Of the chest of Anubis, the jackal headed god of death.
All right, I thought.
I had not seen that one coming.
The maybe nine-foot-tall creature stepped forward, seeming to coalesce out of the shadows. Starlight limned the muscles on the broad, human-like chest, on thick arms banded by gold, and on strong, athlete’s legs. The latter emerged from under a white linen, pleated skirt, the ancient Egyptian version of a kilt, with a golden jackal’s head in place of the sporran. But they ended with huge, very non-human clawed feet, which along with the elongated snout on the head and the slitted, golden eyes, were enough to give me the creeps even before a spear the size of a small tree was shoved at me.
I caught it in a rung of the ladder and sent it spinning off into the night. Only to have the creature materialize another out of thin air. And then three more jackal headed bastards leapt into the fray from the terrace above.
Okay, then.
Done here.
The creatures came along as I jumped for a nearby roof, slashing and hacking at me while we were still mid-air. I received an impromptu haircut from a razor-sharp sword, watched the inch-long fringe arc against the starlight, and got my own knife in my attacker as I hit down, rolling. And saw the creature pull eight inches of steel out of its side and throw it away as if it had been a splinter.
All right, then.
A little-known fact about dhampirs is that we are fast. Not Louis-Cesare fast, but compared to almost anybody else . . . yeah, I could move. Which I proved by taking off like a bat out of hell.
And had one of them pass me in a classic flanking maneuver, without so much as breaking a sweat.
Son of a bitch, I thought, ripping up one of the ubiquitous satellite dishes and flinging it at the nearest snout. Only to have it be caught midair and snapped back, so fast that I ended up bending over backwards to miss it and fell off the building. I grabbed a laundry line on the way down, which would have been more of a comfort if one of my attackers hadn’t immediately started reeling me in.
I began overhanding it for the other side—fast—only to find that there was a jackal on that end, too.
Why they didn’t just skewer me on one of those huge spears I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t matter in a minute.
Dorina, I thought, some help here!
And I wasn’t talking to myself.
Well, okay, I sort of was, but . . . it’s complicated.
My name is Dory Basarab, daughter of the famous vampire senator and general Mircea Basarab, and recently a member in my own right of the North American Vampire Senate. I’d been promoted for two reasons: it was assumed that I’d vote the way that daddy wanted, thus giving his faction on the senate additional power. And because of Dorina—my “twin” as she called herself—which I guess was a reference to Siamese twins.
Only instead of being joined at the hip, we were joined everywhere.
We’d been born one person with a duel nature—half human, half vamp—but a single consciousness. Until, that is, our father Mircea—a master mentalist—had decided to put a barrier between our two halves when I was just a girl. The idea had been to give the human side of me a chance to grow up separately from my vampire nature, which had already been stronger than I could handle.
That was why so few dhampirs lived for very long: their two sides ended up at war with each other, and ripped their minds apart. Mircea had helped Dorina and I to avoid that, but at the cost of remaining separate people for something like five centuries. And a division like that . . . tends to be permanent.
I hadn’t even known she existed until recently, when Mircea’s barrier finally failed, since we had never been awake at the same time. I’d just thought I had fits of dhampir-induced madness when I blacked out and killed everything in the room. It had kept me apart from society for most of my life, under the assumption that I was a dangerous monster.
It didn’t help that I was sort of right.
Not that Dorina was a homicidal maniac, but she had all the ruthless practicality of a vampire, blended with centuries of being a virtual prisoner in my mind. Mircea had left human-me in charge of our union, which allowed her