. And by worse, I mean half tumbled down skyscrapers with mostly missing windows, other buildings blackened and burnt out, and large swathes of land chewed up as if a gigantic mole had been tunneling. It honestly didn’t look that much better than it had during the battle itself, except that the fires had been put out.
Largely put out, I corrected, noticing flickering red light staining the inside of an already charred hulk. Of course, that could have been somebody making dinner. Housing was at a premium these days, and squatting was rampant in anything that was remotely structurally sound.
Although some people had been more creative than that.
“What the—what is that?”
Bahram, the big, bearded vamp from Hassani’s court, grabbed my shoulder and pointed at something off to the left. I had no idea what, because I was driving, which in Hong Kong meant piloting a repurposed rickshaw around the skies. And because the skies were so full, he could have been pointing at anything.
“Don’t grab me,” I said, shrugging off his hand.
He turned in his seat to stare at something behind us, and Rashid, the big, bald vamp on the other side of the backseat, frowned. “Shouldn’t Louis-Cesare be driving?”
“Why?”
A crazy-ass vehicle comprised of a couple smallish fans and someone’s living room sofa dipped down almost on top of us. Once upon a time, that would have been illegal. You couldn’t merely slap a levitation charm on something and call it a day. There were rules; there were laws; there were standards.
Right up until the city got the crap blown out of it, along with half of its vehicles. Now, it seemed that anything worked, only it didn’t. It didn’t at all! I grabbed a broom stick off the floorboard and beat on the bottom of the couch.
“Mm goi jeh!”
A small child’s face appeared over the back of the sofa, and stared down at me curiously, before someone whom I assumed to be her grandmother pulled her back so she could stare at me instead.
“Mm goi jeh!” I repeated. Which was the polite way of saying “move your ass” in Cantonese. At least, I assumed so, since it had been yelled at me a few dozen times now.
It seemed to work. A moment later, the fan on the left-hand arm of the sofa was turned to the right, causing the whole contraption to veer in that direction. And almost collide with a floating Pot Noodle Shop in the process.
“That is why,” Rashid said dryly.
“I do not know how to drive one of these,” Louis-Cesare informed him, just before we were bumped by a careening taxi, which resulted in us scraping along a levitating sidewalk for half a block before I could get the sticky control mechanism to put us back into what passed for a road.
“Neither does she,” Rashid replied, holding on white knuckled to the side of the rickshaw.
He said something else to Bahram, but I didn’t understand since it was in Arabic. That was probably just as well. My backseat dr
iver had been kibitzing ever since we left the rent-a-rickshaw place, and I was getting tired of it.
I didn’t clap back, however, because I was busy keeping us alive. The rickshaws were kept in the air by standard levitation charms, but that was the only thing about them that was standard. They were powered by huge fans in the back, like the ones on airboats, and they were dangerous as hell.
Ours had a safety cage over the wildly whirling blades, but plenty of those around us did not, and there weren’t a lot of road rules in Hong Kong. That had always been true, but it was especially so now, as the usual land arteries had been mostly severed by damage from the battle, and people had been forced to take to the skies. That had resulted in a much more crowded airspace than I had seen before.
And the damned pirates didn’t help.
“Not today,” Louis-Cesare said, and brought up an arm, knocking a would-be thief back onto his flying rattletrap.
It was a casual gesture, but it must have been damaging, because it really pissed off the thief. He was a vampire, if a very stupid one, who didn’t bother to check out the power signature of the guy he was attacking. The rattletrap swerved away, and then abruptly swerved back, and the bastards actually tried to board us!
