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And I might have been wrong about the viper thing, I thought, staring. Because a second later—like a literal second—she’d wrapped him up in those giant coils and squeezed. And she squeezed hard.
His eyes bulged, his face darkened, and he thrashed hard enough to knock a hole through another wall and into what looked like a ballroom. But the consul held on, even when he morphed back into an eel, thinning and elongating his body and almost slipping out of her grasp. But Mircea, Marlowe, and Caedmon had grabbed spears off the fallen, and now they stabbed them through the beast’s tail and into the floor, pinning it in place.
Or they tried. But it thrashed so hard that it shot the weapons back out as huge, flying projectiles that turned the nearby walls—and some of the guards who had been unfortunate enough to be standing in front of them—into porcupines. One swipe of that great tail also sent Marlowe, who was both a master vamp and a senate member, slamming back through the ruined waiting room and into the office as if he were nothing.
He flew by me and crashed into the far wall, although he didn’t go through it. But he hit hard enough to shake the whole room and to send the chandelier swinging wildly overhead. But a second later he was up and snarling, his fangs out, his eyes glowing.
And a second after that, the wall behind the great beast was being riddled with holes as large as cannonballs. The blasts—from Marlowe’s master power, at a guess—blew plaster and brick and marble sheeting everywhere, causing the screams from the fleeing people to reach a crescendo. But they didn’t blow through the creature, who dodged them easily.
It really was faster than a vamp, I thought, barely believing my own eyes. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I saw guards and even senators looking around in confusion, the way humans usually did when they saw vamps move. The only ones who seemed able to keep up with it were the consul and Caedmon, and they clearly weren’t going to be taking it down alone.
What was this thing?
I didn’t know, but a second later Marlowe was back in the fray, where Mircea had commandeered a forest of spears from arriving soldiers. And it seemed they’d learned from last time, driving them almost up to their hilts in the stone floor. The creature didn’t seem to have so easy a time throwing them off after that, any more than it did the old soldier, who had been stabbing and slicing and riding it like a bucking bronco this whole time. Or the consul, who just tightened her grip no matter what it did, matching it move for move.
It looked like a stalemate, with neither of them able to get an advantage over the other. But that was good enough, I realized, relief flooding me. All she had to do was hold it there while her men finished it off!
Only I guess the creature had figured that out, too. Because it abruptly changed form again, this time into a giant squid, with seemingly a tentacle for every attacker. They were huge, each of them almost as big around as the consul’s alter ego, but they looked like water—almost clear except for sickly pink suckers on the undersides—and flowed like it, too.
They contracted back through her coils like deflated balloons, only to expand again once free, at which point they tried to wrap her up.
The two of them fought the big battle, writhing together in a constant, mind-bending coil that felt like it was turning my brain inside out. While new, weirdly fluid arms just poured around the spears that had been pinning it down, and then slid off, leaving the vamps looking like they were trying to stab water. The latest version of the creature had also finally neutralized the old soldier, sucking him in and leaving him floating in the gelatinous mass of its body, unable to fight or even to move.
We were losing, I realized in shock. Two demigods, a consul, and a small army of senior vampires, and we were losing. How was this possible?
But it was, and I’d brought that thing here; this was my fault. I had to help, but I was out of power, to the point that I couldn’t even stand. I tried anyway, but only flopped back down, sliding in blood when my le
gs gave out from underneath me.
Billy popped up beside me as I stared at the battle helplessly. “Cass! What are you doing? They need you!”
I just looked at him numbly. “I don’t . . . have anything . . . left.”
“But I do!” he snarled, also staring at that thing. “Use it well, ’cause it’s all I got.” And the next second, I felt it—something like the outpouring of power that took place whenever I fed him to increase his stamina or range. But this time it was pouring back into me, a rush of strength, of life, that practically pulled me off the floor and onto my feet.
I felt Billy flow into his necklace to keep from fading, while I staggered and almost fell, my body trying to adjust to the sudden, dizzying return of power.
But not much of it. Billy was a ghost, not a god; he only had so much to give. But it was something, maybe enough for a single spell. Not a time stoppage; no way could I manage that. But maybe one of the easier ones—
My thoughts cut out and I hit the ground again as a blast of blood and body parts exploded through the air above me. The latest group of guards, I realized, as legs and arms and other things began raining down everywhere, battering me like fleshy hail. And then scrabbling around and kicking out after they hit the floor in a hundred squirming pieces, because they were vampire body parts, and they weren’t dead.
Not yet, I thought sickly.
But we were all going to be pretty soon, because this latest incarnation of the creature was laying waste.
Rafe’s beautiful sketches were splattered with gore as another wave of guards arrived—just grist for the mill. The guards couldn’t handle this any more than the regular soldiers could. Call the army, I tried to scream, but there was blood in my mouth, a great gout of it sliding down my throat, threatening to choke me.
I spat it out, but before I could try again, I saw Mircea yelling something at the remaining troops. I couldn’t hear him, but I didn’t have to. The gestures were eloquent.
And I suddenly realized that we had a bigger problem than I’d thought.
The tent city was just outside, filled with soldiers who not only didn’t have a demon partner yet, but in many cases weren’t even really soldiers. The blond musician whose thoughts I’d drifted through had been right. Many masters weren’t sending their best; they were sending those they considered expendable, the ones they didn’t care much if they never saw again.
And if that thing broke through a few more walls, they wouldn’t.
There was a good chance that the only reason the creature hadn’t gone after them yet was because it didn’t know where it was. It had been outside before, in the tent city, when it was possessing the redhead. It hadn’t been in here, and shifts tended to be disorienting anyway. It might not know how close it was to its former prey.
But any minute now, it was going to find out.
