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Once he’d cleaned off his deck, the captain barked an order and the ship started moving away, out of the line of fire. I didn’t blame him. Spell after spell was flying out of the apartment, exploding in the air like fireworks.
I ducked to avoid sparks from a near miss, and Pritkin grabbed my arm. “You have to get out of here!”
“Me? What about you? You’re in my body!”
“I’ll be fine!”
“Yes, you will. Because you won’t be here,” Mircea said, suddenly appearing beside us. His hair had come loose and one of the ends was smoking slightly. I pinched the flame out between my fingers, but considering the conflagration going on behind us, that didn’t make me feel any better.
Pritkin apparently had the same thought. “You’re outnumbered! You need the help!”
“And how much help do you think you would be in your condition?” Mircea demanded, motioning the ship back toward us.
“More than you, vampire! The place is going up like an inferno!”
“That is my concern. Yours is to get her to safety and switch back as soon as—”
I never heard the rest of the sentence, because a spell slammed into me, picking me up and hurling me into the void. It happened so fast, I barely realized what was going on until I was falling. The side of the building flashed by all of three feet away, the windows blurring together into a continual black line, the pavement rushing up at me at a ridiculous pace. And then something snatched me, almost cutting me in two.
I looked up to see the sailing ship above me, the prow dipped low and Mircea hanging off the end of the wooden figurehead. His fist was knotted in my waistband, which explained why I couldn’t breathe. Considering the alternative, I really didn’t mind so much.
Even so, I was surprised his reflexes had been good enough to catch me. He looked kind of shocked himself. For a second, the reserved demeanor cracked open on something wild and fierce and compelling. Then he dragged me up, put a hand on either side of my face and kissed me full on the lips. From somewhere above, I heard Pritkin swear.
“I guess that whole blackmail thing didn’t exactly work out like you planned, huh?” I gasped when Mircea released me.
“Saunders will die for this,” he hissed, staring back up at the balcony.
“That might be kind of tricky,” I pointed out as a swarm of mages burst out of the ley line and fell onto the deck behind us. It looked like Saunders hadn’t been kidding; the vampires hadn’t been the only ones making plans for this meeting.
Of course, plans don’t always work out.The mages seemed to have assumed the ship would be level, because half of them slid down the rough planks before grasping some kind of handhold, and the other half went plummeting over the side. I stared after them for a second as a dozen little shield chutes bloomed against the night sky. Then Mircea dragged me against his side, vaulted over the railing and jumped—straight after them.
We didn’t end up plummeting to our deaths but onto the surface of the yacht, which had quietly come around underneath. I grasped the railing, my heart still stuck on terror, but Mircea pried me off and we ran. The mages who had kept their balance followed us, and there seemed to be an awful lot of them.
“I can’t believe they’re trying this with the consuls here,” I panted as we dodged deck chairs and little folding tables.
“The consuls aren’t here. That’s why I went to Washington State, to my court. I had to welcome them. They’re there now, with the Senate.”
“Something else you didn’t mention!”
He grabbed me around the waist and tossed me over the side. I got a brief, dizzying vie
w of the dark parking lot below before I was caught by a waiting vampire on the Chinese consul’s barge. Mircea jumped the distance behind me, and as soon as we were aboard, it took off—only to be hit with a spell that shuddered it to a halt.
I looked behind us to see a dozen or more mages manipulating the biggest net spell I’d ever seen. It had enveloped the dragon’s tail on the stern of the barge and was slowly drawing us back alongside the other ship.
“I couldn’t very well tell you anything without being overheard,” Mircea said, staring around.
“By whom?” I demanded. “The only people in the apartment were family!”
“Exactly.” His neck craned upwards as he caught sight of something. I followed his gaze to see what looked like a wall of wood descending on us. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sailing ship’s deck. The massive schooner had flipped upside down.
Mircea held me up and a vampire reached down and grabbed me by both arms, his legs enmeshed tightly in the rigging. Mircea jumped up beside him. “You don’t trust your own family?” I gasped, holding on for dear life.
“I don’t trust one of them. Someone tried to kill the Consul, if you recall.”
“But you said you knew who that was!”
He shook his head. “The Bentley was serviced the day before MAGIC was destroyed, and the bomb would surely have been noticed at that time. So it was planted later, after the man to whom you’re referring was already dead.”
