I wasn’t in pieces, but I hit hard. Hard enough to force all the breath out of my lungs, and to leave me gasping like a beached fish. Hard enough to ruin Radu’s couture with wooden splinters, some as big as knitting needles, suddenly sticking out of it. Almost hard enough to knock the bazooka from my suddenly numb hands.
Almost.
I snarled and lurched back to my feet, and swung the RPG launcher up at the same time. Louis-Cesare was throwing three more vamps off the balcony and elbowing a mage in the face without even turning around. Because he was looking at me.
He opened his mouth to say something, probably to ask, What the hell?—which yeah. Let me know when you find out, I thought. But then he caught something out of the corner of his eye, and his expression changed.
“Get down!” he yelled. “Get—”
What looked like a bunch of fifty-caliber rounds cut him off, strafing us from a box on the other side of the theatre. They ripped through the old hardwood like it was nothing, tore through the shoulder of a troll in the doorway, sending him staggering back into the hall. And would have torn through me—
Except that Louis-Cesare had just leapt from the neighboring box, taking a whole line of tank-killing rounds while knocking me out of the way.
I hit the floor with him on top, the once-perfect body a mangled piece of red flesh and white bone and—
I tried to scream, horror washing over me along with his blood. But my voice wasn’t under my control any more than my body. My head was already turning back toward the stage, my hands were pulling the bloody weapon out from under him, and my eyes were fixing back on target.
What are you doing? I yelled at Dorina. What the fuck—
“That.”
I felt my lips form the word, but nobody heard. Including me, because I’d just fired a rocket launcher, and didn’t have hearing protection. The resulting sound was so loud that, for a second, everything went absolutely quiet and almost still.
I could see blood droplets, flaming splinters, and a lone crystal from the chandelier, thrown back into space by the impact of the bullets, lazily turning. I could feel the sparks that edged the shell as it blasted out of the end of the weapon, glittering brightly in the gloom. I could trace the thin trail of smoke as it tore across the room—
Just as a magical grenade was palmed and primed and thrown downstairs, all in one swift gesture by another pair of hands.
Two explosions ripped across my vision; two redundant systems failed simultaneously. And the beautiful crystalline creatures dove as one, so fast that I barely saw them move before they were gone. Down, down, down to a flooding room lit by a spiral of light, where a portal’s maw had opened, spearing bright yellow beams through the floating debris.
I watched them through Dorina’s eyes as they poured through the portal, moving like quicksilver, visible only because of the silhouettes they cast against the light. And they weren’t the only things. The huge tank was emptying after them, its contents falling down the portal’s maw like water down a drain. Along with the body of the older guard, the floating crates, and the now-empty table, just a square of darkness against the portal’s light before it was swept away on a rushing tide of water.
But not enough of it.
Because it wasn’t just the wards below that had been taken out. I stared through drifting smoke at the great energy field over the stage, which a second ago had been hard as a rock and slick as glass. And which was now bucking and bowing and shimmering and—
“Get back!” I yelled—uselessly.
Because the next second, the ward shuddered and shook and broke, loosing the entire wall of water to come crashing down, all at once. And it looked like it had gone up higher than the curtains as well as deeper, because the heavy red velvet pieces went shooting off into the flood, ripped away by the force of the tsunami that had just been unleashed, right on top of us.
The wave slammed over the balcony, but I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t hear anything but the echo of the gun blending with the roar of the water until everything was sound. Like everything was suddenly cold and dark and liquid.
Well, almost everything.
Because Dorina’s hold over me had shattered along with the explosions. And as soon as it did I dove for the floor and Louis-Cesare, grabbing him right before the water hit, and clinging as we were swept over the balcony. And out into the room, falling half in water and half in air, before hitting the floor the same way.
Then the rest of the wave came down and tried to drown us.
I grabbed the only thing I could reach—a flat piece of wood that might have been flooring, because it wasn’t three inches thick—and held on. The great wave sloshed forward and then back, preparing for another surge this way, and I shoved Louis-Cesare onto the slab and braced over top of him. It was almost the same position I’d occupied earlier, under very different circumstances.
And then we were thrown forward again, the current propelling us and a dozen other stragglers up the incline, through the theatre doors, and across the ruined lobby. Where some ended up slammed into the wall, but not us. Louis-Cesare and I went shooting forward, straight out the front doors and into the street, on a swell big enough to surf on, which was practically what we were doing.
Until I looked up and saw a big white delivery truck and—
Chapter Twenty-six
“Augghhh!”
I screamed and sat up, staring around wildly.
At a darkened room.
My room, I realized, recognizing the mural on the far wall, splashed with moonlight.
And my bed, where I was lying next to—
There were running feet, a door crashing open, and a light flicking on, but I barely noticed. Because Louis-Cesare was beside me, and he was all right. He was all right!
Only, he wasn’t. He was out cold, in a healing trance, the kind vamps fall into when they need all their strength focused on repairing catastrophic damage. Damage I could still see in ridges and ripples of flesh, healed over but not yet smoothed out, what seemed like everywhere.
There was a huge indentation over his heart, with new, pink skin puckered and drawn around it. Another where his belly button should have been, except that it had been carved anew by hot metal, embedded pieces of which still ringed the crater the bullet had left. I pushed back the duvet and found a third wound in his thigh, angry and red and seeping into the bandage I pulled away.
It looked like a shark had taken a bite out of him.
There were other wounds, too, smaller but still visible, because a vampire’s body isn’t like a human’s. It prioritizes healing, putting the most dangerous wounds first. So the little lesions, which should have been closed in an instant, hadn’t been, because he’d needed, because he’d almost, because—
“Dory?”
There were other people here now, and he was naked. I should have been covering him back up, but I wasn’t. I was pulling him into my arms, crying and making sounds that weren’t screams, but weren’t not screams, either. And staring at the wall, my wall, which should have been comforting but wasn’t, because one of those shots had taken his heart. It had taken his heart, and if another had torn through his neck, or if a piece of shrapnel had—
“Dory. Dory, take this,” someone was saying, and trying to give me a cup of some hideous-smelling concoction.
I didn’t take it. I held on instead, rocking him slightly, I didn’t know why. Maybe to comfort him, although he didn’t know it. Maybe to comfort me. While a litany of no, no, no rang in my head, and may have come out of my mouth, but I couldn’t tell, didn’t care. Because he wouldn’t have suffered all that except for me, because he could have dodged any of those things but for me, because he deliberately—and I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—
“Dory!”
Someone snapped their fingers in front of my face, loud enough to make me blink.
It was Olga. I looked up to see her bending over the two of us, her hair in a mess. She had on a baby blue robe over a floral nightgown; I don’t know why I noticed that. She took my head between her hands—giant, strong, strangely comforting hands—and looked into my eyes.