“Ray!” I screamed, while someone else shouted: “Now!”
The alley lit up with a strange purple light, and something hit me like every freight train on Earth, all at once. I didn’t scream, but only because I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything, including fall, despite the fact that I’d been caught halfway through a leap. Except watch as what looked like a stone hockey puck—one of the captured fey artifacts—sent purple lightning scrawling up the alley walls.
I could feel Dorina struggling as hard as I was, but we remained suspended in mid-air while the lightning built and built above us, raising the hair on our head and arms and sending painful chills cascading up and down our body. And then it came crashing down, all at once, a searing torrent that felt like it should have incinerated us on the spot, or cooked our bones inside our skin. But it didn’t kill us. I didn’t know what it did, other than make me feel like I was coming apart at the seams.
And maybe I was.
A portal opened up in the opposite wall, and from the strength of it, it was headed a long way away. I barely noticed. A horrible ripping, tearing, sundering feeling had hit me, and suddenly, there she was, standing in the alley bedside me: Dorina, but not in the ghostly way she sometimes appeared when we had a chat. But solid. Real.
She touched my hand, looking as shocked as I was. For a second, we just stared at each other. And then a group of fey tackled her like linebackers, and all of them disappeared through the portal.
It immediately closed up behind them and I fell to the ground, the strange light dying at the same moment. Louis-Cesare grabbed me a second later, right before I passed out, yelling things that I couldn’t hear over the pounding of my heart. Because I’d just realized something.
He hadn’t been the target, after all.
Dorina had.
And now she was gone.
Chapter Three
Dory, Cairo
I awoke in the dimness of an unfamiliar room. It was lit only by a few low burning oil lamps and the starlight drifting in through some large, floor to ceiling windows. My sleep muddled brain finally recognized it as the suite that Louis-Cesare and I had been assigned at Hassani’s court, all golden stone, cream draperies, and medieval architecture that, in the low light, could have been mistaken for a pharaoh’s palace.
That was especially true in the lamplight, with the tiny wicks dancing in the soft breeze blowing through the windows, and throwing veil like shadows on the walls. This place had electricity, as well as all the other modern conveniences, or it had for the past week. The fact that it didn’t now informed me that the main wards were online, the big boys that didn’t play well with electrical systems, even before I felt the frisson of their power brush across my skin.
Hassani wasn’t taking any chances, I thought, and felt a bolt of pure rage shoot through me. No, he wasn’t taking chances now. Now when Dorina was gone and Louis-Cesare had almost died and Ray—
Ray was in pieces.
I sat bolt upright in bed, a scream building in my throat as I remembered that scene in the alley. Ray’s face, looking startled and then horrified when he realized what was happening, his eyes going to me for help I couldn’t provide. And the blood, so much of it, like a mist coating everything. I could still taste it on my tongue, smell it in my nose, feel it gunking up my eyelashes. Ray . . .
I felt Louis-Cesare move behind me. He was naked, with the lamplight sheening all that creamy skin, turning it to gold. He had been draped over me like a weighted blanket, only even more comforting. Now I felt his arms go around me, and his body sit up behind mine, preserving the closeness.
It didn’t help.
A strange, hollow feeling lay under my breastbone, like a gaping wound. It was so real that I slid a clumsy hand down there, to see if I had been put to bed half gutted. My hand met only smooth, sleep warm skin, without a cut or flaw. Yet I could still feel it: a deep, echoing nothingness, like my soul had been carved out of my body.