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“Then why did you say—”
“To make the guilty party feel secure. Kit narrowed it down to eight suspects, five of whom belong to me. I had them transferred here as soon as I received his report and borrowed the consular ships to make it look like the Consuls were meeting here. If an attempt was made to disrupt the meeting, we would have our traitor.”
“That’s why you discussed their visit in the middle of the living room. You wanted everyone to hear!”
Mircea nodded as the clipper began to move away, putting some distance between us and the melee. But some of the mages had managed to get themselves untangled from the net spell in time to launch themselves at us. I thought things were about as bad as they could get, dangling upside down twenty stories up while the Circle’s mages started swarming down the webbing toward us. And then the ship started to rotate.
I think the captain was trying to jiggle his stowaways loose, and he was doing a damn good job—on me. Mircea grabbed me as my grip started to slip and swung us over the side just as the rounded hull came into view. “No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “You aren’t suggesting—”
“I have you,” he assured me, setting my feet down onto the very uneven planks of the hull. “Think of them as small steps.”
“To where?”
“Up there,” Mircea said as the ship slowly began to rise back toward the balcony.
“The people trying to kill us are up there!”
“They’re down here, as well,” he pointed out. “And we have more allies there.”
“One of whom could be a traitor!”
“No. The suspects have been given the night off and instructed not to return before dawn. If one of them does, we’ll have him.”
We’d almost reached the keel, but the mages were right behind us and the balcony looked very far away. And unless I was imagining things, the rotation had picked up speed. “Wait. What if the traitor decided to go with a bomb instead?”
“We’ve checked. The apartment is perfectly safe.”
“Yeah. It looks it!” I said, and then the flat deck was coming up at us again and there was suddenly nowhere to put my feet. Not that it mattered because the ship’s rotation jerked to a halt, with my toes hanging off the edge. “Mircea!”
He didn’t answer, just swept me up and jumped down to the mast, which was sticking out of the deck like a bridge. The mages had nowhere near good enough balance to follow along the curved, polished surface, and so they decided to start flinging spells instead. One of the furled sails went up in flames right beside us and then Mircea put on a burst of speed and we were suddenly out of mast and jumping.
“Did you have to carry her?” Pritkin demanded, as we landed back on the balcony.
Mircea ignored him, beckoning the Chinese barge closer. “Come with us!” I said, gripping his hand.
He shook his head. “If Saunders gets away tonight, he’ll go into hiding. It may be months, even years, before we have him again.”
“You don’t have him now! He has you!”
The Chinese barge slid alongside, and Mircea picked Pritkin up and handed him over the side into the arms of the waiting captain. He said something in Mandarin, and the vamp nodded, setting Pritkin on his feet and reaching for me. I ended up over the side and on the deck before I quite realized it was happening.
“Mircea! Don’t do this!”
It was like he didn’t even hear. He turned and disappeared back into the thick, choking column of smoke that was now billowing out of the apartment. He didn’t look back.
I turned to Pritkin as the barge slipped rapidly away. “We have to get him out of there!”
“I’d be a bit more worried about us, if I were you,” he said as a large white ship appeared in the sky.
I knew it must have come from the ley line, but it had merged with real space so quickly that it looked like a magician’s trick. That made sense, as there were a few hundred mages lined up along the railing—the ones Saunders had boasted about, I guessed. “Tell me again that they don’t want us dead,” I said as a fiery blast exploded out of the side of the vessel, passed a yard in front of us and hit the clipper broadsides.
The ship went up like a Roman candle. The explosion of burning wood, rope and sail hit us, causing our craft to swerve precariously in a wide arc. I held on to the railing and watched burning pieces of the clipper ship plummet to the parking lot below. They crashed onto the rows of employee cars, sending half a dozen somersaulting skyward and setting off a chorus of car alarms. I didn’t see any of the crew make it off.
Even worse, the Lord Protector’s ship was heading straight for the penthouse. If it got there with that number of reinforcements, Mircea was dead. There wasn’t even a question.
I grabbed the captain by the collar. “Stop them!” He didn’t seem to understand, so I shook him and pointed at the ship. “They can’t be allowed to dock!”
He just pried my hands off his silk tunic. Not a word was said, but the idea was conveyed anyway—he wasn’t crazy. Luckily, I was on board with someone who was—or at least gave a fair impression of it most of the time.
