“It must have been the ricochets,” Jason insisted. “I’m an expert shot!”
“Yes,” Tomas agreed. “I don’t think you missed my ass once.”
“Can we get back to the point?” Sarah said. “Ranbir is missing!”
“And?”
“And we have to go back for him!”
There was a sudden, uncomfortable silence.
“He’d do it for us!” she insisted.
“Would he?” Tomas asked. “He’s a dark mage—”
“He isn’t!”
“He sort of is, though,” Ev pointed out. “He does blood magic—”
“Chickens! He kills chickens!”
“Have fun, then,” Tomas said, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms.
Sarah glared at him. I had kind of gotten the impression that they were an item, since he moved to shelter her the way that Louis-Cesare did me. But it looked like there might be trouble in paradise.
Not that it mattered. “We have to go back,” I pointed out.
Tomas cocked an eyebrow at me. “Oh, and why would that be?”
“Ranbir has the map.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Dory, Hong Kong
We went back. It was useless, except that we discovered what happened to the samurai when they were carved into pieces. Best case scenario, they got confused and some parts ended up on the wrong bodies. In one case, that created an Indian-god-looking creature with a dozen arms, and in another, a monster where two non-matching halves had decided to come together. That left us being charged by something that walked on its hands like a circus performer, while its other pair tried to decapitate us with twin swords.
But you notice, I said “best case”. Worst case scenario were all the other pieces, a couple hundred of them at a guess, which had decided not to bother looking for their missing bodies. They were just growing themselves new ones.
They weren’t doing too well with that right now, but as soon as another magic cloud washed over them, we were going to have a lot more enemies. Only nobody intended to hang around for the show. Except possibly for Sarah, who was being stubborn.
“He ran off,” Tomas said, when we stopped in a nearby side street to regroup, after the vamps hacked up the horrors. “He had the map; he lost his nerve; he ran. It’s that simple.”
“It’s not that simple! He wouldn’t just abandon us!” she insisted.
“Bullshit.” Tomas sneered. “Mircea doesn’t have a daughter, much less a dirty—”
Louis-Cesare slammed him against the wall of a house, causing a bunch of ash to come raining down from the roof. “And my wife.”
“Your what?” Tomas looked in shock at Louis-Cesare for a moment, looked back at me, and then at Louis-Cesare again—
And burst out laughing.
That had about the result you’d expect, but Sarah had clearly had enough. “Cut it out!” she yelled, getting in between them. And barely missing having Tomas put a fist through her face.
He pulled back with a curse, and starting yelling at her, but she wasn’t having that, either. “I wouldn’t have been in danger if you would control your temper! I know you don’t like him, but insulting his wife is a low blow.”
“That is not his—”
“How would you like it if someone insulted me? People don’t exactly like jinxes, either—”
“That’s completely diff—”
“It is not completely different. Jinxes are outlawed. I’m supposed to be locked up in some cell somewhere, living out my life staring at a wall like a good little freak of nature. And I probably will be if the Circle ever catches up with me. How would you like it if Louis-Cesare called me—”
“He calls you anything, and I cut his damned head off!” Tomas said fiercely.
Louis-Cesare started to comment, probably about how likely that was, but I beat him to it. “Louis-Cesare doesn’t have to worry about that,” I said. “He doesn’t go around insulting women.”
Tomas had the grace to blush, although it didn’t last long.
“You’re not a woman; you’re a dhampir. And you aren’t his wife—”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because he’s all but married to a bitch named Christine!”
Louis-Cesare started to say something, but I held up a hand and he backed off gracefully. He looked like he wanted to see this, too. I got in Tomas’s space, not abruptly, but slowly, almost sinuously. I brushed my hand down the side of his pretty hair, to turn his face toward me. It had healed, and he was back to