The buka looked directly to where Chigaru’s guards supported the prince against the wall, one on either side. The buka roared, baring fangs the length of my fingers, and lunged toward him. Mychael threw himself between the monster and the prince, the steel of his sword infused and glowing with magic. Tam was next to him, his unseen power adding to Mychael’s strike. Between the two of them, they gave the bastard something to really roar about.
Or they should have.
The thing ate Mychael’s magic like candy and Tam’s like a sugar topping. Absorbed. Gone. The sword didn’t even part its fur.
“Raine, get him out of here!” Mychael shouted.
I knew he meant the prince. “I’m not leaving without—”
“We’ll follow!”
“If we can” went unsaid.
Imala shouted to the prince’s guards. One got in front of Chigaru and the other behind, and pushed their way through the courtiers, toward Imala and me.
I looked down the stairs. Just because I couldn’t see the giant hand and the nightmare it was attached to, didn’t mean that it wasn’t down there waiting with its closest monster friends. Terrorizing a hotel packed with people wouldn’t be a solo effort. The sounds of screaming, running, and panicked people coming up from below proved it.
Imala, Chigaru, and his guards reached us.
Mago clutched my arm. “I have a ladder in my room. If we can get there, we can get the prince out through the window.”
I had a surge of hope. Mago’s escape ladder, in his luggage . . .
Luggage that Balmorlan had ordered taken.
I swore. “It’s not there. Balmorlan took—”
Mago bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “I keep it under the mattress in case of emergency.”
If this wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what was.
Make it down two floors alive instead of four. Sounded like better odds to me, though it depended on what hell spawn was waiting on the fourth and third floors. Mago’s room was at the end of the freaking hall. One death trap at a time, Raine. One at a time.
“Let’s go!”
We went down the stairs as quickly as the darkness and probable presence of monsters would allow. Imala and Mago were on either side of me. Chigaru was moving on his own, but his guards were sticking close, as were two of his mages. Other goblin courtiers brought up the rear. I didn’t see Mychael or Tam.
Chatar was one of the prince’s mages.
Great. Monsters weren’t bad enough, now I had a mage accused of murder because of me close enough to shoot one of his poisoned darts into the back of my neck. There needed to be a revenge timeout until we were out of here.
Mago tripped, the gilt railing the only thing that kept him from falling into the stairwell. “What the hell is—” He looked down at the carpet and sucked in his breath with a hiss.
A foot. A man’s foot.
The shoe was still on, but the rest of the body was gone, though not without a trace. Blood and gore soaked the carpet in a dark trail down the next dozen or so steps.
Visuals to go with the sounds we’d heard.
Chigaru stepped up beside me. “What lies below, seeker?”
The prince was simply calling me what I was. No insult or slight intended. He was standing beside me, in the glow of what light I had.
He was a target in more ways than one and he knew it.
“Whatever waits for us was sent here because of me,” he said quietly.
He was only partly right, but I wasn’t going to be the bearer of that bad news.
The prince’s ramrod straight posture told me more. He wasn’t going to let any more of his people be killed trying to protect him. When he had stood on the bow of his yacht, he had been trying to draw out his assassin. Now, he was using his body as a shield for his people, some of whom were probably plotting to kill him—and one of them was standing not five feet away.
A noble Mal’Salin.
Icicles must be forming in the Lower Hells. Big ones.
Focus, Raine. Bukas and monsters with giant, peoplesnatching hands didn’t just jump out of a black mage’s twisted imagination. I picked up the pace as much as I could in the thickened air. The slower we moved, the faster we could find ourselves eviscerated and eaten, and not necessarily in that order. One of Chigaru’s guards walked directly in front of him, so the prince didn’t have to force his way through the air. Having to slow down for the prince—or worse, having to stop for him—could be fatal for all of us.
Imala’s red lightglobe reflected off one of the hotel’s mirrors. Mine shone on what was sprawled at its base.
The mirror may have been warded before, but it wasn’t now.
At first glance, someone might think the body had been torn in half. This was worse, if that was possible. From the waist up, the man was on the floor. From the waist down, he was inside the mirror, wherever the monster that had grabbed him had come from—and where it had gone back to, trying to drag its prize with it.
Imala snatched some kind of metal sculpture off a small table next to the mirror. “Shield your eyes,” she ordered. With one smooth move, she hurled the sculpture into the mirror, shattering it, and exposing nothing but a wall behind it—with half a body lying at its base. That shut one door to Hell or wherever that thing had come from, but it left entirely too many more on this side with us. I swore if I lived through this I was going to shatter every mirror I saw for the rest of my life.
Mago swallowed with an audible gulp. “So much for where the buggers are coming from.”
I hustled our little party the rest of the way down to the fourth floor. Chaos reigned. Judging by the screams coming from down the darkened corridor, a lot of people hadn’t made it past the doors to their rooms before they were attacked.
Imala hissed in frustration.
If we stopped to help, we stopped to die. She knew it and she hated it. The odds of us making it out of here ourselves weren’t too gre—
Pain, like a hammer to the chest, sent me to my knees.
My mouth was open, but no air was making it in or out. I tried to speak, struggled to breathe, my hands joining my knees on the floor. Pain, sharper than the first, sent me facedown on the carpet. Power surged in my chest, alternating with the pain. At each surge, I gasped a little air. The power was the Saghred.
So was the pain.
I knew it. I didn’t know how, but I did.
The Saghred twisted and jerked against my chest. It wanted to stay here. Badly. To stay and to feed. Dying people released souls, souls the rock wanted, needed like it needed nothing else.
Its need became mine.
I raised my head and saw them. Souls fleeing dying bodies, their last moments of life spent in terror and screaming, in a hotel turned hunting ground, a slaughterhouse for the demons and nightmares that came out of mirrors, through walls and up through the floors.
“Raine?” I heard Imala call as if from far away. “Raine!”
All I could manage was a head shake, which was what the rest of me was doing. I forced myself to breathe slowly. In. Out. Just keep the air moving. All I got was a lot of rasp and too little air.
“You!” She shouted to someone, sounding closer now. “Help me.”
Strong hands locked around my upper arms, pulling me to my feet; another arm went around my waist, supporting me. Mago’s arm.
“Are you all right?” he asked, even though he knew I wasn’t.
I couldn’t answer. I hissed air in and out between my teeth to keep control. The rock wasn’t taking me, not now. Another punch to the chest made me stagger, but the pain was milder. The surging, swirling power was taking its place. The pressure on my chest suddenly lifted, and I sucked the cold air into my burning lungs, cooling, calming. “I’ll be fine . . . when we get out.”
Imala’s small hands gripped my upper arm; Mago took over where one of Chigaru’s guards had hauled me to my feet.