Midnight`s Daughter Page 0,107

headboard was already cracked, it didn’t seem to be giving, either. I finally realized that Louis-Cesare had wrapped the sheets around the sturdier frame, and it was metal. “Son of a bitch! Let me go this instant—I mean it!”

“Do not thrash about, Dorina, you will only injure yourself further. I will release you when the doctor arrives.”

I lay back, preparing to squelch the panic I should be experiencing at being confined. It hadn’t risen yet, but I had no doubts that it was only a matter of time. “There won’t be anything of this bedroom left by the time she gets here!” I warned him.

“Under normal circumstances, perhaps not. But your strength is considerably under par at the moment.”

“When I’m sane maybe,” I said, wrenching on the sheets. All that did was to tighten them further. “But this is sure to bring on a fit. And you’ve seen how much fun those can be.”

“Your control is not so poor, surely,” he said with a frown. “Mircea did not mention—”

I glared up at him. “Claire has been missing for more than a month.”

“What does that have to do—”

“She exerts a dampening effect on my fits. Without her, my control is slipping. Fast. Now let me up!”

He paused, but his eyes held what looked like genuine compassion, the earlier humor dissipating in the face of my distress. After a moment, he reached for the restraints. “I did not realize that the woman was so important—,” he began; then both of us swiveled toward the door. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t heard it open, but the cooler wash of air from the hall had gotten my attention.

“I hate to interrupt,” Radu said, “but I was wondering if either of you did anything to cause the wards to fail just now?”

Chapter Nineteen

“My lord… I can explain—,” Louis-Cesare began, looking less than certain that he could do anything of the kind.

Radu held up a hand. “I am sure there is a perfectly good reason why my niece is naked and tied to her bed. I am also equally certain that I do not wish to hear it.”

Louis-Cesare’s hands fumbled a little, but they managed to get my wrists loose. I snatched up my jeans. “What’s wrong with the wards?”

“They went down a few—” Radu stopped as the windows abruptly darkened, almost like night had decided on an encore. “Well, that’s not right,” he said crossly.

I got to the windows a half second before Louis-Cesare. The view wasn’t encouraging. The sky boiled with greenish black clouds, laced through with silver streaks. The air pressure built in palpable waves, like a snake drawing its coils in closer and closer. A flash hit a decorative planting of three palms near the driveway, splitting one in half. The reverberation rocked the floor, sending vibrations up through my feet straight into my skull.

“This isn’t the right time of year for storms,” Radu was saying behind me. I didn’t answer, being too busy watching shadows shift in the vineyards beyond the house. Dark shapes unfurled leathery wings like tattered cloth in a breeze. Cold little pinpricks started running up and down my spine.

“ ’Du—when you say the wards fell, which ones exactly did you mean?” The shapes converged on the house, sweeping toward the window with the heavy wingbeat of large black birds. Below, I could hear something scrabbling with swordlike claws for purchase on the stucco.

“Why, all of them.” He moved closer to see what had caught my attention. “They’re on a common power source. I—”

A birdlike head on a serpentine neck smashed into the window, the glass distorting its face into a grinning rictus. Radu stumbled back with a small cry. The head disappeared and a talon-ended claw smashed through the window, reaching past me to grab at him. I beat at the thing with a bedside lamp, but it bounced off the leathery appendage without even leaving a dent, sending a throbbing pain up my arm to my shoulder.

Louis-Cesare grabbed the thing’s leg and jerked it inward. Its wings stuck in the space between the window and the small cast-iron balcony beyond, keeping it from advancing. It also blocked its buddies from getting inside—at least for the moment. I got a good look into its greenish yellow eyes, but only animal intelligence looked back. I wondered where the smart one was.

Louis-Cesare had spun Radu out of reach. “You must raise the wards—quickly!”

“That will trap us in here with them!” The thing in the window began to