Chapter Forty-six
The consul’s place was a disaster area.
Of course, it had been well on its way before. But after another hour of fighting, which was what it took to clear the house and lock up the fey who had gotten through the portal but had avoided being gutted, the place had finished its descent into an expensive heap of rubble. Not that that seemed to bother Zheng.
He tossed what might have once been a quality settee aside, and searched through the debris underneath. And emerged with—
“Don’t you think you have enough?” Ray demanded.
Zheng ignored him and dusted off his find, before severing it from its remaining tether and adding it to his collection. “She said—” he began.
“I know what she said,” Ray interrupted testily. “And it was a head. Not seven heads!” He regarded with loathing the collection bouncing along at his former associate’s waist, tied there by bloody silver-blond hair.
“Yeah, but she don’t like me so much,” Zheng pointed out. “And it don’t hurt to have insurance. Not that I ou
ghta need it after saving the senates’ collective—” He broke off as a younger vamp sped by, clutching a gory trophy tightly against his chest.
And then looking around in shock when he realized that it suddenly wasn’t there anymore.
“Oh, come on!” Ray said, as the young vamp caught sight of his golden ticket being tied securely onto Zheng’s waist.
Zheng grinned at him. The younger vamp’s shoulders slumped, and he sped off.
“He wouldn’t last a day against the competition anyway,” Zheng said. “Anybody who don’t get a seat and thinks they ought to have, will be challenging for it for weeks, maybe months. There’s a lot of fighting ahead.” He looked pleased.
Ray looked skyward—literally, since that part of the roof was missing. “I wasn’t talking about him!”
“Oh? Then what?”
“You saved their collective asses? I thought I had a little bit to do with it, too!”
“Oh, yeah.” Zheng grinned. “That was pretty good. Where’d you send ’em, anyway?”
“This swamp I know,” Ray snapped.
“Swamp?”
“In Faerie.”
Zheng looked disapproving. “That don’t seem so bad.”
I had a brief flash of that vision Ray and I had shared once, about a primeval-looking quagmire straight out of Jurassic Park, and begged to differ.
Only I didn’t have time, because Anthony staggered out of a hole in the wall, hugging a pretty blonde in one arm and an amphora of wine in the other. His toga was gone, his tunic was bloody and he was sporting what looked a lot like an old-fashioned shiner. But he seemed happy.
He looked around at the spotty fires, the drifting clouds of smoke and the tumbled marble of what had been a beautiful atrium only hours ago.
“She really knows how to throw a party,” he told me, with apparent satisfaction. “You have to give her that.”
He staggered off.
Zheng shook his head, frowned and looked around one more time. “I think that’s all of ’em.”
“What?” Ray asked. “There had to be, like, a couple hundred fey who got through before we hijacked their portals.”
“Yeah, but the consul cheated. Her sandstorm scoured half of ’em, and then Hassani’s fire cooked most of the rest and then Ming-de got hold of what was left—”
We collectively shuddered.