Marlowe didn’t appear injured, but his fangs were out and his eyes were furious. “It’s going to get very hot around here very soon, Cassie. I can’t think of a better time to make our exit. The ghost can catch up with us later.”
Billy must have overheard, because he began babbling like crazy. I couldn’t make out most of what he was saying, but I got the gist. “Billy says not to shift.”
Marlowe looked incredulous, but my expression must have warned him not to argue. “Stay here. I’ll arrange something, ” he said abruptly before vanishing in a blur of color.
I was left huddled under the table to escape the stampeding crowd. Through the transparent tabletop I could see that the female fan had finally fought her way to her idol, a look of devotion on her features. I could only assume that she was drunk or legally blind, because the object of her affection was looking pretty damn scary. The glowing eyes, pulsing brain and salivating mouth didn’t seem to register with her, however, and she lunged for him just as Deino gave a mighty heave and ripped the bucket away. The force of the movement caused the contents to splash all over the woman, drenching her from head to foot and leaving what looked like a piece of liver wedged in her cleavage.
She screamed, which was the worse possible reaction, because it got the zombie’s attention. It ignored Deino, who was yelling in an unknown language and repeatedly clouting it over the head with the empty bucket. Instead, it dove for the gory girl.
Casanova was trying to evacuate the lounge and direct the fight away from the remaining norms. “Get the damn bocors in here!” I heard him bellow, just as three security men threw themselves on Elvis. He went down on the blood-slick floor barely a yard away from me, with the woman underneath him. Wherever the voodoo workers who usually controlled the acts were, it didn’t look like they’d be quick enough to prevent her from becoming a midnight snack for the King.
“Help her!” I screamed at the Graeae. Enyo didn’t need to be told twice. In a blink she switched from old-lady mode to her alter ego, covered in her own blanket of blood. It’s supposed to contain remnants of every enemy she’d ever slaughtered, and either the variety or sheer amount got the zombie’s attention. He dragged himself to his feet, despite having three security guards hanging off him. He didn’t let go of the woman, but tucked her under his arm and stumbled after his new prey.
At a frantic look from me, Pemphredo snatched the girl and shoved her at Deino before jumping on the zombie’s back. He gave a very nonmusical hiss when she started digging in his open cranium, tossing out handfuls of bloody brains. Enyo stayed just out of reach, leading the stumbling creature on a zigzag course through the tables, while her sister continued the impromptu lobotomy.
Marlowe appeared at my elbow, hair wild and pantaloons scorched, but otherwise unharmed. I grabbed his shirt with both hands. “Tell me you have a plan!”
“There’s a trapdoor under the stage, we just have to make sure none of the mages see us go through it.”
I didn’t think that would be an issue. The zombies were a little short on fighting technique, but they made up for it in resilience. As Marlowe spoke, a mage thrust his arm completely through our waiter’s abdomen, but despite the fact that his fist came out the other side, it didn’t even slow the zombie down. Elvis, on the other hand, had either tired out or lost enough cognitive ability to forget what he’d been doing, because he had simply stopped three or four tables away. Enyo and Pemphredo abandoned him for the mages, leaving the newly arrived security people to deal with the King.
Casanova ran over at the head of the squad. “What are you two waiting for?” he screeched in a very unsexy voice. “Go!”
“I’ll check out the exit and make sure there are no surprises, ” Marlowe said, slipping into the crowd. I started to follow when I was stopped in my tracks by a very unwelcome sight. A livid-looking Pritkin was standing by the smoldering remains of the bar, scanning the room. Marlowe’s vermilion pantaloons must have caught his eye, because he zeroed in on him and, a second later, on me.
Uh-oh.
Casanova followed the direction of my gaze and said something a little stronger. He gave me a panicked look. “Mircea ordered me to help you, but there are limits! Locking the mage in an office while he recovered was one thing, but I cannot inflict actual harm. Not even if I’m staked for it!”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about?” I didn’t get an answer because several mages had crashed through the undead lineup and were headed our way. He motioned for his security people, half of whom were vampires, to intercept them and started to follow, but I grabbed his arm. “When did you talk to Mircea?”
“He called a few hours ago, after you pulled your little stunt at MAGIC. He asked if I’d spoken to you and what we’d discussed. I told him.” He saw my expression and his own grew even more irritable. “Did you really expect me to lie? I may serve two masters, Cassie, but I try to do it well.”
With that cryptic remark, he was off, leaving me to handle Pritkin on my own. I judged the distance to the stage and knew I wouldn’t make it. The tables that weren’t on fire had overturned, and a few had begun to liquefy under the barrage of spells, sending rivers of melted glass everywhere. There was nothing else for it; Billy’s warning notwithstanding, I was going to have to shift. I called for my power, but it was sluggish. I wasn’t sure whether that had to do with the portal scrambling my brains or the sight of Pritkin’s face as he fought his way through the chaos. Either way, I was screwed if I couldn’t concentrate better than this.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and whirled around to find Deino looking pleased. Her sisters were busy fighting war mages with unabashed glee, but she had stuck to my side like a burr. She still had a grip on the sobbing, half-crazed fan girl, whom she thrust at me. “Birt’ Day!” she said happily, apparently pleased to have found a substitute for her ruined gift. I shook my head violently. A human sacrifice wasn’t on my wish list.
“You know why mummies don’t take vacations?” a muffled voice asked from under Marlowe’s napkin. “They’re afraid they’ll relax and unwind.”
The girl, who had collapsed in a shaking heap, had the presence of mind to start crawling off. Deino watched her gift scurry away with an exasperated expression, and that momentary loss of concentration was all Pritkin needed to jump her and send her crashing headlong into the clump of speakers. For an instant he had a straight shot at me but was too busy sending a fireball into the towering heads to take it. They exploded in a hail of flaming wood and flying mechanical parts that scattered across the stage, marring the polished surface with ugly scorch marks. The flames turned the area around the speakers into a leaping bonfire that quickly spread to the nearby piano.
Before I could scream, Deino’s grizzled head popped up over the burning mass. She didn’t appear to be so much as singed, but she looked plenty pissed. A second later, I got to see what the loopiest Graeae’s special talent was. Deino didn’t change shape or make Pritkin shoot himself as I’d half expected. She just turned those sightless eyes on him and he stopped dead, as if he’d run into an invisible wall. He dropped the gun he’d pulled, presumably for me, and stood gazing blankly around the room. He didn’t appear to be harmed; it was as if he simply didn’t know where, or even who, he was. The burning piano top collapsed in a musical crash behind him, but he didn’t so much as flinch.
Deino kicked the blazing statues out of her way and crossed to me. A mage threw a fireball at her from the closest segment of the fight, and she turned it back on him with a rude gesture. She tapped Pritkin on the shoulder and, when he turned around, she decked him. From this close, I could see that those hollow folds of skin were not as empty as I’d thought. They held a dark, roiling mist that in no way looked like eyes, but somehow gave the impression of sight.
“That must work really well in battle,” I said, awed. It would be hard to throw a spell when you couldn’t remember it, or even why you were fighting. Deino preened. “Will it wear off?”
She shrugged noncommittally, gave me a kiss on the cheek and mumbled “Birt’ Day” in my ear before wandering off to join her sisters. The mages had shredded the zombies, whose twitching body parts littered the ground around the door, and were holding their own against the vamps. But I had a feeling that was about to change.
I intended to follow Marlowe’s example, but Pritkin suddenly came back to life. I looked from his icy green eyes to the gun he’d retrieved. “There’s one advantage to my blood,” he hissed. “Mind games don’t work.”
I decided not to bother trying to open a dialogue. I lashed out with my foot and caught him square on the knee. It probably wouldn’t have done anything but piss him off under normal circumstances, but the surprise of it combined with the river of blood and slick entrails on the floor to send him sprawling. He slid into the piled-up tables, tumbling them like a bowling ball crashing into a bunch of pins. Heavy glass tabletops tumbled down everywhere, some rolling off to the side but a few landing on him.
The flaming orange spells were flying thick and fast now, with the last one slamming into the top of the stage, setting the overhanging canopy of silk leaves ablaze. It was the last straw for the stage’s bamboo frame, which collapsed like a giant game of pickup sticks. I avoided being squashed only because I dove for cover under one of the last remaining upright tables. I was afraid the glass top wouldn’t hold, but none of the bigger columns hit it, and the others merely rattled off.
When I looked back up, Pritkin had disappeared. I thought I saw Françoise’s bright green dress for an instant, near the main entrance, but then it was lost to the black smoke boiling through the ruined nightclub. I did catch sight of another familiar face, though. “Billy!”
The almost transparent shape of a cowboy had appeared by the main doors. He saw me at almost the same moment, and a look of profound relief flooded his features. He zoomed straight at me. I was about to ask him where he’d been, but he slipped inside my skin without so much as a hello. All I got instead was some hysterical gibbering. Then I got a glimpse of the main fight and forgot about him.
Casanova threw the mage he’d been throttling into two others, then caught sight of me and shouted. I couldn’t hear him over the din, but I didn’t really need to—it was obvious what the problem was. The Graeae had left the building.
I did a quick mental survey and realized that, until a few minutes ago, Deino was the only one who had not saved my life. Enyo had held off the mages at Casanova’s, Pemphredo had helped me in the kitchen afterwards and Deino had just made it a hat trick. They had paid their debt and now I was on my own. Casanova was yelling something again, while trying to hold off three mages at once. I still couldn’t hear him, but I read the word on his lips easily enough. “Go!”
I nodded. The Graeae were my responsibility, but they would have to wait their turn. I wasn’t sure whether it was okay to shift yet or not, and I couldn’t get a thing out of Billy. I started to crawl off but was stopped by an iron grip on my foot. Pritkin was pulling his way out of the tables with one hand and holding on to me with the other. Damn it!
“Cassie!” I whipped around at the familiar voice and saw Marlowe’s curly mop sticking out from under the remains of the stage. I couldn’t imagine what he was still doing here. There was fire everywhere, and vamps have approximately the same flash point as lighter fluid. He gestured for me to get out of the way and I flattened myself without asking why. I glanced back in time to see Pritkin lifted off the ground by an unseen hand and thrown across the mass of overturned tables, close to the main fight. Marlowe beckoned for me to join him, but there was no way. Bits of burning green silk were raining down all around the stage, creating a minefield of magical fire. It was as dangerous to me as regular fire was to a vamp; I couldn’t risk it.
I looked around quickly, but there were no other options. The fight going on behind me put the main entrance out of the question, the back room was a dead end and the side exit was a sheet of flame from where a fireball had hit the hanging bamboo curtain, setting it and half the wall ablaze. With no other choice, I did the only thing I could and reached again for my power.
This time it came readily, surging beneath my fingertips like someone had opened a floodgate. Almost dizzy with relief, I tried to think of the best place to go. Then Pritkin launched himself over the pile of tables, hands outstretched, and I freaked and shifted with no destination in mind. All I was thinking about was finding Myra. Wherever that led had to be better than hanging around while Dante’s lived up to its name.
There was no bone-jarring landing this time—only a gradual darkening of the fiery scene until it disappeared altogether, to be slowly replaced by a very dark street. After a minute, my eyes adjusted enough to make out a large building with a sign proclaiming it to be the Lyceum Theatre. I didn’t know what time it was—the street was deserted, but it could have been anywhere from midnight to close to dawn.
“I thought you’d be along,” Myra said from behind me. I whirled, my hand jerking up automatically at the sound of that smug, childish voice. Two daggers sailed straight at her, but she just stood there in the middle of the street, unconcerned. A split second later I realized why as my own weapons came sailing back at me. They didn’t wound me, but they hit with enough force to knock me off my feet and send me skidding back along the filthy street. Myra held up her hand. A gleaming bracelet that looked a lot like my own dangled from her thin wrist. Except, where mine had daggers, it had tiny interlocking shields. “A gift from some new friends. To level the playing field.”
I clambered to my feet. “When have you ever believed in a level playing field?”
She grinned. “Good point.” Then her face changed as she got a good look at me. “So, you managed to complete the ritual. Congratulations. Unfortunately, your reign is destined to be the shortest in history.”