“You’d better,” he growled, his eyes glittering.

I smiled wide enough to show that my fangs were out. “Go.”

He did, albeit after kicking aside the first group of people who charged us again. Then I was the one ducking as bottles from the bar came flying my way. Glass shattered as my quick maneuvers caused some to hit the wall behind me. My victory was short-lived as the velvet couches I’d admired were the next salvos. One briefly knocked me flat, although others knocked over the people trying to tackle me, so they helped me more than harmed me.

My blithe attitude changed when the next items magically hurled my way were knives. They came at me as fast as I could bob, weave, or knock them away, and the ones I avoided turned around in midair before zooming toward me again. Even with my speed, two sank into my back, and when I still felt searing pain after I’d yanked them out, I looked more closely at the blades.

Ragged bits of another metal coated them, and that lingering pain in my back meant only one thing.

“Silver!” I shouted, spinning around to put my back to the wall before any more of those deadly blades struck me from behind. That left my front vulnerable, but I grabbed a thick crystal ashtray and shoved it inside my bra. Now, I had a knife-proof patch over my heart. Vlad didn’t, though, and more silver-edged knives were coming from seemingly out of nowhere.

Something sparkly caught my eye. A large grouping of rings, necklaces, bracelets, and other jewelry floated about twenty feet above the bar. As I watched, a necklace flew off the throat of one of my attackers, joining that mass. Then slivers from the jewelry bundle split off and stuck to the kitchen knives that were hovering in the air next to the jewelry bundle.

If our lives weren’t in danger, I would’ve admired the spell caster’s cleverness. Talk about making the most out of what was available. Yet that same someone had taken this fight to a whole new level. Who was it?

Not one of my attackers, I decided, since they were putting all their efforts into a physical assault. I shoved them aside more viciously than I’d done before and looked around for the spell caster.

Elena was on the floor about twenty feet away, her legs still bent at odd angles. She wasn’t crawling away from the chaos or doing anything else a normal person would. Instead, her hands were up as if in supplication, and beneath the various sounds from the fight around us, I caught a hint of her muttering in a strange language.

I couldn’t translate what she was saying, but I recognized what she was doing. I started toward her, then stopped when a cloud of silver-edged knives suddenly formed a protective barrier around her. I might not be able to reach her, but I knew someone who could.

“Elena’s the spell caster!” I shouted.

Just as quickly, Ian yelled, “Whatever you do, don’t kill her!”

Vlad spun around, not even looking at the person who smashed a chair into him as soon as his back was turned. “Stop,” he ordered Elena, holding up a flaming hand in warning.

She spat out an unfamiliar word and raised her hands higher. Vlad clenched his fist, and Elena’s whole body exploded as if she’d swallowed a bag of grenades. I winced, but he’d warned her, and that was more than he normally did.

The people attacking us cast a horrified look at Elena’s flaming, scattered remains. Then everyone stopped fighting and began to run for the elevator. I thought it was fear over what Vlad had done, but then I felt the ground start to shift. The entire room began to plummet downward as if it had morphed into an elevator whose cables had been cut.

“What’s going on?” I screamed.

Ian reached me first, grabbing my arm and ignoring the electricity that shot into him. “Elena’s death triggered a spell that opened a thousand-foot sinkhole beneath us, so if you value your arse, we need to leave!”

Vlad reached us right as a shower of concrete began to rain down from the ceiling. The walls cracked and folded, too, until it looked as if the room was also squeezed by a giant fist during its mad free fall. Vlad crushed me to him, huge bursts of fire shooting from his other hand. Ian flung his arms around my waist the instant before Vlad vaulted us upward.

The force of the fire blasted through the chunks of debris that threatened to throw us into the destruction below. I had to shut my eyes from all the rocks and ash that blinded me as Vlad continued to blast a path to the surface. I couldn’t count all the impacts I felt along the way. One briefly knocked me unconscious, and more than once, fire came so close that I felt it melt off parts of my clothes.

Then the pain ceased and the awful sounds of destruction dimmed. I blinked hard, and through clouds of smoke saw that we were now clear of the underground club. In fact, we were now over the entire city block. Well, what was left of it. The sinkhole had claimed far more than the decoy bar. Now, instead of a row of tightly clustered buildings, there was only a smoking hole the size of a football field several stories deep.

“I told you not to kill Elena,” Ian muttered, his tight grip on me causing new bruises to appear faster than the old ones could heal. “She might have been only a mediocre shag for me, but she fucked you right and proper, Tepesh.”

Chapter 9

We had barely cleared the sound of police sirens before Vlad dropped us into the middle of a section of deserted buildings. Then he backed Ian against the nearest wall and hauled him off of his feet with a single hand to the throat.

“You lied,” Vlad said, biting the words out. “First you brought us to a place where you knew we wouldn’t find the caliber of sorcerer we needed, then you failed to warn us that Elena’s death would trigger a massive sinkhole. I should kill you right now for such betrayal.”