“Realized what? Mircea, how—”
“She’s yours—you said it yourself!”
“But how—”
He suddenly threw his head back, laughing like a boy. And I just stared, wondering if I really was going mad. Or if he was.
“Mircea!”
“Your coven must work similarly to our houses,” he said, eyes bright. “And, as you saw yesterday, when I all but drained the family, the power exchange works both ways. I can send power to subordinates, but they can also send it to me.”
I blinked, suddenly remembering the small hits of power I’d gotten from my coven on a couple of occasions. I hadn’t thought of it because I wasn’t used to having a coven, which was what the Pythian Court actually was. And because the hits had always seemed so small.
But then, maybe I hadn’t needed as much before.
I stared down at Rhea, who was still unconscious, but also very much alive. “She’s powering the connection.”
“The link between the two of you is,” Mircea corrected. “And possibly your whole coven for all I know.”
He grinned at me, the dignified master vampire suddenly giddy from the power loss, from dragging someone almost literally back from the dead, and from the same euphoria that was finally hitting me.
And then blurring like a bad radio signal when someone else called my name.
“Cassie!”
A wash of sound blasted over me, a raucous, out-of-tune blare that made me jump—and realize that the wedge of neon behind me had widened and brightened. And that hands were reaching through, shaking me, and pulling me back. Pulling me away from him.
“Help is coming,” Mircea said, grabbing my hand, his voice strangely distorted. “Cassie—do you understand? Help is coming! Hold on.”
“I’m trying!” I told him, clutching his hand while feeling like a mass of taffy being stretched in two different directions.
And then my fingers slipped out of his, and like a door slamming shut, I was suddenly somewhere else.
I was suddenly somewhere horrible.
Chapter Nine
The quiet of Mircea’s mountain retreat shattered, replaced by a mix of shouts and explosions and screams. And a weird drub, drub, drub that sounded like Dubstep and made me want to cover my ears, only my arms didn’t seem to work. Or my eyes, I thought, staring around at a world gone red.
I blinked, but the view didn’t change, except that Carla was suddenly in my face. “We’ve got to get out of here!” She was yelling at point-blank range, but I barely heard her. Because that weird sound kept getting louder.
I finally realized that it wasn’t a drum, or crazy dance music. It was a series of powerful spells—the source of the red glow—exploding against something that bisected the drag a dozen yards away. Something wavy and indistinct, a barrier so flimsy that it looked like someone had stretched a piece of gold plastic wrap across the room.
“Thought the wards were down,” I said thickly, trying to focus eyes that were still trying to see two places at once.
“They were,” a different voice said, sounding satisfied. It took me a second to realize that it was bellowing from the little black thing scurrying across the floor like a spider, because it couldn’t fly anymore.
“Grafton—the guy from the Oracle,” Carla panted, trying to haul me up. “He used to be a war mage, like a thousand years ago.”
“I heard that.”
“You . . . got the shields back up?” I asked, attempting to help Carla, but just making things worse. My limbs were all mixed up, and nothing seemed to work right.
“Well, in truth there was nothing wrong with them,” Grafton said.
“Nothing . . .”
“Other than the null the Black Circle had sitting on the controls,” he added, talking about a mage capable of absorbing all magic within a certain radius. “We knocked him out, dragged him to another room, and—”
“Who is we?”
“A group of us—reporters, photographers, errand runners—something like forty people in all. We’ve been camped here all week.”
“The second stories of these Wild West facades have actual rooms in them,” said Crystal Gazing, who must have gotten a new avatar, because it was fluttering around my other side. “But nobody used them—until we realized that they offered a perfect vantage point.”
“It’s become rather like a shantytown,” Grafton said. “With reporters from every major paper and most minor ones bringing in bedrolls and such, refusing to leave after your last escapade. We assumed something else might happen, and wanted to be on hand—”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Carla muttered.
“—and fortunately so,” he added. “Some of us know a thing or two about wards.”
“Yeah, only now we have to hope the damn things hold together until the Circle gets here,” Carla panted. “Which, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t going so great!”
“That’s the trouble with shielding common spaces,” Grafton agreed. “You can’t use the strongest wards, lest they mistake a guest for a threat. But the everyday variety, even expensive ones like these, will only hold so long against this sort of—”
“Will you shut up?” she demanded. “We have to move!”
She was right; one glance at the ward told me that. It was starting to look like a threadbare blanket, with obvious gaps in the golden weave. But I still couldn’t seem to get my limbs to work.
And then Carla cursed and slung her purse over her head. And grabbed me under the arms. And started dragging me back toward Augustine’s, like Fran?oise was already doing with Rhea.
“Augustine thinks he can get his ward back up,” Grafton explained, spidering alongside us. “We’re pulling back to the shop for an extra line of defense.”
“Good idea,” I said weakly, staring at several dozen spells that were exploding against the barrier and radiating outward, like acid dropped in water.
And at the pterodactyl-type monstrosities, physical wards from the lobby, that had swooped in and started picking up mages, only to hurl their mangled bodies at the wall. And at the taco cart and its flower-draped fake donkey, which was burning like it had been doused in gasoline. And at the Graeae, on the other side of the barrier near the lobby, who appeared to be hemming the mages in, keeping them on the drag as if waiting for the scary thing inside to slaughter them all.
Which would have been great, except that the scary thing appeared to have left the building.
I looked around—why, I didn’t know; it wasn’t like I could have missed it. But there was no giant hound anywhere. Some of the mages must have gotten their shit together and banished it. And without it, there wasn’t much left to distract them.
As demonstrated when a mage taken by one of the pterodactyl wards managed a spell that set the thing on fire—and fell what had to be four stories when it released him. The dying ward then dive-bombed the group attacking the shield, exploding in fiery bits against their armor. But if it did any damage, I couldn’t tell.