I nodded in relief and grabbed his hand, but Pritkin pulled back when I reached for him. “It’s your call,” he told me seriously. “But we don’t know what we’ll find once we get out of here. It would be wise to conserve your energy if you plan to rescue anyone.”
Caleb stared at him incredulously. “You actually think they made it out of here without being turned into shish kebabs? And even if they did, this place is more than half flooded—putting the corridors outside completely underwater!”
“Something that would not overly concern a vampire,” Priktin said, meeting my eyes in understanding. Caleb was thinking about the disaster from a human perspective, but the people in this section of MAGIC hadn’t been human in a long time. If they had survived the initial blast, they might actually be okay. Rafe might be okay. I felt a little light-headed suddenly.
“It looks like no easy way out, then,” I said reluctantly.
“You can’t be serious!” Caleb was looking at me like I’d lost my mind.
I bristled, because I wasn’t any happier about this than he was. “I can only shift so many times in a day, and taking two people with me drains my strength pretty fast,” I told him flatly. “Pritkin’s right. If I exhaust myself now, I won’t be able to help any survivors. Even assuming we find some.”
“Then how do you suggest we get out of here?” he demanded, glaring at me. Like I’d come up with this idea instead of his buddy.
“You’re war mages,” I told him irritably. “You figure it out. Preferably before we drown.”
“Yeah, you’re a Pythia all right,” he muttered.
“I’ll check out the corridor,” Pritkin offered, stripping off his heavy coat. “It might not be as bad as it looks.” He took a deep breath and dove—leaving me alone with a war mage who, until a few minutes ago, had been doing his best to hunt me down. From his expression, I could tell that Caleb was thinking the same thing.
“I guess it’s a compliment for one of us,” I said a little nervously.
“Not really. If I kill you, how do I get out?” I stared at him, and he was expressionless for a drawn-taut moment. Then he sent me a brief flick of a smile. “John knows me.”
Yeah, I thought darkly. He’d known Nick, too.
“What was that?” Caleb suddenly demanded, whipping his head around.
“What was what?”
He ducked the sphere underwater, but there was nothing to see but our legs churning up the mud. After a minute, he brought it back up, where it highlighted a scowling face. “I thought I felt some—” he began, and then his head disappeared.
I stared blankly at the spot where it should have been for a second before looking around frantically for a dart with a scalp. But there was nothing. Nothing except tiny ripples in the water.
I scanned the surface, but the only clue to his whereabouts was the ghostly glow of his sphere, sinking fast. Somehow I didn’t think he’d suddenly decided to take a swim. And then a trio of darts thumped into the wall behind me, giving me something new to worry about. They almost hit a dark shape that had been crouched on a jut of rock, making it leap outward to avoid them. Of course, it jumped straight at me.
My arm jerked up and my knives met the creature halfway through its arc, slamming into it right before it slammed into me. I had a brief impression of hot, stinking breath and bloodstained jaws, and then it was on me. A body thick with fur and muscle knocked me out of the water and back onto the scored and pitted tabletop.
A guttural growl vibrated through my skull as a clawed foot slashed at the wood. It caught the bell of my sleeve, ripping it completely off. I rolled to the side just as a heavy head came crashing down, burying powerful jaws in the thick planks beside me.
My instinct was to run, but there was nowhere to go. Instead, I ended up with handfuls of wet, stinking fur as I fought to keep the slippery head against the table, where it could chew on wood instead of on me. But even partly trapped, it was strong and ferocious.
Claws raked my dress, and for once I was grateful for Augustine’s exuberant use of fabric. The heavy, waterlogged folds kept my skin from getting shredded as badly as the material. Powerful legs scrabbled on the slick tabletop, trying to find purchase, while my knives stabbed it over and over, the little blades punching holes that splattered hot blood over my chest, arms and face.
Despite my efforts, the creature finally tore free of the wood by ripping out a large chunk of it. It turned with serpentine quickness, reared up on hind legs directly over me—and was stabbed in the back by a dart. The iron wedge exploded out of its midsection and over my head, soaking me in gore as it passed.
I slid back into the water, trying to stifle a scream. It was easier than usual, thanks to the bubble of panic that had lodged somewhere between my stomach and throat. My fingers tightened convulsively on the slab of wood while I gasped and choked and tried not to move. I really didn’t want to end up like whatever had just tried to eat me.
A moment later, Caleb’s head broke the surface. He still had the sphere clutched in his fist as he heaved and coughed and brought up what looked like a quart of muddy water. “You all right?” I asked when I could speak.
The light glinted off the drops beading his buzz cut, silver on black, and the dark trickle of blood sliding down his temple. “Better than it is.”
“You killed it.”
“Hope so.” His smoker’s growl was a little more prominent.
“Good,” I said shakily. “What was it?”
“Don’t know.” His eyes focused on something just behind me. “You kill that?”
I looked at him blankly before following his gaze to where my knives had impaled something furry and scaly and really, really wrong to the tabletop not three feet away. I shrieked and jerked back, and the knives followed the motion, letting go of their prey to be reabsorbed by my bracelet. And untethered by anything, the gory body slid slowly off the tilted side of the table.
Caleb pushed it aside, giving the darts a target other than us. We crouched in the dark, hearing the steady thud of metal into meat, until Pritkin surfaced at my elbow a few moments later.
Pritkin popped up at my elbow a moment later. He gasped in a lungful of air before catching sight of the dark hulk of the creature floating a few yards off. “What is that?”
“The welcoming committee,” Caleb said straight-faced. “What did you find?”
“The corridors are flooded, but the nearest staircase is clear from about halfway up. It’s doable.”
“If we make it that far,” Caleb growled, glancing upward.
As if it had heard him, the chandelier finally stopped rotating. Without the scrape of metal on metal, the chamber was almost silent. The only noise came from the water lapping against the walls and splashing into the flood. And the even softer sounds of wretched sobbing.
Both men tensed and Caleb waved the light around, but of course he didn’t see anything. “What is making that noise?” Pritkin demanded.
“Augustine’s idea of a joke. He spelled my dress,” I told him.
Pritkin sized me up for a moment. “Take it off.”
“What?”
“I can use the charm on it to confuse the wards.”
The arm that wasn’t holding on to the table crossed protectively over my chest. “But . . . I’m not wearing anything underneath.”
“Nothing?”
“Maybe panties.” At least I thought I was. After the day I’d had, I wasn’t really sure.
Pritkin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Would it help at all to remind you that I’ve seen it?”
“Once! A long time ago! And it was really, really dark!”
He started to say something and then seemed to catch himself. “Give me what your maidenly modesty can spare, then.”
“Why do you need it again?”
“Oh, for—Give me the damn dress and I’ll show you!” Before I could reply, he pulled out a knife, reached underwater and sliced off what felt like half the skirt.
“Why do these plans of yours always involve me getting naked?!” I whispered viciously—to no one because he’d already gone.
In a minute, another row of darts tore loose with the earsplitting sound of shredding metal. They ignored us in favor of targeting Pritkin and the row of sobbing fabric he was sticking in cracks and crevasses along the wall. The material was fast turning into tatters as dart after dart hit it, fracturing the stone behind and letting in what could now literally be called a flood. Between the crying dress and the rushing water, the wards suddenly had plenty to shoot at besides us.
“Come on!” Caleb tugged me out of the protective shade of the table. “That charm won’t last forever!”
We swam full out for the far wall, staying underwater as much as possible. The wards had rotated away from us to fire volley after volley in Pritkin’s direction, their rusty clanging a cacophony in the enclosed space. I peered into the gloom every time we surfaced, desperately trying to see him, but the light was just too low. The most my eyes could pick out were brief flashes off multiple knifelike edges, as dozens of darts were flung through the air.
I was still looking when I swam into the wall. Caleb steadied me and then ducked underwater for a minute. “The door is just below us,” he told me after surfacing. “John was right: the corridor is completely flooded. But the stairs are only about fifteen feet to the left.” He started to dive again, but I caught his arm.
“John will be all right.”
I stared at the hail of darts that were still being unleashed behind us. Chunks the size of boulders had been carved out of the wall where they hit, with a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from the larger ones. “How could anyone be all right in that?”
“Trust me—I know him.”
“So do I,” I said savagely. “That’s what’s worrying me!” A crack echoed through the room, loud enough to momentarily drown out the wards. And the next second, a huge piece of the wall gave way, dropping almost whole into the flood like the calving of a glacier. It hit the water with the granddaddy of all belly flops. The resulting wave reached even us, slamming me back into Caleb.
“Don’t move,” he whispered as the nearest chandelier rotated our way, drawn by the disturbance of the water. It swiveled this way and that, sending darts slicing through the waves crashing all around us.
“We’re going now,” Caleb said in my ear. “Okay?”
I searched the dark one more time for any sign of Pritkin, but there was nothing. Damn it! I should never have left him!
“Cassie!”
“Okay.” It came out more like a croak. I’d never felt so helpless.
That was the longest fifteen feet of my life. I ducked underwater, following the dim light of Caleb’s sphere through the black rectangle of the doorway. And almost immediately I realized I had a problem. I’d planned just to follow Caleb, but although I knew Caleb was somewhere right up ahead, I couldn’t see him. There was too much dirt and debris in the water, choking off what little light his sphere gave out and leaving the flooded corridor almost pitch-black.
I quickly lost all sense of direction, unable to find up or down in the dark, freezing water. Everything looked the same, and the burn in my lungs was making it hard to concentrate. My pulse pounded sickeningly at my temples, and a flood of cold ran through my limbs, turning them sluggish and slow to respond to my brain’s frantic commands.
My grasping fingers finally found something that felt like a doorway and my foot scraped against a jagged surface that might have been stairs. I kicked against it instinctively but didn’t go very far. The remains of my waterlogged outfit dragged me down as I tried to fight my way toward the dim undulation that I really hoped was the surface.
Then a hand wrapped in the front of my dress, threatening to strangle me, and with a kick and a heave, I broke into air. I grabbed the sleeves of a wet white shirt and stared at the man wearing it. For a second, everything went gray except his face. His eyes looked too green, too clear, with a diamond-sharp, surreal edge. It took me a moment to notice that his face was flushed and his eyes were bright as lightning. The lunatic had enjoyed himself.
“How the hell did you get here before me?” I demanded, gasping as much from relief as lack of air.
Pritkin shrugged. “I took the back door and came around.”
“Pritkin. There
is
no back door.”
“There is now. The projector punched a hole in the south corridor.”
“Bit of a design flaw,” Caleb rumbled.
“I don’t think the wards were ever tested over a sustained period,” Pritkin told him. “Something to keep in mind when we rebuild.” He finally noticed my expression and frowned. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m trying to remember all the reasons you are indispensable and can’t be killed slowly and painfully.”
He ignored that and hauled me to my feet. I gathered up my tattered skirts, along with whatever dignity I’d managed to salvage. Then the three of us squelched up the stairs.
Chapter Eight
Caleb’s sphere made little headway against the gloom and was soon covered in a thick layer of dust. It was like the one I felt clinging to my skin, gritty and all-encompassing, as if the place resented not being able to drown us and was trying to slowly bury us alive. It didn’t have far to go.
The swath of destruction carved by the ley line hadn’t reached down this far, but it looked like some of the tremors it caused had. There were cracks in the walls as big as my thumb and chunks missing from most of the steps. We picked a zigzag path up the solid parts to the top, only to find yet another dark-as-night corridor.
Pritkin took point while Caleb brought up the rear. The rooms in this section were mostly residential, including the palatial suite used by Mircea when he was in residence. We stepped through the doorway into his rooms, and it was suddenly difficult to tell that we were in an underground fortress in the middle of a crisis.