“The tree is moving!” I screamed at Jean, who’d fixed a broad smile on Papa Noel, the Cajun Santa, who rode his red-lit sleigh across the frozen lake, pulled by eight grinning green-lit gators.
“Yes, Jolie. We must climb down when the tree grows near,” he said, as if, duh, I should’ve known the escape route lay down the trunk of a moving three-centuries-old tree.
I was almost jerked off my frozen feet by Rene, who shoved me toward the edge of the roof. Holy crap; the tree had arrived. I reached out and grabbed hold of a branch the girth of a half-dozen baseball bats, grown warm from its covering of lights.
Whoever had come up with this bright idea for an escape needed to be horsewhipped, and I knew just the wizard to do it.
I crawled across the widest limb and stopped when I reached the trunk, which was wider than my SUV I blew up last month. I needed a strategy.
“C’mon, sunshine, follow me.” Jake skirted past me, and quickly figured out a way to dangle his legs off one branch and slide onto the one below it. Luckily, live oaks had a dense array of limbs so the method even worked for my short legs. The lights kept the snow off so it wasn’t as miserable as it might have been.
Also, live oak branches grow all the way to the ground, so we were able to slide off the last one straight into a fluffy snowbank.
When I struggled out of the snow, I almost tripped over a sweating Adrian Hoffman, deep in concentration as he twirled his fingers in intricate movements and chanted words that were incomprehensible to me. He was doing all of this—running the whole freaking City Park light show using his pretty Blue Congress magic. Which he shouldn’t be able to do anymore since he’d been turned vampire.
“Pretty cool, ain’t it, babe?” Rene wrapped his arms around me from behind, sharing some shifter body heat.
“I thought wizards lost their magic when they were turned vampire,” I whispered, not wanting to break Adrian’s concentration. At least that’s what Etienne Boulard had told me.
“He says he’ll lose it eventually but it takes a few decades,” Rene said. “Come on, let’s get to the transport with the others before he runs out of juice.”
I turned to follow Rene, but before I’d taken two or three steps through the deep snow, there was a loud crack and everything went black and silent.
“Rene?” I whispered. “Adrian?”
Nothing. Just wind that screamed like a woman in pain, and heavy snow, and bitter cold.
Something shuffled to my right, where Rene had been, and I stumbled blindly toward the sound, holding my hands in front of me to feel for what I hoped would be a nice merman.
Instead, another loud crack sounded, from my left again, and a sharp pain lanced through my left calf. My leg buckled under me, and I hit the snow as another shot rang out. Because it was definitely a shot. In the pitch blackness, that last blast had been accompanied by a flash of red fire.
I dug inside my jeans and pulled Charlie from his makeshift holster inside my Harry Potter pajamas. Don’t glow, I told him. We have to stay hidden. But if you can help keep me warm, I’d appreciate it.
Later, I’d worry about how Charlie knew what I meant and what I needed. For the moment, he was not only failing to glow, but had heated up with a delicious warmth that spread through my arm and into my body. My feet were still frozen, but by holding the staff two-handed, I thought I could avoid hibernation.
I couldn’t see, though, damn it. I crouched in the snow and listened, sorting out wind and snowfall from cracking branches and distant traffic.
I reached out with my other senses, sifting through the input. Fresh, clean snow, wet wood from the trees, gunpowder. I noted those and pushed them aside, looking for energy signatures. Rene’s wonky shifter aura, or the buzz of Adrian’s wizard signature.
I felt both, although they were faint. The strongest aura I read was wizard, off to my left, where Adrian had been. I moved slowly, trying to make myself a small target in case the shooter had night-vision equipment, and praying the wizard I was moving toward was Adrian and not Zrakovi.
The aura was strong now, and I stopped again, trying to pinpoint it. Ahead and just to the right. I crawled now, not wanting to make myself a big target by standing up. Charlie touched the ground with each movement of my hand, melting the snow with a faint sizzle.
Here. I laid the staff beside my knee and felt around me in a wide sweep of my arms, touching something warm to my right—something that grabbed my hand and twisted my wrist violently. I couldn’t avoid a sharp intake of breath.
“DJ?”
Oh thank God. “Adrian? What happened?”
“Somebody shot at me, so I dropped the lights. He’s moved back toward the transport.”
Damn it, who was the shooter? “I’m hit, too—left calf. You okay?”
“I’m a bloody vampire. Bullets don’t do much.”
Right. I’d forgotten.
Rand!