“Come out and face me!” Olga thundered. “Come out and die!”
And, this time, somebody did come out, but it wasn’t White Hair or Gravel Face. It wasn’t trolls at all. But vampires, what looked like a whole army of them, unleashed from doorways on both sides of the ground floor like an unending flood.
And while I was sure Olga’s crew was good, I didn’t think they were that good.
Until somebody else tore out of the truck—literally—grabbed Olga off the cab and then picked it up and threw it across the room. The approaching horde scattered, like pins when a bowling ball smashes through them. And another indescribable sound went up from every troll in the place, including from my throat because it was contagious. Blue roared and we roared with him, a deafening, earsplitting cry that shook the walls.
Then the two armies clashed, and everything was chaos.
“Part of Geminus’ family, my ass!” Ray yelled. “This is the whole thing—it’s gotta be!”
Yeah, it did. Which . . . was not going to work, for a variety of reasons, but I didn’t have time to list them right now. Because we’d been recognized.
A wave of vamps leapt for the balcony, and Ray and I grabbed stakes from Rufus’ suitcase and prepared for a back-to-back, no-holds-barred fight. I was trying to protect Rufus, and get him in between us, until I realized: he didn’t need it. He pushed me off, grabbed his case, and let loose.
For a moment, I just stood there, getting schooled. Because, sure, I bought some stuff to even the field from time to time, but I wasn’t a mage. And the difference between what I did and what a century-and-a-half-old magical arms dealer could do was . . . eye-opening.
Rufus had unfolded a stand from one side of his suitcase, making it into a little table. It looked like something a traveling magician would use, as a platform for card tricks or maybe pulling a bunny out of a hat. Only I didn’t see any bunnies.
What I did see were a flock of bolas made out of light that went sizzling through the air to wrap around vamp legs and then drag them backward, while sinking into their flesh as if trying to eat through it. I saw something scatter from a vial that was almost too bright to look at, a dazzle that strobed the room and caused the vamps heading for us to scream and shield their eyes, while their flesh burned and bubbled off their bones. I saw nets, made out of what looked like the same stuff as the webs at the theatre, that snared half of the oncoming assault. And then, Rufus sent a pulse through them, slammed back against the floor a story below, leaving the snared vamps sizzling and smoking and trolls enthusiastically stomping on their heads.
Yet the vamps just kept coming.
I saw a bunch of magical throwing stars, like mine but incredibly fast, zip through the crowd, flaying a path. I saw a dislocator hit a bunch of vamps, turning them into something that looked like a rat king, a single creature with numerous heads and limbs sticking out at odd angles. I saw a mass of black circles, filmy and indistinct, that fluttered out into the air like they were made out of tissue paper, and didn’t seem to do anything at all.
Until a handful landed on a vamp leaping for me and he suddenly looked like Swiss cheese. Because they weren’t circles; they were holes. And everywhere they touched, something suddenly went missing.
Yet the vamps just kept coming.
I got a stake in my latest problem, ducked under a knife swipe, and took out two more. Then jerked back the head of a guy trying to strangle Ray. Who pulled free, dodged under another assault, spun, and slit the vamp’s throat. And drenched us both in bright red blood, because he hadn’t even been a master.
But there were plenty that were. Enough that, barely a minute into the fight, Rufus switched to the big guns, although they didn’t look like it. They didn’t look like much of anything, just a handful of small silver disks, which put out tiny pincers and glommed on to the mass of shirts and trousers around us.
And then projected what looked like a bunch of quarter-sized swirls of color and light that opened up in front of the vamps, I didn’t know why.
And then I realized: they weren’t in front of the vamps.
“Oh shit! Oh fuck! Oh shit!” Ray said, as one of the nearest masters looked down—in time to see his whole midsection get sucked inside the growing portal.
It was the size of a saucer when it finished consuming his chest in a swirl of angry red flesh and yellowish fat, and a dinner plate by the time it pulled in his legs. And then I guess it ran out of steam. Because it winked out with the guy’s head still here and somehow still alive, with malevolent eyes staring, staring, staring—
Until I kicked it down the hall and looked up, panting.
And saw another wave headed our way.
It’s what people often forget about vamps, and what makes fighting them so damned hard: hurting them is easy—if you’re good and fast, or slow but tricky. But killing them is something else altogether. And if you don’t kill them, they just. Keep. Coming.
And then suddenly I was eating carpet.
Ray screamed, “Troll!” about the time that he smacked me and Rufus to the floor, and I looked up to see a couple thousand pounds of muscle slam overhead and into the wall behind us. The troll appeared to be dead, judging by the fact that half his torso was missing. But the body took out a bunch of vamps anyway, sending them crashing against the stone, and then smearing along the wall under his momentum. They left a bloody swath that stretched halfway down the corridor, but that wasn’t what had me staring.
I’d seen Blue survive a combined spell that would have taken down a platoon. Yet this troll had a burning crater in his chest, and had also been flung from halfway across the building. What the fuck?
And then Rufus suddenly stopped with the magical mayhem and threw up a shield. One that bloomed with angry colors a second later, along with scrabbling, burning vamps. Because somebody hadn’t waited for their allies to get out of the way before lobbing an attack.
“Mages!” someone yelled; it might have even been me. I wasn’t sure because, while the shield had saved our asses, it also acted like a kettledrum, trapping the sound of all those spells inside. To the point that I thought my head might burst.
Rufus did something to tone the sound down, enough that I could hear Ray yelling at me. “Call Marlowe!”
“I can’t call Marlowe!”
“You have to—we’re getting slaughtered here!”
“And half the city will go with us if they set those weapons off! Some pissed-off trolls probably won’t do it, because they’ll think they can take them—”
“Probably because they can!”
“—but Marlowe’s men show up, and it’s over!”
“It’s over anyway if we’re stuck behind this shield!”
He had a point.
I fished out my phone and called somebody, but it wasn’t Marlowe.
“Roberto?” I yelled, barely able to hear myself.
“Dory.” The thick, rounded Italian syllables always made it sound like he was eating. Of course, he usually was. “You got Stan’s truck? He keeps bugging me. Pretty soon, I gotta bug you. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’ll get around to it! I’m partying with my boys over at Oceanid right now—”
“That place closed down.”
“They said that’s what they told you! I said they’d better pay you your percentage, ’cause this is your turf—everybody knows that! But they’re laughing over here—”
“Laughing?”
“—about this being your territory! Said they’re taking over—”
“I got a deal with Geminus!” The wolf growl was starting to eclipse the mellow Italian vowels.
“But Geminus is dead, and they say you’ve run things long enough! They got a little troll problem at the moment, but as soon as it’s over, they’re coming for you—”
“They’re coming for me? I’m coming for them!”
“Better get here fast, then! And remember, the trolls are on your side!”
I hung up.
Ray just looked at me. “You think inviting a crazy were gang boss is gonna help?”