I picked up the decapitated body and offered the vampire the stump again.
He did not seem to understand.
“Feed,” I urged him.
“What? I can’t!”
Of course, I thought. He has no arms. I dragged the body up to his mouth, to the point that the fey’s blood smeared his lips.
“Gah! Gah! Gah!”
I pulled it back. “Is there a problem?”
“Is there a problem? Is there a problem?” Blue eyes blazed at me. “I get my limbs torn off, get kidnapped, and now you’re trying to poison me—”
“It is not poison.”
“—and you ask if there’s a problem?”
I decided that he might be in shock. Just as well. There were four fey still on their feet, including the one with the missing arm, and they were coming.
I broke off half of the scimitar’s blade in the first one’s neck and kicked a second far enough away that I should have had time to deal with the remaining two. But he only stumbled back a short distance before hitting and then splaying against something that I couldn’t see at all. Something that appeared to be rotating and was taking him along with it.
Dodging a blow, I watched him circle against the primordial fury of the line. Ley lines were fascinating: huge rivers of magical power that flowed around the Earth and then beyond. It was said that their energy could dissolve a human in seconds, and a vampire even faster. No one traveled through them without a shield of some kind.
Like the one gleaming all around us, I realized, as two of the remaining fey jumped me.
I slammed their heads together, somersaulted over top of them, and then did it again from behind. They had thick skulls; they did not go down, and one even spun and swung at me. But I twisted away and pulled back out of reach, taking a second to think.
Why did we need a shield inside a portal, which was already a shielded pathway through a line? That was the reason people made such things: to provide safe passage from one point to another. Why bother with a second layer of protection?
Unless they were more interested in keeping something in than keeping something out, I realized.
This wasn’t an assassination; it was a kidnapping.
Fear and panic swept through me at the idea of being caged, so much so that I lost myself for a moment. I lashed out, beating my fists and feet against the sides of my prison, and then against the jailors who had stupidly locked themselves in here with me. The shield, which had already been spinning wildly from the tumult inside began rocking alarmingly, sliding and sloshing us around.
The rocking motion became so violent that it brought me out of my fit. It was just in time to see us burst through, not the gate on the other end of the portal, but the side of the portal itself. And go spinning off into the fury of the ley line.
Suddenly, everything changed. It was like the difference between riding down some white-water rapids and surfing the crashing ferocity of an ocean in a major gale. We plummeted down what felt like a fifty-foot wave, then rode another back up, only to be spit out the top and do it all again. And again.
I was overwhelmed for a moment, and I suppose the fey felt the same, because the attacks had stopped. Or perhaps there was another reason for that. A vortex of orbiting body parts beat on me as we spun about, as their owners could no longer do. But some bruises were less of a problem than the reason for the fleshly storm: we were tumbling out of control, and I did not know enough about shields to stop us.
But someone else did.
“Goddamnit!” The vampire yelled, his body, or what was left of it, thumping about the shielded circle. “Hold me up. Let me see!”
“Let you see what?”
“That!” He nodded vigorously at something. “The control!”
“This?” I touched something about the size of a crystal ball. It was on a stick, protruding waist high from what was probably supposed to be the stationary middle of the shield, but which was now slinging all over the place.
“Yes, hold me up, damn you!”
I held him up.
“Fuck,” was his verdict.
“Is that bad?”
“No. It’s peachy fucking keen, what the hell do you think?”
He gave me a rapid-fire stream of directions that involved turning the ball this way and that, which did not appear to have any effect on the spinning.