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And I didn’t.
At least, not us.
I knew that because a second later, we were still sitting in the same puddle of spilled hell juice, inside the same cleaved-in table, in front of the same murderous guard. But the pillar that had been over there . . .
Was now over here.
With a wicked-looking blade stuck halfway through the middle of it.
“What did you do?” Casanova screeched, his voice reaching into the falsetto. Maybe because the tip of the blade had stopped inches away from his crossed eyes.
I stared at the blade, and then out the window, which was still shuffling like a deck of cards. And thought maybe I knew. “This is the Shadowland,” I hissed as the guard started trying to pull his blade out.
“So?”
I grabbed Casanova’s head and turned it toward the window. “So you can think things how you want them!”
“But . . . but that’s just about how it looks.”
“You sure?” I said as the frustrated warrior gave a roar and punched the stubborn post.
Which promptly moved a foot backward and smashed into his face.
And punched him back.
“See what you mean,” Casanova said as the guy fell on his ass, an imprint of the day’s specials stamped onto his forehead.
And then several more guards rushed to their buddy’s aid. And had the table halves slung at their heads by a rapidly sobering vampire. And then we were rolling and yelping and crawling along the filthy floor, trying to keep the bar’s pillars between us and the guys trying to kill us.
But that’s a little hard when you’re rattling around between wildly shuffling pieces of wood, like a pinball in a particularly aggressive game.
Or make that impossible. A pillar suddenly appeared in the space right in front of me, causing me to almost break my nose. Casanova banged into another, fell back into a sprawl, and had a third slam into being between his legs.
An expression of mingled pain and fury came over his wine-flushed face. And then an unfortunate guard decided to hit a vamp while he was down, and lunged for him. And got batted back toward the door like a baseball when Casanova jumped up, grabbed a chair, and started swinging.
“Shift us!” he yelled.
“I can’t!”
“What?”
“My power is acting up—”
“What?”
I jumped to the side to avoid a guard who came sliding by on his back. And then again to miss the creature chasing him. And then had a third start a weird dodging dance with me, his sword and the pillar I was somehow keeping in front of me as a shield.
Because it looked like Rosier’s oath not to kill me didn’t extend to his people.
And, okay, this was no time for an explanation of the difficulty of using my power outside earth. Or the fact that I was having problems with it even back home. Or the fact that I didn’t understand what those problems were. There was only one thing that mattered right now, with Casanova staring daggers at me because I couldn’t twitch my nose and get us out of every possible situation.
“I can’t shift, damn it! Think of something else!”
But Casanova didn’t want to think; he wanted to bitch at me. “You came to hell with no way to get out? Are you insa—”
He broke off as three guards jumped him, apparently mistaking constant whining for weakness.
But Casanova wasn’t weak. He preferred to let other people to deal with his problems, preferably while he stood around and informed them about what they were doing wrong. But when it came down to it, he was perfectly capable of throwing down—and to the side, and through a window—as the guards quickly learned.
