Death's Mistress (38 page)

I breathed a sigh of relief. Dislocators do exactly what their name implies. And it wouldn’t help Ray to get him back together if the pieces were all jumbled up.

After a minute, I edged around the blackened mark on the floor, the edges of which were still sizzling, and crept across the kitchen. Everything was quiet, peaceful. I stuck my head out the door, cautiously looking around. I didn’t see anything.

That was a disappointment, as I’d been hoping for an arm growing out of a wall, or maybe a torso where the banister used to be. As long as it was
subrand’s, I wasn’t picky. But there was nothing.

He must have had time to get out the back door, I thought furiously. I shouldn’t have hesitated, waiting for Cheung, but as much as I had no reason to like the guy, dislocating half his organs seemed a bit much. But now that complete bastard was probably half a block away—

And someone grabbed me from behind.

“Stop doing that!” I said as I was yanked back against a hard chest. “You’re going to scare me to death.”

And then Louis-Cesare walked out of the living room—on the opposite side of the hall.

“That would at least be a novel way to die,”
subrand said, casually breaking my wrist. The sword fell to the ground with a clatter.

I sucked in a breath and fought not to scream, while my brain gibbered somewhere in the background that that was impossible, that no shields held against a dislocator, that that was why the damn things were so illegal that it was a life sentence just to possess one. I’d always been willing to take the risk, on the logic that life in jail was better than no life at all. And dislocators were the option of last resort when nothing else worked.

And now we were screwed, we were screwed, we were so very screwed, my brain helpfully informed me. Because I didn’t have anything worse. I didn’t even
know
of anything worse.

“Release her,” Louis-Cesare said, prompting a laugh out of my captor. I could feel it vibrate through me as he jerked me hard against him.

“And if I do not?” he asked, sounding amused.

I looked down at the slim hand holding me so easily. He was only using one; the other was still wrapped around that damned sword. I watched its pale glow leech over the boards and wondered if it was going to hurt much.

The fey hadn’t looked like he’d enjoyed it, as I recalled.

“I will kill you,” Louis-Cesare said simply.

subrand sighed. “It was an intellectual challenge to breach the wards. But now that it is done, I find myself growing bored.” That hand came up around my throat again, smearing mud and someone else’s blood. “Give me what I want or die,” he said calmly.

“I knew you were a villain,” Louis-Cesare said calmly. “I did not know that you were also a coward.”

Unlike Cheung,
subrand ignored him, instead tightening his grip on me. Louis-Cesare made a small movement and the hand around my throat cut off my air entirely. He stopped.

I was running scenarios through my mind, and the only one sticking was the time. I could hear the clock in the kitchen ticking so slowly that I was sure something must have been wrong with it. How many minutes were left until the wards cycled back on? Two, three?

Because I didn’t think I had that many.

And then
subrand jerked and spun, throwing me against the wall and slicing through the air behind us with the sword. It should have taken off his assailant’s head, but the guy who’d just nailed him in the temple with my lost stiletto didn’t have one. And then the knife at my back was out and stabbing up.

subrand turned at the last second, or I’d have had him; as it was, the cold iron carved a bloody furrow across his chest. It looked like those shields didn’t hold so well against one thing, I thought, as two fey dropped to the ground from overhead.

They landed almost on top of Louis-Cesare, and several others poured out of the remains of the pantry. They were trying to overwhelm him with numbers, but Scarface gave a yell from overhead and dive- bombed them, a sword in each hand and a huge grin on his face. I didn’t see any more, because I was trying to avoid getting the same treatment as the fey in the kitchen.

It wasn’t easy.
subrand didn’t even flinch, either at the blood pouring down his temple or at the gash in his torso. He also didn’t slow down, and he moved even faster in person than his doppelgänger had, a blur of silver against the dark hallway.

I’d dropped as soon as the heart blow missed, grabbed my fallen sword and rolled to the side. But I hadn’t had time to get back to my feet before that glowing blade stabbed down, hard enough to stick into the floorboards. He wrenched it out, and a split second later, it was flashing down again, and again, and again, as I rolled around the vestibule, dodging the staccato-like stabs, barely staying ahead of the blade and only getting my own sword up once.

That resulted in getting it sliced in two, as I was going to be any minute now, and then
subrand stumbled, cursing, the first sign of pain I’d seen. Of course, that was understandable, considering that a vampire head had latched onto his ankle like a rabid pit bull.

The rest of Ray was in the vestibule, hiding behind some furniture, which he started lobbing at us. A side table hit
subrand in the chest, and a lamp struck him in the shoulder, and then Ray’s head was sent flying to land with a wet-sounding thump well down the hallway. Whereupon his body went into a frenzy, tossing everything and anything it could get its hands on. And it wasn’t bothering to aim anymore.