Tempt the Stars

Chapter Twenty-nine

The hard way turned out to be pretty damned hard.

“Shit!” Caleb cursed as the door blew open and the bar was swarmed by a mass of familiar blue-robed guards. Who looked like they remembered us, too. And no way could the two of us take on that many.

But then Pritkin grabbed Rosier and threw him into the first wave. Who staggered back into a table full of the locals, sending mugs and arcs of hell juice flying. And knocking a bunch of dusty, gray-garbed patrons to the floor.

That didn’t seem to bother the guards too much, who were busy thrashing back to their feet, more than one of them drawing those damned curved blades. Until a gnarly, lumpy, gray-green limb, less like a hand than a proboscis, snaked out from under one of the patrons’ cloaks. And crumpled the nearest sword like tinfoil.

And okay, that works, I thought, right before guards and furniture started flying.

I had to hit the disgusting floor to avoid a chair, which splintered against the wall behind me in a hail of bits. But by then I was under the table, grabbing Casanova and the bottle he was still holding. “Give me that!”

“Getcherown,” he slurred, and grabbed it back. And blinked around blearily, before focusing on the veiled guard who had just dove after me. Only Casanova apparently thought he was also after his precious hell juice.

So he bonked him on the head with it.

“Was’ goin’ on?” he demanded as the guard slumped over, leaving us with a view of struggling legs and flashing blades. And a gray-green fleshy lump that appeared to be eating a chair.

“Bar fight!”

“Oh. I haven’t been in one of those in—” A curved sword cleaved the table clean in two. “And now I ’member why.”

We scrambled back as the sides fell away, leaving us staring at a massive blue-robed warrior, his blade sheened with black blood. I stared at him and he stared back, and underneath the veil he wore, I saw him smile. Because we didn’t have any weapons and Caleb and Pritkin had been jumped by half a platoon and the closest cover was a pillar a few yards behind him, which might as well have been on another planet—

And then the sword was slashing down and there was no time to scream, no time for anything except shifting or dying, and I couldn’t shift and I knew I couldn’t—

And I didn’t.

At least, not us.

I knew that because a second later, we were still sitting in the same puddle of spilled hell juice, inside the same cleaved-in table, in front of the same murderous guard. But the pillar that had been over there . .

Was now over here.

With a wicked-looking blade stuck halfway through the middle of it.

“What did you do?” Casanova screeched, his voice reaching into the falsetto. Maybe because the tip of the blade had stopped inches away from his crossed eyes.

I stared at the blade, and then out the window, which was still shuffling like a deck of cards. And thought maybe I knew. “This is the Shadowland,” I hissed as the guard started trying to pull his blade out.

“So?”

I grabbed Casanova’s head and turned it toward the window. “So you can think things how you want them!”

“But . . . but that’s just about how it looks.”

“You sure?” I said as the frustrated warrior gave a roar and punched the stubborn post.

Which promptly moved a foot backward and smashed into his face.

And punched him back.

“See what you mean,” Casanova said as the guy fell on his ass, an imprint of the day’s specials stamped onto his forehead.

And then several more guards rushed to their buddy’s aid. And had the table halves slung at their heads by a rapidly sobering vampire. And then we were rolling and yelping and crawling along the filthy floor, trying to keep the bar’s pillars between us and the guys trying to kill us.

But that’s a little hard when you’re rattling around between wildly shuffling pieces of wood, like a pinball in a particularly aggressive game.

Or make that impossible. A pillar suddenly appeared in the space right in front of me, causing me to almost break my nose. Casanova banged into another, fell back into a sprawl, and had a third slam into being between his legs.

An expression of mingled pain and fury came over his wine-flushed face. And then an unfortunate guard decided to hit a vamp while he was down, and lunged for him. And got batted back toward the door like a baseball when Casanova jumped up, grabbed a chair, and started swinging.

“Shift us!” he yelled.

“I can’t!”

“What?”

“My power is acting up—”

“What?”

I jumped to the side to avoid a guard who came sliding by on his back. And then again to miss the creature chasing him. And then had a third start a weird dodging dance with me, his sword and the pillar I was somehow keeping in front of me as a shield.

Because it looked like Rosier’s oath not to kill me didn’t extend to his people.

And, okay, this was no time for an explanation of the difficulty of using my power outside earth. Or the fact that I was having problems with it even back home. Or the fact that I didn’t understand what those problems were. There was only one thing that mattered right now, with Casanova staring daggers at me because I couldn’t twitch my nose and get us out of every possible situation.

“I can’t shift, damn it! Think of something else!”

But Casanova didn’t want to think; he wanted to bitch at me. “You came to hell with no way to get out? Are you insa—”

He broke off as three guards jumped him, apparently mistaking constant whining for weakness.

But Casanova wasn’t weak. He preferred to let other people to deal with his problems, preferably while he stood around and informed them about what they were doing wrong. But when it came down to it, he was perfectly capable of throwing down—and to the side, and through a window—as the guards quickly learned.

“Make for the bar,” he yelled at me. “The bar!”

And yeah, the massive old looked-like-oak-butprobably-wasn’t rectangle was the only cover available, except for flimsy tables that broke when you looked at them. But the bar seemed a long way away, and we were fast running out of pillars. And then I was out, as the one in front of me was finally hacked in two, and a blade came slicing at my jugular.

And missed.

Because the guy holding it lurched and staggered back, which made no sense.

Until I noticed that he was suddenly a lot shorter.

“Ha!” Casanova said, having just pulled the rug out from under him Shadowland-style, and wished away a large hunk of floor.

And then a customer was thrown into him and they staggered into me and we all went down. I hit a table and bounced off, only to get knocked to my knees by somebody’s elbow. And then to the floor by somebody’s knee. And then my chin hit down hard, and when I looked up, dazed and hurting—

It was to see a bloody and thrashing Pritkin being dragged toward the door.

He was surrounded by what had to be a dozen demons, while Rosier and half a dozen more fended off Caleb. And suddenly, I got it. The old adage about possession being nine-tenths of the law must hold true for the demon realms as well, because Rosier was going to take him.

And then defy the council to violate his sovereignty and come take him back.

Our eyes met for an instant across the bar, and triumph flashed across his. Because we both knew they weren’t going to set a dangerous precedent for the daughter of an old enemy. Once Pritkin went back into his father’s realm, he wasn’t coming out again.

Pritkin must have realized that, too, because he was fighting hard. But he had no weapons and one of his arms was dangling uselessly at his side and the other had five guards hanging off it—who suddenly staggered back, screaming, when a fireball erupted around Pritkin’s shielded arm and set their robes ablaze.

But a bunch of reinforcements were streaming inside, despite the fact that the odds were already ridiculous. Six of them grabbed tabletops to use as shields and jumped Pritkin and the rest ran to help Rosier. Which left him able to turn toward his son and lift a hand—

And the fire abruptly went out.

Pritkin still had his own shields up, at least for the moment, but it didn’t matter. The guards had obviously had enough of trying to drag a reluctant demon lord anywhere, and with the extra numbers, they didn’t have to. They just hoisted him up, off the floor, and there were too many for even him to fight, and he was almost out the door—

So I did the only thing I could.

And moved it.

Specifically, I moved it onto the ceiling, which was the only place I could think of that might help. But that appeared to have surprised the guards, who were still trying to use it to come in. And who ended up falling through the roof instead, and onto the ones surrounding Pritkin.

Bonus, I thought blankly as they kicked and thrashed and he sprang free, looking a little crazed.

But not as much as Rosier when he spun toward me, and screamed something in a language I didn’t know. And every warrior in the place abruptly stopped. And looked up, too.

And then came rushing straight at us.

“Jodor,” Casanova breathed.

I didn’t say anything, because I was struggling to get on my feet—why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like I had time to do anything, or even to form a plan. But it didn’t matter, because my legs weren’t taking orders, and my eyes kept losing focus and then something hit me on the head.

But it wasn’t a guard.

It was—

“Good one,” Casanova breathed. And started rapid-firing bottles over the bar that we were somehow suddenly behind.

I grabbed my throbbing head, which had connected with the underside of the bar top, feeling dizzy and confused and really pretty unwell. And saw the bartender stooped in a crouched position over by the wall, looking equally bemused. Maybe because he suddenly had nothing to be crouched in back of.

Because we hadn’t moved to the bar; the bar had moved to us. But I hadn’t done it. And then someone came sliding across it, and someone else jumped on top of him, and—

“Was that you?” I asked Pritkin, who was somehow over here now, on his back, his one good hand wrapped around his father’s throat.

“The door,” he said, half-strangled, because the same was true in reverse.

“No, I did the door,” I said, and hit Rosier over the head with one of our dwindling stash of bottles.

“That door!” Pritkin rasped, his eyeballs rolling up.

Which I took for a bad sign until I looked up, too.

And was hit in the face by something hairy.

I pulled it off and found a coil of rope in my hands. Weird, I thought. And then Rosier was somehow gone and Pritkin was looping it around my waist.

I tried to help him, because his hand didn’t seem to work right. But then, neither did mine. “Wer’ we going?”

“Out.”

“Oh, good.”

“Come on!” I heard Caleb’s voice and looked up again. And saw him hanging out of the bar’s front door, which was now opening out of the ceiling above our heads.

And then I was being hauled on a fast ride up and out, onto the roof, where I landed on some nasty shingles that bruised my butt. And then froze it, because the Shadowland was always cold. But that was okay, because it cleared my head slightly.

Enough that I realized that Pritkin and Casanova were still down there.

I scrambled back to the edge of the door, where somebody else was on the rope, somebody heavy enough to cause Caleb to strain. I grabbed for the end of it, but before I could do anything, Casanova was climbing out of the opening.

“I saved one,” he told me, looking a little disheveled.

“What?”

He hauled a bottle of hell juice out of the darkness and set it on the shingles. “Only one left.”

The building shook as some kind of serious spell went off in the room below, and I grabbed his lapels. “Where’s Pritkin?”

And then there he was, struggling to pull himself past the doorjamb with only one functional arm. But he managed, even before Caleb could help him, like he was in one hell of a damned hurry. And a second later I realized why.

When the section of roof I was kneeling on suddenly caved in.

I had a split second to see Rosier’s evil face and a forest of shiny swords and the floor all rushing up at me—

And then my arm was almost snatched out of its socket when someone caught me.

I looked up to find Casanova staring at me, as if he couldn’t believe he’d managed that, either. Especially one-handed, because the damned bottle was still clutched in the other. And then he was screaming and yanking me up and screaming again, because his feet were slipping on the widening edge.

And then Caleb jerked him back and Pritkin grabbed me. “Run!”

Which, yeah. But the cascade of old tiles and half-rotten ceiling beams and moldy plaster that had been the roof made it seem like we were running in place even as we pelted for the edge. Because the precipice was coming along with us, nipping at our heels.

And then consuming them, in a boiling mass of debris, just as Caleb grabbed me and swung me up, which seemed the wrong direction but I couldn’t scream with a throat full of plaster dust. And then we were going down again, fast, but I couldn’t figure out why until—

“Shiiiiiiit!” I screamed, finding dust no match for a zip-line ride down a sparking electric wire, dangling off the bit of rope Caleb had thrown over the top and speeding fast, fast, too damn fast toward a one-story building across the street.

Which we reached just as a bunch of indigo guards burst out of the bar behind us, and took off like bats out of hell. Or servants of one very pissed off demon lord, anyway. And then I couldn’t see them anymore because we were running up some stairs, and then pelting across the second building’s flat roof and running to the edge and no, no, no—

And then jumping across a too-wide cavern we almost didn’t make, Casanova’s feet slipping on the edge and his arms spiraling wildly, and me grabbing him and spinning around, and then Caleb grabbing me and all three of us doing a strange, death-defying dance on a two-inch ledge before Pritkin grabbed us and yanked us back.

And then we were off again.

“Where’s the council?” Caleb yelled as we pounded across the roof.

“Less than a block,” Pritkin said, which should have been good news. Only he didn’t sound like it.

It didn’t look like Caleb thought so, either. “What’s the problem?” he demanded.

“That,” Pritkin said as we ran up to the other side of the roof.

And yeah.

This side had a fire escape going down, but it didn’t do us any good. Because the street below had suddenly decided it didn’t want to be a street anymore. And turned into a culvert.

And then flip, a stone-walled garden. And hey presto, a sewage tunnel. It was shifting so fast, it was making me dizzy, and I wasn’t even down there. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate a yard through the middle of a landscape that was constantly changing, much less a block.

Only it didn’t look like someone wanted us to have even that tiny chance.

Because the building suddenly shook all around us, like the aftershock from an earthquake had hit it. Only the earthquake was coming, not going. And tossing us up—

And up and up and up some more, as the building sprang out of the ground, additional stories popping out of the earth like cars on a freight train heading straight into the sky.

“Oh, shit,” Casanova said miserably. And then, “Fuck that!” as the bits of rope came out again.

And this time, I was siding with Casanova.

Because yeah, there was another electric line, attached to the side of the building. And yes, it had grown up along with the rest of this place. But the building was now a good fourteen stories up, making the line into an almost perpendicular plunge to a tiny pole way the hell down there.

Which might not even be there in a minute, the way things were going.

And then it wasn’t, as Pritkin waved a hand and the pole went scooting down the street-that-was-a-street again for the moment, weaving in and out of the crazy landscape like a skier on a hill, only to stop at the entrance of a large edifice at the very end.

An edifice that looked like a municipal building, but probably wasn’t.

“Oh God,” I said, with feeling.

“Fuck that!” Casanova repeated, backing away.

“It’s doable,” Caleb said staunchly.

“In what universe?”

“You have a better plan?” Pritkin asked, throwing his very thin and not-at-all sturdy-looking piece of rope over the line.

“Yes! Anything that takes place on the ground!”

“Man up,” Caleb advised.

“I’m a vampire—”

“Yet you’re afraid of heights.”

“Yes!” Casanova said hysterically. “They’re one of the few things that can kill me! I hate fire and I hate

heights!”

“How do you feel about stakes?”

“Very funny! Very goddamned—” He broke off when a familiar streak of red lightning tore across the roof and exploded against the lip of the building.

“What are they doing?” he screamed.

“Trying to get a payday,” Pritkin snarled. And I remembered what he’d said before, about having enemies, even at court. But damn it, Rosier was here—

Only he wasn’t, I realized. There was no slick gray suit among the blue robes leaping from the other roof to ours. He must be down on the street, keeping the card flip going. And that meant—

“Oh, shit!”

And I guess Casanova agreed. Because he grabbed Caleb, who grabbed the other bit of rope. “No, Caleb takes Cassie!” Pritkin said. “You come with—”

I didn’t hear the rest, if there was any, because I was being shoved brutally backward. I hit concrete hard, just as red lightning exploded where we’d all been standing, and part of the roof disintegrated into a mass of flying stone. I would have ducked and covered my head, but it was the part Caleb and Casanova had been standing on, and I was screaming and scrambling up and—

And watching them zoom away along the slender lifeline that Caleb had somehow managed to snag even as they dropped. An almost dizzying wash of relief flooded me. They were going to be all right; as long as the line held, they were going to be—

“Cassie!” There were spells going off everywhere, deafeningly loud, but I heard that and my head jerked around. To see Pritkin, lit for a second by unnatural spell light, and silhouetted against a massive ball of boiling energy coming this way. And then I was grabbing him because he couldn’t grab me and the rope, too, assuming he was able to grab it at all when I couldn’t even see it with all the weird jumping light—

And then we were jumping, too, and falling, and the roof was exploding and—

And there was a disorienting moment of free fall amid flying debris and hot, rushing air, and no, no, no, no, NO—

But then we caught—a barely perceptible jerk on a filament of line that hardly changed the feel of things at all because this was almost free fall, too—a crazy mix of whistling wind and abject terror and pant-wetting desperation. And that was just the initial descent. Then we hit the curve at the bottom, where the line dipped almost all the way down to the street and I felt loose pebbles in the roadbed roll under my filthy toes for a moment, a completely surreal experience that would have lifted my heart to my throat if it hadn’t already taken up permanent residence there—

And then we took off, our momentum shooting us up and forward at the same time, on a mad slalom down a constantly changing street.

For a long moment, I couldn’t see anything but a rush of neon on either side, colorful streamers like kites in the night, rising and falling as signs and buildings sprang in and out of existence and taxis honked and people shouted at us or ran to get out of the way.

But for some insane reason, I was laughing as we ran up a car’s roof, pushed off, sprang over top of a bus, swooped down on the other side right in front of another madly honking car, and then bounced up onto a red, double-decker bus that caught us just as our improvised zip line gave up the ghost.

I hit the open aisle, still gasping on wild, insane, out-ofcontrol laughter to match a crazy situation that couldn’t possibly exist, but somehow did, and it took me a second to realize that Pritkin was laughing, too. And then we were running down the spiral stairs and jumping onto the sidewalk and crashing into Caleb and Casanova as they ran up to us on the street.

“Show-off,” Caleb said breathlessly.

From there it was a short dash through the doors of the great building, and across a strangely normal-looking lobby, and down a not-so-normal looking hall, and then through a set of double doors—

Into a seemingly endless dark oval, slick and seamless, and littered with stars.

And a voice that crashed like thunder all around us. “Council is now in session.”