my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.
I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn’t going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close—they’d be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.
I didn’t take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building to where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above my office. That was probably where Martin and Susan were. It would be where the vampires were heading.
I hit the stairs and took a risk. Spells to dull sound and keep conversations private were basic fare for wizards of my abilities, and it wasn’t much harder to make sure that sound didn’t leave the immediate area around me. Of course, that meant that I was effectively putting myself in a sonic bubble—I wouldn’t hear anything coming toward me, either. But for the moment, at least, I knew the vampires were here while they presumably were unaware of me. I wanted to keep it that way.
Besides, in quarters this close, by the time I reacted to a noise from a vampire I hadn’t seen, I was as good as dead anyway.
So I murmured the words to a reliable bit of phonoturgy and went up the stairs clad in perfect silence. Which was a good thing. I run on a regular basis, but running down a sidewalk or a sandy beach isn’t the same thing as running up stairs. By the time I got to the ninth floor, my legs were burning, I was breathing hard, and my left knee was killing me. What the hell? When had my knees become something I had to worry about?
Cheered by that thought, I paused at the door to the ninth-floor hallway, opened it beneath the protection of my cloak of silence, and then dropped the spell so that I could listen.
Hissing, gurgling speech in a language I couldn’t understand came from the hallway before me, maybe right around the corner I could see ahead. I literally held my breath. Vampires have superhuman senses, but they are as vulnerable to distraction as anyone. If they were talking, they might not hear me, and regular human traffic in this building would probably hide my scent from them.
And why, exactly, a voice somewhere within the storm in my chest whispered, should I be hiding from these murdering scum in the first place? Red Court vampires were killers, one and all. A half-turned vampire didn’t go all the way over until they’d killed another human being and fed upon their life’s blood. Granted, an unwilling soul taken into the Red Court found themselves at the mercy of new and nearly irresistible hungers—but that didn’t change the fact that if they were a card-carrying member of the Red Court, they had killed someone to be there.
Monsters. Monsters who dragged people into the darkness and inflicted unspeakable torments upon them for pleasure—and I should know. They’d done it to me once. Monsters whose existence was a plague upon millions.
Monsters who had taken my child.
The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.
I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, “Fuck subtle.”
The gurgle-hissing from around the corner ahead stopped at a confused intersection of speech that needed no translation: Huh?
I lifted the blasting rod, aimed it at the corner ahead of me, and poured my rage, my will, and my power into it as I snarled, “Fuego!”
Silver-white fire howled down the hallway and bit into the corner ahead, blowing through it as easily as a bullet through a paper target. I drew the line of fire to my left, and as quickly as that, the fire gouged an opening as big as my fist through several sections of studs and drywall, blasting through to the perpendicular hallway where I’d heard the vampires talking. The din was incredible. Wood tore and exploded. Drywall flew into clouds of dust. Pipes