Embrace the Night

Saleh might have found his prey, but it looked like he lacked the power to take his revenge. Even though Rosier didn't seem nearly as interested in preserving his life as he did in ending mine. And Billy was right: there was no way the cavalry was going to get here in time.

Saleh did manage to hack the thing off my left arm in passing, although I would have preferred him to free the right, given the choice. But I wasn't about to argue. I got a grip on one of the nearby window shards, one that looked a lot like a claw itself, red and glittering, tapering from a wedge base to a needle-fine spike. Pritkin had said that Rosier had to lower his defenses to feed. It looked like I was going to get a chance to test the theory.

Rosier jumped for me, a misshapen white blur against the dark, landing with enough force to knock the wind out of me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see, but I could feel. Before the lethargy started again, before he could render me completely helpless, I reached out for the slick surface of his skin and drove the shard as deep as I could into his side.

He screamed, but there was little blood, little bodily fluid of any kind. And the spongy flesh closed up around the wound almost immediately. So I plunged the shard in again and this time I left it, while feeling around for others. Some were too blunt to use, but here was a nice blue one with a jagged edge; there a deep green with a fissure making it into a double blade; and over there, almost at the end of my reach, was a pearly white, so cracked and splintered along the edge that it was almost serrated—and cut about as well, too.

One of the black things was trying to grab my free arm, while its master screamed and thrashed about and tried to eject multiple knives all at once. "You will pay for that," he told me, blood dripping from his mouth onto my stomach, mingling with my own.

"Maybe, but not today," I gasped, as Saleh rose up behind him. I didn't even have time to flinch before the wide blade took off Rosier's head.

Blood spurted out then, a river of it, as if something much larger than the tiny body slumped across me had been killed. I lay in a pool of it as the whirlwind started up again, its sound almost immediately overshadowed by the familiar scream of air that signaled a ley-line fissure. Or, in this case, a portal.

"You better run," Saleh told me, as the stream of fire holding off the demon cloud halted abruptly. But I couldn't run, could barely crawl, and there was no time in any case. The cloud dove for me, a screaming mass of hysterical hate, only to be hit by a hail of bullets from the stairwell as a dozen vamps flowed into the room.

"Is this a private party?" Alphonse asked, crushing the black thing hanging off my thigh under a heavy motorcycle boot. "Or can anyone join?"

Sal pried the creature off my back and stomped heavily on its center. It screeched and writhed and melted away, leaving only what looked like a scorch mark on the stones below.

"You do know how to throw a party," she said as she pulled the last creature from my right arm and slung it against the wall. She looked me over. "But you were right. Elegance isn't your thing."

I lay back against the fake stone of the floor, listening as the demons and vamps fought it out all around us. It didn't sound like the demons liked automatic gunfire any more than they did fire. I watched the last of them being pounded into nothingness by Alphonse's size twelve boots while Sal examined my various wounds. What was left of Rosier's body was nearby, a wasted scrap of bloody white flesh. I thought seriously about throwing up, but decided it was too much trouble.

Sal checked out my thigh and shoulders and pronounced them only flesh wounds. The stomach was worse, wide enough to need stitches, but I borrowed her belt and bunched enough of the skirt under it to serve as a makeshift bandage and to keep me decent, all at the same time. Multitasking, that's how you get things done, I thought, and burst into giggles.

"None of that," Sal said reprovingly. "Have hysterics later. The Consul's on her way and she's go

"Hell, yes, I got it. And if she's coming, maybe she can get off her ass and help with some of the dirty work for a change!"

All the blood drained from Sal's face, and her eyes fixed on a point just over my left shoulder. "And with what ‘dirty work' precisely do you require aid?" a husky voice asked from behind me.

God knows what I would have said, but before I could even turn around, Jesse ran out of the dark and jumped in front of me. "I got it!" he yelled, and sent a plume of flame straight at the Consul.

She met it with the blinding wall of sand, dry as a desert, hot as hell, that I had once seen eat a couple of vampires alive. Only she wasn't throwing it outward at us, I realized after a moment, when my flesh stayed on my bones; she was using it as a shield. I got Jesse around the middle and screamed in his ear. "Cut it out! She's a friend!"

The fire abruptly vanished, and he stood there looking a little sheepish. "Uh. Sorry?"

"Not strong at all?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Well, maybe a little strong." I guess now I knew who had taken on a cluster of angry demons.

"Why weren't you with the others?" I demanded.

"I was on my way down here when two of those things attacked me. I fried 'em," he told me happily.

"Then you could have gotten into the kitchen! You could have gone with Radella and the others!"

"And leave you like this?" He sounded insulted.

The Consul dropped the sandstorm and Jesse did a double take, then just stared, trying to prove that "eyes as big as saucers" wasn't an exaggeration. I guess he hadn't gotten a good look at her before. She arched one eyebrow in a way that reminded me eerily of Mircea. "Friend?"

I smiled weakly. "Well, you know. Not an enemy."

"That remains to be seen," she said, holding out a jeweled hand.

I blinked at it for a moment until I realized what she wanted. She expected me to hand over the Codex. And I'd already admitted that I had it. I figured I had maybe a minute to fork it over before she had me strip-searched.

"Uh," I said wittily. My brain was exhausted, my body was in serious pain, and I had nothing left. I couldn't let her take it, not when Pritkin had been willing to go to such lengths to see it destroyed. I still didn't understand exactly what it did, but I knew enough to think that maybe he'd had a point. Because no way was the geis the only reason she wanted it. Ming-de and Parindra hadn't had a sick vampire, and they'd seemed pretty keen.

The Consul didn't say anything, but she didn't lower her arm, either. "Give me the Codex, Cassandra."

"That wasn't the deal," I reminded her. "I agreed to save Mircea. That was all."

"We will attend to our own." She pulled someone forward who had been standing behind her. Tami. "Give me the book and I will give you your friend."

"You'll give her to me anyway. As soon as Mircea is healed, she is free. You've sworn it."

Those sloe eyes narrowed. "But he isn't healed. Not yet."

It took me a second, but I got it. "And you have him." I had the counterspell, but I couldn't heal Mircea if I didn't know where he was. And that left Tami under the Consul's manicured thumb until she chose to release her. Or until she gave her back to the Circle.

"So you've decided what? That you want the Codex more than you want to save Mircea?"

"Once I have the Codex, our mages can cast the spell."

How inconveniently true. "And if I refuse to give it to you?"

The Consul's grip on Tami's arm tightened slightly. "I do not think you will refuse."

"And I think she will," a ringing voice said behind me. The corridor was suddenly flooded with a blinding golden light. "Well done, Herophile. You have fulfilled your quest!"