“You promise?” With tears trembling in her dark eyes and her color high, she was truly stunning.
“I promise,” I told her, pulling her back toward the door.
She followed me through meekly enough, flinching when Louis-Cesare broke off a bedpost with a crack. He wedged it against the door, which he’d somehow forced back into place. “We must go!”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said, and shoved Christine off the balcony.
Louis-Cesare ran to the edge, looking over. “What did you do?” he asked me, in disbelief.
“What needed to be done.” I pulled out a gun and emptied it into the swarm of vampires behind us. And then his arm was around my waist, and we were falling.
We landed on something hard, but more yielding than concrete, and then we were moving into Central Park in a squeal of tires. We were in the Lamborghini, with Christine in the front, clutching the seat. And Ray driving.
“You can’t drive!” I told him, trying to get my limbs sorted out as we barreled diagonally across the street, heading straight for the curb.
“No shit!” We jumped it, and the resulting jolt almost threw me out of the car. I grabbed the back of Christine’s seat as we slammed back down on a footpath and careened toward a fountain. And then somebody started shooting at us.
The only good thing was that by midnight, even most of the bums had gone home to sleep it off. That was lucky for them, because Ray was the worst damn driver I’d ever seen. And that was after I jerked his head out of the duffel and parked it on the dashboard.
“Gah! That makes it worse!” he told me, as I tried to get the eyes facing forward.
“How can it possibly be worse?”
“Because I got double vision now! Get it off! Get it off!”
He batted at his own head and succeeded in sending it tumbling into Christine’s lap. She immediately went into hysterics and slapped it away. The head fell out of the car; Ray hit the brakes and we came to a screeching halt.
“What are you doing?” I screeched, as he hopped out. “There are people firing at us!”
“Tough!” came from somewhere under the car.
Louis-Cesare had pulled a gun from the duffel and was returning fire, and either he was a good shot or he got lucky, because the left front tire of our pursuers’ car suddenly blew out. The explosion of rubber caused their car to swerve violently, sideswiping a tree and disappearing over an embankment.
I used the brief reprieve to roll under the chassis to help find Ray’s missing piece, but the car was built too low to the ground to provide me much access. I was feeling around with my arm when a line of bullets strafed the side door, causing me to hit the dirt. A quick glance showed three vamps’ heads poking up over the embankment, a streetlight gleaming on the muzzles of the guns they had pointed at us.
And then the car took off, leaving me hanging out in the open.
Fortunately, Ray had decided to move it only a few yards, apparently having the same trouble retrieving his missing part that I was. It jerked to a stop, scraping along the side of a rock wall, and stymieing Christine’s attempt to climb out over the side. She turned around the other way, scrambling into the backseat just as I slid back behind the protection of the bumper.
Louis-Cesare was holding on to her with one hand and trying to return fire with the other, which wasn’t working out too great, judging by the number of bullets that peppered the ground around me—half of them his.
“Would you cut it out already?” I snarled. “If I’m going to get shot, I’d like it to be by the bad guys.”
He glared at me over the head of a hysterical Christine, who had him in a sobbing neck lock. “And if you will hurry up, we can get out of here before they manage to fix their vehicle!”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
More bullets slammed into the back side of Radu’s baby as I peered under the car. But I could see the whites of two small, angry eyes glaring at me from near the right back wheel. I swept out a leg and hit the side of the head, and it rolled out from under the car—just in time to get drilled through the forehead with a bullet.
“What? What was that?” Ray demanded, his eyes crossing, as I snatched him up by the short and spikies.
“Nothing,” I said, and dove over the backseat, and we were off.
The vamps abandoned their car and took off after us on foot, which was a smart move considering the number of obstacles in our path. They were gaining and Ray was cursing and Christine was sobbing. “Please, please let me out!”
“If I let you out, they will shoot you!” Louis-Cesare told her in French.
“They won’t!” She shook her head hard enough that a spill of ebony hair flowed down over her shoulders. “I know them; I can talk to them!”
“I don’t think they’re in a talking mood,” I said as Louis-Cesare thrust her at me. I thrust her back.
“You cannot drive a stick shift,” he reminded me.
“I also can’t return fire and hold on to your girl-friend at the same time,” I snapped, scrambling over the seat.
“Relax—we’ll lose them,” Ray told me as I tried to take the wheel. “I got a portal right up ahead.”
“We can’t go through another portal!” I said as we bounced across grassy hills, apparently not missing a rock or a root on the way.
“I’m not looking forward to it, either, but you got a better suggestion?”
“Any suggestion would be better!” I said, dropping his spare part in his lap and trying to ease in behind him. “If we go through a portal, we’ll explode.”
“We didn’t explode last time.”
“I didn’t have my duffel last time!”
“What difference does that make?” Ray demanded, his cheek smushed against the steering wheel.
“The putty’s in there.”
“What putty?”
“The putty I was going to use to blow up the portal at your office,” I panted, finally realizing that he had the damn seat belt on. A bullet parted my hair as I worked frantically to get it undone.
“So don’t shoot at it and we’ll be—”
“It doesn’t need to be shot!” I told him as the seat belt slithered free. “If it comes into contact with a portal’s energy, it detonates automatically. And that much would not only kill us, but take out a full city block!”
Ray paled. “Then you might want to turn here,” he said as a familiar flash split the air right ahead.
I swerved hard to the right, sending his hairy butt tumbling into the passenger seat. We plowed through a park bench, skidded into a road and were back on asphalt, if not out of trouble.
I leaned over the seat. “Where to?” I yelled.
Louis-Cesare shot me a pained look. “Vampire hearing!”
“Human adrenaline!” I shouted back, just as loud. “Where?”
He swallowed and faced the inevitable. “We have to report this.”
I nodded and shifted gears. For the first time in my life, I was actually relieved to be headed to vamp central.
CHAPTER 19
It was an hour later and Elyas was still dead. We were back at the mansion, and things were starting to get a little creepy. Not so much because of the dead body, but because of the ones that remained alive. So to speak.
Exhibit number one was in the hall outside the study. The vamp must have been young enough not to have much power of his own, because without his master’s to aid him, he was little more than an automaton. He had a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other, and he’d been sweeping the same patch of already-gleaming floor over and over for the last ten minutes.
I had this crazy vision of him standing there, sweeping and sweeping, until he dried up entirely and began to crumble. Until he became dust himself. If his arms go last, he could sweep himself up….
“How long does it take to find a freaking bullet?” The crabby voice jolted me out of an exhausted haze.
Ray was exhibit number two in the creepy undead department. He, Christine and I were in the sitting room next to the study, waiting until the big shots decided we were needed. I’d taken the opportunity to dig the bullet out of Ray’s skull before the wound healed over. But so far, I wasn’t having much luck.