“Just eat it.”
“Why?”
“Did you have dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, dinner, dinner! Did you eat?” He waved a hand. “No, don’t bother to answer that. I already know. You never eat.”
“The food at my house was drugged!”
“Yeah, you always got an excuse. But then you end up bottomed out of energy and we almost die.” He pointed a slightly shaking hand at the bar. “Eat it!”
I ate it.
It was good.
I held up sticky fingers. “Happy?”
“Not for longer than I can remember,” Ray said fervently, and gave me a little push. “Let’s go.”
We went.
And found portals opening everywhere when we hit the great hall, and I do mean everywhere. One appeared in the floor almost under our feet, even before we managed to exit the stairwell, swallowing up the last few steps and almost swallowing us. We leapt across as creatures started crawling out, clearing them by inches, only to hit the ice rink the floor had become and slide into the thick of the fight.
Which, ironically, was the only thing that saved us.
Marlowe’s boys had been fighting back-to-back against a mob of the bird-type things that had attacked Anthony. They were losing, which I couldn’t understand since they seemed to outnumber the creatures. Until one of the guards turned my way.
I froze, partway to my feet, staring into the face of a vamp wearing the shoulders of a golden breastplate. It was all he had left after what looked like giant talons had ripped away the rest, and most of the flesh underneath. His heart was gone, his chest just a raw cavern of broken ribs and shredded lungs, his throat savaged.
Yet he was on his feet.
But not due to his own power.
“Dory!” Ray cried, and jerked me back. But Ray couldn’t get any traction, and I still had the damned heels on because I’d been afraid my feet would freeze to the floor otherwise. So instead of getting away, we hit the ground again, just as the zombie lunged—
And had a thrashing mass of Weres fall on his head.
Judging by their expressions, I don’t think they’d expected their portal to open over a sixteen-foot drop. And startled Weres have exactly one reaction. They demonstrated it by attacking everything in sight, giving our guys a moment to regroup and us a chance to scramble out of the way. And duck into a dark alcove, because there was nowhere else to go.
Busts and statues were cracking and falling in huge chunks. Lights were bursting and raining down glittering glass. Bullets were whizzing around thick and fast, and creating an impossible-to-navigate obstacle course down the whole length of the corridor. And then there were the portals, which worried me more than the rest, since there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them, no way to predict where the next one would show up.
Because it didn’t look like the other side cared.
One sprang into existence in front of the wall just down from us, which would have been bad. Except it was maybe a foot away from the marble and facing it. That left the vaguely lizard-type things inside scrabbling uselessly against the flat, shiny surface as more and more tried to push through, until the ones in front finally turned around and tore into the ones threatening to crush them from behind.
None of them made it out.
But the creatures in a second portal had it worse, when their doorway on the world opened in what would have been a prime spot in the middle of the hall—if another portal hadn’t already been occupying it. And no, I’d never stopped to wonder what would happen if a portal tried to open inside another one. But I would have guessed that maybe you ended up with two metaphysical “tubes” running one inside the other.
Only apparently not.
What you got instead was a blur of color as the two portals met, but didn’t meld. The currents started fighting it out, which in turn began pulling them out of shape, distorting the usual round openings into odd and conflicting shapes. Which probably wasn’t good for them but was even worse for the creatures trying to come through.
“Duck!” Ray screamed, as a slurry of bones and fur and mangled flesh was suddenly flung around, like someone had stuck a knife in a blender.
But other than for dropping into a squat, we didn’t move, because there was simply nowhere to go. If a squad of master vampires couldn’t break out of this corridor, Ray and I sure as hell weren’t going to do it. But the odds on getting back to the stairs weren’t looking that great, either, since the battle had shifted and the fighting was taking place right in front of them now. But we couldn’t stay here much longer without—
I stopped, my thoughts skidding to a halt as a third portal caught my attention.
Not because of what came out this time, since it was already open.
But because of what went in.
Nothing much. Just a couple of the hundreds of spent casings rolling underfoot, which had been kicked this way in the scuffle. And which had fallen into the portal, because the bottom of it was intersecting the floor.
Fallen in and hadn’t come back out.
I looked at Ray. “Did you see—”
“No.”
“But I think it’s—”
“I know what it is!” he said feverishly. “And we’re not jumping into some random portal when we don’t know where it goes. We are not ending up any-freaking-where! We are not doing this, do you understand? For once we are not going to take the craziest possible—”
I didn’t try to convince him. I didn’t have to. The Senate’s men had been getting pounded by an army of creatures whose abilities they couldn’t have known about because they weren’t supposed to exist. And by the steadily worsening odds, as portal after portal spit out reinforcements that our side didn’t have. And by the fact that every time they lost a colleague, he or she abruptly ended up on the other side.
Facing them.
Marlowe’s boys were well trained, but they weren’t used to having to hack apart the bodies of their fallen friends. Or to being abandoned by their own kind. Or to having a portal full of gelatinous, acid-filled creatures open in the ceiling directly overhead and start to rain down fiery death.
The first sizzling lump had barely squelched against the floor when they broke and ran.
I didn’t blame them.
Only they couldn’t retreat, because of the mass of civilians behind them, most of whom hadn’t made it out of the ballroom. So they surged forward, running into the minefield of portals ahead. Because they’d last longer there than they would standing in a rain of unquenchable fire.
And they took the creatures they’d been fighting right along with them.
There was no hiding from those kinds of numbers, no standing and facing them. There was only one option that didn’t equal certain death, and I guess Ray felt the same. Because when I jumped for the maw of the suspicious portal, he jumped right along with me.
Something snatched at my arm, something else tore my dress, and a breath hot as fire skimmed along my neck—for an instant. And then the portal grabbed us and threw us around and spit us out. Onto a long, rectangular balcony in what looked like some kind of cave, with a line of fiery blue swirls dotting the side of a rock-cut wall beside us.
And a bunch of men and fey who looked kind of surprised to see us there.
For a second, we looked at them and they looked at us, and yeah, they were Svarestri, all right. At least the fey were. The war mages with them were typical—old leather trenches, ass-kicking boots and a crap ton of weapons. They looked a little grubby next to the fey, with their silver eyes and silver hair and haughty expressions, though the last were kind of overwritten by shock at the moment.
“Well, I don’t know what I expected,” Ray said blankly.
And then we were diving back into the portal, the wrong way around because there was no time to turn—or to avoid the hail of bullets that came after us. But we landed as we’d fallen—on our backs—less than a second before the barrage whizzed by overhead, one bullet cutting through my hair on my way to the floor. Then I was rolling and jumping and getting back on my feet—
And slamming back down, because they were shooting on this side, too.
We’d ended up back in the great hall, just as a new group of guards appeared from the ballroom. They started laying down a deadly salvo ahead of them, which flew over our heads since we were hugging the ground. But that wouldn’t be a huge help in a second, because they were coming our way.
And they didn’t look like they planned on stopping.
Ray and I dove back inside the portal as a solid wave of heavy-booted feet pounded toward us, since friendly fire kills you just as dead as the other kind. We found the same group of bad guys standing about three yards ahead of us on the other side. Only they were facing away from us this time, having an animated conversation, I guess on the assumption that we wouldn’t come back out the same portal.
And you know what they say about assumptions.
I dropped three of them with the vamp’s gun before the rest even turned around, and then we threw ourselves backward, hoping like hell that the charge was over.
It was, only it didn’t look like it had been too successful. Because the vamps were now coming back this way, chased by what looked like half the corridor, and that same trick wasn’t likely to work twice. I guess Ray didn’t think so, either, because he picked me up and threw me out of the way, which would have been great if I hadn’t hit the consul’s marble wall quite so hard.
And if he’d been able to get out, too.
And he might have—if four fey hands hadn’t reached out of the portal and dragged him back again. No, I don’t think so, I thought savagely, hugging the wall as guards and things pounded past, ignoring me in their rush. And then lurching for the portal again.
Only to find something in my way.
A big something. I looked up to see a handsome, blood-flecked face with dark eyes and hair and a tiger prowling around the side of it. Zheng.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.
“In there,” I growled, trying to push past, but he grabbed me with one huge, overmuscled arm. I could see it because he’d lost his tux jacket and his shirt had taken a beating. But not as much as he was about to. “Let me go!” I told him furiously. “They have Ray!”
