Here. She is here.
A passageway ran parallel to the ballroom’s mirrored wall; the combatants had already pierced it twice in wild combat. Now Antinous was aimed squarely at the first hole—yet the aperture framed a slim figure, a familiar, tattered cotton shirt knotted at her waist, her lovely wintry eyes wide and vacant. The wet, smoky breeze carried a murmur of thunder plus a wave of her natural perfume, musk-drenched roses nodding under incipient storm. A glitter at her throat—the cocoon of ossification peeled from Maximus in an instant, shredding to nothingness, and fury unlike even the summit he had already mounted filled him from toes to scalp.
Even the craze of glut was paltry, infantile,nothingto this rage.
Collared. No wonder the call of his own fledgling was so muted. The question of just where Antinous had acquired such a demimonde item was unimportant—as was every other consideration, for the sun was just about to breach the horizon.
The killgrowl made words, a single sharp command. “Leila,down!”
Distraction was a gift to his enemy. Antinous struck, claws sinking into his eldest son’s belly, ripping upward to find the heart.
CHAPTER 29
She floatedthrough nightmare hallways full of corpses, veering as the rumbleroar and sounds of breakage changed, sometimes meeting dead ends, often unable to pick her way past stacked bodies. Each time she got near a window the necklace got worried, swamping her with clear plastic goop, slowing her down and making it hard to think.
I’m not wandering,she kept repeating internally.I’m doing recon, I’m looking at the house.
Then the rumbling swallowed her, crashing and creaking all around. She turned down a cramped, dark hall, thankfully free of sprawled, rotting shapes, and saw bars of faint light crisscrossing along its shaft. Not windows, she realized with a burst of muted relief, just holes.
Drywall dust floated in the air, like the glittering poof-grit of dead biters. Splinters and shards of wood, drywall, paneling, glass littered bare linoleum; this had to be a service passageway. A mansion was like a mall or a grocery store, there had to be places for the help to scurry around without visually afflicting their betters, and those passageways were never given more than a slap-kiss of cheap paint.
Pow. Crash-crunch. Boom. The whole structure rocked like a ship in a hurricane, and visions of Looney Tunes chaos made her want to laugh. Her lips twitched as she picked carefully between chunks of wreckage; she reached the first bar of light falling across the hall and stopped, wrestling down the urge to smile since she couldn’t afford to spend the extra energy.
The sounds were coming from her left. She turned, staring through floating veils of vaporized plaster and drywall dust at a dim cavernous vista of broken walls, furniture smashed to flinders, bits of ceiling descending with majestic slowness, fierce shining glitters of broken glass.
It was amazing the roof hadn’t caved in yet, though a low groan rising under the noise of a vampire fight gave her the syrup-slow realization that it wouldn’t be long before that was a major possibility.
Confused motion. Her new eyesight was sharp, but they were moving sofastand she couldn’t quite tell what the hell. Something else was happening, some new force fighting for control of her tired body.
“Leila!” A familiar voice, cutting through clear, thick lassitude. “Down!”
Her knees folded in immediate, unstinting obedience. Something big and dangerous whooshed overhead, the roar swallowing her whole, and crashed along the ballroom’s parquet, throwing up more jagged splinterspears. Two combatants, so far as she could tell, both with dark curly hair.
It can’t be.There was too much crap in the air, her vision was failing. The necklace was warm against her throat, but it didn’t have to work so hard now to keep her trapped; her limbs were leaden, her head filling with the funny floating sensation of drifting off to sleep.
One vampire had his hands buried in the other’s midriff; both snarled, their eyes glowing with bars of wet spreadingcrimson glow. She was still trying to figure out which one was the ancient, crazyass biter when her body shut down.
Dawn had risen.
CHAPTER 30
The agony was immense,terrible, another sanguinant’s claws puncturing viscera, rising for the heart—was this what his own targets had felt, every time Antinous sent his son to kill? It did not matter, for Leila had collapsed almost as he gave the order—the collar would render its wearer quick to obey a bonded protector—and he had managed to wrap his arms around his opponent.
Clinging, clasped cheek to cheek, close as lovers, Nemesis propelled himself for the windows. The last, literally gutwrenching effort, the final piece of his plan, and his mind was very nearly empty as glass shattered, dust-choked drapery shredding with the force of their passage.
Too late Antinous grasped the danger; perhaps he thought his eldest meant to kill them both rather than suffer another’s grasp upon the treasure. It did not matter—the sun’s chariot was loosed from pink-pearl gates. Swollen and venomously red through a haze of burning, the great enemy of sanguinant both fledgling and elder lifted a rim over the horizon, scattered its light from a lid of heavy cloud closed over the city.
Past the ballroom’s window was a flagstone patio meant for outdoor parties, then wide lawn sloping vaguely downward to a thick, spiny-green hedge masking the estate’s boundary. No hole to hide in, no stick or stone to break the advance of quickly intensifying daylight—Nemesis’s boots had long since evaporated and his bare soles skidded against flagstone, driving hard even as claws nearly reached his throbbing, aching heart.
Is she safe?Was Leila in a shadowed portion of the wreckage?
Eerie bronze glow strengthened. It stung, though weak and filtered through both cloud and smoke; the fire’s breath now blanketed the entire city, swirling as the threatened storm lingered over outlying sand-scrub wilderness beyond the borders. Yet even that shadowless glow was more than enough to kindle a fledgling’s tender flesh—or induce rapidly mounting anaphylactic shock in an ancient elder.
Only a daywalker or Archon could risk the sun’s eye. And Nemesis had discovered just the previous morning, racing to the outpost holding his leman in safety, that he had surpassed elder status.
Age was no guarantee of strength. Perhaps the many deaths he had meted out sharpened and strengthened him in the Blood; perhaps he had been capable of daywalking for some while yet remained unaware, assiduously and habitually avoiding the danger.
Or perhaps the touch of a star-eyed nymph had hallowed him, made him capable of a fresh miracle.
