Midnight's Daughter

Caedmon darted out of the doorway toward me, but Drac intercepted him. They flowed into combat without a pause, evenly matched and darkly beautiful. There seemed little to choose from between them—Caedmon the more cu

I dropped to the ground, leaping aside to avoid the slash from a vamp’s knife. “Louis-Cesare!” I broke the arm of the vamp, but his weapon skittered across the floor, out of reach. “Some help here!” The chandelier fell, shattering in a thousand sparkling pieces that scattered like ice across the floor. Underneath it was the vamp who had attacked me, the molten metal of the fixture searing to his flesh as he lay screaming.

And still Louis-Cesare just hung there. Power was curling upward from every wound now; my skin prickled with it even halfway across the room. The mage seemed almost drunk on it, scooping up those coils of mist as fast as they flowed outward from his captive’s body.

There were three mages and every vamp that wasn’t busy holding down Radu converging on me. I was about to be toast if I didn’t move, so I did—straight toward Louis-Cesare. I was hit halfway through my leap by something that felt like a club but, since I didn’t see anything, was probably a spell. I smashed onto the tile, but somehow kept hold of my stake. Then two vamps were on me.

One was a master, but the other was not. The baby practically fell on the stake, puncturing his gut, by the smell. His shrieks added to those of the vamp still frying under the chandelier, and the clash of swords.

The baby vamp fell away, but the master had his head buried in my throat before I could move. I thrashed and struggled, but it was more the casing of dirt I still wore that kept his teeth out of my neck than anything I did. He bit down, but got only a mouth of dried mud for his trouble. And then he was sailing through the air, his head lolling at an u

They turned amber, just like Mircea’s when he was angry, I noticed. And at the moment, he was furious, with power sputtering around him like an electric field. Vlad might still think of Radu as his inept younger brother, but that was an image distorted by time. A second-level master could do a lot of damage, especially if the alternative was a sure death. I was glad to see ’Du finally putting some of those centuries of accumulated power to work, but what the hell was up with Louis-Cesare?

Radu helped me up, but tightened his grip on my arm when I started toward the balcony again. “I can feel the pulse deep within your body,” Jonathan was saying, heedless of the carnage around him. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were fever bright. He had widened the wound in Louis-Cesare’s side to a gaping hole. His hand disappeared in it up to the wrist. “That heart of yours, trembling against my fingertips. Beating, just for me.”

The pain must have been excruciating. Louis-Cesare’s neck arched backward until it looked as though his spine would break. The glittering mist of power around him had grown, forming a thick shroud of pale silver light that threatened to hide him from view.

I fought against Radu’s hold. “Are you crazy? Let me go!”

“It’s a spell,” he said quickly. “They’re behind a ward. Break it and it will destroy Louis-Cesare!”

“He’ll die anyway!” I’d met Jonathan’s kind before. Radu released me and snatched up the sizzling vamp from the floor. He slung him, and the melted, smoking metal attached to him, at another, who had come at us so fast he was little more than a rush of air.

“Claire!” I realized that somewhere in all this was the one person who could bring down any ward, half the time without even realizing it. I grabbed Radu’s arm. “Have you seen her?”

“Who?” He was watching Drac’s troops, who were circling us warily. Their master had disappeared—I assumed from the ring of steel on steel coming from the dining room that he and Caedmon had taken their fight in there.

“A woman—tall, red hair, young—have you seen her?”

“No. But Chef was saying something about a girl invading his kitchen earlier—”

“Get to the kitchen. Find Claire and—”

Radu grabbed my stake and threw it at an advancing vamp. It hit the approximate center of his chest—not a heart blow—and although he skidded in the blood, he didn’t fall. The second master, I assumed. Radu snatched the sword off the dead vamp and got it up in time to meet the one headed straight for him.

I crouched, stripping the vamp’s body of a shorter weapon, but had to throw it at a trio of mages trying to get close enough to cast a net spell. Above my head, Radu’s blade slid against the master’s down to the hilt, twisting his wrist at an awkward angle. In the half second it took him to adjust, Radu pushed past his defensive plane and got inside his reach, driving an elbow against his throat. His sword work looked like it had improved through the years.

The vamp staggered and we were on him. Radu pulled the stake out of the middle of the vamp’s chest and plunged it into his heart while I hacked at the neck. It wasn’t a pretty job, but I got the head off.

It bought us a little time, as everyone paused, waiting for someone else to attack first. “You go to the kitchen!” Radu said, looking a bit crazed. “I’m needed here.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a fighter?”

“I’ve no desire to face my brother. Others I can manage. Now go, and tell Chef I said to let them loose. We could use a diversion.”

“Let what loose?” I didn’t get an answer because Radu was attacked by the two remaining mages with the magical net. If I’d had my backpack, I could have taken care of them in a second; without it, the best I could do was to avoid getting caught myself. Luckily, the mages seemed to view Radu as the bigger threat. I turned on my heel and ran.

The back of the house was an even bigger mess than the front. The hallway to the kitchen had been trashed, to the point that large pieces of it were missing. I leapt through a crack in the broken wall, thinking to save time by cutting through the pantry, since it was now open to the hall. But I had to immediately slow down. I already had several cuts in my bare feet courtesy of the chandelier, and the scene ahead of me seemed specially designed to add more. Broken bottles, smashed cans and crumbled shelving were everywhere. There was so much shattered glass littering the white tile floor that it looked like frost.

There were people, too. A lot of them had to be Drac’s, because I didn’t know them. But the handsome young human who had fed Louis-Cesare after we’d arrived was lying across the doorway to the kitchen. It looked like something had been feeding from him, because his rib cage was open and half his bones were licked clean.

I stepped over him and someone hit me in the head, hard. I grabbed the weapon and smashed the wielder against the wall, only to find myself face-to-face with an outraged human in chef whites, clutching a marble rolling pin. He did not seem to understand even after seeing me that I wasn’t an enemy. I caught a glimpse of myself in the shiny stainless-steel fridge: mud-matted hair sticking up in all directions, wild eyes and a grimy body streaked with blood and sweat. Okay, maybe he had a point, but I didn’t have time to explain.

“Where is she? Where’s Claire?” He pointed the rolling pin at a steel-covered door across the room. “You put her in the meat locker?” I slammed him against the wall again. “Tell me she’s alive!”

“Sh-she was when she went in. It was her idea,” he babbled as I dragged him across the once pristine kitchen floor. It was now covered with dirty foot, paw and claw marks. Of course Radu’s pets would find the kitchen. But they must have been there and gone, because none were in evidence.