Unlike the young ones, those as old and strong as this could summon power in an instant, with little or no buildup required. It was backing down. It was refusing challenge.

But vampires lied.

My muscles tensed, adrenaline drowning my system, power and speed and—ripping, tearing, burning, yessss. The bloodlust flooded me as I prepared for fight not flight, always the preference, always the joy. And then I lunged—

—at the door, slamming it shut a second before something crashed into the other side.

The vampire jumped.

“You did not feel them change?” I challenged, pushing against the clawed hand that was caught in the gap between the door and the wall. It was longer than a man’s, with huge, exaggerated knuckles under a covering of black hair, and thick yellowed talons that scored the heavy metal.

“I was…distracted.”

“That kind of distraction can get you killed, vampire.”

“So I see.” It brought the butt end of a weapon down on the creature’s fingers, hard enough to sever several of them, and the rest withdrew with a howl. “Shifters.”

“Yes. I smelled their musk when I awoke. Did you not?”

“No.” The voice was clipped. “They scented as human to me.”

“Pity.”

That must have stung, because power flashed through its veins for a split second before being reined in again. “There are thirteen, two of them injured,” it said, showing off. “The odds are acceptable.”

“Not with the small thing.”

“The small—you mean the child?”

I looked down. The little one had grabbed onto my leg with a grip I would have defied even the vampire to break. That was good. It left my hands free.

“Child.” I used language so seldom, sometimes the words wouldn’t come. But this one…“Yes.”

“I will protect her.”

I didn’t answer. I was looking at the claw marks on the door. They had the same foul stench as the creatures—wrong, unnatural—and they were bubbling the green paint as they dripped down the surface. A moment later, the lock on the door began to sizzle, smoking as if a blowtorch was on the other side.

I glanced up at the vampire. “You were saying?”

It scowled. It did that a lot. But a moment later, I joined it when the room lurched hard to the right, like a ship on the seas, and ugly cracks ran up the walls. One split the ceiling all the way to the light, causing it to flame out in a shower of sparks. But more light speared through the cracks, crisscrossing the gloom in slivers of hellish orange.

One lit on the bar of a cage, and the metal went as molten as in a furnace. But I had never seen a furnace turn a bar white-hot in an instant. Or boil it away to smoke in another.

I did not bother to see what the rest of the rays were doing. My eyes lit on a turned-over table not far away. It was in poor condition, but it had wheels. It would do.

I righted it and started piling things on top.

“What are you doing?” the vampire demanded. It looked like it might have interfered, but the lock was now gone and its back was against the door, keeping it closed.

More or less.

“That will become apparent. Where are we?”

“Nowhere. The dark mages who used this place folded over a piece of a ley line, creating a pocket in non-space—” It broke off with a disgusted sound. “There is no time for this! We have to—”

“There is time,” I said, poking my nose into a large jar. Little round balls of greasy metal. I added it to the pile.

The vampire made another displeased sound, but it answered. “A ley line is a river of great metaphysical power. Among other things, it separates worlds—”

“I know what a ley line is.”

“Then you know that they are meant to be traveled through very quickly—as when stepping through a portal. They are not designed to be used as a permanent residence!”

“Yet someone has done so.”

“Those with an extensive knowledge of magic and a pressing need to hide have used the trick for centuries, but it carries great risk. If the spell they used as an anchor fails, the shield bubble keeping out the ley line’s energy will fail, too, and in that case—” It gestured wildly at the room. “Do you understand?”

I glanced up. In the few seconds I had worked, the scene had changed. It now looked as if the room were made of glass and someone had thrown a ball at it. The impact point was a solid heart of flame, with boiling orange-red energy radiating outward in jagged rays. They lit the remaining pieces of the room like the sun through stained glass, causing the gunpowder in the air to shimmer like gold dust.

So much power.

It was beautiful.

I tore my eyes away. “I understand that we need to get out.”

“Yes, yes! We need to get out! Therefore making a barrier will do us little—”

“I am not making a barrier.”

The vampire looked at the heavy pieces of trash I had gathered on the table. “Then what is that?”

I didn’t bother to answer. “Open the door,” I said instead.

“Efin!” It threw up its hands, and then had to lower them quickly as the door buckled behind it. “Yes, yes, d’accord. Now you and the child, you stay behind me, do you understand?”

I looked at it. It liked to scowl, it liked to demand things, and it liked to talk. It reminded me of someone.

“I understand.”

“Good.” It took a breath. Then another, which made little sense as it did not breathe. And then it spun to the side.

The door crashed open and a snarl of fur and unbridled savagery boiled into the room. And stopped, several yards in, slavering mouths agape. Which is what most creatures would do when faced with the solid field of flame the back half of the room had become.

They would have recovered in a second. I didn’t give them one. I swung the table outward, putting all my strength behind it, and with the heaviness of the metal augmented by the tower of machinery on top. Machinery that spilled over when its base slammed into the shifters’ backs, or stomachs for those with slightly better reflexes, not that it mattered; not that anything mattered. Not with a thousand pounds of falling steel and iron and tiny rolling metal bits sweeping them toward their doom.

And then I was jerked back by the vampire. Its teeth were out and its bloodlust was rising. But I did not think it was about to feed with the flames licking toward us. “Get on,” I told it impatiently, shoving the table at it.

“You get on!” it snarled, and threw me and the small one onto the pitted tabletop. And then through the door. And then down a corridor, which was fast collapsing behind us.

I twisted around in time to see that several of the shifters had somehow made it out also, but they were uninterested in attacking us. They barreled into two of their own who had stayed behind, and then attacked them in their panic to get out. They went down in balls of fur and thrashing limbs and the next second were consumed by the gaping maw of energy behind us.

It was less like glass now, I thought, holding the whimpering small thing as the corridor curled up, concrete, brick and plaster, all the same. As if the scene were merely an image drawn on paper and held to a match.

It was oddly unreal, like the expression on the vampire’s face as it ran, pushing us with inhuman speed, racing the impossible until fire lapped at its heels and I jerked it onto the table with us. The flames followed, crackling like lightning across the width of the tunnel, burning through the vampire’s jacket and searing a wound in its arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, flooded the air. The corridor bucked and buckled. Electricity lifted the hair on my arms and prickled at my exposed skin, the space left to us sizzling with it as we scrambled backward, as the tunnel flamed out around us, as beautiful death reached fiery hands out for us—

—and missed.

The floor bucked wildly one last time, and suddenly we were bouncing into darkness, the table smoking like a flare, the portal behind us burning not orange but bright, incandescent white for one brief instant. Before it exploded like a bomb, picking us up and throwing us through the air and into a large group of people who were rushing through what looked like a warehouse door.

But they weren’t people; they were vampires. Dozens of them, some getting out of the way in time, others somersaulting along with us as we hit the ground, as we rolled toward a street, as I reached for the small one the impact had torn out of my arms and a knife at the same time, because the fight was not over yet. No, the fight was just beginning as I rolled to a stop and surged to my feet and—

“NO!”

The voice tore through me like a hundred knives, plucking me out of the air halfway through a leap and sending me crashing to the ground. My body twisted, but the power wouldn’t let me rise. Not the vampire’s—not this vampire’s. There was only one who could do this to me, and I looked up with no surprise at all to see the diffuse outline of a being made of moonlight, shimmering in the air above me.

“No,” I told it. And “wait” and “child.”

But it didn’t listen. It never listened.

And then the glow faded, and there was nothing but darkness.

Chapter Three

Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. But when an earthquake is doing its best to shake your room apart, you don’t have much of a choice. I blinked open my lashes to find sunlight poking cheerful fingers into my eyes, a wannabe Pavarotti in bird form outside my window, and at least a 5.0 on the Richter scale.

The jam jar of daisies on my dresser was dancing. Little puffs of plaster were sifting down from my ceiling. And my bed was slowly migrating across the worn wooden boards of my floor. I stared around in utter confusion because I was still half asleep, and because the pounding on the door almost exactly matched the pounding in my head. For a minute, I wasn’t sure if it was the room shaking or me.

The room, I decided, when the jam jar danced to the edge of the dresser and leapt to its doom.

“Crap,” I said, and fell out of bed.