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“Augggghhhhh!”
Somebody was screaming.
I did not think that it was me. It was hard to tell over the sound of the portal roaring like a hurricane in my ears, and the violent green of all that swirling power searing my vision. I had many ways to see, but the raging energy of the line negated most of them.
That was all right.
I did not need to see my attackers to kill them.
Their scent was strange in my nose, and their bodies showed up as cool spaces in my mind’s eye against all that pulsing power. They did not seem to have the same ease at detecting me, however. Several were turned in completely the wrong direction, while others were moving about with their arms out, trying to locate me after I tore away from them in the initial confusion.
I helped them out with that, slitting the first creature’s throat before he knew I was there and then had two more jump me, zeroing in on his aborted cry. I whirled, dancing away from one and slashing another with my blade, where it stuck in the bone of his arm. I tried to cut through and then I tried to pull out, either of which would have worked easily with a human. But he wasn’t one, and my blade stayed trapped.
We circled each other, him trying to get a knife in me while I tried to free myself. I finally cracked through the bone with sheer brute force. But instead of falling away into the electric tunnel we were traveling through, the severed arm began orbiting us, like a piece of clothing thumping about the laundry machine back home.
There were other body parts tumbling around, too, one of which was still screaming. It was part of the small vampire that Dory liked. He must have been close enough when the portal opened to have been swept inside along with us.
My eyes were adjusting now, to the point that I could see the fey as dark shadows silhouetted against all that leaping color. I still couldn’t make out any details, but the vampire . . . yes, I could see him. Because he is family, I thought, and smiled.
I cut off a fey’s head and offered him the bleeding stump, but he only stared at me. Another fey jumped onto my back while a second grabbed my wrist—the one with the scimitar in it. I dropped the body of their compatriot, and snatched a tumbling arm as it fell past.
“Is this yours?” I asked the vampire.
“What?” He stared at me some more.
“Does this belong to you?”
“No?”
“Good.” I used the jagged femur to stab the fey on my back through the eye. And when he let go, I slashed it across the other’s neck.
I picked up the decapitated body and offered the vampire the stump again.
He did not seem to understand.
“Feed,” I urged him.
“What? I can’t!”
Of course, I thought. He has no arms. I dragged the body up to his mouth, to the point that the fey’s blood smeared his lips.
“Gah! Gah! Gah!”
I pulled it back. “Is there a problem?”
“Is there a problem? Is there a problem?” Blue eyes blazed at me. “I get my limbs torn off, get kidnapped, and now you’re trying to poison me—”
“It is not poison.”
“—and you ask if there’s a problem?”
I decided that he might be in shock. Just as well. There were four fey still on their feet, including the one with the missing arm, and they were coming.
I broke off half of the scimitar’s blade in the first one’s neck and kicked a second far enough away that I should have had time to deal with the remaining two. But he only stumbled back a short distance before hitting and then splaying against something that I couldn’t see at all. Something that appeared to be rotating and was taking him along with it.
Dodging a blow, I watched him circle against the primordial fury of the line. Ley lines were fascinating: huge rivers of magical power that flowed around the Earth and then beyond. It was said that their energy could dissolve a human in seconds, and a vampire even faster. No one traveled through them without a shield of some kind.
Like the one gleaming all around us, I realized, as two of the remaining fey jumped me.
