Magic Breaks

The stalks sprouted fat black bulbs.

Undead magic smeared my mind. I glanced back over Curran’s shoulder. Andrea had locked Christopher’s arm in a death grip and was pulling him across the floor. Behind them a vampire fell through the hole in the ceiling and charged after us.

Curran leaped and landed on the stairs. Jim with Ghastek was only a step behind.

The flowers opened, releasing a dense corona of thin filaments glowing with pale purple, as if someone had taken the fringes from several passionflowers and strung them together on the same stem.

Andrea reached the stairs, dragged Christopher a few steps up, and let him go. He collapsed.

The vampire glided among the blossoms, silent and quick.

“Don’t kill it,” Ghastek murmured. “I need a ride.”

The flowers shivered. A cream-colored shimmering mist rose from their petals. The vampire stumbled, reared back in complete silence, and collapsed.

“Damn it,” Ghastek swore.

The stalks rustled. Black hairy roots stretched over to the bloodsucker’s body.

“Beautiful,” Christopher whispered. “Mortem germinabit.”

“Come on, Christopher. We have to go.” Andrea hauled him upright and we climbed the stairs.

“I know we’ve been following our own scent trail, but I don’t remember any of this,” Jim said.

“That’s because we didn’t come this way,” Robert said.

“But I remember the two holes we climbed out of on the way up,” Andrea said. “I smelled us. This lobby or whatever it is wasn’t supposed to be here. This should have been a hallway. Are you saying the room moved?”

“We don’t know,” Thomas said.

The stairs ended in another door. Robert eased it open. A typical hotel hallway rolled out before us, complete with long red carpet and numbers on the doors.

“So we have no idea where we’re going?” Nasrin asked.

“We’re going down,” Curran told her. “Unless this place develops its own gravity, the direction shouldn’t be that hard.”

I wouldn’t bet on that.

• • •

FOUR FLOORS LATER the section of Mishmar that was lifted from a hotel ended. We took the stairs, squeezed through a gap in the wall and suddenly the carpeted hotel hallway was gone, replaced by the hardwood floors and open plan of a modern apartment. The walls changed from beige to polished glossy red, rich like the color of arterial blood. The dark gray furniture stood intact, the couch and chairs arranged as if waiting for a party to begin. Even the pots still hung from a baker’s rack above the range. Now how did my father manage that? How does one pick a chunk of a building and set it on top of other buildings without the furniture sliding around? Maybe someone put it all back together after it became a part of Mishmar?

I tried not to think about the sheer power required to sever several floors of a building and lift them hundreds of feet in the air without disturbing the contents. It broke my mind.

We tiptoed across the hardwood. Modern art hung on the walls, a collection of strategically placed streaks of red and white. An open suitcase, half filled with men’s shirts, lay in the middle of the floor, just by where the door should be. A long brown streak stretched across the polished wood toward the missing door. Dried blood.

The wererats checked the hallway beyond, slinking forward.

“Clear,” Thomas called.

“Not exactly,” Ghastek murmured.

I felt them too, behind us, above us, to the right . . . More than twenty now. The vampire horde kept growing, like a snowball as it rolled down a snowy hill. I didn’t know if these were new vampires or if the ones we left behind somehow found a way around the deadly flowers. I didn’t even care. I just wanted out of Mishmar.

We pushed on into the hallway. Fatigue was slowing me down and I dragged myself forward, each step an effort as if an anchor was chained to my legs. I wanted to lie down, but taking a nap wasn’t an option.

“An elevator shaft would be nice right about now,” Jim said.

“Keep dreaming,” Curran told him.

A wide gap severed the floor of the hallway. Robert dropped to all fours and stuck his head into it, bending down so much that half of his body disappeared. By all rights, he should’ve tipped over. “I don’t see anything moving.”

“Any undead?” Curran asked Ghastek.

The Master of the Dead looked at him. “Pick a direction, I’ll tell you how many.”

“Is there a direction in which there aren’t vampires?” Andrea asked.

“No.”

Curran glanced at me.

“Down is as good as any,” I said, and pulled my saber out. It didn’t feel like Slayer, probably because it wasn’t Slayer. Slayer lay broken in Curran’s pack.

“Down it is.”

The two wererats dropped into the gap, and Curran followed. I jumped after him, and he leaped up to meet me, caught me in the air, and landed on soft feet.

“Fancy,” I told him, scanning one end of the room, while he peered at the other. This floor appeared to be a high-end gym, filled with rows of ellipticals and treadmills.

“Trying to impress, baby.” Curran set me on my feet, caught Ghastek, and handed him off to Jim none too gently. We started moving. The machines stood in a single row to the left and in another two rows with a path between them to the right. Above them flat screens, now dull and dusty, mourned the passing of the tech age on their swivel mounts.

The multiple points of undead magic shifted, streaming toward us.

“Incoming,” Ghastek said. “Moving fast. They probably found a point of entry to this floor.”

We backed away.

A gaunt, skeletal shape squeezed through a crack in the wall near the ceiling and sat there, fastened to the wall with huge talons, the two red eyes like burning coals.

“Above and to the right,” I murmured.

“I see him,” Curran answered.

Another undead squeezed out of the gap and crawled next to the first one. This one was clearly older. The ridge of bony protrusions along his spine rose at least three inches, and his jaws looked like a bear trap. Across from us a third vampire crawled out of a dark crack in the other wall. This one felt old, too. A long ragged scar marked its face, trailing down over its chest past the point I could see. A cannibal vampire. The two words didn’t even go together. What’s next, zombie pirate Viking ghosts?

A shape flickered across the corner of my eye, dashing behind the treadmills. Another moved in the corner. Six vampires had entered the room, and they were stalking us. This wouldn’t be pretty.

“There are many vampires,” Christopher reported.

“Shhh,” I told him. “Keep moving.”

Vampires reacted to prey that ran, so we didn’t run. We moved quietly and steadily toward the back of the room.

The ancient vampire on the right wall slunk down. Behind us, an undead leaped onto the treadmill and perched there, like some mutated hairless cat. More undead eyes glared at us through the gaps in the machines.

Not good.

Something clanged ahead. I glanced that way. Thomas had found a huge metal door.

“Locked,” he called out quietly.

Nice. Beating on it would definitely provoke the vampires.

The undead moved toward us, two on the ground, two on the walls, one across the tops of the treadmills. I braced myself. If I had to kill them, so be it.

Andrea raised her crossbow.

The leading undead leaped. The ancient bloodsucker with the scar dashed across the gym and disemboweled the first vampire in midleap. Undead blood hit the floor, and Scar jerked a chunk of vampiric spine out of its opponent. The injured bloodsucker dropped like a stone. Scar leaped, spinning like a corkscrew, its talons opened wide, and sliced two other vampires, carving their flesh down to the bone. Two clumps of spongy dry lungs with bloated hearts hit the floor.

I closed my mouth.

The three remaining vampires, two old and one with its spinal ridge just beginning to develop, trotted over to us, crossing each other’s paths, their heads down.

I turned. Ghastek stood on his own feet, his face pale, his eyes determined. The younger vampire twisted upright and picked up the Master of the Dead. The two ancients perched on the floor, Scar on the left and the other, large vamp, so pale it looked completely white, on the right, moving in perfect unison.

“You may want to break the door down,” Ghastek said from four mouths, three vamps’ and one his own, in the familiar dry voice I remembered. “The rest of the undead will smell their blood. We don’t have much time.”

15

THE DOOR OF the gym opened to a half-ruined restaurant. Then followed a room with vampires and Ghastek got to use his new undead, while I got to use my substitute saber. It still wasn’t Slayer, but it did okay enough to get me from one end of the room to another. We slammed the door shut and had ourselves a run across another hallway to a staircase. Down we went.

Filthy rooms, crumbling chairs, floors that made no sense, one moment a luxury high-rise, the next a ruin, then a hospital . . . Sometimes icy cold, sometimes sweltering hot. One room housed a pile of rotting corpses slithering with huge snakes. Another had an imaginary floor. The floor was there, we could see it, but when Thomas stepped on it, he went completely through. Robert caught him and pulled him out, but not before the rat alpha got a glimpse of what was under the floor. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just had this wild look on his half-rat, half-human face, backed away, and took off in the same direction we had come from. It took us ten minutes to catch up with him.

At one point we’d reached a hole in the side of the building and one by one stuck our heads out of it. The breath of cold, fresh air was like manna from heaven. We were high above the ground. I saw a piece of a sky, a distant field of snow, and then a giant reptilian-looking bird swooped down and tried to claw my face off with its talons. Thanks, Roland. Much appreciated.

Curran pounded on the wall for a few minutes trying to break us free. The wall held, but even if we did manage to break through and start climbing down, the birds would pluck us off.

We’d clustered around that hole for a while, not wanting to leave, but eventually we had to move. Down and down, picking up more stray vampires as escort. They were everywhere now, a constellation of filthy magic sparks moving along with us, always trying to close the distance.

“Maybe this hellhole has no end,” Andrea growled, as we opened yet another door.

“No.” Christopher gave her a smile as he walked through the doorway. “It ends. It is finite . . .” He stopped.

We stood in a prison block. In front of us two rows of cells stretched forward, and in the distance I saw a section of a familiar circular clearing. I had seen this exact setup underneath the Casino. Rows of cells radiated from the central circle like spokes from a wheel, except the Casino’s cells held vampires. These cells held corpses.

“No,” Christopher whispered. His legs crumpled under him. He dropped to the floor and pulled the hood over his face, squeezing his slender body into a small ball. “No, no, no . . .”

Bodies filled the cells. Some skeletal, grasping at the bars with fingers that used to have flesh. Others fresher, with rotting muscle still clinging to their bones. A few didn’t look human. One of these cells must’ve been Christopher’s. He had sat here, in a cage, dying slowly and watching the dead around him fall apart.

“How horrible . . .” Nasrin whispered.

I knelt by Christopher and put my arms around him.

“No . . .” he moaned.

Nasrin crouched by me, her voice calming. “It will be fine, Christopher.”

“We’re not staying,” I told him. “You are not in a cage. You are free.”

He tried to rock back and forth. He couldn’t even hear me.

Behind us, the vampiric horde swelled somewhere in the walls, like an avalanche ready to break and bury us whole.

“We can’t linger,” Ghastek said, shifting in the vampire’s arms. His other two bloodsuckers halted.

“No . . .” Christopher murmured.

“Shhh,” I told him. “Look at me. Look at my eyes.”

I let my magical defenses slip a little. My power curled around Christopher. He raised his head and looked at me. “Mistress . . .”

“I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” I was getting very good at making promises I couldn’t keep. “I won’t let you get stuck here in a cage. Come on.”

I pulled him to his feet.

Curran looked at Nasrin. “Carry him if you have to. We need to go.”

Nasrin took Christopher’s hand. “Here, hold on to me. It’s okay. It will be fine.”

We began jogging past the cells. Corpses watched us pass with empty orbs. The putrid smell choked me. Dear God. So many people.

“Child!” a female voice called.

I stopped in midstep. I knew that voice.

An arm in a dark sleeve thrust between the bars, above a rotting corpse pressed against the iron. A woman looked at me from inside the nearest cell. The last time I saw her she had been middle-aged, with a stocky powerful build and a face the color of walnut. She looked decades older now. Her cheeks sank into her skull, hollow and withdrawn. Her skin hung off her bones. Dirt and dry blood stained the indigo mesh veil covering her dark hair and forehead. She was a ghost of her former self.

“Naeemah.”

“Child.”

She came from an ancient family of shapeshifters who served as bodyguards. Months ago Hugh had hired her to guard me, though not out of the goodness of his heart. He had begun to suspect that there was something off about me, but Roland sent him on another assignment, so he instructed her to watch over me and keep me alive until he could come back and pick up where he’d left off. My aunt had chosen that particular time to waltz into town. Without Naeemah’s help, I would’ve been dead.