Midnight's Daughter

Page 28

I jerked away, shivering in a cold sweat, damning whatever mages had set this trap all to hell. After my breathing returned to something like normal, I borrowed a handkerchief from Olga and wrapped it around my hand. No more skin-on-skin contact, not here.
I squatted and tried to make eye contact, but I couldn’t see his face until I brushed a snarl of hair back from his forehead. His usual pale perfection had faded to chalk white and his eyes were bruise dark. I felt a surge of unaccustomed compassion. He looked so young, without the superior, closed expression he usually used around me. He didn’t look like Louis-Cesare, Senate member and arrogant bastard. He looked like Louis-Cesare of the auburn hair and the blue eyes and the devastating smile. I reached out, my finger tracing the line of a single tear down his cheek. Then I slapped him.
The first one didn’t have much of an effect, but by the fourth, I’d gotten into the swing of things and his head was thumping the wall each time it rocked back. A slender hand reached out and latched on to my arm before I could deliver a fifth. “Have you snapped out of it yet or should I hit you some more?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t mind. Really.”
His mouth curved into a painful expression that might have been a smile, except for the awful brightness in his eyes. “Dorina.”
“That would be me.”
“Thank you.” There was a quiet gratitude in his voice that made me grin like an idiot, and some of the bleakness in his expression faded.
“You know,” I said, glancing at another Shroud of Flame spell that blocked the door behind him, “you could really make my day and tell me you have something to counter that.”
He blinked at the thick wall of fire as if surprised to see it there. “No.”
“Then we have a problem.” It was an understatement. Now I knew why the mages didn’t bother to waste manpower guarding their backs. Anyone who sneaked in here was trapped until one of them came along and finished him off, or left to rot. Neither option appealed to me, but neither did getting flame broiled. I might survive the Shroud, but I’d spend a month helpless thereafter from having every inch of skin barbecued. Olga might also live through the process—the thinnest troll skin is approximately the consistency of rawhide—but no way could Louis-Cesare manage it. Vamps burn like they’ve been soaked in lighter fluid even without magical help. We needed an alternative.
Louis-Cesare had regained his feet, but was leaning heavily against the wall, resting his head on his forearm. “Merde.” I decided to see if Olga had any ideas; he looked like he needed a time-out.
I eyed the cavern walls speculatively. “Olga, do you think you could hack through that?” She didn’t have a pickax, but then, she hadn’t had one earlier, either.
She shrugged. “In time. But Lars come soon.” Lars hadn’t struck me as a mental giant, and he’d let Louis-Cesare slip by, but maybe I was missing hidden depths. I must have looked skeptical, because she waved at the wall. “He make new door.” Okay, that I could see. Mages tend to forget that there are other ways to solve a problem than magic. You can put all the spells you want on a doorway, but if someone kicks down the wall and makes a new one, it doesn’t matter much, does it? I just hoped Lars didn’t bring the ceiling down on top of us in his enthusiasm.
“Where are we?” Louis-Cesare had decided to join the conversation.
I turned on him, and for a moment had the disorienting sense of double vision, seeing someone who was the same as ever, and yet so very different. I forcibly squashed the empathy that wanted to dull my edge. I couldn’t afford that now. “I didn’t know I was coming here until a few hours ago,” I accused, my voice harsher than I’d intended. “How do you keep finding me?”
Louis-Cesare’s expression shifted from the dullness of shock to arrogant exasperation. “That is hardly relevant at the moment.”
“It’s relevant to me!”
He apparently decided that answering was easier than arguing. “Because of the cell phone I gave you. The Senate was able to use it to pinpoint your location.”
I fished it out of my jeans and stared at it. The sleek black case gleamed innocently in the dim lighting. I should have known. I ground the traitorous device under the heel of my boot with a scowl.
Louis-Cesare watched, a wry curve to his lips. “I am beginning to understand your difficulties with electronics.”
“Very funny.”
“Lars is here,” Olga suddenly announced, getting heavily to her feet.
“You brought trolls with you?” Louis-Cesare had apparently just noticed the two mountains staring at each other through a curtain of fire.
“It’s more like they brought me.” I left him to his own devices and went to see what Olga thought Lars could do.
“Get the others,” Olga was telling him. Lars obediently turned and lumbered back down the corridor, shaking the floor slightly as he did so. “It not be long,” she said, glancing past me to Louis-Cesare. “You know this vampire?”
“Unfortunately.” Her teeth bared and I hastened to explain. “He’s okay. He just whines a lot.”
Under the drained and the pained and the fed up, Louis-Cesare almost looked amused—until Olga thumped him on the back. The comradely gesture would have shattered a human’s spine. “Good. I hear rumors,” she informed us. “They say the rebel vampires and dark mages work together. When Lars come back, we break through these walls. You,” she told Louis-Cesare like a general addressing a private, “sense any vampires, awake or asleep. We kill them first. Then we take back what is ours.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Louis-Cesare asked incredulously. “The Senate itself wouldn’t dare to attack such a place, at least not yet. But you propose to do so with what? A band of trolls?”
He’d addressed the question to me, but Olga answered. “If you afraid, you go,” she said with a shrug.
Louis-Cesare’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as if he was having trouble processing the fact that a wild-looking bearded lady had just called him a coward, but I didn’t let him get going.
I turned to Olga. “There could be a complication.”
She raised bushy eyebrows and I started feeling guilty. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. “There’s a chance that the mages and vamps are getting a little extra help these days.” I spent the next five minutes filling her and Louis-Cesare in on my recent adventures. “Don’t get me wrong—if you still want to kick some vampire butt, I’m your girl. But I don’t think your crew is ready to deal with Drac just yet.” I managed not to mention that I didn’t feel much like it myself, either, although I think the point came across.
“You knew where he was, even to the room number, and you said nothing?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Do you wish to trap him or not?”
“Not!” I responded heatedly. “That’s Mircea’s thing. I want to kill him. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that. But I’m only going to get one shot at it, and I’m not exactly prepared right now. That was the point of coming here in the first place, to get some decent weapons.”
“The Senate has weapons!”
“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to turn them over to me. Besides, they don’t have the kind of stuff I need. Or if they do, they aren’t likely to admit it.”
“That was why you did not want me with you. You were planning to buy illegal weapons!”
“Until Benny got dead, yeah. That was the plan. The plan now is to steal them.”
Olga’s massive forehead was wrinkled as if thinking was causing her pain. When she spoke, though, it was clear that she’d followed the conversation well enough. “This Drac you speak of, he killed my Bienvior?”
“Yeah. He had mages with him who did the dirty work, but he was in charge.”
Olga nodded, as if that was all she’d needed to know. “If he here, I kill him for you,” she said simply.
Louis-Cesare and I exchanged a glance. “Um, Olga . . .” I stopped, both because I had no idea how to explain how unlikely that was and because the crew had arrived. At least, I supposed they were behind Lars, but his bulk filled the doorway, making it impossible to tell.
“Take down wall,” Olga told them, pointing to a spot beside the doorway. “Then we kill things.”
What we found after hacking through two walls of solid rock was a warehouse. But it wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Stretching in a long line down either side of a rough-hewn corridor were tiny, shallow cells, barely more than indentations in the walls. Most were empty, but a few were not. And one caught my attention immediately because, although it was at the end of the corridor, the scent emanating from it was unmistakable.
The cell was empty, but the scent was strong. Too strong for the occupant to have been gone long. The trail led to a door, which even before I reached it I realized was heavily warded. I cocked my head, filtering out the sounds coming from behind me, and concentrated. Yeah, I’d thought so.
I ran back to the other end of the corridor, dodging trolls and demons and the assorted creatures they were releasing from the cells, and grabbed some of the larger chunks of rock from around our newly created doorway. Running back the way I’d come, I managed to avoid Louis-Cesare, who was standing in the middle of the corridor watching me with a bemused expression, and reached the door again. I heaved the rocks at the warded door, every nerve ending singing at me to hurry.
The wards held firm, as I’d assumed they would, but the guard on the other side, who had been jingling change in his pocket and humming off-key, suddenly came to attention. He might not be able to hear through the door, but he could certainly hear the strident alarm that had gone off when the wards were tested. “Come on,” I said under my breath. “You can handle this. Probably just some stupid slave got loose. Did you double-check the last door you closed? Because if not, and you go for help, you’ll catch hell. Come on in and check it out on your own. Then no one needs to know.”