Claimed By Shadow
Page 37

"I gotta tell ya," Billy said, sitting up and grabbing his head with both hands, "I haven't felt this bad since I got into that drinking contest with those two Russian bastards." He groaned and lay back down.
I cautiously reached over and poked him with a finger. He was as solid as I was. I lifted his wrist and felt for a pulse. It beat strong and firm under my fingers. I dropped his hand and scrambled back a couple of feet, only to encounter another impossible thing. í felt something solid against my back and looked down to see an orange-brown hand lying on the floor. It was connected to a similarly colored arm, which led to the naked torso of what my brain finally identified as Pritkin's golem. Only, despite the color, he wasn't clay any longer.
I didn't need to check for a pulse—he was obviously breathing, his oddly colored but otherwise perfect chest rising and falling normally. Or what would have been normal for a human. Since he was supposed to be a big pile of clay animated by magic, it wasn't normal for him. A glance that I swear was involuntary informed me that he was also anatomically correct, which he certainly hadn't been before, and that whoever had handled the changeover had been generous. The next second his eyes—real ones this time—flew open to regard me with utter confusion. They were brown, I noticed irrelevantly, and he didn't have any eyebrows or eyelashes. In fact, he didn't appear to have any hair at all.
I looked back at Billy. He was pale and needed the shave he'd been putting off for a century and a half, but otherwise seemed fine. He quite simply had his body back, which was ridiculous because it had gone for fish food ages ago.
"What the hell?" I felt the floor move and looked around wildly. I did not need another of Mac's crazy rides. Only we didn't, I realized after a minute, appear to be going anywhere. The room was definitely shaking, though, and I spared a second to wonder whether Faerie had earthquakes when Billy sat up, wild-eyed and panic-stricken. He felt his chest, then let out a scream and began thumping himself in the head, stomach and legs, as if his body was some unfamiliar and horrifying bug that had crawled onto him.
He jumped up and started dancing around the room, shedding clothes and screeching. His antics and the room's gyrations upset the golem, which had left behind confusion for fear. His eyes widened and his lips opened to emit a high-pitched squeal that was a lot harder on the ears than Billy's screams. I stumbled across the room, avoiding both of them, and grabbed the sheet. After tearing it into strips, I bound up Tomas' wounds as best I could while the golem and Billy ran around, bumping into things and each other, and managing only to work themselves up more.
I freed Tomas before one of them could careen into him and dragged him under the table. I crawled in after him and put my hands over my ears, which felt like they'd start to bleed any second. Let somebody else deal with the crisis for a change—I was through.
It became obvious that abdication wasn't an option when half the roof was abruptly ripped off. For a second, only a patch of blue sky and a couple of yellow butterflies showed through, giving the impression that the tiny insects were responsible for the damage. Then a head the size of a small car poked in. It was green and covered in shiny, iridescent scales, with a snout big enough to eat a person without needing a second bite. No smoke came out of its nostrils, but I didn't need that to know what it was. Its orange eyes had narrow red pupils that dilated on sight of me like a cat that had just encountered a new form of mouse.
It poured through the hole in the roof, its head suspended on an impossibly long neck and its huge jaws cracking to show off jagged, dark yellow teeth. I froze with its warm, acrid breath in my face, so close that it made my eyes start to water. Then the golem really lost it, running naked and screeching directly across the dragon's line of sight, causing the orange eyes to focus on him instead. He plunged through the curtain and the dragon followed, its neck flowing past me in a river of scales, its talons trying to rip a large enough hole in the roof for its huge body.
I scrambled out from under the table and tackled Billy Joe, who had torn his shirt off and was clawing at his bare chest, leaving red welts behind. "Billy!" I grabbed for his wrist, intending to drag him under the table with me, but he was too fast. He ran to the back of the room, to the small door beside the cot that I had never seen opened. I didn't see it now. I had the feeling that it was solely ornamental, but Billy didn't get that. He beat on it and tore at the doorknob, which he finally managed to rip completely off.
I stared at him in confusion. I'd never seen him like this and wasn't sure there was anything I could say that would calm him down. Then there was the fact that, in human form, Billy stood almost six feet tall. No way could I subdue him without a weapon, and the only ones I had—my gun and bracelet—would likely kill him in his new form.
There was a lot of keening, swearing and some explosions from the front of the shop, then there was a rushing wind and a sound like a hundred helicopters starting up. I looked up to see the dragon lift itself into the air on black leathery wings, screeching and clawing at its face. Half its snout was missing, lost in a smoking hole, and there were gashes in the great wings that beat the air with the force of a small hurricane. A second later the creature was gone, soaring high over peaceful green fields toward distant, tree-covered hills.
Billy slumped against the door, his hands on the scarred wood, his fingers a bloody mess. He was sobbing in great, wracking heaves, but at least he was no longer manic. I was about to try to talk some sense into him, when Pritkin ran through the curtain, followed by Mac and Marlowe. The vamp wasn't, I noticed with rising anger, under any kind of restraint. And the first thing he did was head for Tomas.
"Pritkin! Stop him!" I crossed the room at a run, while the mage merely stood there, looking in disbelief at Billy's solid form. I dove under the table from the far side and grabbed Marlowe's wrist before he could drag Tomas into the light. "Get away from him!”
He looked surprised, as well he might. Why any human would think she could stop a master vampire from doing anything he wanted by holding his hand was laughable. I threw myself backwards, raising my wrist with the bracelet on it and hoping it would be enough to do the trick. I never found out, since nothing happened. I shook my arm and glared at the inert silver. What was wrong with it now?
"Our magic won't work here," Marlowe told me gently. "I'm not going to hurt Tomas, Cassie. Believe it or not, I want to help.”
Sure, which was why he'd sat by and watched him be butchered. Marlowe had a reputation that had started in Elizabethan England, when he'd been one of the queen's spies, and it had increased in infamy ever since. If even a fraction of the stories whispered about him were true, I didn't want him anywhere near Tomas. "Get away," I repeated, wondering what I would do if he said no. But instead of arguing, he slid gracefully out from under the table. I checked on Tomas' wounds, but they didn't seem to be any worse. His eyes were open a fraction and he even managed to raise his head.
"I can't hear him," he said obscurely, an expression of pure bliss passing over his face. Then his eyes closed and his head fell back, connecting sharply with the tile floor.
My heart almost stopped and I frantically felt for a pulse, which of course I didn't find. The fact that I'd even tried said something about my mental state. It looked like he'd fainted or was in a trance, but I couldn't be sure. Tony had once been involved in a clandestine and highly illegal feud with another master. One of our vamps lost an arm and was halfway gutted in the miniwar. When he was brought back to us I'd assumed he was dead, but Eugenie said he was in a healing trance. He'd stayed unmoving and immobile for several weeks, until one night he suddenly sat up, asking whether we'd won. I hoped Tomas was only in a trance, but there was little I could do for him either way. Vamps healed themselves or they didn't—there weren't a lot of medical or magical remedies that worked on their systems. The problem was to keep him safe long enough for him to have a chance to recover.
I glanced at Pritkin. "Why isn't Marlowe tied up or something?”
"Because we may need him," was the grim reply.
"Do you know who he is?" I demanded.
"Better than you." He tore his eyes away from Billy, who was now rocking back and forth, staring sightlessly at the wall, and turned the full force of his stare on me. He wasn't angry—that, at least, I'd almost come to expect, and it wouldn't have worried me. But this was different. He was pared down somehow, his eyes so intense that they looked like two lasers. It was the face of a predator when its own life is threatened—deadly, serious and completely focused.
"Let me explain the situation," he said, and even his words were faster and more clipped than before, as if every second counted. "We have arrived in Faerie, but not in the unobtrusive way I had planned. Most of our magic will not work, and we have a finite amount of nonmagical weapons. One of our company is gravely ill and two others are mentally suspect. To make matters worse, that dragon was the guardian of the portal, and having failed to defeat us itself, it has gone after reinforcements. If the Fey do not already know we're here, they soon will. And we cannot go back though the portal for obvious reasons.”
"Will the Senate come after us?" I asked, uncertain that I wanted an answer.
Pritkin gave a short bark of a laugh. It didn't sound amused. "Oh, no, at least not until they can appeal for passes. To cross into Faerie without them is to risk a death sentence. As we have done.”
"He means that we're all in this together," Marlowe added. "I, too, am without a pass, and the Fey are famous for not listening to excuses. If I'm caught, I could be killed." He smiled at me. "So I won't be caught, and shall endeavor to see you are not, either.”
Mac snorted. "The fact is, we're all safer together. Nobody would last a day in Faerie alone right now.”
Marlowe shrugged. "That, too. And, as my first comradely gesture, may I suggest that we leave this area as soon as may be? We have very little time to lose.”