“I saw,” he said, his voice drifting across the scene. He courteously didn’t remind me that of course he’d seen it, or I wouldn’t be able to. But I didn’t care about details right now.
Dorina had just hit her groove.
She performed a double decapitation with the sword, ducked under the two arcs of blood, and threw her scimitar ahead of her, piercing a falling fey partway through his jump. She grabbed a passing pole or a long piece of wood off a shop—I didn’t have time to see which—and a second later, it had two fey impaled on it. Then she pulled her scimitar out of the still falling fey, gutted another attacker, dodged his spilling entrails and used the tip of the sword to pluck a brass platter off a display. Which she then slammed into yet another fey’s face hard enough to leave an impression of his features in the metal.
And she did it all one handed.
But while that was as impressive as hell, it was nothing compared to the second act.
I couldn’t see anything of my actual surroundings, or feel except for a vague impression of Louis-Cesare’s body beside mine. But I sat up anyway at what my vamp was now seeing. “What the—”
“You did not know she had this power?” Hassani’s voice asked, as a great black specter rose out of Dorina, the cheerful lights of the marketplace still visible through the ends of its tattered form, but the eyes—
Were solid red and burning.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dory, Cairo
“Shit,” I said softly, staring as the inky black specter launched itself at a group of maybe a dozen fey, who had been about to end this whole affair with a massive drop from both sides of the street. Instead, they didn’t even have time to shit their pants before—
“Allah preserve us,” Hassani said softly, while I just sat there, staring.
The vamp whose eyes I was seeing through had had much the same reaction. He skidded to a halt at the edge of a gutter while a hail of body parts rattled down on the rooftops, street, and crowd of screaming, running humans below. Right before getting splashed in the face with a huge gout of blood himself from a savaged torso.
It smacked down at his feet, pale and naked and looking like a wild animal had been at it. A really big animal. Vamps are not squeamish for obvious reasons, but I felt this one’s diaphragm give a slight lurch of sympathy.
Because she’d torn them apart, literally ripping the contingent of fey limb from limb, and so fast that my eyes couldn’t track it, because the vamp’s couldn’t. He stared down at the modern art like splatter of white skin, yellow fat, and red blood and veins and meat that was all that was left of a being possibly older than the pyramids. Then he looked up, a little dizzily, giving me a diminishing view of the mad cavalcade as it disappeared down the street.
I saw Dorina flow back into our body, hacking and slashing without missing a beat. I saw Ray fling us around the alley as if he was born to it. I saw myself . . . well, honestly, I didn’t remember what I’d been doing. All this crazy shit had been happening around me, yet I’d noticed very little of it.
Which made no damned sense at all!
Was Hassani doctoring the images he was sharing for some reason? Because I wasn’t that oblivious and Dorina . . . couldn’t do any of that. My brain skidded off the topic of the specter, as if unwilling to deal with it right now, and concentrated instead on the swiftness of the attack. She had the liquid speed of all masters, but she wasn’t that fast—I knew she wasn’t.
Louis-Cesare had been faster than her when we’d fought while he was possessed. Not by a lot, but enough that I’d lost a leg to that damned blade of his! Mircea had managed to reattach it, but I still had the scar. It was only a fine line now, barely even noticeable, just a shade lighter than the rest of my skin. But still. If she’d been able to do what I just saw, I wouldn’t have a mark on me.
And Louis-Cesare would be dead.
Of course, I’d been holding her back, fighting with everything I had, because my lover was not in his right mind and I didn’t want her to gut him. Whereas, last night, I had been helping her. Had my contribution really made so much difference?
Or had she merely been learning new skills since then, spreading her wings now that she could, becoming what she was meant to be all along? Instead of helping her, had I been holding her back all these years? I had no idea.
I looked up and saw Hassani’s eyes on me through the hazy street scene he was still projecting, probably because he was waiting for an answer to his question. I licked my lips. “I . . . never saw her . . . like that.”
“And now that you have?”
I refocused my eyes and stared at the bloody mess scattered across the souk. The consul’s vamps were doing the same, appearing a little shell shocked. But they had a job to do, and to give them credit, they didn’t hesitate for long.
They began dropping off of buildings, with most grabbing passersby and wiping their memories, as well as any phone or other recording device they could find. Others began cleaning up, piling pieces of once formidable adversaries into whatever receptacles were available. There were plenty to choose from, everything from baskets to brass platters, since the shopkeepers had all fled.
Not a single vamp went after Dorina.
I didn’t blame them.
“I got nothing,” I told Hassani honestly.
“Well, perhaps I do.”