at me, and there was no deception on his face this time. None at all. If I’d wanted honesty, I was getting it. “I only know that I left for the right reasons, and that I returned for the wrong ones. Because I was afraid, and I am weak.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re weak, all right,” Rashid said sarcastically.
The healer smacked him.
“No,” I said, putting my arms around Louis-Cesare’s neck and pulling him down to me. “You didn’t come back for that.”
“Then why did I come back?” The blue eyes were haunted.
“For the same reason you left. For love.”
And then, right there, in front of them all, I kissed him.
Chapter Thirteen
Dory, Cairo
“This is all very touching,” Zakarriyyah said dryly. “But can we please get back to the point?”
“Which was?” I asked, still hanging onto my lover.
“To discover who sent our attackers. If it wasn’t the two of you—”
“What attackers?”
He looked irritated, probably because he’d already explained this to Louis-Cesare while I was out. But I hadn’t heard it. And I still didn’t.
Because someone cursed and someone screamed, and every vamp in the semi-circle surrounding us suddenly looked like they’d seen a ghost. Several fell to their knees and several more fled, dropping their weapons and running for the exit. And the rest were staring in what looked like horror at something behind me.
I turned, but all I saw was an elongated shadow flickering in the firelight and rippling down the stairs. It didn’t look like a man; it didn’t look like anything, at least not from this angle. And before I could look up and see what had cast it, the healer’s pretty face was in my way.
“Do it,” Louis-Cesare said roughly. “Now!”
“What?” I asked, turning back toward him.
And never completed the motion. A soft, cool hand slid onto my shoulder, and I realized what was going on—half a second too late. “Don’t you da—” I began.
Then I was out.
I woke up furious—and disoriented, because I was staring up at a huge dwarf. He had to be three stories tall and was carrying a basket filled with giant emeralds. He looked like he’d tripped, and some of the stones were tumbling out and cascading to earth like the world’s costliest waterfall. I was lying right underneath, and the view up the glimmering cascade was seriously trippy with only half my brain working.
Bes, the demon fighter, I thought vaguely. God of war and parties, which didn’t seem to go together to me, but the ancient Egyptians had liked him. One of our guides had said that dancing girls often had a tattoo of him on their upper thigh . . .
Then the rest of my brain came online, and I abruptly sat up.
Son of a bitch!
The world went violently swimmy as soon as I moved, as if I was in a boat on the high seas. I clutched the cold stone underneath me and stared around, waiting for my eyes to adjust and my stomach to settle down. I didn’t get any help with that, because the healer—damn her—was missing, although that might have been her screaming somewhere in the distance. I couldn’t tell. It was a woman, but there were men’s shouts, too, and bangs and crashes and—
I grabbed my head, feeling cold hair on one side and bumpy, burnt flesh on the other. It was concerning, but less so than the pain. What had that bitch done to me?
I didn’t know, but I slowly realized that I’d been moved into the shadow of the great stairs, as had Hassani. He was lying nearby, with the remains of his smoke blackened robes still white enough in places to show up in the gloom. He was out cold, but since he hadn’t dusted away, I assumed he was in a healing trance.
Lantern Boy was there, too, standing a little way off and bisected by a jagged backdrop of half-light, half-dark from the slant of the staircase. It lit up his own white and blue robe and the hand he was using to clutch the stone. I couldn’t see his face, but his body language read “freaked out” loud and clear.
Makes two of us, I thought, and rolled to my knees. This did not improve the massive migraine that the vamp hereafter to be known as That Bitch had given me. But I somehow managed to drag myself back to my feet.
The fury helped. It helped a lot. I’d been left with a half dead consul and a kid who couldn’t be more than