“Well?” Zheng asked, or rather mouthed, because John couldn’t hear a damned thing.
That might have had something to do with the weapon’s shop across the street, which was in the process of burning down. It was shooting bolts of multicolored spells skyward in a less impressive, but no less loud, version of what they’d left behind in the alley. In addition, the heat seemed to have gotten to the more prosaic weapons, detonating ammo boxes like staticky bombs with bursts of bullets flying everywhere.
Not surprisingly, this had caused the crowd in the area to panic and run, not that they hadn’t already been doing that. He and Zheng’s crew had pulled back around the corner of a building, not that it helped much. But it helped some, John thought, as a burst of gunfire nailed an illuminated restaurant sign just overhead, sending a shower of golden sparks down onto the cursing vamps.
“Damn it, is it working?” Zheng yelled.
“Give me a minute!” John yelled back, because even vamp hearing probably needed an assist at the moment. And because it should have been obvious that the answer was ‘sort of’.
John thumped the little device on his arm again and the staticky blue square hovering in the air in front of him straightened up. It was a grid pattern, not showing streets or buildings, or even height and depth, because all that added complexity to the spell and made it that much more likely to be discovered. Trackers were designed to be used on dangerous dark mages, among other threats; they prioritized stealth over everything else.
Because walking into a dark mage trap after he realized he was being tracked was . . . not optimal.
However, that left the rudimentary grid John was looking at, where that same heartbeat was pulsing, pulsing, pulsing away, nine squares over from them. John did the mental math, and looked up at Zheng. “He’s within half a mile, and moving fast!”
“Half a mile? That’s all it says?” Zheng grabbed John’s arm, and the grid went wonky again.
“Cut that out!” John said, and knocked the creature’s hand away.
And promptly found himself up against a wall—literally. His remaining shoe was dangling a few inches off the street, his head had just taken another jolt, and his back was feeling like it had been shoved at least part way through the concrete. So much for that brief window of camaraderie.
For a moment, he was keenly aware of the fact that he was basically out of magic, out of weapons, and facing seven unhappy, fanged faces, including one he’d have had difficulty dealing with even at his best. As it was, they’d have to fight over who got to drain him first.
But then he flashed on an image of Cassie as he’d first seen her: sprawled on the floor of the North American Vampire Senate, tumbled blond curls in her face, wearing a ridiculous happy face t-shirt in a bright, sunshiny yellow. She’d been a victim if ever he’d seen one, and facing off with the type of vampire that would have given this lot nightmares for weeks.
Which was why what came next had been so surprising. John had seen that same perfect victim—delicate, powerless, and unarmed—look up at the creature humans had once called simply “The Ripper.” And stare him down.
At the time, John had thought her either mad or extremely stupid. It was only later that he’d realized: she’d been playing the best card she had. The vampires wanted something from her and wanted it badly; they weren’t going to let the bastard feed. But if she’d wavered, even for an instant, if she’d shown that he could scare or intimidate her, they might have let him try some non-lethal but very unpleasant methods to get her to do as they asked.
But she hadn’t wavered. Hadn’t blinked. Hadn’t done anything but glare at the son of a bitch in a way that clearly said “you’re not helping your case.”
Causing the creature to back off, even before John had started trying to be the hero.
She’d taught him something that day, something he utilized when he looked from Zheng to the huge hand the vampire had splayed on his chest. And slowly raised an eyebrow. “Am I annoying you already?”
Zheng glared at him some more, and then let him go, so abruptly that John would have staggered if he hadn’t been expecting it. “I have the feeling you were born annoying!”
“My father would agree with you.”
John thumped the disk on his arm again while the vampires huddled around, providing some protection from the battering of the crowd. Not that it helped. The other half of the tracker had melted into Caleb’s skin, an invisible, weightless presence that was supposed to be impervious to blood, sweat and tears. But not to magical conflagrations, apparently.
The static was getting worse.
“We need to get away from that,” John said, nodding in the direction of the weapon’s shop. “I think it’s interfering.”
“You think?” Zheng said savagely. His temper had undergone a noticeable change since they climbed down from the rooftops, and it wasn’t hard to see why. This was his city, or it had been before his recent elevation. And it was falling apart.
In more ways than one, John thought, as the street suddenly moved beneath them.
The vamps mouthed curses he couldn’t hear over the heightened screams from the crowd, while he went staggering back against the wall. And then the street did it again, harder this time, the upheaval almost knocking him off his feet. The vampire’s servants stood firm, like sailors on the rolling deck of a ship, but their eyes were wide and more than a little panicked.
They obviously didn’t know what was going on, either.
Unlike Zheng, who appeared to have figured something out. Because he took off like a shot, leaving John and the boys staring at each other. And then trying to follow him through the now stampeding crowd.
It was harder than it looked, and it looked pretty damned impossible.
The streets were narrow, there were too many people, and the ground kept heaving everyone into the sides of the alleys, where they were deluged by waterfalls of trash from above. Burning trash, in many cases, which had the vamps spooked as hell and John cursing his lack of shields. And that was from the minor tremors.
The major ones caused the whole street to buck like a bronco—or more accurately, like an earthquake had hit it, sending the weaker buildings imploding, people screaming, and rapids forming in all the water swirling underfoot.
Then something else hit, more ephemeral but no less worrying. It caused John to jerk his head around, and wonder if another combined spell had just exploded nearby. Because a wave of magic had accompanied the latest tremor, but it wasn’t a kind he knew.
But Zheng obviously didn’t feel the same. With a curse loud enough to be heard over the chaos, he went striding out of the latest alley and into the midst of a square of falling buildings and floundering people, where confused war mages seemed to be attacking everything now. They were sending blasts at the detritus flying at them on the wind, at the tiles cascading off surrounding rooftops, and even at each other when one stumbled across another’s path. They were attacking anything and everything that could be viewed as a threat—which definitely included a seven-foot-tall vampire!
John grabbed Zheng’s arm and slammed them both into the side of a building, just as the silvery tail of a dissolution spell flew past their faces. It detonated against a nearby shop, where the big glass windowpanes melted rather than shattered, running like liquid into the raging river the street had become. The same would have been true for the two of them, had it hit them without shields, which neither of them had at the moment!