“Unfortunately.” Her teeth bared and I hastened to explain. “He’s okay. He just whines a lot.”
Under the drained and the pained and the fed up, Louis-Cesare almost looked amused—until Olga thumped him on the back. The comradely gesture would have shattered a human’s spine. “Good. I hear rumors,” she informed us. “They say the rebel vampires and dark mages work together. When Lars come back, we break through these walls. You,” she told Louis-Cesare like a general addressing a private, “sense any vampires, awake or asleep. We kill them first. Then we take back what is ours.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Louis-Cesare asked incredulously. “The Senate itself wouldn’t dare to attack such a place, at least not yet. But you propose to do so with what? A band of trolls?”
He’d addressed the question to me, but Olga answered. “If you afraid, you-go,” she said with a shrug.
Louis-Cesare’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as if he was having trouble processing the fact that a wild-looking bearded lady had just called him a coward, but I didn’t let him get going.
I turned to Olga. “There could be a complication.”
She raised bushy eyebrows and I started feeling guilty. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. “There’s a chance that the mages and vamps are getting a little extra help these days.” I spent the next five minutes filling her and Louis-Cesare in on my recent adventures. “Don’t get me wrong—if you still want to kick some vampire butt, I’m your girl. But I don’t think your crew is ready to deal with Drac just yet.” I managed not to mention that I didn’t feel much like it myself, either, although I think the point came across.
“You knew where he was, even to the room number, and you said nothing?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Do you wish to trap him or not?”
“Not!” I responded heatedly. “That’s Mircea’s thing. I want to kill him. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that. But I’m only going to get one shot at it, and I’m not exactly prepared right now. That was the point of coming here in the first place, to get some decent weapons.”
“The Senate has weapons!”
“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to turn them over to me. Besides, they don’t have the kind of stuff I need. Or if they do, they aren’t likely to admit it.”
“That was why you did not want me with you. You were planning to buy illegal weapons!”
“Until Benny got dead, yeah. That was the plan. The plan now is to steal them.”
Olga’s massive forehead was wrinkled as if thinking was causing her pain. When she spoke, though, it was clear that she’d followed the conversation well enough. “This Drac you speak of, he killed my Bienvior?”
“Yeah. He had mages with him who did the dirty work, but he was in charge.”
Olga nodded, as if that was all she’d needed to know. “If he here, I kill him for you,” she said simply.
Louis-Cesare and I exchanged a glance. “Um, Olga…” I stopped, both because I had no idea how to explain how unlikely that was and because the crew had arrived. At least, I supposed they were behind Lars, but his bulk filled the doorway, making it impossible to tell.
“Take down wall,” Olga told them, pointing to a spot beside the doorway. “Then we kill things.”
What we found after hacking through two walls of solid rock was a warehouse. But it wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Stretching in a long line down either side of a rough-hewn corridor were tiny, shallow cells, barely more than indentations in the walls. Most were empty, but a few were not. And one caught my attention immediately because, although it was at the end of the corridor, the scent emanating from it was unmistakable.
The cell was empty, but the scent was strong. Too strong for the occupant to have been gone long. The trail led to a door, which even before I reached it I realized was heavily warded. I cocked my head, filtering out the sounds coming from behind me, and concentrated. Yeah, I’d thought so.
I ran back to the other end of the corridor, dodging trolls and demons and the assorted creatures they were releasing from the cells, and grabbed some of the larger chunks of rock from around our newly created doorway. Running back the way I’d come, I managed to avoid Louis-Cesare, who was standing in the middle of the corridor watching me with a bemused expression, and reached the door again. I heaved the rocks at the warded door, every nerve ending singing at me to hurry.