Midnight In St. Pertsburg (The Invisible War 1) (25 page)

Shadows sparring on the wall drew Mike’s eye to the other side of the cavernous room, just as another clash rang out. Ian fought, sword against sword, with one of the fairy assholes that had set the dogs on them to begin with. One, but not both. Which meant the other could be lurking about, ready to pounce at any moment.

“Where’s the other fairy?” he asked Rose.

Rose stared, wide-eyed at the
cu sith
leaping at Nazeem. One of the dogs managed to catch Nazeem’s forearm—or maybe the vampire had left himself open, since he used the dog’s grip to drag it close enough he could drive the iron spike deep into its neck. The dog howled in expressive pain and terror, and Mike shook Rose to get her attention.

“Hey! Focus! If the other one’s out there—if it’s under a glamor—I need you to find it.”
 

“Nazeem needs help.” Rose’s hand locked in a knuckle-whitening clench around Mike’s rosary. “They’re tearing him apart.”

To Mike’s practiced eye, Nazeem had the situation well in hand. Wounds that would have crippled a mortal man were nothing to a vampire, and his blood kept the
cu sith
’s focus away from more vulnerable members of the team. “He’s fine. Would you—”

A blinding flash of light came from Mike’s rosary as the air before Rose shimmered. The second fairy knight—tall and cold and radiant—hissed and jumped back, attack aborted. The creature lifted its sword, and Mike met its glittering amethyst eyes over Rose’s head. In its face, he saw the blend of arrogance and cruelty Mike had believed unique to demonkind. The familiarity brought a grim smile to Mike’s face.
 

Mike pulled Rose behind him with one hand as he raised the other to meet the fae sword. As shining steel fell towards vulnerable flesh, Mike sent a lance of power through his palm that drove the creature back. It staggered and snarled, all semblance of regal beauty abandoned to feral rage.

It drove its sword into the marble floor, and the shadows in the doorway grew. Tentacles of darkness, smoking and dripping, reached out for Mike and Rose. One brushed against Mike’s face before he could get his iron cross up and the touch of it burned his skin like acid.

“It’s not real!” Rose’s back pressed against Mike’s as more pseudopods of shadow grew behind. “It’s another glamor. It feels the same.”

Which meant, if Rose was correct, there was no point trying to fight the swarming shadows directly. As they wrapped searing agony around his leg, his gut, Mike hurled fire at the knight—an apprentice’s trick that wouldn’t have made a demon or voider flinch, but the shadows lost their substance as the knight had to draw his own power to douse the flames. Mike tried lightning next, but it split around the fairy’s sword and dissipated.
 

Risking a glance around the room, Mike realized he was on his own. Nazeem had put down one of the hell hounds, but he’d lost his iron spike in the process and now wrestled with the second of the monstrous beasts while the third tore at his leg. Ian was pressed into a corner, the hilt of his sword smeared crimson with his own blood, but Mike couldn’t tell if Ian was badly wounded or simply working his own kind of magic against the knight whose furious blows he could barely counter. This was the greatest truth of the invisible war—no matter how you prepared, no matter how much experience against the supernatural you had, nine times out of ten you were still in over your head.

The tenth time you were usually just fucked.

*
   
*
   
*

With her back turned, Rose couldn’t see anything of what was happening, but her othersense gave her all the information she needed. Nazeem’s pain—the first unmistakable feeling she’d gotten from the vampire. Ian’s pounding waves of excitement. The hunger and rage of the
cu sith
. The murderous joy of the fairy men.

The padre would have been invisible, if not for his physical presence at her back. Rose wanted to ask him what he was doing, why he wasn’t blasting these guys, how she could help, but the words were an immovable weight in her mouth. All she seemed able to do was stand there and feebly swing the rosary at the writhing shadows around them, watch its light fade a little more each time one of the tentacles struck at her.

Rose realized she was terrified.

Even more, she knew she was helpless, that the only thing protecting her was Mike’s own weapon in her hand. Mike should have been over helping Nazeem or Ian with their own fights, but instead he was forced to stand here and protect her because she was just a sensitive, not some magically empowered warrior like the rest of them. The one thing she could do—the one thing that made her presence here worthwhile—she’d failed at. The fairies had snuck up on them. Twice, if you counted the knight coming out of nowhere just now and almost chopping her head off.

Sudden heat surrounded her again as Mike sent another wave of fire at the fairy man who threatened them. Rose could have told him the fire was only an annoyance—the creature felt no real fear of it—but she had noticed the shadows faded while the fire blazed. Mike yanked her forward, dragging her along like so much dead weight—like the useless baggage she seemed to be. He pulled her through the doorway and out into the light of the room. He threw himself back against a wall and pulled her close in front of him. He grabbed her hand—the one that held his rosary—and the fading light flared bright again.

“Concentrate on that,” he said.

“On what?”

“This!” He wrenched her hand higher, squeezed it hard enough the beads dug painfully into her skin, then let go. “On keeping that thing away from us.”

Rose didn’t want the fairy to come close. She very much didn’t want the fairy to come close. She thought about that, long and hard. Tried to push that thought out through her fingers, into the warm, glowing crucifix that dangled from her fist.
 

Mike lifted his hands and the tiny glass fragments from the window Nazeem had shattered swept across the floor. They rose into the air, began to circle, a terrible, glittering whirlwind. It surrounded the fairy, tearing at his clothes and his skin, until the spinning air misted red.

“Ian!” Mike yelled. “Close ranks!” Mike pointed a hand towards the iron spike Nazeem had dropped and with a gesture sent it flying towards Ian’s opponent. The knight deflected it with languid ease, knocking it aside with his sword, but the distraction was enough for Ian to disengage and run towards Mike and Rose.
 

Ian ran into the glowing circle of Mike’s crucifix just as the closer fairy ran his hand down his bloody face then clenched the hilt of his sword, still driven into the floor. Unlike when Mike did magic, Rose could feel the pressure building against her skull as the knight called power. The glass shards exploded out from him, peppering Nazeem and the dogs, shattering to dust on the walls and ceiling. Nothing touched Rose or Ian or Mike.

The knight came towards them, and Rose thought furiously, over and over,
Get away get away get away.
The rosary stayed bright and the fairy had to back down from the light.

Behind her, Mike said, “Get rid of them, Irish.”

“Working on it!” Ian snapped. He sounded annoyed. Felt confused. None of it sat right on Ian.

“What’s wrong?” Rose broke her mental litany to ask. “Ian, what’s not right here?”

“Nothing is right here.” The second fairy man approached and Mike’s hand joined Rose’s again over the rosary. “These are powerful folk—too powerful to be on this side of the curtain. The woman we saw before, she was broken somehow and that made more sense, but these…I can’t banish them. I don’t know how, since they shouldn’t be here at all.”

Cruel amusement radiated from the fairies, disorienting in its intensity. “Lord Pyotr has made a home for us here. You,” the knight who had been fighting Ian pointed at him, “blood traitor—” The fairy stopped abruptly and sniffed the air. He trailed a finger down his sword, then tasted the blood he found there.

This time, the confusion and—yes, she was sure of it—fear came from the fairy. He leaned over, whispered to his companion, then raised his sword to point at Mike’s ball of light. The light flared, became blinding. Rose covered her eyes, squeezed them shut. Mike swore and the light went away. When Rose opened her eyes and looked around, the fairies—all of them—were gone.

*
   
*
   
*

Before Mike could move to stop her, Rose rushed over to Nazeem. He stood, head down, drenched in blood. His eerie stillness, in the wake of the chaotic fight, disturbed her enough she reached out without thinking.
 

Nazeem flinched back. His head lifted and Rose felt a paralyzing anger burn through her. Too late, she realized she still held Mike’s rosary. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and threw the offending object aside.
 

“Rose!” Mike’s sharp rebuke came from behind.
 

Nazeem took several long, slow breaths—what could only be an attempt to calm himself—and his anger and pain receded. “I am all right. You needn’t be concerned.”

“You’re absolutely
not
all right.” His clothes were blood-soaked rags; the places the dogs had torn into him were as obvious as they were ugly. “You need help.”

“He’s not human any more.” Mike had moved to stare up at the rotunda, surveying the damage Nazeem had done falling from the roof. “The faster you figure that out, the better off we’re all going to be.”

Rose’s own rage was staring to flare, driving back the fear that had tried to strangle her. “Is that why you just abandoned him? Why you let those, those
things
pile on him without any help?”

“Rose.” Despite the blood still dripping from his body and the pain that throbbed through him, Nazeem’s voice was steady as steel. “Michael acted correctly. I am not as delicate as the rest of you. Nor can I take advantage of certain…protections.”

The crosses, he meant. Embarrassment warmed Rose’s cheeks. Which only stoked her anger. “But he just left you out there.” She pointed at Mike. “I saw that trick you did with the iron spike, flying it around at the fairies. You could just as easily have stabbed it into those hounds first, to help him out.”

“I did what I had to do. Nazeem was fine. I knew Nazeem would continue to be fine. Ian needed help, and we all needed Ian’s help.” Mike frowned and looked back at Ian, who still stood quiet and thoughtful in the same place he’d ended the fight. “Which reminds me—what the hell happened there, Irish?”

Calm had settled over Ian while Rose wasn’t paying attention, and it smothered some of her own fear-driven anger. “This faelock—Pyotr, I guess—he’s like nothing I’ve seen before. Nothing I’ve even heard of before. He’s more powerful than he should be, commands the folk in ways he shouldn’t be able to.”
 

Ian sheathed his bloody sword. “Rose says this cathedral is wrong in ways she’s never seen. The vampires are jumpy and breaking their own rules.” He looked over at Mike. “What the hell is wrong with this city?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mike said.

Rose found herself less comfortable with Mike’s admission than she would have predicted. A few days ago, she would have loved nothing more than to find a chink in Mike’s been-there-done-that attitude, but now, surrounded by the threatening darkness on a floor coated in blood, the idea Mike might be as over his head as the rest of them—that there might never be a time when you learned enough about this business to navigate it safely—was chilling.

For the first time, it occurred to Rose that maybe they weren’t being paid enough. “So what do we do?”
 

Mike held out his hand and his rosary came flying into his palm. “Right now, we go back to the hotel and we get some sleep. There hasn’t been enough of that the last few days and the last thing we need is to be making exhaustion-related mistakes. As for the rest….”

He called another light, looked around at the mess they’d created in the cathedral. “Tomorrow is Friday. We’ve been here less than a week. We’ve been rushing along, stumbling from one thing to the next. It’s possible there’s something we’ve missed or overlooked.” He paused. “Or been deliberately distracted from.”

An ominous thought, but Rose was simply too tired to try to parse it out this second. “I just hope our employers thought to put someone on retainer for clean-up.”

“We’re done for tonight.” Mike doused his light.
 

Outside, Todor waited exactly as they’d left him. Which made one thing that had gone right. “What are you going to do with him?” Rose asked.

“I guess I’ll bring him back to my room,” Ian answered. “He could be useful later. I’ll stick him in a circle so he shouldn’t be too disruptive.”

They drew stares from the desk clerk, tramping through the lobby, bleeding and exhausted. Todor’s invisible presence sent agitated ripples through guests and staff alike, but the
domovoi
followed Ian into his room docilely enough.
 

Rose followed Nazeem to his room. Tonight, she refused to be put off. Either he recognized that or he was too tired to argue and he let her in without comment. “You’re hurt,” she said in a flat voice once they were alone.

“Yes,” he answered, mimicking her tone.
 

What was wrong with these people? All three of her teammates, it was like pulling teeth to get information. “Are you sneaking off to the Winter Palace again?”

A full-length mirror in a heavy gold frame hung in the short hallway between the living room and the bedroom. Nazeem stood in front of it and gingerly pulled his torn shirt away from the ugly gash in his side. Mike was right that vampires weren’t the same as normal people—no mere mortal would still be walking around with such an injury. Not to mention the smaller bites and slashes that covered his arms and the self-inflicted hole in his thigh.
 

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Rose hated that she had to ask. That she hadn’t been able to isolate pain from the kaleidoscopic whirl of Nazeem’s emotions.

“Of course,” he answered. “But I will live.” He peeled off his jacket, frowned at the tattered, bloody leather. “I will not be going out tonight, so you needn’t…chaperone.”