limited freedom, mainly when I was asleep or freaked out and my control lessened. She was therefore both very old and yet also strangely naïve in how she thought about things, with much less real-world experience than I had.
And, like a child, anything that startled her was likely to get beaten up.
But damn, if I couldn’t use some of that ferocity right now.
However, Dorina had the ability to leave our body behind for mental jaunts on her own, and this looked like one of those times. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass handed to me—possibly literally in a minute—by creatures faster and stronger and more numerous than I was. And my damned purse, which had some items that might have evened the odds, was back on the terrace, assuming there was a terrace anymore.
I was starting to find Egypt less romantic.
And then somebody grabbed me—from behind, just as I was being hauled over the edge of the roof.
“If you stake me, I swear to God!” Ray shrieked, before I could retaliate. Or figure out what was happening. Because we were going up, I realized, as one of the jackal-headed bastards jumped for me—
And missed.
I saw the creature flail in the air, its fingertips just missing the fringe of what appeared to be a rug from somebody’s living room, which I’d been slung across. It was an ugly rug, and its fringe was an unraveled mess. Even stranger, it appeared to be the only thing underneath us at the moment.
“Hold on!” Ray yelled. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!”
That’s reassuring, I thought, as we took off, soaring over the rooftops of Cairo on what appeared to be a flying carpet. At least as far as I could tell with the wind throwing what remained of my hair in my eyes and my fisted hands clutching the hard-to-grasp surface for all I was worth. I almost fell off three times anyway, felt my stomach lurch alarmingly when we jackknifed around a building, and then we stopped—abruptly enough that I did hit the ground.
Or another dusty rooftop, at least, with my head spinning and the stone underneath my hands feeling like it was undulating while I stared up at Ray. “What the—”
He was off the rug with a hand over my mouth before I could blink. “Shhhh! I don’t know what kinda hearing those things have, all right?”
“Whhmpphwhhmmmmhhh?”
“What?”
I removed his hand. “Then why did we stop?”
“Why did we—” he looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know how to drive that thing!”
He gestured back at the rug, which was levitating a couple feet above the roof and looking pathetic. Like, really pathetic. For one thing, it wasn’t even close to being a rectangle, which was one reason I’d had so much trouble holding on. For another, it had a “pattern” that would have embarrassed a cross eyed two-year-old, with nothing repeating or making sense. It looked like somebody had scribbled a picture . . . in a hurry . . . in the dark . . .
I glared at Ray. “Son of a bitch!”
“Shh! Shhhhhh!”
“Where is it?”
The blue eyes shifted. “Where is what?”
“You know damned well!”
“All right, all right! Keep your voice down—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish pulling an object out of an inside pocket of his tux, and instead jerked it out myself. And then shook it under his nose. “You said it wasn’t finished yet! You said—”
“I say a lotta things,” Ray hissed. “Cause I got a master with a death wish! I wanted to test it out first—”
“Well, it obviously works!”
“Yeah.” He glanced back at the lopsided rug. “You know. Kinda.”
“Close enough.”
I stood up and looked around, but as I’d feared, there was no Louis-Cesare. There were no jackal-headed thugs, either, including the ones that had been after me. And there’d been at least a dozen, as more had zeroed in on my location from surrounding buildings.
What the hell was going on?
“How does this thing work?” I asked Ray, returning to the business at hand.
He shrugged. “Same as the other, more or less.”
I examined it. It resembled a child’s toy pistol, but with an extra-large barrel. But what it shot out wasn’t water.
Ray and I had gotten the idea for a new weapon from a recent adventure in supernatural Hong Kong. A hidden city that existed out of phase with the normal world, it didn’t have to hide its weirder elements like most enclaves did. That had allowed some . . . peculiarities . . . to