“What the—” I didn’t get a chance to finish before Mircea grabbed me around the waist and flung us at the wall.
I hit hard, bruising my knee and smashing my cheek against the filthy concrete. But I didn’t complain. Because at almost the same instant, a bolt of red lightning sizzled through the tunnel, electrifying my hair and raising gooseflesh on my skin. Goddamnit!
“They’re supposed to be dead!” I said, furious.
“Perhaps this is a different group.”
“Jonas said there were only supposed to be five!”
“Yes, we’ll have to mention that to him when we return,” Mircea said grimly, as a bunch of pissed-off demigods blew past us.
I thought there were four, not five, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to see anything at all with bright green afterimages leaping across my vision. And then it was impossible, when so much spell fire lit up the tunnel that it looked like a sophisticated security system had been installed in there.
Laserlike spells bounced off walls and ceiling, crisscrossing each other in a deadly web of crimson fire. They turned the small, round space into something straight out of hell, and gave me plenty of light to see that the spells weren’t the kind meant to stun. Everywhere they hit, they blackened the heavy concrete, sparked off the rails and sent a thick layer of dust from the floor billowing into the air.
Mircea cursed and pulled me behind him, which would have been fine, except that a bolt slammed into the wall just down from us a second later. It must have hit an electrical line, because a great shower of sparks spewed across the tunnel, a few flaming out against my dress. Mircea cursed again and pulled me back the other way, near the stillsmoking blast mark from the previous spell.
“Get out!” he rasped.
I stopped staring at the fireworks long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“Shift out of here! Now!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through this. If they kill her, I’m dead anyway! Why do you think my power brought me back here?”
“I’ll deal with it!”
“You can’t! Mircea—”
He pushed me against the wall, his body shielding me, his eyes reflecting the sparks. And their expression was pretty damn scary.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“What?” He looked at me like he thought I’d gone mad.
“Would you protect the Consul if she was here?”
“Of course not!”
“What would you do?”
“Whatever she needed—”
“You would help her.”
“Yes!”
“Then help
“You are not the Consul, Cassie! She has abilities you cannot possibly—”
“—understand. I know.” And from the little I’d seen of them, I was really okay with that. “But I have abilities she doesn’t. She can survive a direct hit from one of those blasts; I can shift out of the way and miss it. It’s the same—”
“It is not the same! You are this.” He gripped my arms, hard enough to bruise. “You are flesh, soft and sweet and yielding and
“Mircea! They’ve been trying to kill me for three days and
“Due to luck!”
I stared at him. “Then I must be the luckiest person alive!”
He just looked at me, and I’d never seen that expression on his face before, like he was really going to lose it. There was something going on here, some issue I didn’t understand. But there was no time to figure it out.
“I have to fix this,” I told him, as clearly and calmly as I could. “If you want to help me, then help me. Don’t shield me, don’t protect me, don’t bury me alive.
He stared at me a moment longer and didn’t move. The fight was escalating and also getting farther away from us, back toward the crowded platform. And I didn’t think the Spartoi cared much how many people they killed, as long as my mother was one of them.
“Mircea,
“What do you need?” It was harsh.
“To touch her. That’s all I ever needed. One second and we’re gone—all of us—and this is over.”
He nodded briefly and let me go.
I pushed off the wall and back into the corridor, trying to get a glimpse of my mother. I only needed to touch her for a second to shift her away, but I couldn’t just appear beside her. Spatial shifts required me to see where I was going, or risk ending up in a wall or a ceiling or part of a mage.
And right now, I couldn’t see shit.
Except for billowing clouds of dust, crisscrossing spells—and the crazy-ass kidnapper, erupting from the fray and screaming bloody murder.
He was headed straight at us, but he wasn’t running this time. Instead, he and Mom were levitating on something I couldn’t see, thanks to their flapping coats. But I felt it just fine when it slammed into my stomach, picked me up off my feet and sent me careening backward into the far reaches of the tunnel.
And now there were two of us screaming, me and the mage, as we pelted into darkness, him trying to push me off and me holding on for dear life, struggling to reach behind him, to grab her, to touch—
But either he figured out what I was doing, or he was the worst damn driver in history. Because we went weaving across the narrow space, bouncing off the sides and scraping across the ceiling, red bolts of spell fire following us into the gloom. And then he got smart and tipped over, dumping me ass-first onto the hard gravel between the tracks.
I cursed and scrambled back to my feet, about the time that a blinding radiance flooded the air. It sent wildly leaping shadows dancing around the walls, disorienting me almost as much as the deafening sound of a horn and the tracks vibrating under my feet and the dirt shimmering like gold dust in the air—
“What’s happening?” I screamed.
“Train,” the kidnapper shrieked.
I stared up at him. “Train?”
“Train!” Mircea yelled, flinging one of the Spartoi against the side of the tunnel. And then the guy’s friends leapt for Mircea and he leapt for me and I leapt for my mother—
And grabbed a handful of something soft and rubbery and gelatinous instead, completely unlike human flesh. That wasn’t surprising, because the bastard of a mage had flung a shield around the two of them and I’d grabbed a handful of that. It stretched, encasing my arms like thick latex as I tried to punch through, and Mircea tried to keep the mages from incinerating us all, and the damn kidnapper tried his best to kick me in the head.
He gave me a glancing blow on the temple, but I stubbornly held on, as the rattling around us grew worse and the horn sounded again, deafeningly close, and my hand finally closed over one of my mother’s. For a second, I stared at her and she stared back, her wide blue eyes reflecting the approaching light. But while I could feel the fingers under mine, could trace the bones of her hand, could grasp her wrist, I couldn’t actually touch her. A thin membrane of the shield still separated us, and as long as it did, I couldn’t shift—
And then I couldn’t anyway because something smacked into us with the force of a Mack truck.
We went shooting down the tunnel like we’d been fired out of a gun, bounced off a wall, hit the floor and then went tumbling head over heels over head. I had the mage’s shield in a death grip and I didn’t let go, even as it careened around the small space like a Ping-Pong ball on acid. It absorbed some of the damage, and Mircea absorbed most of the rest, throwing his body over mine until something scooped us up and carried us along like a
