Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (20 page)

A deafening crack rent the air behind her, and she turned to find the edifice of the palace crumbling to dust. People swarmed out of the doorways in an attempt to outrun the fallout, though she was not sure they were any safer out on the streets.

Finally, in the chaos, she caught a glimpse of the Swede and Vasily in the middle of the thoroughfare, boarding a horseless hack that had somehow managed to escape the carnage unscathed. They were separated from her by a sizeable tide of humanity, and she held her breath and prayed they had given up on her.

But just as Vasily mounted the step up into the vehicle behind the Swede, he froze. Her heart plummeted in dread as his head slowly swiveled around in her direction. His amber eyes locked on her, and he smirked.

“Damn it,” she muttered.

With one last futile glance around her to try and locate Rowan, she turned and ran flat out in the opposite direction down the teeming street, her hands still bound awkwardly in front of her. The quake finally subsided, and an eerie stillness descended as she ran, broken only occasionally by the sound of someone crying or showers of rubble shifting from fallen buildings.

The crowd thinned as she sprinted down the dirt-packed thoroughfare, dodging overturned steam cars and fallen debris, the scent of Theodora’s blood still thick in her nostrils, grit and snow stinging her eyes. She ran as fast as her bruised legs could carry her, until her lungs were burning, and even then she pushed through the wall of fire.

She focused on the memory of Helen’s face and imagined she was running to her, that she actually had a chance of seeing her again.

Just when she’d begun to let herself hope that Vasily had lost interest in chasing after her, however, a hand clamped down like a vise over her injured shoulder. Her vision whited out from the agony, and she gasped. Her forward momentum was arrested, nearly pulling her arm from its socket in the process, and she cried out in pain and rage.

Before she could pull in another breath, she was being lifted off her feet and flung sideways through the air as if she weighed no more than a sack of flour. She crashed into an abandoned costermonger’s cart, sending pomegranates rolling into the dirt and stunning the air out of her lungs.

After an interminable moment of breathlessness, she was able to draw a single gasp, but alongside the oxygen came an upwelling of pain in her back and head. She managed to raise her head just enough to see Vasily stalking in her direction, fangs out, eyes glowing. He was taking his damn time about finishing her off, but she supposed that since he finally had her all to himself he wanted to savor his meal.

She looked up and down the street but could locate no one close enough to intercede…not that anyone would have, when the world was literally falling in on their heads.

Vasily looked very satisfied with himself as he crouched over her, running a hand down the side of her cheek and neck in a rough grope. He paused at the top of her Iron Necklace then wrapped his fingers around her throat. His grip tightened, and he shoved her head hard into the ground, jarring her teeth.

She gasped for air and struggled fruitlessly beneath him, beating at his chest with her bound hands and kicking out with her legs. But she might as well have been kicking a chunk of rock for all the good it did her.

His head descended, his mouth opening obscenely wide, his fangs dripping with spittle. His grip on her throat slackened, though she’d almost rather it hadn’t, for she got a sudden whiff of his breath as she inhaled. It smelled like a dead animal.

“Jesus, what have you been eating?” she managed to choke out.

He growled in response and jabbed his knee into her gut, cutting off her breath once more. She was getting damned tired of people hitting her in the stomach. But just before he could sink his fangs into her throat, a shadow fell over them.

Rowan.

It was about damn time.

His fist connected with Vasily’s jaw, knocking him off of her. She rolled away and breathed in great gulps of freezing, dusty air, trying to ignore the ominous creaking in her bones. She didn’t think anything was broken. Yet. Though her body felt like one giant bruise.

The sound of something shattering drew her attention from her own sorry state, and she turned just in time to see Rowan pulling Vasily through a broken shop window across the street, raking the man’s back over the shards of glass sticking up from the frame. Thick, viscous blood splattered on the ground beneath them.

Vasily howled in pain and kicked Rowan in the stomach with such force that Rowan flew halfway across the street. He landed against the side of a steam car, collapsing its metal hood inward like an accordion bellows. His strange, toxic blood leaked out of his wounds, burning through his clothes and hissing against metal, though only for a moment.

He healed even quicker than Vasily, however, so just moments after landing, he was on his feet again, looking extremely annoyed but thankfully unscathed.

Vasily sneered at Rowan from the shop front, wiping blood from his eyes, and charged him with super-human speed. Rowan easily matched the assault and delivered a blow straight to Vasily’s throat before the other man could even raise a fist.

It all happened so quickly that Hex could barely process it between blinks. Vasily buckled to his knees and emitted a horrible gurgling sound, his throat caved in, his face turning a horrible vermillion. A few seconds later, he collapsed to the dirt, twitching and foaming at the mouth. A few seconds after that, he fell still.

It had been a dirty move on Rowan’s part, but Hex had never been much for gentlemanly codes of conduct when it came to fighting for one’s life.

Rowan rushed to her side and helped her to her feet.

“Where’d you learn to fight like that?” she gasped.

He gave her a dark look and tore away the rope at her wrists as if it were made of cheap newsprint. “Can you move?”

“I can try,” she retorted.

Suddenly, her wristwatch began a cycle of clicks. It paused, then repeated them, allowing her enough time to puzzle out the code.

Over Abdeen. Where are you.

She cursed and turned in the direction of the palace. She must have run farther than she’d thought, for the
Amun Ra
was just a tiny speck of brown in the hazy sky.

She fixed Rowan with a stern look. “The
Amun Ra
is in Cairo,” she said. “Did you know about this?”

Rowan just shrugged defensively and used the edges of his tattered shirt to wipe at the grime on his face. He’d long lost the stolen uniform jacket.

“Simon might have mentioned returning here once he’d seen to your sister,” he said.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious. “If Helen is on board, in the middle of all of this, I’ll skin the pair of you alive. I wanted her away from the city.”

She tapped out a response to Simon, giving their location as accurately as she could. Just as she finished, however, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked over Rowan’s shoulder, and her heart sank. Vasily was on his feet once more, looking even more deranged than before.

Rowan followed her look and groaned in frustration. “How the hell do you kill it?”

She wished she had the answer to that. She had a feeling she’d done little more than piss Theodora off even more by bashing in her head earlier. She glanced up and down the street but saw no sign of the other vampire. She thanked God for small mercies.

“Stake to the heart?” she quipped. It always worked for the heroines in gothic novels.

“Tried it,” he said, completely seriously.

“Fire?”

“Unfortunately, there is none to hand,” he ground out.

“Beheading? Surely he can’t grow another one.” He gave her a long, skeptical look, and she shrugged. “It’s worth a try anyway.”

He sighed wearily. “Stay here,” he said, then ran back in the direction of Vasily.

The ground started to rumble beneath her once more, and a terrible swell of noise she was becoming all too familiar with rose up behind her—terrified screams, the dull thud of falling stones, the sharp, echoing peal of the very earth cracking open. But this was even worse than before and moving in her direction with the speed of a freight train.

She turned her head away from Rowan and Vasily and froze in shock at what she saw. A mob was running up the boulevard in her direction, slowly thinning out as people sought refuge down side streets and in the ruins of half-crumbled buildings.

In their wake came the thing that chased them: a giant rift in the earth. It ripped its way down the center of the street, heading straight in her direction. One side of the fissure pushed the ground up, while the other side shifted downward, a chasm opening between them, sucking down anything that was in its path: steam cars, dray carts, even a few poor souls who’d not managed to get out of the way fast enough.

Just as the earth began cracking beneath her feet, she dove for the nearest alley and curled herself under a half-caved doorway. She wrapped her arms around a stone pillar and clung with all the enhanced strength her Welding hands afforded her.

It took what seemed like an eternity for the tremor to subside.

Finally, when the earth was once again still, she stood on shaky legs and dusted off her clothes and hair. She shook her head, as if that would shake off her terror, and ventured out to the main street once more. The street seemed even wider than it had been before, with a giant, zigzagging canyon running straight down its center. She didn’t dare get close enough to see how deep it actually was.

The earthquake hadn’t seemed to even register with Rowan and Vasily, however, their battle continuing unabated nearly on top of the rift. She let out a gasp of dismay at Rowan’s proximity to the edge. She scanned the skies for the
Amun Ra
through the veil of snow and could see its hull swiftly closing the distance between them. Just another few minutes, and Simon would be close enough for the emergency ladder to reach them.

She glanced back at Rowan, and her hopes, momentarily buoyed by the approaching dirigible, sank. She wasn’t sure they had a few minutes, for Rowan had still not defeated Vasily.

The vampire was driving the fight back in her direction, and Rowan had no choice but to follow him. Vasily was playing coy, lashing out and dancing away in the space of a single second, never allowing Rowan close enough to reach his head. Worse, he’d managed to lure Rowan even closer to the edge of the rift. Occasionally, one or the other of them would slip on the eroding sand, and every time it was Rowan, Hex’s heart went into her throat.

Suddenly, Vasily reversed his momentum, taking Rowan off guard and flipping their positions until Rowan’s back faced the chasm. She could easily discern Vasily’s intention to try and force Rowan over the edge, and she cried out a warning as he abruptly feinted forward.

She cursed her timing, for Rowan’s attention shifted to her for a split second, and in that split second, Vasily made his move, trapping Rowan beneath him.

She wasn’t sure who she was upset with more: herself for distracting him, or Rowan for letting himself be distracted. Rowan’s torso hung suspended over the edge of the rift, straining against the weight of Vasily pressing down on him. Vasily’s hands went straight for Rowan’s neck, knocking him flat onto his back and straddling his body.

Rowan may have been stronger than Vasily, but Vasily was, alas, smarter than he looked. If Vasily didn’t force him over the edge, then gravity would, and even Rowan seemed subject to that fundamental law of nature. In Rowan’s present position, it was only a matter of time before he tipped over the edge.

The deep, resonant blare of the
Amun Ra’s
fog horn sounded, and she looked up to see its glorious underbelly hovering in the sky just above her, the emergency ladder descending in her direction.

Rowan had told her to get the hell out of there, and there was a time in her life when she might have done just that—she
had
nearly done that, in fact, just a month ago when faced with an eerily similar situation.

She’d almost left Rowan behind in the desert to rot alongside Janus, despite the promise she’d made to the sheikh. Even after he’d taken that bullet for her, that insidious voice inside her head had still been there—an insidious voice that sounded an awful lot like Hubert Bartholomew.

She couldn’t shake the guilt of letting herself even consider listening to that voice. Abandoning Rowan in Cairo had only added to her burden, much as she’d tried to deny it to herself—much as she’d tried to assure herself she was doing the right thing.

What sort of person had she become? What sort of coward?

Well, there was no way in hell she was leaving Rowan behind this time, not after all he’d done for her.

She picked up a long piece of splintered wood and charged forward. She used all of the strength she had to ram the wood against Vasily’s head.

Caught off guard, Vasily fell straight over the edge of the rift, allowing Rowan just enough time to pull himself back to safety. She planted her feet firmly in the rubble and began to scramble backward before she too pitched over the side from the force of her momentum.

Her victory lasted only a moment before Vasily’s hand shot up out of nowhere and grabbed her foot. She yelped as he dragged her over the edge in one smooth move. She heard Rowan call out behind her, but even he couldn’t reach her in time to stop her descent.