studying, brewing, casting, summoning, setting my hair on fire—you know, wizard stuff. So had Molly. There were smoke stains on the floor, and I could see the squares and rectangles where my old furniture had been, the feet of tables, the bases of bookshelves, the holes in the wall where I had screwed in the wire-frame storage shelving. My old copper summoning circle had survived, somehow, at the far end of the room. Maybe the floor of my old living room had collapsed over it, shielding it from the worst of the flames.
But it offered me no help.
I wouldn’t have any trouble reaching up and grabbing the lip of the opening, then hauling myself out. But climbing out while carrying my brother would be a hell of a trick. Damn, I wished I had spent more of my time on earth magic. Altering gravity for a few seconds would make this really simple—but doing it at my current level of skill would take time that we did not have.
I’d have to go with the alternative and hope I didn’t kill us both. Go, me.
I stooped down, wrapped exposed skin in towels as best as I could, and got hold of Thomas’s arms. He hissed out a breath, but he didn’t move, his body putting up all the resistance of boiled pasta. He was shockingly light, but even light, limp people are a pain and a half to move around. It took me a minute to get him up and over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. After that, I positioned myself under the exit, turning my body to, hopefully, make sure I didn’t take any of Thomas’s skin off on the way out.
“I should make a cloak of levitation,” I muttered. “Doctor Strange would never have this problem.”
I felt a flash of guilt at wasting time with smartassery and shoved it down. Time for that when my brother was safe.
And then I crouched, made the best guess I could, gathered my will, and thrust my right hand down at the floor while snarling, “Forzare!”
Raw kinetic force lashed down at the floor below me, and because of Sir Isaac Newton, it also propelled me up. I flew through the air, but I’d misjudged the amount of force needed. Magic is more art than science, and it was considerably harder to work with precision without a few tools to help me. So instead of gracefully sailing up to the level of the hallway’s floor, I sort of lurched up to the level of my belt and then started to fall back down.
I grabbed at the floor of the hallway and desperately levered a knee up into the opening to give me a couple of points of tension—but it was hardly a solid position. I pushed as hard as I could with my right arm, but it was out straight, and there was only so much power in my shoulder and upper back. I strained to lift my brother onto the floor, but I had no leverage, and my position was too precarious to apply much of my strength. My muscles burned and then began, slowly, to falter. I ground my teeth, reaching deep, and strained to gain a few fractions of an inch that began to fade almost at once.
I started preparing to drop in a controlled fall that would, hopefully, protect my brother—but then his weight suddenly vanished from my shoulder.
Lara dragged him to one side with quick efficiency, blue eyes bright, cheeks still flushed, and then seized the guard’s heavy leather jacket and tossed me one sleeve. I took it.
“You’re taking forever,” she said, and hauled me out of the hole.
“And yet you’re the one literally fucking around on the job,” I countered.
“That?” she asked, bobbing her head back toward the guard station and flashing me a wise, wicked smile. “No. That was just feeding. The other thing takes much, much longer. And preferably candles and champagne.”
I pulled my legs out of the way, barely, before she shut the trapdoor—my trapdoor—and threw the bolt.
“How is he?” she asked.
I held up my amulet so that she could see her brother better.
“Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”
White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: