Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
Part of which was moving slightly. The strongest vamps, I assumed, because the damned things remained deadly even as mince meat. And that went double for Carales, who was in front of the pack and furious, his eyes like two coins.
He was slowly clawing at the air, as if it had become almost solid around him, but he was speeding up as I watched, tearing through it, shredding it like paper, and bursting out—
Only to be stopped again, frozen in place like a statue, as somebody else joined the fray.
The Pythia, I realized, who was standing between the two of us with a raised hand aimed at the vamp.
She’d cast some spell I didn’t know, but it seemed to have taken a lot out of her, because she was panting and furious, and looking from Carales to me with those unsettling, pale blue eyes. “Would you two cut it the hell out?”
I stopped moving because I had no idea what was going on.
Not that I’d been going anywhere anyway, as my hideously elongated feet weren’t touching the blood-splattered tiles.
Instead, I was suspended in the air and moving sluggishly, and then attempting to look as harmless as a twelve-foot-tall, hunchbacked, prehistoric monster could, as those disturbing eyes stayed on me.
So much for Relic fierceness.
But it seemed to work, because after a moment, I slowly began drifting down toward the floor.
“Are you okay?” Sophie asked me worriedly, grabbing my blood-splattered fur.
“Yeah,” I croaked, because I could currently do that, although that was about all I could do. I sagged against my student, and she somehow held me up, despite the enormous weight differential.
“You poor baby,” she said, utterly furious. “I knew we shouldn’t have left you!”
“Poor baby?” Someone else came forward from the knot of people by the door, and I vaguely recognized the pudgy vamp with the bad tie. “Poor baby? Look what that thing did to Roy!”
It took me a moment to realize that he was pointing a shaking finger at the redhead, who was on the floor and not looking good.
He was face down with the bony protrusions, what was left of them, lying shattered around him, and blackish blood coating his formerly nice suit.
And puddling outward in the liquid spurting from a ruptured water line in the wall, but he was still slightly moving.
Master, my counterpart snarled in my head. Need wood.
Stop it, I thought back as hard as I could, because I was starting to suspect that we might have misread a few things.
“Roy tried to kill her!” Sophie said indignantly.
“Only after she turned into that!” The portly one’s eyes swept over me, and even past his anger, I could see the fear and revulsion on his face. “And what the hell is that?”
“A war mage,” the Pythia snapped, probably hearing the same incipient hysteria in his voice that I did. And wanting to get ahead of another problem. “She isn’t the issue—”
“Well, she looks like a goddamned issue to me!”
“She came in just as Reggie jumped me—for one of our sessions, you know? And got the wrong idea. I think she thought—” she stopped and looked at me.
And unlike the others, her face registered no revulsion, or even appalled fascination.
She looked like she was merely talking to my human half.
“You thought he was attacking me, didn’t you? You were trying to protect me.”
I nodded, and she sighed.
“Sorry about all this,” she said, shoving tumbled blond curls out of her eyes. “We were training. Reggie has standing orders to jump me at random times to keep my reflexes honed. He just... picked a bad moment.”
“Bad moment,” a lump in a leather coat croaked from somewhere behind what was left of the far counter. “Yeah.”
“The other mages you saw were... I don’t remember the name of the spell.” She shrugged it off. “But it makes numerous doppelgangers spring from a single mage. So I can kill them without hurting him, you know? And so there’s more of a challenge.”
A challenge, I thought, staring at the short, delicate woman in front of me. Who apparently thought that getting jumped by a mass of vicious war mages was a good time. And those hadn’t been slinging fake spells, either, so what the hell—
“Sorry, but can you hurry up?” Jen ground out. “The leader is a beast.”
And he was, having just broken through the Pythia’s spell, whatever it had been, and started for me again, only to get trapped by Jen’s energy once more. But it was straining her, which wasn’t surprising. I didn’t know how she was holding him at all.
The Pythia sighed again. “Look, no offense,” she told me. “But I can’t get Marco under control until you change back into something more...” Her pale gaze swept over me, but it seemed like words failed her. “Something else,” she finally said.
“Yeah,” the blond vamp panted. He came back into view with a scarf wrapped around his neck and then tied over his head, probably to keep the latter from falling off. “Change back!”
“You’re not going to attack her—” the Pythia began.
“The fuck I’m not!”
“Yvain!”
“I thought you said facing off with me would be fun,” my other half said, her voice low and gravelly, but somehow silky, too. “Did you not find it fun, vampire?”
Annnd that probably wasn’t the best idea, I thought, furious, because the Pythia had to throw another of those spells to freeze Yvain in place, halfway through a leap.
And then just left him there as I had been, hanging in space like some bizarre sort of chandelier.
“Will you all please cut it out?” she screeched.
“Sorry,” I croaked. And then decided that, yeah, changing back was probably a good idea, only I’d prefer not to have an audience.
“Here,” Sophie said, figuring out my hesitation and pawing through a large shopping bag she’d dropped on the floor. And coming out with a handful of caftans, one of which she wrapped around me as best she could because no way would it have fit.
But it gave me some cover as I shrank back down to normal, and had a wave of dizziness hit me so profoundly that I just stayed there, sprawled on the floor, while she fussed over me.
“You can let them go,” I heard the Pythia telling Jen about the vamps. “They’ll behave.”
“That would be wise,” Jen said levelly, but she lowered her hand. And a cascade of body parts abruptly hit the floor across the room, along with the bodies they had been attached to, as the force that had been holding them against the wall suddenly vanished.
“Don’t try it,” the Pythia told Carales, who snarled and snapped at me like an angry dog.
I looked at him blearily, but didn’t reply in kind.
Luckily, most of the vamps appeared to have had enough, sorting through the pile to find their various pieces and hobbling or being carried off by others.
I assumed the missing items would be reattached, or possibly grow back; I wasn’t sure how it worked, but you didn’t see injured vamps walking around.
They seemed to be able to heal just about anything save that, I thought, and dropped the wooden spoon I was still clutching.
Damn, I felt bad.
“You overdid it,” Sophie told me. “You shouldn’t be fighting when you’re injured!”
“That was her fighting injured?” the chubby vamp said blankly.
“How are you this strong?” the Pythia asked Jen, regarding her curiously. And then her eyes went cloudy and almost pure white. “Oh, really. All of you?”
“What?” Jen asked.
“All of you in that grocery store got a bump up in power, didn’t you?” the Pythia said, which was news to me. “How... interesting.”
“Don’t talk to her!” Sophie said to Jen. “Don’t say anything!”
“I’m not your enemy,” the Pythia told her evenly. “And I already know. Help your mistress up, and let’s go somewhere we can talk.”