And from the huge sugar sculpture of three rearing cobras that had been in the middle of the U of tables. But which was now on its side, with great chunks scattered over the floor and glittering in the candlelight. And sending the stench of burning sugar into the air, because a fallen candelabra had started to melt it into a sticky sugar sea.
“What happened?” Mircea asked thickly.
“They happened!” Paulo said, staring at the large number of people clustered around the senator’s table, in what looked like some sort of uniform.
Mircea couldn’t see much, but it was enough. There was only one group he knew who wore long crimson capes and gold helmets and caused this kind of panic. And since the senator was talking to them instead of trying to calm her guests, he assumed it was serious.
“What are they doing here?” he asked, but didn’t get an answer. Because a group of guests had decided to hell with the crush around the doors, and had come running back this way.
Mircea assumed they were headed for the small hall at the far end of the room, which the servants had been using to bring in the food. But if so, they never made it. In the bottleneck between several upturned tables, someone came a little too close to the burning sugar—with predictable results.
And if Mircea had thought it was pandemonium before, it was nothing next to a bunch of vampires with flaming hems trapped inside a room with no way out.
“Well . . . damn,” Jerome said, as a group of now genuinely out-of-control master vampires began screaming and running and falling and flailing—
And, in one case, sliding—right underneath the table.
“Aaaauggghh!” Paulo said, rearing back with his table leg.
“No, no, no!” Mircea said, wrestling with him, before he could bring it down on some master’s skull.
“Put it out! Put it out!” the pink lady screamed, because the flaming man had just set the tablecloth on fire.
And then the world fell away again.
Mircea felt himself falling, the explosion that had destroyed half the roof behind him having sent him flying. He landed after a three story drop in a roll that left him unhurt, and scattering along with the rest of his company. Until one of his men grabbed his arm.
“What’s happening?” A panicked whisper echoed in his mind.
“Residual power from the day—”
“Then we’re dead!”
Mircea’s man shook him off. “He can’t top it up at night! Scatter until he expends his reserve, then proceed as planned!”
The man nodded and flew off to the left, while Mircea’s man dimmed his power as much as possible, to make himself harder to see. And then flattened against the building, melding what was left with the energy being thrown off by someone inside. He waited for the inevitable rush of guards to come pouring into the courtyard in defense of their master.
And kept waiting, because none came.
Instead, the initial volley, which had carved a huge bite out of the top floor of the building, was soon joined by similar explosions around the perimeter. But despite that, and unlike the others, who made themselves targets by moving, Mircea’s man stayed where he was. Moving only enough to stay aligned with the actions of the servant inside.
And, slowly, the hits grew more erratic and less powerful. The crushing blows became severe, then serious, and finally glancing. And then stopped all together, allowing Mircea to see burning trees and a pockmarked building through drifting clouds of smoke.
“Get ready.”
Mircea’s man sent the thought around to his people, and received back flickers of acknowledgement from dozens of minds. Mircea felt the man’s hands clench, but he tamped down any and all physical signs of tension. His heart did not beat; his breath did not flow; his palms did not sweat. The only discernable sign of his intentions were the slowly bunching muscles in his calves, preparing to spring—
And then knotting painfully, when he suddenly stopped, and urgently sent hold, hold, hold, to his people.
They held. Mircea thought they might have anyway. Or, if they had been running, it would have been in the opposite direction.
Because something unholy was happening in the middle of the garden.
The small figure of the consul was small no longer, churning and twisting and swelling—exponentially. But not in any kind of understandable way. Mircea stared because he had to, because the man whose eyes he’d borrowed was doing so. But if it had been up to him, he’d have looked away.
Because whatever was in the garden wasn’t human any longer.
A coil of scale-covered strength pushed up and out, black even in the firelight that splashed it. It rose two, three, four stories into the air, higher than the walls around it, and simultaneously swelled up wider than five men could have reached around. And that was before a great serpentine hood spread out easily three times wider than that, blocking out the stars.
Mircea felt the vampire he was shadowing swallow, but then stiffen again, probably knowing that they had no choice but to attack. They had already committed treason; there was nothing behind them but death. And so they went forward, Mircea’s man leaping from the shadows with a mental scream: “Now!”
Mircea came back to himself in a sea of people. There was smoke, and screaming, and jostling; someone dug an elbow into his side; someone else stepped on toes that already felt mangled. And then someone yelled: “No, No! Grab him—grab him!”
And then he fell down some stairs.
It hurt, because he was still too disoriented to catch himself properly, but it was nonetheless an improvement. Because he fell out of the crowd surging down a large hall above, and into a small landing with an open window. An open window belching smoke, but still. He’d take what he could get.
Mircea concentrated on remembering how to move his own arms and legs, instead of someone else’s, and finally got it sorted out. He staggered to his feet just as three more people came tumbling down the stairs after him. Well, Paulo and Jerome had been running, until the pink lady lost her footing behind them, and knocked them down along with her and then into Mircea.
“Hello,” she said breathlessly, from atop his stomach.
Jerome pulled her off, but Mircea, who had hit his head and bruised his butt on impact, stayed down for a moment.
Paulo didn’t. He had spied the window, and he scrambled to his feet, running over to stick his blond head out. “I think we can get down this way!” he said excitedly. Which was good.
And loudly.
Which was not.
“Uh oh,” Jerome said. And then jerked himself and his lady friend out of the way, as the crowd in the bigger corridor upstairs paused, turned, and then came stampeding their way.
Mircea found that he could move, after all. And then he dove after Jerome, who was pulling his lady past an outraged-looking Paulo and down the rest of the stairs. And then into a hall, because bodies had flooded the landing and were surging after them, despite Paulo’s vociferous protests.
“In here,” Mircea said, and pulled them through a door down the hall that proved to be a pantry, and then into a kitchen. Which was deserted, the servants having already departed, probably through the open door on the other side of the room.