I sat up, holding my head. It hurt, and I felt dry-mouthed and groggy. The usual telltale signs of a powerful suggestion having worn off. Mircea must have had to use the big guns to overcome the geis, and the result was worse than a hangover. I got up and staggered to the window, throwing it open and gulping in a few lungfuls of cold, crisp air.
"The master?" Horatiu repeated.
I blinked at him over my shoulder. He had a bottle of wine perched precariously on a tarnished silver platter and his hands were shaking, making it tremble badly enough that I was afraid it would fall. "I don't know," I said, moving to help, and a second later he had me around my already abused throat.
I didn't need to watch the age spots fading, the shape of the hands gripping me reforming, to know who had me. "How did you find us?" I demanded, not bothering to struggle.
"You were kind enough to mention the vampire's name in my hearing," Pritkin sneered. "And it seems he is well known in Paris. Discovering where ‘Lord Mircea' has his residence wasn't difficult!"
"Tell me you didn't hurt the old man," I said, wondering what he'd done with the real Horatiu. Hoping a slip of my tongue hadn't just ended a centuries-old life.
Pritkin's bark of a laugh echoed harshly in my ears. "I found him asleep, with the tray beside him. I left him so. My quarrel is not with him."
"No. Your quarrel is with me, and my patience is not endless," Mircea hissed. He'd appeared in the doorway, a tray similar to Horatiu's in his hands. It was loaded with food—a round loaf of bread, butter, jam—that he'd somehow rounded up.
"Then let me try it no further!" Pritkin said, pulling a dark sphere out from under his cloak. "Give me my property or we all die. Right here. Right now."
"The map will do you no good dead!"
"Nor will it you!" Pritkin snapped.
"I said we were reasonable men. It appears I overrated one of us," Mircea replied. His hands flexed slightly and his lips drew back from his teeth. I swear I could almost see his fangs lengthening. I felt like screaming at both of them that we couldn't afford a fight when it could end with one or all of us dead. But it wouldn't have done any good. So I went with something that would.
While Pritkin stood glaring at Mircea, I shifted behind him and grabbed the small sphere from his hand. I threw it out the window even as he turned, shock on his face, and Mircea grabbed us both and jerked us out of the room. The door shut just as an explosion rocked the front of the house. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
"Are you quite mad?" Mircea asked me conversationally. "That was a dislocator."
I didn't have time to respond, because Pritkin let out a roar of pure rage and threw himself at Mircea.
They crashed backwards, through the railing and down the stairs, hitting the bottom and then rolling straight into a large mirror. It shuddered, but didn't break, at least not until Mircea grabbed Pritkin by the collar and threw him into it. The fracturing glass made a sound like crinkling tinfoil, cracking in jagged streaks of broken lightning that radiated out from his shoulders like wings. Then the mirror came crashing down, scattering glass everywhere, and Pritkin grabbed up a large shard and made a swipe straight at Mircea's neck.
I didn't see what happened then, because they carried the fight into the next room, out of sight. I jerked up the blanket I still wore and ran to the bottom of the stairs, but had to slow down to pick my way through the shards of mirror. And, right at the bottom of the steps, my bare foot encountered something that wasn't wood or glass—a folded scrap of paper.
It was a single heavy sheet containing a mass of scribbled instructions. A mass of very familiar scribbled instructions. I stared at it in disbelief; I guess I knew who'd been running the auction now.
My head whipped up at the sound of an explosion, and I ran into the reception room to find a section of the floorboards charred black and smoking. But a broken vial lay nearby, so it had been a potion, not a spell. It looked like both men were too drained to try anything fancier than old-fashioned hand-to-hand, which meant that I had