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That suddenly burst off of the wall and came at me again.
“The fuck!” Marco said, grabbing and stabbing it over and over, and then Rian was back and we were suddenly somewhere else, somewhere with a cheering crowd and dazzling lights and a groaning buffet table.
I stared at the latter for a second, unable to keep up. And then I noticed: the crowd was still audible, but muffled. And the dazzling lights were outside a large viewing window, like a skybox at a stadium. And the well-dressed group around the buffet was looking at me with polite surprise, but no more. The most I received for standing there covered in black blood and panting at them was a slightly raised eyebrow.
And that was from Adra, the head of the demon council, who was looking as blandly agreeable as always.
“Is there a problem?” he asked pleasantly, right before Marco bellowed and went for him, because he’d somehow come along, too.
I tried to stop him, but a master vampire moves like lightning, and I didn’t even get my mouth open before he passed me in a blur of motion.
And then froze, midleap, held in place by nothing I could see, because Adra hadn’t so much as moved.
For a moment, everything stopped. There was no sound, other than the ocean crash of the crowd, no movement except for the thing that two master vamps had been trying to kill for the last minute wriggling off the end of Marco’s knife and scurrying away, no anything but a vampire suddenly realizing he wasn’t in Kansas anymore and rolling shocked dark eyes over at me.
I licked my lips.
And then Rian burst in from a door I hadn’t noticed, wild-eyed and frantic, her long dark hair tangled about her beautiful face. “They’re killing him!” she told me, grabbing my hand.
And we ran.
The sound of the crowd slapped me in the face when we burst out of the main room onto a balcony, a wide, plush thing like the suite behind us, and unlike the rest of the run-down stadium. But when I crossed the expanse and hung over the railing, I saw the same thing I had before, only from a better vantage point: Casanova in the middle of a sea of sand, being chased by half a dozen different kinds of creatures, and naked, bleeding, and defenseless—or as much as a master vampire ever is.
Which was looking pretty damned defenseless right now.
Rian stared down at him, her hand clenched, her face frantic and furious and terrified, as he narrowly avoided being skewered by what looked like a giant beetle. It was the same one that had almost steamrollered me, and I’d been wrong about the size. The legs were as big as cranes, the shell was the size of a house, and it must have been diamond hard, because the next second Casanova vaulted over the top of it and brought down two joined fists with a master’s strength behind them.
And didn’t even dent it.
The creature had better luck, flinging him off with a twisting motion. And the legs, which might have been huge but were really freaking fast nonetheless, started slamming down, here, there, everywhere, which was pretty easy considering that the thing had six. And Casanova was doing what looked like interpretive dance but was more like fleeing for his life while the creature’s movements threw up huge spouts of sand, half hiding him from view.
And then they did hide him, as the thing stopped trying to skewer him and started trying to bury him instead, crashing down against the soil and flinging up great gobs of sand on top of its shell with every leg it had.
Until I shifted it to the other end of the arena, in a move that sent me to my knees, whether because of the thing’s size or because we weren’t on earth anymore, I wasn’t sure.
“Cassie—Cassie!” somebody was yelling, I think it was Rian. Possibly because my blurry vision showed me that I’d just expended a lot of power for very little result. I stared through railings as Casanova clawed his way out of the sand, his usual Spanish good looks dirt-streaked and wild-eyed, although the latter might have had something to do with the fact that the massive beetle thing was already on its way back toward him.
So I flipped it, and oh God, not good, not good, not good, I thought as a wave of crippling nausea hit like a sledgehammer, hard enough to drop me the rest of the way to the floor. But I had to get it together, because something was happening. And I doubted it was anything good, because when was it ever? And because the crowd seemed to like it.
The upswell of sound from below was almost deafening even this high up, adding to the confusion in my head and the pounding in my ears and the sickening queasiness in my gut when I grabbed Rian’s hand, trying to get back to my feet.
And discovered that it was Adra’s hand instead.
“Impressive,” he told me, hauling me up as easily as if I weighed nothing.
He looked like a pudgy banker today, in a nicely pressed gray suit that I was seriously considering hurling all over.
But I didn’t. Because I could see the arena over his shoulder, and . . . and it hadn’t been so bad, after all. I let go of his hand to grab the railing, in time to see a bunch of the little bug things attack the big bug thing. Along with some other things, half of which made my brain hurt to look at them, because I guess the glamourie couldn’t do anything with them, either. But they suddenly surged forward, having been hugging the sidelines, waiting for scraps, but were now seeing an opportunity for a feast instead.
Because the big beetle was still on its back, rocking side to side, trying to get back up but not having much luck. Maybe because it was being chowed down on by what had to be a hundred other creatures. And I guess the belly wasn’t as hard as the shell, because they were chowing fast.
I looked away, relieved and sickened in about equal measure. Until I caught sight of Casanova running back this way, looking up at us and yelling something I couldn’t hear over the crowd. But I guess Adra did, because he glanced over as well, and shook his head.
“Denied.”
And I guess Casanova heard that, because he started waving his arms furiously and screaming something I still couldn’t hear but didn’t have to.
“What—what’s denied?” I asked as Rian stared at Adra with open hate on her face.
