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I didn’t see if I’d been fast enough. I didn’t see anything, because a vicious blow sent me skidding backward, until my head stopped me by smashing into a metal railing. In the next compartment.
For a moment, I couldn’t move, too stunned to do anything but lie there as the car swam sickeningly around me. Two head blows in quick succession had me trying to decide between passing out and puking up breakfast, or possibly doing both at the same time. I rolled over, glass crunching under my hands, but some old clubbing advice about never passing out on your back got me onto my hands and knees. I looked up, dazed and disoriented.
In time to see the gun leveled at my head.
I stared at it for a split second, my eyes crossing, and then I tried to shift. But my head wasn’t clear enough, and even if it had been, panic makes shifting difficult. And nothing panics me quite so much as staring down the wrong end of a gun. I tried again anyway, but the mage squeezed off a shot at the same moment, and I knew I was dead.
Only for some reason I wasn’t, despite the sound of the shot and the smell of gunpowder in the air. It told me I hadn’t shifted, but I couldn’t figure out how else he’d missed me from all of two yards away. And then I looked up and bumped my head on the suitcase, which was still bobbing about despite having had a smoking chunk carved out of its butt.
I didn’t know where it had come from, since I hadn’t brought it with me. But I didn’t ask questions, just grabbed the thing for a shield I didn’t need because Mircea had arrived. And he was no longer looking so interested in caution.
He snatched the Spartoi’s gun out of his hand, the metal squeezing up through his fingers like Play-Doh. The demigod looked from his ruined gun to the enraged vampire and back again, and for some reason, he seemed more perplexed than frightened. And then Mircea used the gun to thwack him into the opposite side of the now-empty compartment.
The blow had looked effortless, almost casual, like someone swinging a golf club on a Sunday afternoon when he really doesn’t give a damn if the ball goes into the hole or not. And yet it sent the Spartoi far enough into a metal side panel to bow it outward in the shape of his body. And I decided that my estimate of the clearance must have been about right. Because we were suddenly treated to the nailson-a-chalkboard sound of metal being dragged over concrete, as his steel-covered ass scraped along the tunnel wall outside.
He didn’t move, and I thought he was done for, was sure of it. To the point that I whipped my head around to see if my mother was all right. But the movement was too fast for my aching skull, folding my knees under me after a halfhearted attempt to stand. Mircea moved to help me, and therefore he also wasn’t watching when the Spartoi peeled himself out of the panel and jumped—straight at us.
Mircea did sense him in time to turn, to get an arm up—which the Spartoi used to throw him the remaining length of the car. I stared as he busted through the shattered back window, twisted in midair, caught the bottom of the jagged windowpane and propelled himself back inside. Only to get hit with a spell that sent him sailing what looked like half a mile down the tunnel.
All that took far less time to happen than it did to say, and then a blast hit the suitcase I was clutching hard enough to toss me back like a rag doll. I felt something scrape across my back and something else rip what felt like a chunk out of my scalp, and then I was tumbling end over end into almost pitch-darkness. Until my back hit a wall, hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs, to cost me my grip on my floating life preserver, and to send me tumbling to the floor.
My knees hit gravel and my hands hit steel and blood was cascading into my eyes and I couldn’t breathe. So it took me a second to realize that I’d been tossed back into the tunnel. But that somehow, I was still alive.
I had to be. Death didn’t hurt this much.
But I didn’t understand why until I looked up to see the Spartoi walking toward the next compartmen
t as the train sped off. He didn’t bother to look back, didn’t even wait until I was safely out of sight before turning away. Like he hadn’t bothered to waste power disposing of me.
Blood trickled into my eyes as I sat there, understanding flooding me along with something that made my hands shake and my cheeks burn. Mircea had been a threat, and had been dealt with accordingly. But in the Spartoi’s eyes, I wasn’t worth pursuing. I wasn’t worth killing. I was just some minor nuisance to be taken care of on his way to murdering my mother, and I didn’t think so motherfucker.
I grabbed the suitcase and leaned forward, and the little platform shot ahead like a bat out of hell. Mircea grabbed me around the waist a second later, appearing out of the darkness and vaulting up behind me. He said a really filthy phrase in Romanian that I probably wasn’t supposed to know.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
The train had disappeared around a bend and we leaned left and followed, scooting around the corner at what had to be fifty miles an hour. We didn’t bother discussing a plan, because the plan was simple: find him; kill him. I actually wanted that bastard’s head more than the kidnapper’s, who at least didn’t appear to want my mother dead.
Right after we took out the goddamned Spartoi.
I leaned forward a little more, to the point that I risked tipping over, trying to milk every ounce of speed out of the spell. It should have been insanely frightening, rocketing into a pitch-dark tunnel with seemingly no end in sight, and no way to know if we were about to take a header into a wall. But apparently fear and fury don’t work together, because I didn’t feel anything but hurry, hurry, hurry thrumming through my veins and echoing in my ears, along with the growing rattle of the train up ahead.
And then light flooded the tunnel and we passed a station filled with people staring in the opposite direction, probably wondering why the hell the train had just barreled by without stopping. Or maybe they were wondering about something else. Because a couple of seconds later, we zipped into the tunnel’s mouth and almost ran into three figures streaking along ahead, barely discernable against the gloom.
It looked like the remaining Spartoi had arrived a little late to the party. But they were catching up fast, courtesy of some motor scooters they’d commandeered from somewhere and levitated. Two were on one and one was on another and they were tearing down the tunnel at a rate of speed that left them little more than blurs against the night.
I stared at them, horrified, because I’d just seen what one of these things could do. There was no way we could let three more get to that train. Just no way.
“Mircea—”
“I know. Get me close,” he said, like I had a choice. The damn tunnel was twelve, maybe thirteen feet across, and they were right in the middle of it. Which meant that anywhere I went was going to be close.
“Why?” I asked anyway.
And then we shot in between them, and I found out why.
Mircea savagely kicked the guy on one scooter, sending him crashing headfirst into the wall. And then he leaned over and kept him there, as we and the scooter and the guy shot ahead. Or, at least, most of the guy did. I was thankful that the headlight on the thing was jumping around, so that I didn’t get much more than a glimpse of the black streak left by his head as Mircea ruthlessly ground it into solid cement.
And then kicked him off and jumped on his scooter. The body went flying, tumbling back into darkness, and the scooter ricocheted away from the wall. And straight at the one driven by the other two guys.
