Midnight's Daughter (Dorina Basarab 1)

“Then we have a problem.” It was an understatement. Now I knew why the mages didn’t bother to waste manpower guarding their backs. Anyone who sneaked in here was trapped until one of them came along and finished him off, or left to rot. Neither option appealed to me, but neither did getting flame broiled. I might survive the Shroud, but I’d spend a month helpless thereafter from having every inch of skin barbecued. Olga might also live through the process—the thinnest troll skin is approximately the consistency of rawhide—but no way could Louis-Cesare manage it. Vamps burn like they’ve been soaked in lighter fluid even without magical help. We needed an alternative.

Louis-Cesare had regained his feet, but was leaning heavily against the wall, resting his head on his forearm. “Merde.” I decided to see if Olga had any ideas; he looked like he needed a time-out.

I eyed the cavern walls speculatively. “Olga, do you think you could hack through that?” She didn’t have a pickax, but then, she hadn’t had one earlier, either.

She shrugged. “In time. But Lars come soon.” Lars hadn’t struck me as a mental giant, and he’d let Louis-Cesare slip by, but maybe I was missing hidden depths. I must have looked skeptical, because she waved at the wall. “He make new door.” Okay, that I could see. Mages tend to forget that there are other ways to solve a problem than magic. You can put all the spells you want on a doorway, but if someone kicks down the wall and makes a new one, it doesn’t matter much, does it? I just hoped Lars didn’t bring the ceiling down on top of us in his enthusiasm.

“Where are we?” Louis-Cesare had decided to join the conversation.

I turned on him, and for a moment had the disorienting sense of double vision, seeing someone who was the same as ever, and yet so very different. I forcibly squashed the empathy that wanted to dull my edge. I couldn’t afford that now. “I didn’t know I was coming here until a few hours ago,” I accused, my voice harsher than I’d intended. “How do you keep finding me?”

Louis-Cesare’s expression shifted from the dullness of shock to arrogant exasperation. “That is hardly relevant at the moment.”

“It’s relevant to me!”

He apparently decided that answering was easier than arguing. “Because of the cell phone I gave you. The Senate was able to use it to pinpoint your location.”

I fished it out of my jeans and stared at it. The sleek black case gleamed innocently in the dim lighting. I should have known. I ground the traitorous device under the heel of my boot with a scowl.

Louis-Cesare watched, a wry curve to his lips. “I am beginning to understand your difficulties with electronics.”

“Very funny.”

“Lars is here,” Olga suddenly announced, getting heavily to her feet.

“You brought trolls with you?” Louis-Cesare had apparently just noticed the two mountains staring at each other through a curtain of fire.

“It’s more like they brought me.” I left him to his own devices and went to see what Olga thought Lars could do.

“Get the others,” Olga was telling him. Lars obediently turned and lumbered back down the corridor, shaking the floor slightly as he did so. “It not be long,” she said, glancing past me to Louis-Cesare. “You know this vampire?”

“Unfortunately.” Her teeth bared and I hastened to explain. “He’s okay. He just whines a lot.”

Under the drained and the pained and the fed up, Louis-Cesare almost looked amused—until Olga thumped him on the back. The comradely gesture would have shattered a human’s spine. “Good. I hear rumors,” she informed us. “They say the rebel vampires and dark mages work together. When Lars come back, we break through these walls. You,” she told Louis-Cesare like a general addressing a private, “sense any vampires, awake or asleep. We kill them first. Then we take back what is ours.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Louis-Cesare asked incredulously. “The Senate itself wouldn’t dare to attack such a place, at least not yet. But you propose to do so with what? A band of trolls?”

He’d addressed the question to me, but Olga answered. “If you afraid, you go,” she said with a shrug.

Louis-Cesare’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as if he was having trouble processing the fact that a wild-looking bearded lady had just called him a coward, but I didn’t let him get going.

I turned to Olga. “There could be a complication.”

She raised bushy eyebrows and I started feeling guilty. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. “There’s a chance that the mages and vamps are getting a little extra help these days.” I spent the next five minutes filling her and Louis-Cesare in on my recent adventures. “Don’t get me wrong—if you still want to kick some vampire butt, I’m your girl. But I don’t think your crew is ready to deal with Drac just yet.” I managed not to mention that I didn’t feel much like it myself, either, although I think the point came across.

“You knew where he was, even to the room number, and you said nothing?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Do you wish to trap him or not?”

“Not!” I responded heatedly. “That’s Mircea’s thing. I want to kill him. I think I’ve been pretty clear on that. But I’m only going to get one shot at it, and I’m not exactly prepared right now. That was the point of coming here in the first place, to get some decent weapons.”

“The Senate has weapons!”

“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to turn them over to me. Besides, they don’t have the kind of stuff I need. Or if they do, they aren’t likely to admit it.”

“That was why you did not want me with you. You were planning to buy illegal weapons!”

“Until Benny got dead, yeah. That was the plan. The plan now is to steal them.”

Olga’s massive forehead was wrinkled as if thinking was causing her pain. When she spoke, though, it was clear that she’d followed the conversation well enough. “This Drac you speak of, he killed my Bienvior?”