to catch up with a crazed cartoon carpet and the two mad types riding it.
“Get her!” I heard myself yell.
It was in Arabic, but I somehow understood, maybe because I was borrowing someone else’s brain.
Another vamp looked at me, his eyes wild. “You get her! I can barely keep up!”
My vampire—one of Hassani’s men, I assumed, since I was seeing through his eyes—cursed, and then cursed again as a jackal-headed fey sprang from a higher rooftop, right down on top of us. But the new arrival didn’t attack. He was too busy throwing himself off the roof at Dorina, who was zipping past down below.
And, damn. I knew what had happened, of course; I’d been there. But it looked a little different from this angle. She was standing, perfectly balanced, on a tiny scrap of carpet, despite the fact that Ray was slinging it all over the damned street. And while one of her hands was clenched white knuckled around the graffiti gun, the other was slicing and dicing fey almost casually—
And there were a lot of fey.
I remembered maybe half a dozen or so jumping at us, which were the only ones who’d gotten close enough to snag my vision. But there were so many others that I hadn’t seen. And while the handful of Hassani’s people following us had taken out a few, the vast majority—maybe three or four dozen fey warriors in all—had been dealt with—
By Dorina.
I blinked, but no, I wasn’t seeing things. Or, rather, I was, and through the eyes of a vamp as nonplussed as me. It was all happening so fast, and he was busy leaping and occasionally fighting his way through it, so he might have missed something. But what he saw was plenty good enough.
In short succession, Dorina grabbed a passing line of bare light bulbs, held it long enough to stretch it out, then released it to spring back and knock a trio of fey off our backs; shoved another fey away hard enough to impale him on a piece of wood sticking off a roofline; then grabbed a poster advertising a museum exhibit on Nefertiti and—shit.
“Did you see that?” I asked Hassani, because she’d just created the world’s worst paper cut, slitting a fey’s throat with a poster.
“I saw,” he said, his voice drifting across the scene. He courteously didn’t remind me that of course he’d seen it, or I wouldn’t be able to. But I didn’t care about details right now.
Dorina had just hit her groove.
She performed a double decapitation with the sword, ducked under the two arcs of blood, and threw her scimitar ahead of her, piercing a falling fey partway through his jump. She grabbed a passing pole or a long piece of wood off a shop—I didn’t have time to see which—and a second later, it had two fey impaled on it. Then she pulled her scimitar out of the still falling fey, gutted another attacker, dodged his spilling entrails and used the tip of the sword to pluck a brass platter off a display. Which she then slammed into yet another fey’s face hard enough to leave an impression of his features in the metal.
And she did it all one handed.
But while that was as impressive as hell, it was nothing compared to the second act.
I couldn’t see anything of my actual surroundings, or feel except for a vague impression of Louis-Cesare’s body beside mine. But I sat up anyway at what my vamp was now seeing. “What the—”
“You did not know she had this power?” Hassani’s voice asked, as a great black specter rose out of Dorina, the cheerful lights of the marketplace still visible through the ends of its tattered form, but the eyes—
Were solid red and burning.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dory, Cairo
“Shit,” I said softly, staring as the inky black specter launched itself at a group of maybe a dozen fey, who had been about to end this whole affair with a massive drop from both sides of the street. Instead, they didn’t even have time to shit their pants before—
“Allah preserve us,” Hassani said softly, while I just sat there, staring.
The vamp whose eyes I was seeing through had had much the same reaction. He skidded to a halt at the edge of a gutter while a hail of body parts rattled down on the rooftops, street, and crowd of screaming, running humans below. Right before getting splashed in the face with a huge gout of blood himself from a savaged torso.