Tempt the Stars

Page 39

“Here he’s an outlaw, to be killed on sight!” Rosier panted, having just thrown another guard over the side.
“The council’s order?” I repeated, getting a bad feeling suddenly. “But why would they want—”
“Because of you,” Rosier spat, getting in my face. “He has his own past with them. They never liked him, but it wasn’t until he allied with you that they began to fear him! A council-hating demon and a time-traveling, border-crossing menace? You could go back in history, destroy us all! Although you seem to be doing that well enough as it is!”
“I’ve told you before, I’m no threat to the council—”
“Yes, and it’s so reassuring to have your word on that. Unfortunately, they’d prefer something a bit more certain—like my son’s head!”
“Why not mine?”
“You’re needed for the war effort,” Rosier said bitterly. “He’s expendable—”
“He’s no such thing!”
“Tell them that.”
“Summon them and I will!”
Rosier’s eyes flashed neon, and if looks could kill . . . well, they would have saved him some trouble. “Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he snarled.
Pritkin cursed. “Do it! There’s no choice!”
“You planned this,” Rosier hissed. “You planned this all along. I know damned well she didn’t come up with it on her own—”
Pritkin cursed again, although not as much as when the guards wised up, and four of them decided to attack us together. Four hit down onto our rug at the same time, landing between me and the two demon lords, and their combined weight sent me flying. Off and up and into the void, arms flailing and body desperately trying to shift—and failing.
And staring into Pritkin’s panicked face as I started to fall, because it was a long, long way down.
Chapter Nineteen
Or it would have been if I hadn’t fallen straight onto Casanova.
And that would have been great—if my added weight hadn’t caused his bit of rug to dip a full story downward. And then to fly back up. And then to bounce back and forth between the two extremes, yo-yoing us past the battle that was now raging on both carpets.
“Ooooh,” the crowd said, impressed at our acrobatics.
“Aaaaaah!” I said, grabbing Casanova around the neck, because I am not a member of Cirque du Soleil.
“Get off!” he snarled, because I don’t think he’d planned the heroics. He’d been on hands and knees, peering over the edge of his unsteady perch as he tried to get his men re-formed into a safety net. But they were busy running around, trying to clear the crowd away from what they, at least, realized was not an act.
And therefore there was no one to catch either one of us.
Not that I was all that interested in getting down. The storm had dropped a few dozen more black-clad figures on the surrounding rooftops, too far away to reach the main battle, but only a few flights of stairs away from the floor. I assumed that was why Pritkin and Caleb were keeping the rugs in the air. Fighting on a tiny, unstable platform isn’t fun.
But it beats getting mobbed by two dozen otherworldly soldiers all at the same time.
Especially these soldiers.
Between the dim light at Rosier’s court and the flurry of activity around our escape, I hadn’t gotten a good look at the elite, black-clad troops before. I was getting it now. One of the creatures’ hoods slid back enough to show me his face—if he’d had one. Instead, a blank bronze faceplate gleamed under the lights, and my stomach abruptly started crowding my toes.
“Fuck,” I said, with feeling.
“What?” Casanova’s head whipped around. “What now?”
“That now,” I said, pointing.
“What?”
“Allû.”
“Allû?” For a second, he stared blankly at the nearest carpet, and then his face changed. “Fuck!”
And yeah, that about summed them up. The Allû were the council’s personal guards, who were usually camped out in the Shadowland making life in hell a little more hellish for anybody who dared to cross their demonic masters. But occasionally they got sent on errands, like when the council really wanted somebody dead.
And they usually got their wish, since their freakish army couldn’t actually die. I knew because I’d fought them before. Not that that experience was likely to help much at the moment, since it had mostly involved me getting killed over and over again. I’d been caught in a time loop and kept “resurrecting” whenever time reset itself, until I finally figured out a way to beat them.
Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have a hundred chances to get it right.
“Take us closer!” I told Casanova, trying to grab the edge of Pritkin’s rug as we headed back up again. But it was moving, too, as half a dozen men and creatures fought on top of it, and the fringe barely brushed my fingers.
Which was just as well, since an Allû fell off the rug a second later, burning from a fire spell and barely missing us on its way to slam into the floor far below. And then to get up, still burning. And to run to the nearest building to rejoin the fight.
A second later it burst back onto the roof, moving so fast that the oxygen made the flames lick up all the faster. Its outer robes were already mostly gone, with just a few flaming tatters still clinging to the metal underneath, which was now glowing red hot. Not that the Allû appeared to notice.
But Casanova did, the flames from the burning demon reflecting in his horrified eyes as he stared at me. “Are you insane? Shift us out of here!”
“I only have strength for maybe one shift, if I’m lucky,” I told him. And that was assuming I could concentrate. But it was the only chance Pritkin had.
The good news was, the Allû didn’t use spells. The bad news was, they didn’t need them. They were freakishly strong, unbelievably fast, and impervious to pain since they didn’t seem to actually have bodies in there. As far as I’d ever been able to tell, they were nothing more than animated suits of armor.
Which kind of limited attack strategy. The only way I’d found to get rid of them was to completely destroy that armor. As in shred it to bits with a submachine gun or blow it the hell up, or else they just kept coming back.
Or got bored and decided to start tossing those wicked blades around. Suddenly, the air was filled with shiny death, one of which Casanova grabbed as it passed over top of us. And used it to bat away several others that were tumbling our way because of our crazy course or plain bad luck.
But not because they were being aimed at us.
They were being aimed at Pritkin.
“Get me up there!” I told him, in a panic. Our tiny craft was still bouncing around, but it was well below the level of Pritkin’s now. He and Rosier had just sent a bunch of their attackers flying, and the sudden lack of weight had caused them to shoot upward.
“I’m not a mage!” Casanova said furiously. “I don’t know how to drive this thing!”
“Then think of something!”
“What do you expect me to do?” he demanded. “Jump? There’s simply—” He caught sight of my expression. “No. ”
“You’re a vampire. You’ll live.”
“It five floors down!”
“It’s closer to four now—”
“That’s four too many!”
“—and there’s a wagon down there with hay—”
“It’s fake! This whole place is fake!”
“You owe me!” I said, grabbing his arm. “You led me into a trap!”
“I led . . ” If possible, he looked even more outraged than usual. “You kidnapped me—”
“A trap that almost got me killed!”
“I didn’t know what Rian was going to do!”
“So you say. But there’s nothing but your word for it, is there? Help me now and I’ll vouch for you with Mircea.”
“You—Dios!” he spat. Followed by a lot of things in Spanish that probably weren’t complimentary as we came as close to the floor as we were going to get.
And then he jumped. But I didn’t get a chance to see how or where he landed. Because without his extra weight, the yo-yo effect became more like a slingshot.
The ride up was a terrifying blur, the jump from my perch onto Pritkin’s rug was worse, and then I was screaming and Pritkin was cursing and Rosier was stabbing—a guard and not me, for a wonder—and I was shifting—
And going nowhere.
“Get him out of here!” Rosier growled, grabbing my arm. “Do it now!”
I stared at him, desperately trying over and over to do just that. But all I felt was the metaphysical equivalent of grinding gears. Hauling four people through three worlds had left me as dry as the sand that had finally tapered off, after depositing a few dozen more guards on the rooftops of the fake ghost town around us. Rosier must have managed to pick up every damned one off the hillside as he passed, and we couldn’t fight them all.
A view he seemed to share. “If you’ve cost me my son, girl—”
“Stiff-necked pride did that years ago,” Pritkin said, knocking his father’s hand away. “Yours and mine. This is not her fight!”
“She’s made it hers! She insists on making it hers!” Rosier snarled, and the hand was back, this time around my throat. A pair of green eyes, so like his son’s but so different, burned into mine. “Shift him now!”
But I couldn’t shift him, couldn’t access my power at all, and there was no time for recovery. Because the Allû had decided that the knife-throwing act they were doing wasn’t working, and had started throwing themselves instead. One flipped off a roof to the right, bounced off Caleb’s rug, and then used the momentum to keep right on going, through the air and straight across the drag to a building on the other side.