And ended up retching and almost blacking out instead.
I lay there, pale and cold and trembling, taking heaving breaths while the room around me shook like an earthquake had hit it. Drifts of dust and plaster were raining down, along with what looked like half the ceiling; people were running everywhere. I didn’t know why, because there was nowhere to go. And everyone was screaming, although I couldn’t hear them even though my ears had just popped.
Because the barrage was deafening.
And then the screaming suddenly got louder, loud enough that I could hear it. And the ward started shivering, like it was caught in a high wind. And the latest raft of spells didn’t stop at the surface, but stretched inward, heads forming as power piled up behind them, looking for all the world like the elongated blobs out of old lava lamps.
Until they broke through, the ward evaporating in an instant, with spells exploding and people screaming and diving for the floor, and the rest of the roof caving in.
A war mage jumped for me, his cape billowing out like a piece of the night, throwing some kind of spell I didn’t know. But it was pretty strange, because suddenly, there were two of him. The original and a second like a shadow . . .
A red shadow.
I stared at the man’s doppelganger as it hung in the air for an instant, only feet away from me, wondering what this new hell was, but unable to run or even move—
And then it collapsed, hitting the floor and splattering everywhere, like a bucket of warm red paint. Or a bucket of blood, I thought, blinking suddenly sticky eyelashes. Because that’s what it was: all the blood in the man’s body, which had been ripped out of him in a split second, leaving his exsanguinated corpse to tumble lifelessly to the floor.
And the torrent of blood to splash all over me.
I was still almost completely immobile, but I didn’t need to turn around. I didn’t need to see the next group of mages, who had been heading into the shop at a run, suddenly also preceded by leaping shadows. Didn’t need to watch them tumble to the floor as their friends stumbled into and over them, as both living and dead hit down, sliding on a sea of red.
I didn’t need any of it.
Because there was only one thing on earth that could do something like that.
“Shield!” one of the mages yelled. “Shield, you idiots! They’ve got—”
“Vampires,” I whispered along with him, finally turning my head.
And saw a war mage jump for the six-foot-five-inch hulk of my chief bodyguard, Marco. He hadn’t even made it all the way through the back wall yet, a fact that didn’t stop him from plucking the guy out of the air halfway through the motion and ripping him in two. And then throwing the halves aside with a roar, all in one fluid movement so fast I could barely track it with my eyes.
And then he was through, bursting out of the wall that contained the impossible-to-break-into main safe of the casino.
Which I guess hadn’t been so impossible after all, because he wasn
’t alone.
There was the redheaded southern charmer, Roy, who wasn’t looking so charming as he leapt through the hole and plowed into a bunch of mages, who foolishly thought their shields would save them. And they did—for a couple seconds. But these guys had been at the front of the battle, and their shields were wrecked.
And a second later, so were they.
I saw portly Fred, who used to be an accountant and still looked like one, at least until he threw out his hands toward the latest wave of mages. And then pulled his fists apart in a savage motion, like someone tugging on both ends of a length of rope. It didn’t exsanguinate the men, who were shielded, too. But it did cause all the blood in their bodies to suddenly relocate to one side or the other.
And I guess that wasn’t healthy. Because I was left looking at a group of maybe ten guys, half of whom had dark flushed faces on the right side—and burst capillaries, and red-flooded eyes—and half of whom had the same thing on the left. And the next time I blinked, the group had parted down the middle, falling to either side like Moses had just shown up ready to party.
And then someone was grabbing me and jerking me off the floor and up to a furious, blood-drenched face. “Why the fuck didn’t you call me?”
Blood was all over my face, too, and in my eyes, and dripping in my mouth when I tried to talk. And yet I felt my lips stretch into a smile. The last time I saw Marco, he’d been drained almost dry, that massive body too quiet, too still, so still that I’d wondered if I’d ever see it move again.
Guess so, I thought, head reeling.
“Cassie, I swear, if you don’t answer me right this—”
“Tried,” I said indistinctly. “Didn’t have my phone. Had to use someone else’s.”
“Whose?”
“Hers,” I said, looking at Carla, who was as blood-drenched as I was but seemed okay otherwise, except that she was screaming and screaming and—