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“Fuck,” I said, with feeling.
“What?” Casanova’s head whipped around. “What now?”
“That now,” I said, pointing.
“What?”
“Allû.”
“Allû?” For a second, he stared blankly at the nearest carpet, and then his face changed. “Fuck!”
And yeah, that about summed them up. The Allû were the council’s personal guards, who were usually camped out in the Shadowland making life in hell a little more hellish for anybody who dared to cross their demonic masters. But occasionally they got sent on errands, like when the council really wanted somebody dead.
And they usually got their wish, since their freakish army couldn’t actually die. I knew because I’d fought them before. Not that that experience was likely to help much at the moment, since it had mostly involved me getting killed over and over again. I’d been caught in a time loop and kept “resurrecting” whenever time reset itself, until I finally figured out a way to beat them.
Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have a hundred chances to get it right.
“Take us closer!” I told Casanova, trying to grab the edge of Pritkin’s rug as we headed back up again. But it was moving, too, as half a dozen men and creatures fought on top of it, and the fringe barely brushed my fingers.
Which was just as well, since an Allû fell off the rug a second later, burning from a fire spell and barely missing us on its way to slam into the floor far below. And then to get up, still burning. And to run to the nearest building to rejoin the fight.
A second later it burst back onto the roof, moving so fast that the oxygen made the flames lick up all the faster. Its outer robes were already mostly gone, with just a few flaming tatters still clinging to the metal underneath, which was now glowing red hot. Not that the Allû appeared to notice.
But Casanova did, the flames from the burning demon reflecting in his horrified eyes as he stared at me. “Are you insane? Shift us out of here!”
“I only have strength for maybe one shift, if I’m lucky,” I told him. And that was assuming I could concentrate. But it was the only chance Pritkin had.
The good news was, the Allû didn’t use spells. The bad news was, they didn’t need them. They were freakishly strong, unbelievably fast, and impervious to pain since they didn’t seem to actually have bodies in there. As far as I’d ever been able to tell, they were nothing more than animated suits of armor.
Which kind of limited attack strategy. The only way I’d found to get rid of them was to completely destroy that armor. As in shred it to bits with a submachine gun or blow it the hell up, or else they just kept coming back.
Or got bored and decided to start tossing those wicked blades around. Suddenly, the air was filled with shiny death, one of which Casanova grabbed as it passed over top of us. And used it to bat away several others that were tumbling our way because of our crazy course or plain bad luck.
But not because they were being aimed at us.
They were being aimed at Pritkin.
“Get me up there!” I told him, in a panic. Our tiny craft was still bouncing around, but it was well below the level of Pritkin’s now. He and Rosier had just sent a bunch of their attackers flying, and the sudden lack of weight had caused them to shoot upward.
“I’m not a mage!” Casanova said furiously. “I don’t know how to drive this thing!”
“Then think of something!”
“What do you expect me to do?” he demanded. “Jump? There’s simply—” He caught sight of my expression. “No.”
“You’re a vampire. You’ll live.”
“It five floors down!”
“It’s closer to four now—”
“That’s four too many!”
“—and there’s a wagon down there with hay—”
“It’s fake! This whole place is fake!”
“You owe me!” I said, grabbing his arm. “You led me into a trap!”
