to drain him, a fact that Mircea took this opportunity to demonstrate. I think he was trying to intimidate the others into running, because he did not go for a clean kill. He extended a hand and the mage jerked to a halt, bloody tears suddenly springing to his eyes. But instead of streaming down his cheeks, they flowed outward, flying across the distance between us to Mircea's palm, where the tiny droplets were immediately absorbed.
And then it wasn't only his eyes bleeding; it looked like every pore on his face had ruptured, sending not a trickle but a flood twisting through the air, like a long red ribbon. In a few short seconds the mage crumpled, face now snow white, bloodless lips open in a silent oh. He was dead before he hit the asphalt.
If intimidation had been the object, it didn't work. The mages merely scattered and mounted separate attacks. They probably assumed that Mircea couldn't watch the remaining six at once, and while he was dealing with one, the others would take him out. I was desperately afraid they might be right. The animated corpse moved closer, and a cloud of glass fragments from the destroyed cars rose up from the ground behind it, glittering in the flames like deadly diamonds. As if that wasn't enough, a group of burning tires rotated off the asphalt, looking like a squadron of UFOs against the dark.
I lost track of exactly what happened after that, as everything came at us at once—most of it too fast to see. I blinked and the next time I looked, a segment of fencing had jumped in front of us, acting like a shield to catch the various flying objects. I realized why the corpse had continued to move even after death when it crashed into the fence and the whole thing lit up with sparks. Around its foot, the downed power line was still coiled like a long black snake, hissing and crackling, spitting fire as deadly to a vampire as to a human. But it couldn't touch us, and in a moment, the body went dancing back across the parking lot like a demented puppet.
Mircea sent the segment of fencing flying toward the nearest mage, and it hit his shields with an avalanche of sparks. They held, ensuring that the hot metal didn't touch his skin, but they couldn't stop the fence from wrapping around him like a blanket. The links almost immediately began to glow with a new, more-intense light, melting into his shielding the way hot water sinks into ice.
The other mages had paused for some reason, and I didn't wait to find out why. I dove for Mircea, intending to shift us out before they got their wind back, even if it blew my cover. But a solid wall of energy met my outstretched hand, searing a stripe across my skin that felt like a bad sunburn.
"Get out of here, Cassie," Mircea said, as I snatched my hand back.
"Here's a thought," Billy said. "Shift both of you out of here."
I gave him my "no shit" face. "I have to touch him!"
"What's stopping you?"
Apparently, he couldn't see the barrier any better than I could. But it was there. Mircea didn't have shields—he wasn't a mage and vamp magic didn't work like that. It had to be pure power he was putting out, surrounding himself and the mages in an energy field that had them trapped as effectively as any cage. But in a way, he was as trapped as they were. He couldn't drop the barrier without setting them free, and I couldn't get any closer as long as he kept it up.
"Mircea is stopping me!" I snapped.
"Cassandra! I cannot hold them forever!" A single drop of sweat ran down Mircea's cheek to hang suspended on the edge of his jaw. "You must go!"
Before I could reply, one of the mages tore free, a young man with acne and mismatched eyes, one green and one blue. He stumbled away from the others, his clothes smoking, his limp brown hair on fire. But a few whispered words put out the flames and when he turned, his face furious, there was something in his hand. Something warm and pale pink, the color of the webbing between his fingers.
The little ball looked innocuous, but I'd been around mages long enough to know how likely that was. And Mircea couldn't move, couldn't defend himself, without freeing the others to do even more damage. Fear,