pushed back, but I barely noticed. Mircea had gone for the mage at the same moment, and if he could distract him for just a couple of seconds—
And then the train rocked hard around us, sending people staggering left and then right as it almost left the tracks. I didn’t know what had happened until the back window exploded in a wash of bright red energy. And not just the back one. The metal body of the car must have acted like some kind of conductor, because window after window burst in a long line, like firecrackers on a string.
Glass pelted the screaming crowd, which surged to its feet, people scrambling after bags and umbrellas and jostling me on all sides. Then the lights blew out, plunging the entire train into darkness. And that was it for the passengers, who collectively rushed away from the chaos and toward the only door out.
Which happened to be the one we’d just reached.
I jumped for my mother, but someone stepped on my instep and someone else elbowed me in the ribs, and then I was knocked backward entirely, shoved into the side of the car. My head hit hard enough for me to see stars, but I struggled back to my feet anyway, mainly to avoid being trampled. The people in the last car were pushing into this one, the ones in this one were pushing into the next, and the ones in the next were putting up the kind of fuss you’d expect with three or four hundred crazed passengers trying to stuff themselves into an already overstuffed area.
But the commotion meant that I couldn’t hear Mircea, and the lack of light meant that I couldn’t see him. Or the mage. Or my mother.
Goddamnit, I’d had her! I’d
Freak out at the sight of a man slithering in the missing window beside me.
An emergency light had come on and was flickering dimly at the front of the car, giving me an intermittent look at his face. But for a moment, I didn’t believe it. Because it wasn’t a face I’d expected to see again.
I had assumed that the Spartoi had ended up underneath the wheels, because there had been nowhere else for them to go. There was almost no clearance around the train, not on top, where the roof almost skinned the ceiling of the tunnel, and not on the sides, where the curved walls were streaming away maybe six to eight inches from the windows. It was physically impossible for a grown man to squeeze into a space that small; hell, I couldn’t have done it, and he had at least seventy pounds on me.
But he was coming in anyway.
I watched, torn between fascination and horror, as his body seemed to shrink, to elongate, to flow with an almost serpentine movement. He could have broken out the rest of the glass in the window, giving himself a bit more space. But he didn’t bother. He just oozed through the small opening like he’d suddenly gone boneless, an amorphous mass of skin and flesh and distorted, running features, including a patch of floating hair with no skull to give it definition anymore, and two round eyeballs swimming in the gelatinous mass of his face.
Eyeballs that were nonetheless looking straight at me.
I made a sound between panic and revulsion and stumbled back, and he oozed the rest of the way through the window. And as soon as he did, he started to solidify, bones and muscles and assorted free-range body parts all snapping back into place, like a balloon inflating. And I suddenly stopped worrying about losing my lunch and started worrying about the rifle he was aiming at the crowd.
Or, more precisely, at the back of my mother’s head. I didn’t know why he was concentrating on her with me standing right there, but at that moment, I didn’t care.
I could see her in the next car, her copper hair gleaming under the emergency lights as she looked around frantically, as if trying to find someone. She started pushing forward, calling out something I couldn’t hear over the sound of the screaming crowd and the rattling train and my own blood rushing in my ears. And then I grabbed the long barrel and forced it down, even as he fired.
I didn’t see if I’d been fast enough. I didn’t see anything, because a vicious blow sent me skidding backward, until my head stopped me by smashing into a metal railing. In the next compartment.
For a moment, I couldn’t move, too stunned to do anything but lie there as the car swam sickeningly around me. Two head blows in quick succession had me trying to decide between passing out and puking up breakfast, or possibly doing both at the same time. I rolled over, glass crunching under my hands, but some old clubbing advice about never passing out on your back got me onto my hands and knees. I looked up, dazed and disoriented.
In time to see the gun leveled at my head.
I stared at it for a split second, my eyes crossing, and then I tried to shift. But my head wasn’t clear enough, and even if it had been, panic makes shifting difficult. And nothing panics me quite so much as staring down the wrong end of a gun. I tried again anyway, but the mage squeezed off a shot at the same moment, and I knew I was dead.
Only for some reason I wasn’t, despite the sound of the shot and the smell of gunpowder in the air. It told me I hadn’t shifted, but I couldn’t figure out how else he’d missed me from all of two yards away. And then I looked up and bumped my head on the suitcase, which was still bobbing about despite having had a smoking chunk carved out of its butt.
I didn’t know where it had come from, since I hadn’t brought it with me. But I didn’t ask questions, just grabbed the thing for a shield I didn’t need because Mircea had arrived. And he was no longer looking so interested in caution.
He snatched the Spartoi’s gun out of his hand, the metal squeezing up through his fingers like Play-Doh. The demigod looked from his ruined gun to the enraged vampire and back again, and for some reason, he seemed more perplexed than frightened. And then Mircea used the gun to thwack him into the opposite side of the now-empty compartment.
The blow had looked effortless, almost casual, like someone swinging a golf club on a Sunday afternoon when he really doesn’t give a damn if the ball goes into the hole or not. And yet it sent the Spartoi far enough into a metal side panel to bow it outward in the shape of his body. And I decided that my estimate of the clearance must have been about right. Because we were suddenly treated to the nailson-a-chalkboard sound of metal being dragged over concrete, as his steel-covered ass scraped along the tunnel wall outside.
He didn’t move, and I thought he was done for, was sure of it. To the point that I whipped my head around to see if my mother was all right. But the movement was too fast for my aching skull, folding my knees under me after a halfhearted attempt to stand. Mircea moved to help me, and therefore he also wasn’t watching when the Spartoi peeled himself out of the panel and jumped—straight at us.
Mircea did sense him in time to turn, to get an arm up—which the Spartoi used to throw him the remaining length of the car. I stared as he busted through the shattered back window, twisted in midair, caught the bottom of the jagged windowpane and propelled himself back inside. Only to get hit with a spell that sent him sailing what looked like half a mile down the tunnel.
All that took far less time to happen than it did to say, and then a blast hit the suitcase I was clutching hard enough to toss me back like a rag doll. I felt something scrape across my back and something else rip what felt like a chunk out of my scalp, and then I was tumbling end over end into almost pitch-darkness. Until my back hit a wall, hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs, to cost me my grip on my floating life preserver, and to send me tumbling to the floor.
My knees hit gravel and my hands hit steel and blood was cascading into my eyes and I couldn’t breathe. So it took me a second to realize that I’d been tossed back into the tunnel. But that somehow, I was still alive.
I had to be. Death didn’t hurt this much.
But I didn’t understand why until I looked up to see the Spartoi walking toward the next compartment as the train sped off. He didn’t bother to look back, didn’t even wait until I was safely out of sight before turning away. Like he hadn’t bothered to waste power disposing of me.
Blood trickled into my eyes as I sat there, understanding flooding me along with something that made my hands shake and my cheeks burn. Mircea had been a threat, and had been dealt with accordingly. But in the Spartoi’s eyes, I wasn’t worth pursuing. I wasn’t worth killing. I was just some minor nuisance to be taken care of on his way to murdering my mother, and I didn’t
I grabbed the suitcase and leaned forward, and the little platform shot ahead like a bat out of hell. Mircea grabbed me around the waist a second later, appearing out of the darkness and vaulting up behind me. He said a really filthy phrase in Romanian that I probably wasn’t supposed to know.
