The first group had mostly avoided our box because of the crazed mage. But he’d gotten thrown over the side, and now they had a clear field. And even trolls couldn’t fight with no blood in their bodies.
As several demonstrated almost before I’d finished the thought, huge living boulders suddenly falling to their knees. And to drain a fey that fast, we weren’t talking rank and file here. We were talking—
“Masters!” Ray screamed.
Shit.
The only good thing was that the destroyed wall had left a mass of flaming bits lying around. Shards and splinters of old hardwood, still burning merrily, including on a sheet of paneling directly in front of me. And then in the air after I picked it up and flung it with everything I had at the approaching lineup.
The weight of the slab knocked several of them off the box, the burning shrapnel set more alight and one piece caught a guy straight through the heart. He wouldn’t die—his head was intact—but he was out for the count. Unlike several others, including one blond-haired master who I danced with all across the box, weaving in and out of the battle going on inside, and stabbing him three different times while he tried to drain me.
But you need line of sight for that, and I kept dodging behind trolls. I finally saw an opening, slashed hard across his throat then stabbed directly downward. I was using a wooden shard, not a knife, so that should have been it. But he dodged at the last second, so the blow missed the heart. And then, with an elegant somersault backward into the darkness, he was gone.
I leaned over the edge of the box, panting and light-headed, with a snarl on my lips, because I don’t let prey walk away! But he was nowhere to be seen. But something else was. I realized I was wreathed in a faint yellowish green glow, spreading out from where the master had just been.
Geminus’ family aura, Louis-Cesare confirmed, before I could ask. I was still getting used to seeing auras, the power signatures all vamps gave off that told their family histories at a glance. They’d been invisible before the wall fell in my head, because the skill for seeing them was on Dorina’s side of the brain. But now I could—
And this one made no sense at all.
Why? Louis-Cesare asked. Geminus’ family was huge. The Senate thought they killed all of his masters who were involved with the smuggling trade, but it’s reasonable that they missed a few.
This isn’t a few! And Curly just said—
But I didn’t have time to go into what Curly had said. Because the next wave was about to hit, with mages as well as vamps. And these didn’t look like the pansy-ass guards.
The mages couldn’t jump two stories like the vamps, but that didn’t seem to be slowing them down any. They threw glimmering strands of magic at the top of Louis-Cesare’s box, where they clung like Spidey’s web—and acted like it, too. A ripple of white light tore through them, they abruptly tightened, and the mages went flying through the air like they were riding huge rubber bands.
Allowing them to hit Louis-Cesare with half a dozen spells, all at once.
I felt my heart stop, because even a master could go down under something like that. But the spells didn’t seem to work. They hit, but he didn’t so much as flinch, and nothing happened.
Except that the wounds he’d been healing suddenly started seeping again.
That included a large gash across his stomach that he’d closed so fast it hadn’t even had time to stain his shirt. It was staining it now, in a bright red flood that made my heart clench, even before I started to run. And found that my legs had other ideas.
No! Damn it, let me go! But Dorina didn’t listen. Instead, she threw me back at the wall, where the bicycle was propped up on its little kickstand, the shiny blue and silver paint job reflecting the fighting and the fire and my desperate face.
Because antihealing spells were a bitch. They’d make a human bleed like a hemophiliac until he bled out, and even for a vamp, they could be deadly. They wouldn’t kill you themselves, but they’d slow your healing down enough that an obliging enemy could do it for them. I didn’t know how badly they’d affect a first-level master, but it was safe to say that the field had just gotten a lot more level.
But I couldn’t do anything about it, because I was busy playing with the damned bike!
My hands moved expertly over it, without any input from me, while Louis-Cesare began ripping chairs from the floor and throwing them and everything else he could find at the mages. It seemed to be working. Half of them were knocked over the side, with several getting tangled in their own safety nets, like butterflies trapped in cocoons. And the rest couldn’t seem to dodge and also concentrate well enough to throw a spell. But it left him unable to help Ray.
Who looked like he needed it.
A high-level master was holding Ray’s hands immobilized over his head with one of his own. He’d forced the smaller vamp to his knees with a little smirk, but hadn’t thought to turn him around. Probably assuming that Ray was too weak to bother with such precautions, because most guys at his level would have been.
Ray wasn’t most guys.
He didn’t bother trying to break the hold, which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. He just popped some fang and went straight for something below the guy’s belt. And a vamp’s bite is kind of like a crocodile’s; getting one to release when he doesn’t want to is no freaking joke.
Which probably explains why the guy turned purple and threw up. And why Ray was able to break his hold, rip his throat open, and then flip him over the balcony. He saw me looking and spread his hands.
“Huh? Huh?”
I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t, and because somebody on this side was trying to stab me in the eye. Only to find something suddenly sticking out of his own. The mage fell over, a shocked look on what was left of his face, and I stared upward—at Olga, wrenching a long, skinny blade out of his head, in order to whirl around and slash it through the belly of someone else.
Red splattered and she roared, standing over me with a bloodied sword like a modern-day Boudicca. The sound was echoed by the trolls still in the box and the ones in the corridor outside, where a major battle had broken out. And then everybody went running for the door, because our box was temporarily clear.
Everybody except me.
I looked down to see that the bike’s wheels and handlebars had been taken off, along with various other bits. But the strangely thick center piece was still there, now a fat tube bigger than any bike could possibly need for support. And with a little scope that popped up from the base.
Shit. I tried to cry out, to tell someone that something very bad was about to happen, but my tongue refused to form the words. And even if it hadn’t, I doubted I’d have been heard over the screaming, which had reached highest-hill-on-the-roller-coaster levels, and the continued gunfire, and the bam, bam, crunch of a troll smacking somebody against the floor and walls and possibly ceiling outside.
Meanwhile, I was getting back to my feet and moving to a central position in the box. And resting the no-longer-bicycle on my shoulder, aiming for the bright gold crest over top of the stage. And screaming in my head, because I still didn’t know why.
Redundant system. Got a control upstairs as well as down, echoed in my thoughts.
Shit, shit, shit!
The only good thing was that the former bicycle was damned hard to steady, with the whole theatre now in mass-exodus mode, with enough pounding feet below to shake the box up above.
Or maybe that was the shaft of orange light that suddenly speared upward, shattering the boards in front of me and throwing me back against the wall. Along with the remaining chairs, the mountain of debris, and the cute baby chandelier that had been glittering overhead. And was now in pieces raining down everywhere.