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There were odd rumblings of trains that shook the ground under our feet and seemed to come from every direction at once. There was a weird echoing effect that threw our footsteps back at us, making it hard to listen for others up ahead. And then there were some very suspicious squeaks.
“I think there may be rats,” I said, my grip tightening on Mircea’s arm.
“At least one,” he said softly, about the time I saw the dim glow of another light bouncing off the concrete walls ahead. It was surprisingly distant, considering that we couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind them. But if they got far enough ahead to break the fragile connection, that lead might well become permanent.
I started to run.
And almost bumped into the kidnapper booking it from the opposite direction. I hadn’t seen him in the dark until he was right on top of us, but suddenly there he was, his blue eyes wild, his hair sticking up everywhere and his mouth open in the O of Oh, shit. He almost knocked me down with the damn suitcase, gangly legs churning up the dark as he and Mother headed back toward the platform at a dead run.
“What the—” I didn’t get a chance to finish before Mircea grabbed me around the waist and flung us at the wall.
I hit hard, bruising my knee and smashing my cheek against the filthy concrete. But I didn’t complain. Because at almost the same instant, a bolt of red lightning sizzled through the tunnel, electrifying my hair and raising gooseflesh on my skin. Goddamnit!
“They’re supposed to be dead!” I said, furious.
“Perhaps this is a different group.”
“Jonas said there were only supposed to be five!”
“Yes, we’ll have to mention that to him when we return,” Mircea said grimly, as a bunch of pissed-off demigods blew past us.
I thought there were four, not five, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to see anything at all with bright green afterimages leaping across my vision. And then it was impossible, when so much spell fire lit up the tunnel that it looked like a sophisticated security system had been installed in there.
Laserlike spells bounced off walls and ceiling, crisscrossing each other in a deadly web of crimson fire. They turned the small, round space into something straight out of hell, and gave me plenty of light to see that the spells weren’t the kind meant to stun. Everywhere they hit, they blackened the heavy concrete, sparked off the rails and sent a thick layer of dust from the floor billowing into the air.
Mircea cursed and pulled me behind him, which would have been fine, except that a bolt slammed into the wall just down from us a second later. It must have hit an electrical line, because a great shower of sparks spewed across the tunnel, a few flaming out against my dress. Mircea cursed again and pulled me back the other way, near the stillsmoking blast mark from the previous spell.
“Get out!” he rasped.
I stopped staring at the fireworks long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“Shift out of here! Now!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through this. If they kill her, I’m dead anyway! Why do you think my power brought me back here?”
“I’ll deal with it!”
“You can’t! Mircea—”
He pushed me against the wall, his body shielding me, his eyes reflecting the sparks. And their expression was pretty damn scary.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“What?” He looked at me like he thought I’d gone mad.
“Would you protect the Consul if she was here?”
“Of course not!”
“What would you do?”
“Whatever she needed—”
“You would help her.”
