“You’re not the boss of me.”
There were some more bad words spoken. “Even half dead, you’re a smart ass!”
“I’m half dead?” I repeated. Nice of someone to tell me.
Mircea swore and sped up, although it felt like we were flying already. Trees sped by in a blur, the wind caused my hair to fly everywhere, and the moon seemed to turn into a long, silver streak behind the trunks.
Or maybe that was me. My perfect eyesight didn’t seem so perfect anymore. Kind of like the rest of me.
I started wondering if I’d hit another tree root when we slammed into the ground.
Then I started wondering how Elena was keeping up with a speeding master vampire, who could have given a sportscar a run for its money. But then, I’d have to ask how she’d done everything else, and I frankly wasn’t up to it. I tried to close my eyes, just for a second, and Mircea yelled at me some more. And shook me, which made my head hurt, which made me start to cry and him to swear on pretty much an ongoing basis. Because this was going about as well as these things usually did.
And then we stopped.
“Wait,” Elena said, her hand on Mircea’s arm. I got the impression that she’d been the one to stop us, but didn’t know why.
And it looked like Mircea didn’t either. “We have to get past them!” he hissed.
“No, we don’t.”
She nodded at the moles, or whatever they were, which were right on our heels. But there weren’t enough of them to stay in tight formation anymore. The further we’d gone from the house, the more territory they’d had to cover, with the rays of the sunburst getting farther apart as a result. Leaving us in the free space in the middle of two of them.
Mircea put me down near the trunk of a tree. He wasn’t breathing fast because vampires don’t breathe, but he looked winded, anyway. Or maybe he was just worried. His voice sure sounded like it when he said my name.
“Hm?” I looked up at him vaguely.
“Cassie. Cassie, can you hear me?”
“Stop doing that,” I said, because he was snapping his fingers in my face. I tried to push them away, but I missed.
I didn’t care about that, either.
“Cassie. Cassie!” He sounded like he was shouting, yet I still couldn’t seem to hear him properly. There was a rushing in my ears, and a thickness in my throat, and a lethargy in my limbs. I didn’t feel good, I decided.
And whatever Mircea was doing wasn’t helping.
I felt him put hands on the sides of my face, felt him push power into me. But despite the fact that he was a gifted healer, it being one of his master’s powers, it wasn’t enough. Darkness swamped me, wrapped me up like a smothering blanket, and pulled me down.
“Cassie!” I could barely hear him at all now.
And then the darkness closed over my head, and I was lost.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Well. Here we are again.”
I blinked my eyes open and had a serious case of déjà vu. For a moment, I wondered if the stampeding goats and magical moles and torch wielding mob had been a dream, and I was only just now waking up at Gertie’s. Because the sun was slanting in through the drapes, just like before, although it looked to be at a different angle. And there she was, sitting at my bedside, in the same outfit she’d been wearing earlier.
But then I tried to sit up, and oh . . . oh, no.
“I’d take it easy, if I were you,” she said, as the room spun wildly around me. “You have quite a lump.”
I put a hand to my throbbing head, and felt something the size of a pigeon’s egg over my left ear. It was sore as hell, which worried me less than the fact that the room was still moving. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes.
“You followed me.”
“Fortunately,” it was dry. “Blanking all those memories and stitching time back together was a bit of a challenge, even for me.”