“You don’t know that!” She glared at him. “You don’t know what he is—what any of them are! And I won’t—”
Mircea couldn’t see her anymore, as she’d moved out of his limited range of vision. But the sound of another slap was unmistakable. As were her renewed screams afterward. Like before, they sounded as much of fury as of pain.
“Cut it out!” the bruiser said.
“Why?” It was the scrawny man’s voice. “If she won’t work, she’s no good t’us.”
“Oh, she’ll work. And we need her pretty.”
“I won’t, I tell you!” It was the woman again. “I can’t—”
“You can and you will. If we have t’train another, it’s going to hold things up, and we haven’t time for that.”
“I don’t care!” A sudden gasp. “Let go of me!”
“Why? If you don’t get back to it, you’ll be servicing worse than us soon. Or have you forgotten what that’s like?”
“Stop it! Let me go!”
“I’ll stop it when you come t’yer senses.” He laughed. “Or maybe when I’m finished.”
“You’ll stop it now.”
The voice came from neither of the three humans. But from someone else who had slipped through the portal while everyone was distracted. And dropped to the ground, silent and unnoticed, which wasn’t surprising. Even now, looking right at him, Mircea couldn’t really see him. Just a vague, human-shaped shadow, slightly darker than the rest, but which could have been a trick of the light flickering in a nearby lantern.
“We were just—” the bruiser began, before a brief gesture cut him off.
“On deck.” The voice was a hoarse rasp. “Prepare for docking.”
The bruiser looked like he was about to argue, but for once, the gaunt sailor was smarter. “Come on.” He tugged at his companion’s arm.
They went back upstairs.
The vampire looked at the redhead. She’d moved back into view, holding her cheek. The shadow pushed her hand away, and ignored the shudder that went through her. “My apologies,” he murmured, healing the reddened flesh with a touch.
“I won’t do it,” she told him, her voice shaking. “I can’t—”
“Shh.” He dragged a finger down the side of her face. From a human, it would have been an affectionate or possibly sensual gesture. In this case . . . it reminded Mircea of nothing so much as a horseman soothing a startled filly. It reeked of possession.
But it seemed to work.
The redhead’s eyelids fluttered, and she sank down beside the wall, her head already lolling.
“Sleep.” He told her. “Forget.”
And then she was out.
Chapter Thirty-eight
“Hey. Hey, wake up.”
I grumbled and turned over. Or I tried. But my knee hit something, and a loud horn blasted my eardrum, and I sat up abruptly.
And hit my head.
“Take it easy!”
My eyes focused on Fin, who was peering in the car door down by my feet.
“So, you want the cherry slushie or—” He stopped, and squinted at something neon blue in an oversized cup. “Whatever the hell this is?”
I blinked at him, slowly realizing that I’d been sleeping in my car.
He pushed the cups at me again.
“They didn’t have cola?” I croaked.
“Like I know. I don’t got a charm with me, so whaddya think’s gonna happen if I go in the store like this?”
I took a cup from him. It was cold. “Then who did?”
He looked at something over my shoulder, and I twisted around. To see a massive silhouette against a glittering skyline, a bunch of dark water, and a half-sunk boat. And a little wild-haired woman standing on a rock dabbing at a hulk’s shoulder.
“Wha’ happened?” I asked blearily.
“We started to take on water. Don’t you remember?”
Vaguely.
“Ah, you were high as a kite, on all those disorienting charms. Whaddya do? Take one full in the face?”
“A crate full.” And now I had the hangover from hell.
“Yeah, and who knows what else was in there. Why didn’t you just run out the door, like the rest of us?”
I glared at him around the side of the ICEE I was holding to my throbbing head. “Gee. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Ah, sarcasm. Good. Means you’re okay.”
“Wait.” I’d slumped down and now I sat up. And hit my head again. Son of a bitch! “How’d I get the car?” I called after Fin, who had started walking back toward the gas station we were parked beside.
And was almost hit by a truck barreling into bay number two.
“Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
He made a rude gesture at the driver.
“Fin!”
He turned around. “You ran back for it. Then drove back here to meet us and collapsed.”
He walked off before I could ask anything else, slurping on the cherry ICEE, while the truck driver and I stared at him. I got tired of it first and climbed out of the car. It took a lot longer than normal.
And a lot more effort.
I leaned against the hood, panting and drinking neon blue stuff for a while, because at least it was cold. The night wasn’t, and after the jog I didn’t remember, my sweats were living up to their name.
The gas station was up a hill from the waterfront, with some apartments on one side and a storage facility on the other. A scraggly tree grew down near the rocks, which were covered in graffiti, like the ones by the warehouse. New graffiti, because it was super bright and seemed to move in my peripheral vision whenever I looked away from it.
Squiggle.
Look.
Squiggle.
Look.
Trippy.
Especially with Dorina’s memories, or whatever the hell they were, still sloshing about my cranium.
Sometimes it felt like she was trying to tell me something, like when she gave me that mental slap for thinking I’d had it worse than her. But sometimes it felt like I’d just plugged into random bits of her memories—or Mircea’s, because she seemed to have riffled through his brain a lot, taking whatever she wanted. I wondered if the great mentalist had known that he was being spied on, and by his baby daughter, at that.
Or one of them.
A spike of pain tore through my temples, and I went down to my haunches, holding my head. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. I wanted the stiff drink I hadn’t gotten at Fin’s. I wanted the landscape to stop slinging around every time I freaking moved!
After a while, it did, staying mostly steady when I looked up. But I decided there was a slight chance I wasn’t in any shape to drive right now. I drank some more of big blue, and then I decided that I might as well go and meet the other one—formally, this time.
I got up and walked across the road.
The big guy was down the incline, slumped under the tree, trying to get as low as possible, so his diminutive assistant could treat his wounds. He had a lot of them. Cuts and gouges, some deep, which I guess had been the result of flying shrapnel. What looked like a potion burn on the side of his face, which had barely missed an eye. And something I’d seen before: a chest that was almost black, eclipsing the copper highlights that gleamed on his shoulders in the distant gas station lights, and which I now knew meant bleeding under the skin.
He’d gotten himself a gargantuan bruise, I guess from where the mages’ combined spell had hit. It looked painful, but the fact that it hadn’t torn through his chest was nothing short of miraculous. A combined spell was a bitch.
I offered him the rest of my ICEE, and to my surprise, he took it. And seemed to like the flavor.
Or maybe he was just thirsty. He drank it in about five seconds, before I could warn him about brain freeze, but I guess that wasn’t a thing for trolls. Because he immediately looked around for more.
“I’ll get you another,” I offered, because I had a certain amount of fellow feeling. And because I’d just remembered that convenience stores carry beer. “You want something?” I asked Granny, who shook her head.
“Got it covered,” she told me, and pulled a hip flask out of a pocket. “But some more Bactine would be good. And some of that tape they use for bandages.”
“Okay.”
I wandered back to the store, loaded up, and came outside again, to find Fin dragging a U-Haul trailer past the front door. Or part of one. It was the little half kind.