looked up, panting, but while there were plenty of black clad forms running around, no more were targeting me. Maybe because Hassani had just given a shouted order and his vampires had rushed the invaders, making me think for a second that it was all over. But the army in black pushed back against what should have been an overwhelming show of force, half of them somehow stopping the charge while the rest . . .
Went for the warded cases of artifacts.
And I finally got a clue. This wasn’t an attempted assassination; this was a heist. Somebody wanted the fey artifacts badly enough to risk attacking Hassani’s court for them—and they were getting away with it.
An explosive charge was slapped onto the blue column of a shield to my right, and I heard it go off as I ran. Another just ahead wreathed a shield in black smoke, and a second later it cracked and then shattered like glass. Artifacts disappeared into black plastic garbage bags, which would have usually gotten a reaction from me, since they were our responsibility. But right then, I couldn’t have cared less.
“Louis-Cesare!”
I finally saw him, over near the shattered main shield, looking down over the city. He turned his head to stare at me for a second, before yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the fires and cries and roar of a furious Hassani. Who leapt over the fleshly breakwater of clashing forces with a scimitar in one hand and a long knife in the other, and began demonstrating, that, yes, his assassination skills were as sharp as ever.
The enemy army broke and stumbled back into me, and the vampires yelled and charged. And by the time I fought my way through all of that and ran over to the opening, Louis-Cesare was gone. Or almost.
I spotted him in the distance, running hard into the night, chasing . . . someone. It was almost dark and I couldn’t make out who it was. But I could see the shadows that peeled off the walls all around and followed.
Goddamnit!
“No,” Ray said, running up beside me as I tore the trailing hem off the damned evening dress. “No, you are not going to—”
And then I threw myself onto the roof below, and took off.
Chapter Two
Open space is at a premium in Cairo, so many people live partly on the rooftops. And even those not made up like an outdoor living room are full of stuff: laundry flapping in the breeze, satellite dishes—so many damned satellite dishes—old tires, abandoned refrigerators, piles of rubble and broken furniture that someone intends to do something with at some point, inshallah. But not today, which left it in my way.
It didn’t help that Louis-Cesare had had a head start, and was faster than me, although usually by only a fraction of a second. But tonight—tonight he was flying. I’d never seen him move like that; hell, I’d never seen anybody move like that.
Except for the creatures pursuing him.
There were dozens of them, leaping across the rooftops of Cairo like mad things. And they didn’t look like the shorter types doing the heist; they were at least as tall if not taller than he was. At least as far as I could tell, based on the brief glimpses I got around old stone walls, flapping sheets, and five thousand damned satellite dishes!
I jumped onto a terraced rooftop, grabbed a ladder to vault up to the taller story, and paused. Adrenaline was telling me to hurry, hurry, hurry, but older instincts, the kind that live in the lizard brain, were telling me something else. And I learned a long time ago to listen to the lizard brain.
I glanced around, while palming my knife.
The whole area was dark, with the last rays of the setting sun having just disappeared over the horizon. The only light came from the stars overhead and a few dim windows of illumination, darkened by curtains, in the surrounding buildings. Nothing moved; nothing stirred. My straining ears could hear only distant traffic, faint Arabic from a T.V., and the cooking sounds of somebody fixing dinner in a nearby apartment.
And the tell-tale slice of a blade through the air.
I lunged to the side, a split second before a knife appeared, vibrating in the wood of the ladder. I grabbed it and threw it back—in the same direction that it had come from, because you learn a thing or two in five hundred years. And finished my turn to see it