For about a second—until someone else imagined it right out again.
Fuck!
And before I could come up with any more bright ideas, that damned boot was back, stabbing down all around me. Which wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if there had been any cover out here. But there wasn’t, except for one of the streetlights. And then not even that after the boot lashed out again, and hit the lamppost.
Or, more accurately, destroyed the lamppost. The metal groaned and bent double, heading for me like a toppling tree. I leapt back to miss it—
And managed to miss the ground instead.
Someone tackled me halfway through the fall, but instead of hitting dirt, we didn’t hit anything, with me clawing and fighting and struggling against the arms around me until I heard Louis-Cesare’s voice. And then still struggling because we were still falling, even though there was nothing to fall off of, except the side of the wharf that we were nowhere near. And anyway, that would have been a drop of a yard or two, not the several floors it felt like we’d plunged when—
Whummmp.
I landed on top of something hard, cold and wood-like, and Louis-Cesare landed on top of me. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, because I think he was trying to miss. But I still ended up with my chin striking down and my eyes crossing and nothing making sense.
And then they uncrossed and it still didn’t.
“What the—”
“I brought you into my memories,” he told me, a little hysterically, and then he pulled me to my feet. And into the thick of a crowd.
A really unruly one. People were running and slipping and sliding on icy wood, and before I could ask Louis-Cesare what he meant, a guy in a full-length fur coat smashed into me. And my breath—what little was left of it—went out in a whoosh. And then condensed into a cloud in front of my face.
Wherever we were, it was freezing.
“You did what?” I finally managed to gasp, after being towed through what had to be a couple hundred people.
“Mircea sent me back in to get you out,” Louis-Cesare told me rapidly. “But it was not working and there was no time and you were—” He stared back at me, jaw clenched. “I had to do something.”
“So you pulled me into your mind?”
“No. I do not have your father’s skill.”
“Then what—”
I cut off because the crowd had suddenly gone nuts. We were on the deck of some kind of ship—a big one—surrounded by heavily muffled people in old-timey outfits. Who appeared to be having a collective fit. Because a bunch of them screamed, and a bunch more came stampeding from the opposite direction, threatening to run us down.
Louis-Cesare pulled me into a stairwell before they managed it, and I grabbed him. “What did you do?”
“I needed to get you away from that wharf, but I do not know your mind,” he explained rapidly. “I did not know where to go. I needed something more familiar…and there was only one thing available.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then I remembered the metaphysical accident a couple months ago. And the fallout that had left me in possession of a piece of Louis-Cesare’s consciousness.
It was easy to forget, because it had remained where it had settled, in a hard little lump in a corner of my brain that I avoided like the plague. I didn’t poke at it, didn’t bother it. And for the most part, vice versa was true. Every once in a while I got a flash of something—people I’d never met, places I’d never been—but I blinked them away and forgot it. Because it wasn’t my business, and because I didn’t need anything drawing me closer to him than I already was.
But it looked like I was about to get the tour anyway.
“So we’re inside a piece of your mind, inside my mind?” I asked, feeling like my head was about to explode.
Which was possibly the case.
He nodded, looking around at the crowd.
“Why? Why not just help me? Together we could have taken her—”
“There is no her,” he said tensely. “There is only you. Anything that happens to one happens to both. If you hurt her, you hurt yourself. If you kill her—”
“But we’re inside your head! My head. Something. Anyway, none of this is real!”
“It is to your brain, and it will react accordingly.”
“Meaning what?”
“I do not fully understand all the implications myself,” he said, turning back to meet my eyes. The cold had whipped up some color in his face, and his hair had come loose from its confining clip and was flying everywhere. A strand blew into his mouth and he spat it out, before pulling it behind him and tucking it under the collar of the long coat he’d somehow acquired.
And then pulled off and put around my shoulders, when he noticed I was shivering.
He was wearing an old-fashioned tux underneath it—white tie and tails—but I didn’t bother to ask why. “Give it your best shot,” I told him.
“Your father did not have much time to explain. But it has to do with the fact that your brain controls your body—your breathing, your heartbeat, your autonomous nervous system—”
“Could I have the condensed version?”
“If your brain thinks you are dead, you are dead.”
I stared up at him for a moment, hoping this was a bad joke. But those sapphire eyes were doing that guileless thing again, the one that always threw me because vampire eyes didn’t look like that. Unless they were Louis-Cesare’s, which right now were open and honest and worried and utterly serious.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, clutching the fine wool of the coat. “If I die in here, I die. But if I fight her—”
“You also die.”
“Then what the hell—”
“Mircea needs time. He has to find a way around the blockage, to get you back into the physical world.”
“And what do we do in the meantime?”
“We disappear,” Louis-Cesare said grimly. “I thought it would be easier to do that in my memories. She does not know them as she does yours. We merely have to avoid her until Mircea fixes this.”
I stared at the icy boards under our feet, and didn’t say anything. Because hide-and-seek wouldn’t work, not for me. Not with Marlowe probably putting two and two together right now. But then, there wasn’t only me to think about, was there?
Louis-Cesare had been so insistent, back in the consul’s library, that my victims hadn’t been victims at all. Maybe because he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t woken up surrounded by corpses time and time again. Hadn’t seen people flinch or in some cases run screaming as soon as I came into town.
Because they thought I was her.
He hadn’t been there; he didn’t understand. And even if he did, even if I could convince him that she’d kill him to get to me, it wouldn’t do any good. Would probably do exactly the opposite, in fact. Louis-Cesare wouldn’t just abandon me. I knew that, as much as I knew anything.
So I had to avoid her until Mircea brought us back. And I had to keep my mouth shut in the meantime. Because Louis-Cesare might be crazy enough to oppose Marlowe if he knew the deal, and that wouldn’t end well. Not when one man fought fair and the other…didn’t.
Get back, then deal with the fallout, I told myself.
Somehow.
“So it’s hide-and-seek,” I said, as the deck moved under our feet. Louis-Cesare didn’t answer. I looked up to find him leaning against a column, looking spooked, and vaguely ill. “Are you all right?”
“I…Of course,” he told me stiffly.
“Then why are you green?” It didn’t go so well with the hair.
He swallowed. “I…do not care for ships.”
“You’re a vampire. You can’t get seasick.”
“That is not the issue.”
“Then what is?” I asked, just as a heavily muffled woman decided to hell with the tour of the Arctic we seemed to be on and went back inside. And left a bare spot on the wall. Or what woul
d have been bare had a life preserver not been hanging there, taking up space.
A life preserver that said—
“We must go,” Louis-Cesare told me, taking my arm.
“Why don’t you like ships?” I asked shrilly, looking over my shoulder as he hustled me away.
“I had a bad experience once.”
“A bad experience?” I shrieked, just as the deck lurched, hard enough to cause a bunch of chairs and a guy in a sailor suit to go sliding by.
It rocked again before I could get my balance back, and Louis-Cesare lost his grip on my arm when a woman staggered into him. Which would have been fine if sailor-boy hadn’t grabbed me at the same moment, trying to get back to his feet. And ending up dragging me off mine.
And despite being only a memory or a figment of Louis-Cesare’s imagination or what the hell, he felt real enough, and his grip was hard with desperation. And the angle was steep and the deck was icy and once we started sliding, we just kept on going. Picking up momentum and knocking stuffy types out of the way left and right, heading straight for—
“Oh, shit.”
A churning mass of water, like waves breaking against a shore, boiled up beneath us, coming our way fast as the deck suddenly went from slanted to slanted. And I found myself being pelted by the avalanche of people now pouring down from above. They were screaming, and the frigid spray was drenching us, and the sailor was panicking and using me as a shield, with the arm he’d thrown around my neck threatening to choke me.
And then Louis-Cesare, who had somehow gotten ahead of me and grabbed a railing, flung out a hand. “Dory!”
I grabbed for it, and would have caught it, if three people going crazy fast hadn’t chosen that second to toboggan in between us. He jerked his hand back to avoid getting swept away and I went sliding by, elbowing the sailor and throwing him off and then wrenching back and reaching—
And finally grabbing Louis-Cesare’s hand because he had lunged for me at the same time, his feet hooked under the rail, his body dangling headfirst, like a lifeline.
It was a pretty impressive bit of acrobatics, and apparently everyone else thought so, too. Because suddenly people were barnacling onto the only handhold available by grabbing whatever part of him was closest. Including something that made his eyes pop and his face go crimson and—
And then an angry cloud of darkness loomed up behind his head, blotting out the stars.
Tag, you’re it, I thought but didn’t say, because he couldn’t have heard me over the yelling and the crashing and the ship’s horn. But it must have shown in my face, because he wrenched his neck around and took a look—
And then he let go of the rail.
It wasn’t so much a slide this time as a fall. The ship was fast approaching the perpendicular, leaving us tumbling and flailing helplessly into a dam of people and furniture around a wrecked lifeboat. And then over it, as the impact threw us into the air and through some spray and into—
A big steel door that hadn’t been there a second ago.
And neither had the dark street and the cracked sidewalk and the shiny black, bulbous car that rain was pattering down on the top of.
“Word?”
I went from looking dizzily at the street to looking dizzily at the large guy with the nicotine yellow teeth who had appeared behind a small window in the door.
“Titanic,” Louis-Cesare told him grimly, and the door opened and we were through.
There was a pretty Asian hatcheck girl in a tight red dress on the other side, but we didn’t have any hats. Or shoes, in my case—not that anyone seemed to notice. Maybe because the place was so smoky; I could barely see my hand in front of my face, much less my foot.
But I could still talk, so I did, pulling Louis-Cesare—who was now wearing a standard black tux for some reason—over to the wall. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying option two.”
“What?”
He licked his lips. “Once we realized that I could not take you out, your father told me to evade until he could come up with a plan. He said there were three ways to do that.”
“Which are?”
“Hide—”
“Which didn’t work out so well!”
“No.” He grimaced. “We are therefore attempting to lose her. If she isn’t right on top of us when we transition from one memory to the next, or if she becomes distracted by what else is happening, she will not know where we went.”
“But if she figures it out?”
“Then we go to option three.”
“Which is?”
He said something that I didn’t hear because the door opened again and a fat cat with a bunch of squealing girls blew in. Along with a gust of rain and the sound of lightning. And Louis-Cesare took the chance to pull me into the main room.
It was loud, with someone playing bad jazz and someone else trying to sing over the sound of drunken laughter, the call of a croupier and the click click of a roulette wheel. It was all utterly, completely real, like my first mind-trip to the wharf. Only there were no disturbing holes in this picture.
There hadn’t been any on the ship, either, but I hadn’t been in a headspace to notice it then. Maybe it was because vampires’ senses were better? I wondered, staring at the silver shimmy of a showgirl’s costume on a small stage. So maybe their sense memory was, too. Or maybe he was filling in the blanks?
Or maybe I was nuts for thinking about this now.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
Louis-Cesare had snagged two glasses off the tray of a passing waiter, and handed me one, which turned out to be straight bourbon. “You might want to drink that now,” he said grimly, and bolted his own.
I didn’t even ask. I just threw it back, managing to choke most of it down before a bell rang out, harsh and discordant. And had me jumping reflexively and spilling the rest.
And I wasn’t the only one. On all sides, people jerked to attention, glasses sloshed, cigarettes fell from holders and hands disappeared inside coats. And then everything stopped—music, talking, gambling, drinking. And every head in the place swiveled around.
And looked at us.
“Now what?” I muttered to Louis-Cesare, who had gripped my arm.
“Rien.”
“Then why are they staring at us?”
“They’re not,” he said, pulling me to the side as a fist started pounding on the door.
It was loud enough to cut through the din and make me jump again, although I’m not a jumper. But my nerves were a little frayed at the moment. A fact that wasn’t helped when a line of bullets suddenly strafed the door from the other side.
“So I guess we’re going with distraction, huh?” I yelled, as the room went wild.
Louis-Cesare didn’t answer; he just grabbed my hand and pulled me through a horde of waiters beating it with trays of illegal booze, good-time girls fighting croupiers for cash and tough guys pulling guns. And then the door gave way and a bunch of blue-coated cops burst in, yelling orders we couldn’t hear over the din.
Louis-Cesare grabbed my hand and pulled us onto the stage along with the ensemble, who had packed up their instruments and were disappearing behind a cheap red curtain. And down a hall. And behind a set of stairs.
Until we got hung up behind the bass player, who couldn’t get his huge instrument through a narrow exit.
I looked behind us, but there was nothing there. Not even the cops, who had probably assumed that the curtain fronted a wall. “I think we lost her,” I told Louis-Cesare breathlessly, who didn’t look convinced.
Maybe because the lights took that moment to flash out.
“Shit!”
He didn’t say anything. He just picked up the bass, with musician still attached, and threw it behind us. And then jerked me through the doorway. And then on a breathless trip through a stream of memories that went by so fast, they made me nauseous.
I found that the only way to deal was just to concentrate on my feet, which w
ere running over surfaces that changed between steps: scuffed hardwood to mossy stone to cigarette-strewn concrete to inlaid marble to rocky seashore to—
Fire-lit dirt?
I looked up, blinking, when the scene stayed constant for a few seconds. And saw a slur of dark greenery and bright stars that didn’t make sense because I was dizzy and really confused. Like part of my brain was still trying to catch up.
“Where are we?” I slurred, grabbing Louis-Cesare for info and balance.
And got neither. He didn’t answer, and then we lurched and almost went down. I stared at him stupidly for a minute, because Louis-Cesare was a master swordsman; he didn’t stumble. The man practically looked like he was dancing just walking across a freaking room.
Or going to one knee.
Or leaning heavily against me.
Or crumpling to the ground in my arms.
Chapter Thirty-six
I let him down to the ground, and went into a defensive crouch over him, looking wildly around for our attacker. But all I saw was a tree-strewn hillside under a huge black sky, the Milky Way glittering overhead like a starry rainbow. A small, tumbledown shack stood near the bottom of the hill, and a bonfire was burning at the top. But nothing moved, except for a cool breeze rustling the treetops, a rogue meteor burning up along the horizon and the firelight flickering down the hill.
It looked like we’d outrun her—for the moment.
The bonfire was a ways off, but it was still bright enough to send shadows to play over Louis-Cesare’s face, giving the illusion of movement. But that was all it was. Because he just lay there, even when I shook him.
I pushed up his shirt, which had gone from fine linen to rough homespun, thinking maybe she’d caught him between one transition and another. It doesn’t take much time to slip a stake between the ribs, or to run a knife edge over a neck. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had enough practice.
But there were no wounds, no blood. No obvious problems at all that I could see. I ran my hand around his throat, then down through the lacings on the front of his shirt. And encountered only fine, unbroken skin. And sat down abruptly, feeling dizzy again from sheer relief.