Page 134 of Time's Fool

“To defeat the witch! And I have said, she is irrelevant!”

“And yet, you are my servant until she dies—”

“Or until you do! You swore that you and your creature cannot hurt me; we made an unbreakable pact upon it. But I took no similar vow. Task me, vampire, and you shall be my first meal!”

“And if I do not, the gods shall return and feast upon us all.”

The demon grinned, that horrible yellow maw stretching into a rictus. “Yes, that is unfortunate.”

It turned away again.

And once more, Mircea called it back. “I haven’t given you leave to go.”

This time when it spun, it was no longer laughing. “You wear on my patience, vampire!”

“Then let us dispense with the niceties,” Mircea said, and did nothing at all that I could see.

But the demon suddenly scowled, and lashed out with an elongated arm made of fire, shooting flames across a span more than ten times the length of a man, and targeting the place where Mircea had been an eyeblink ago. And despite the rain, the attack scorched a mighty burning furrow into the ground, throwing up clods of dirt and leaving a blaze that persisted despite the storm. And sent a great wash of steam into the air, which was almost as hot as the fire that had caused it.

Louis-Cesare and I jumped back to avoid being boiled alive, and then just stared at a fight between a master vampire and a demon, which was moving so fast that the only way to track it was by the fiery scars it left in the earth. I wanted to intervene, but wasn’t sure how. And didn’t even have my weapons on me with which to try!

I had no sooner had the thought than Louis-Cesare threw Mircea his sword, and grabbed another off a dead man I hadn’t noticed in the forest behind us. It looked like there had been a battle here not long ago, or possibly still was, for the man had a hex eating its way through the middle of him. But I had too much worry about to pay it much mind.

Because Mircea wasn’t using the sword.

He wasn’t doing much of anything except ducking and dodging, avoiding the creature’s attempted immolations but not fighting back. Or perhaps he was doing it mentally, only if that was the case, he seemed to be working to slow the creature down rather than to harm it. I saw it hesitate several times, just enough that Mircea had time to slip away, but I did not see it falter.

“What is he doing?” I yelled at Louis-Cesare, and wasn’t sure he heard, even though we were standing right next to each other. The wind had picked up even more, snapping our clothes like pennants; between that and the howling, I could barely hear myself think.

But he must have caught something, because he shook his head, his forehead wrinkling. And then threw a knife at a blur as it came by, that turned out to be the demon. Who paused long enough for him to bring his sword slashing down, taking off the creature’s head.

I watched the hideous thing bounce across the mud, turning black and crusting over, with facial features that were easier to discern once the liquid flames weren’t obscuring them. But oddly, it still seemed to be grinning. Possibly because a new head had just sprouted out of the stump of the old, while the severed piece on the ground exploded, showering us with flaming bits.

It should have immolated Louis-Cesare on the spot, for he threw himself in front of me despite being far more flammable. But he pulled the same trick that I’d seen in front of the alehouse, and manifested a makeshift shield formed out of a wash of pure power. The burning chunks disintegrated in the field before they could touch us, and the demon laughed.

“How many more times can you do that?” it asked, and then was on the hunt again.

“How many can you do it?” I asked, and only received a head shake in return.

Not enough.

Damn it, we should have stayed where we were!

But we hadn’t, and the fight had escalated to the point that it was hard to make out anything at all. It was like the duel between two first level masters that I’d seen in a castle in Italy once. I had been off to the side of the audience chamber, waiting on one of the lord’s functionaries to bring me payment for a hunt, when an argument between the master of the castle and a guest turned bloody.

At the time, I had been but a baby dhampir, who was amazed at how swiftly the combatants moved. To the point that I hadn’t tracked them so much with my eyes as by the damage they did to the hall and the way the crowd had moved back out of their way, like the tide ebbing and flowing at the shoreline. I had done the same, and then fled the place entirely when a candelabra near where I’d been standing was sliced in two by a blow I never even saw.

But this . . . was on a level far beyond that.

I had thought that I wouldn’t want to fight Mircea, but had had no idea just what he looked like in a duel. He was quicksilver in human form, only slightly slower than the lightning flashing overhead. But he still wasn’t attacking. He was evading, dodging, staying ahead of his opponent, which might have worked in another type of fight.

But I didn’t think the demon was likely tire soon.

So, what was his plan? Because he had to have one. He hadn’t even looked surprised when the creature turned on us, at almost the instant we arrived. His whole stance had said that he’d expected it, been waiting for it.

So, what now?

“Go find the covens,” Louis-Cesare said into my ear, because he seemed worried, too. “They won’t speak to me; they hate my kind. But you may be able to convince them—”

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