was still a two-thousand-year old vampire with an unparalleled knowledge of sorcery who somehow always managed to have the drop on us despite announcing his presence well in advance.
Michelle, as she freely and accurately admitted, had basically one way of dealing with a threat. But the torrent of flames she hurled at the Prince of Wands guttered out a good three feet from him, which suggested he’d probably warded himself before he got here because the motherfucker did his motherfucking homework. Patrick threw himself into the fray with the wild abandon of an angry bloodsucker, and got about halfway across the room before a telekinetic strike pitched him through a closed window. That left Elaine, very sensibly keeping her head down in the corner.
Then there was me. Sebastian Douglas wasn’t one to get his hands dirty, but for old friends he appeared willing to make an exception. He caught me around the throat with a strength that would have been unexpected if I hadn’t long since lost the ability to be surprised by anything he did, and flung me into the arms of his waiting servant. Hephaestion wrapped me in a fairly restrained but utterly unbreakable bear-hug. I’d been attacked by living statues before and they were a pain in the arse. Near-as-hell impervious and a lot quicker than they had any right to be, your only real hope was to stay away from them and that ship had now sailed entirely.
With an entire room full of his enemies neutralised in basically zero seconds, the Prince of Wands walked calmly to Nimue’s bedside and looked down at her. About the only thing that stopped the look in his eyes from being creepy beyond creepy was the knowledge that it was very much power-lust rather than lust-lust.
“Touch her and you fucking die.” Michelle sounded passably menacing for somebody who had so recently demonstrated her utter inability to harm the person she was threatening.
“I am already dead,” he replied, half to her and half to himself. “Had your friend not thwarted my ambition to ascend the discarded stair, I would now be something quite other, and no threat to any of you. But she did, and I am not, and so I must console myself with the power that resides in your mistress.”
Nim was definitely stirring. The Prince of Wands caught her by the hair and hauled her to her feet, tubes and needles tearing free from her body as she rose from the bed. I thrashed in Hephaestion’s grip but could do nothing. Instead I watched helplessly as he pulled her in with that mockery of tenderness that vampires did when they were going to drain absolutely all of your fucking blood.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then I heard a noise like sixty dogs barking, like the rush of an oncoming train, like the roar of the sea.
Then what was left of the windows exploded, and a force like the wind or the tide tore through the room. It scattered medical equipment and vases of flowers and ripped the Prince of Wands away from Nimue and pinned him to a wall like a leaf.
Lightning cracked outside, rain lashed from nowhere, and Nimue stood in an emerald gown, framed in a halo of city-light.
Sebastian Douglas spoke a secret word, and the room was a blaze of blue fire for all of a moment before Nimue, with the barest motion of her hand, extinguished it.
“Impossible.” And I thought for a moment that I heard fear in his voice.
Nimue walked towards him. Outside a storm howled, and where her feet fell spring water welled through the floor and lilies grew. “So much knowledge,” she said—her voice was distant, and colder than I had ever heard it. “So little understanding.”
Despite the strange deep-sea current that still whipped the room, Sebastian managed by some vast exertion of will and blood to hurl himself one last time at the Witch-Queen of London, his fingers grasping like claws and his fangs bared like a wild beast. For all his scheming and his scholarship, it seemed, he was just a vampire in the end.
Nimue raised a hand before him and the current caught him again, hurling him backwards and stripping flesh from bone in a vortex of arcane fury that I really, really, really did not ever want to find myself on the wrong side of.
In seconds it was over. Two millennia of power and fear stripped away to nothing. A bleached skull in a