“Can it hurt?”
“Yeah! Like when he figures out that you set him up to—” Ray broke off and stared at something behind me. “Shit.”
“Shit? What’s shit?” And then I followed his gaze. “Shit!”
Because Curly hadn’t gone to the john, after all. I could just make him out, through the psychedelic shield, standing on the third-floor balcony across from us with something in his hands. It looked like some sort of controller, small and black and—yeah. It was controlling things, all right.
Or maybe it was a total coincidence that one of the big, round doorways suddenly opened up like the floodgates had lifted—or like a portal had reversed—to gush water down onto the frenzied crowd. Satins were drenched, silks were ruined, and people went slip-sliding for the doors, those who hadn’t already been headed that way because of the massive brawl going on.
“I knew he was too willing to come along!” Ray raged. “He planned this!”
Yeah, he had. I couldn’t hear him, even with dhampir senses, but I could lip-read. “Payback time, bitches!”
Great.
And then it was. It really, really was. Because it wasn’t just water squeezing through the big, round opening. It was—
“What the fuck is that?” Ray screamed, sounding almost outraged.
I laughed the laugh of the faintly hysterical, because Cthulhu had just made his entrance, or something that looked like him. Well, it would if he were scarlet and three stories tall. As it was, I guessed it was a combatant from Faerie.
And it was pissed.
The creature started laying waste with arms the size of tree trunks—if the trees in question were redwoods—and a maw full of holy hell that could spear a vamp clean through and then fling him the length of the room to splat against the pretty windows.
Okay, I thought.
All right!
Then I realized: we were still losing.
“How are we still losing?” Ray demanded, as half the mages and a good number of the vamps peeled off from us to attack Big Red. Yet Rufus was still sweating bullets trying to maintain the shield. And out in the fray, I saw a mage materialize a glowing spear and run it through three trolls at once.
“What . . . the hell . . . are they doing?” Rufus panted, his dark eyes pained. “How are they . . . this strong?”
“They’re using the merchandise,” I said, staring around.
“What?”
“They have to be.” But I couldn’t see—
And then I did.
“There!” I pointed to a couple vamps with a very familiar-looking crate on the far side of the room by the windows. Another crate was already open and the contents were being passed around, which was probably why a charge of maybe twenty trolls was repulsed like it was nothing, sending them slamming backward what had to be thirty yards. And why a bunch more were already floating facedown in what was now hip-deep water.
“Olga was right,” Ray said, gripping my arm. “They’re gonna kill ’em using weapons made out of their own people!”
“No, they’re not.” I scanned the room again. “Stay here.”
“What?”
“Just guard Rufus for a minute, okay?”
“What are you—no!” And then, when he realized what was about to happen: “No, don’t you dare!”
But I did, because I didn’t have a choice. Another minute of those things, and there wouldn’t be anybody on our side left standing. And it wasn’t going to go down like that.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, and jumped.
The shield Rufus had thrown up was the kind that let people out, but not in. Although, judging by the expression of the vamp I grabbed, nobody had really expected me to leave. Or to use him as a buffer to keep the mages’ spells off me while I leapt over the balcony and into thin air—
And grabbed one of the little black camera balls as it whizzed past.
The sizzling body of the vamp fell into the drink, and I took off—under an enormous, slashing tentacle; through another huge waterfall that had just opened up; and out the other side, drenched and gasping, only to slam into a line of vamps leaning over the railing, one of which grabbed me. And found himself flung into the windows a second later, when I popped a leg, and looked around for—
Yes!
“Richard! Richard Kim!”
The shout was unnecessary, because the reporter had already spotted me. He was standing on the balcony below Curly and staring at me with his mouth hanging open, I have no idea why. I waved the ball around at him, and then pointed with my toes, since my hands were busy.
“Over there! Send me there!”
But he didn’t send me there. He didn’t send me anywhere. He just stood there, the controller limp and useless in his hands, while the camera and I went around and around in a little circle.
“Dick!” I said fervently, as a vamp jumped up at me from the floor.
And missed, because Richard suddenly got with the program and swerved me abruptly to the side.
And then sent me careening through a minefield of leaping vampires, slashing water, and a merman that tried to stab me with a trident, because I guess to him all humans look alike. But I did a handstand on the ball and he ended up stabbing the vamp jumping up behind me instead. And then I jerked his weapon out of the vamp and sent it flying into the group around the crate.
What looked like blue-white electricity spidered across the knot of vamps, causing some to fall out and everyone else to look around in shock. Right before I added to the chaos by plowing into the middle of them. I grabbed the crate, hit a vamp in the head with it, got hit back, saw stars, and ended up hanging off the camera ball by my knees with the crate in my hands, while three—make that four—vamps tried to pull it away from me.
But the camera was stronger than it looked, and kept on tugging, and I hung on to the crate with one hand while I used the other to get a stake in the lead guy. He let go, and since the others had been holding on to him, they all fell back, too, and suddenly I was flying.
Straight at someone who had just appeared on the balcony, grabbed the remote from Richard, and used it to jerk me over to him. Somebody with a topknot of dark braids and burning, alien eyes. Somebody who looked like he’d like to rip my throat out like the vampire he wasn’t, but which the damned bitch riding him had once been.
James. I felt my lips form the word, but no sound came out. It was okay; there was nothing of the man I knew in those eyes anyway.
But there was surprise when I tossed the crate to Olga, grabbed the ball with one hand and him with the other, and jerked him over the balcony.
“I have the controller,” the thing that wasn’t James snarled. “What do you think this is going to do?”
“This.”
I used my feet to push off from the railing, as hard as I could, sending us speeding back into the thick of the fight—and straight into the path of one of Cthulhu’s thrashing limbs.
The next thing I knew, I was eating stone on the other side of the room.
Chapter Fifty-nine
I don’t know how fast we were going when we hit the wall, but it was officially too damned fast. I felt myself peel away and fall heavily to the floor, the slo-mo vamp senses that were supposed to protect me kicking in a split second too late. They didn’t help with the blow, but did make it feel like I took a long time to crash down, giving me a chance to notice an imprint of my made-up face that had been left behind on the plaster.
Huh.
And then James was on me.
He must have somehow gotten a shield up in the maybe two seconds he’d had, because he wasn’t looking all that affected. Or maybe you didn’t with a vargr riding you. After all, they didn’t care how much damage they caused their avatar, but I did. Which would have left me at a disadvantage if I’d been planning to fight him, but I wasn’t.