Reap the Wind (32 page)

Something jolted me out of a dead sleep the next morning, and I rolled over to see the clock. Barely seven a.m. But I didn’t go back to sleep. Because I had a job to do and because I needed to find something to stop the pounding in my head.

Which I belatedly realized wasn’t coming from my head.

It was coming from the door.

I stared at it blearily and wondered if I cared. And then the door burst open, and a wild-eyed, dark-haired woman came in, yelling my name even after being tackled by Marco in a flying leap.

Which turned into a trip in the opposite direction when she deflected him with a gesture, sending him slamming back through the air and then through the wall.

I sat up.

I guess I cared.

It took me a second to figure out who I was looking at, because I hadn’t seen her too often. And when I had, she’d been a little more indistinct. Incubi—or succubi, I guess, in this case—don’t normally have bodies, because it takes a huge amount of power to manifest them.

But then, this particular succubus had been on earth something like four hundred years and had power to burn.

“Rian?” I said blearily, and held up a hand so that nobody decided to shoot her.

Including Marco, who had just rushed back in, weapon drawn.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “She’s . . . she used to be Casanova’s girlfriend.”

“I am still his girlfriend!” Rian looked at me wildly, dark hair everywhere. I guessed real hair was harder to handle than the spirit kind she’d had until recently. Because it was a little scary.

Then again, that might have been because she kept pulling on it.

“Okay, you’re still his girlfriend,” I said, because this seemed to be important for some reason. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that.”

“He won’t be happy! He won’t be happy at all!”

“And why is that?” Marco demanded, looking like he’d like to introduce her to the nearest window. The kind without a balcony.

But Rian didn’t look like she cared. “Because he’s about to be killed!” she shrieked, and grabbed my hand.

And the next thing I knew, we materialized in a roar of noise, like a wave crashing onto a beach. Make that a thousand waves onto a thousand beaches, I thought, momentarily deafened. And staring around at a bunch of backs, because we’d landed in the middle of a crowd.

I never shifted into crowds for fear of ending up inside another person, but Rian must have had better control. Possibly because she didn’t exactly shift, but instead could transition between the human and the demon worlds. Which is where it looked like we were, in the middle of a crowd on what appeared to be some old wooden bleachers.

I thought there might be an arena down there that the bleachers were surrounding, but it was hard to tell since almost everyone was taller than I was. And many of them were holding containers of beer and popcorn in the way. Along with the usual bad-for-you stadium snacks like nachos and chili dogs and huge squirming black insects on a stick, still trying to claw and bite despite being drilled through.

Rian dragged me past, still staring, and the scene rippled at the edges. Other holes appeared here and there, maybe because there were just too many people for any glamourie to compensate for. Or maybe because there
was
no substitute for some of them, nothing except shuddering horror.

I jerked back from something I’d seen once before, a giant clear slug of a man, with an evil-eyed demonic thing crouched inside his overlarge belly, black and red-eyed and visible through the layers of translucent, glistening fat. Which was horrible enough, even before the red eyes swiveled to mine. And I started backing up the other way because no, no, no—

And ran into something else.

Something that looked like some kind of centaur, if instead of the back half of a horse you substituted a horse-sized scorpion, complete with curling barbed tail, and way too many legs and pincers in the place of hands. I shied back from him—it—as well, looking this way and that, but seeing no way out. Just a crowd of monsters who had just seen me, too, and were closing in on all sides, popcorn or whatever the hell it actually was forgotten in the headlong rush for a real meal.

I screamed and shifted, with nowhere in mind, just “away.”

And away is where I went, only it wasn’t an improvement. I looked up from the panicked crouch I’d landed in, and found myself in the middle of a huge open space, surrounded by towering stands full of monsters. And, yeah, it was an arena, all right, filled with what must have been ten thousand screaming fans, like a major league football game. Only I didn’t see a football.

I did see the giant pincer that plowed into the ground a second later, though, throwing up a great welt of sand. And Casanova, the usual suave and impeccably dressed casino manager, running past wearing a loincloth and an expression that went beyond panic, left fear in the dust, and was well into full-on heart attack territory. Only he was a vampire, and his heart didn’t attack.

But something else did. I had a half second to see a massive carapace coming my way, black and oily and shining under the lights, before it blocked out most of them. Along with the stands and the crowd and the sky, because the thing was big as a bus. And that wasn’t counting the hairy legs large as tree trunks that caged me in on all sides, before some protrusion as big as a sword flashed down—

And missed, because I’d just shifted to Casanova. Who was halfway across the sandy soil of the arena, and moving fast. At least he was until he ran into me and we boiled over in a rolling, cussing, screaming ball, and I shifted—

Back into my atrium at Dante’s.

I hit the marble floor, scattering sand everywhere, and Marco grabbed for me with a snarl—why, I wasn’t sure.

Until I realized—Casanova hadn’t come with me, despite the fact that I’d been clinging to him with both arms and a leg when I shifted.

But something else had.

Something else that I didn’t even get a good grip on before it jumped from my back to Marco’s face, like a prop out of freaking
Alien
. Long, black, king-crab-sized legs wrapped around his head, extending from a beetle-like body, a miniature of the one I’d just fled from. And which I felt like fleeing from again but instead I was screaming, “Get it off him! Get it off him!” while a dozen vamps tried to do just that.

Fred burst out of the suite with a kitchen knife and plunged it into the space on the creature where hideous body met ugly head. And jerked back, I guess trying to peel off the horrible shell. And ended up with only a broken knife for his trouble.

So he tried using his hand instead, before jumping back. “Shit! Shit!”

“What is it?” I said, afraid he was going to say “poison.”

“The damned shell is razor-edged. It almost cut my hand off!”

“Here!” One of the boys threw him a jacket, which he wrapped around his bleeding digits before trying again.

And this time, he actually managed to peel off the shell, with a horrible squelching sound that I thought I might hear in my nightmares from now on. And then Rico was there, blocking the entry to the main part of the suite with an expression that said a platoon wasn’t getting past him, and Marco was grabbing the knife. And throwing himself onto the creature, which had just rebounded off the wall and onto the floor and
was still moving
.

And biting and fighting and scurrying around the atrium, leaving a trail of slime behind that wasn’t eating through the floor but was tripping the hell out of the vamps trying to catch it. And then the creature lunged for me again, only to get caught in midair by Marco’s knife, before slamming into the wall over my left shoulder.

We both looked at it for a second, the knife quivering out of the still-moving body, the splatter of black ooze that had smeared the plaster and left flecks all over my shorty pink nightgown, and the chittering, squealing thing.

That suddenly burst off of the wall
and came at me again.

“The
fuck
!” Marco said, grabbing and stabbing it over and over, and then Rian was back and we were suddenly somewhere else, somewhere with a cheering crowd and dazzling lights and a groaning buffet table.

I stared at the latter for a second, unable to keep up. And then I noticed: the crowd was still audible, but muffled. And the dazzling lights were outside a large viewing window, like a skybox at a stadium. And the well-dressed group around the buffet was looking at me with polite surprise, but no more. The most I received for standing there covered in black blood and panting at them was a slightly raised eyebrow.

And that was from Adra, the head of the demon council, who was looking as blandly agreeable as always.

“Is there a problem?” he asked pleasantly, right before Marco bellowed and went for him, because he’d somehow come along, too.

I tried to stop him, but a master vampire moves like lightning, and I didn’t even get my mouth open before he passed me in a blur of motion.

And then froze, midleap, held in place by nothing I could see, because Adra hadn’t so much as moved.

For a moment, everything stopped. There was no sound, other than the ocean crash of the crowd, no movement except for the thing that two master vamps had been trying to kill for the last minute wriggling off the end of Marco’s knife and scurrying away, no anything but a vampire suddenly realizing he wasn’t in Kansas anymore and rolling shocked dark eyes over at me.

I licked my lips.

And then Rian burst in from a door I hadn’t noticed, wild-eyed and frantic, her long dark hair tangled about her beautiful face. “They’re killing him!” she told me, grabbing my hand.

And we ran.

The sound of the crowd slapped me in the face when we burst out of the main room onto a balcony, a wide, plush thing like the suite behind us, and unlike the rest of the run-down stadium. But when I crossed the expanse and hung over the railing, I saw the same thing I had before, only from a better vantage point: Casanova in the middle of a sea of sand, being chased by half a dozen different kinds of creatures, and naked, bleeding, and defenseless—or as much as a master vampire ever is.

Which was looking pretty damned defenseless right now.

Rian stared down at him, her hand clenched, her face frantic and furious and terrified, as he narrowly avoided being skewered by what looked like a giant beetle. It was the same one that had almost steamrollered me, and I’d been wrong about the size. The legs were as big as cranes, the shell was the size of a house, and it must have been diamond hard, because the next second Casanova vaulted over the top of it and brought down two joined fists with a master’s strength behind them.

And didn’t even dent it.

The creature had better luck, flinging him off with a twisting motion. And the legs, which might have been huge but were really freaking fast nonetheless, started slamming down, here, there, everywhere, which was pretty easy considering that the thing had six. And Casanova was doing what looked like interpretive dance but was more like fleeing for his life while the creature’s movements threw up huge spouts of sand, half hiding him from view.

And then they did hide him, as the thing stopped trying to skewer him and started trying to bury him instead, crashing down against the soil and flinging up great gobs of sand on top of its shell with every leg it had.

Until I shifted it to the other end of the arena, in a move that sent me to my knees, whether because of the thing’s size or because we weren’t on earth anymore, I wasn’t sure.

“Cassie—Cassie!” somebody was yelling, I think it was Rian. Possibly because my blurry vision showed me that I’d just expended a lot of power for very little result. I stared through railings as Casanova clawed his way out of the sand, his usual Spanish good looks dirt-streaked and wild-eyed, although the latter might have had something to do with the fact that the massive beetle thing was already on its way back toward him.

So I flipped it, and oh God,
not good, not good, not good
, I thought as a wave of crippling nausea hit like a sledgehammer, hard enough to drop me the rest of the way to the floor. But I had to get it together, because something was happening. And I doubted it was anything good, because when was it ever? And because the crowd seemed to like it.

The upswell of sound from below was almost deafening even this high up, adding to the confusion in my head and the pounding in my ears and the sickening queasiness in my gut when I grabbed Rian’s hand, trying to get back to my feet.

And discovered that it was Adra’s hand instead.

“Impressive,” he told me, hauling me up as easily as if I weighed nothing.

He looked like a pudgy banker today, in a nicely pressed gray suit that I was seriously considering hurling all over.

But I didn’t. Because I could see the arena over his shoulder, and . . . and it hadn’t been so bad, after all. I let go of his hand to grab the railing, in time to see a bunch of the little bug things attack the big bug thing. Along with some other things, half of which made my brain hurt to look at them, because I guess the glamourie couldn’t do anything with them, either. But they suddenly surged forward, having been hugging the sidelines, waiting for scraps, but were now seeing an opportunity for a feast instead.

Because the big beetle was still on its back, rocking side to side, trying to get back up but not having much luck. Maybe because it was being chowed down on by what had to be a hundred other creatures. And I guess the belly wasn’t as hard as the shell, because they were chowing fast.

I looked away, relieved and sickened in about equal measure. Until I caught sight of Casanova running back this way, looking up at us and yelling something I couldn’t hear over the crowd. But I guess Adra did, because he glanced over as well, and shook his head.

“Denied.”

And I guess Casanova heard that, because he started waving his arms furiously and screaming something I still couldn’t hear but didn’t have to.

“What—what’s denied?” I asked as Rian stared at Adra with open hate on her face.

“He killed it,” she spat. “You said he could go if—”