Page 143 of Fortune's Blade

“I don’t care what they’re going to do! We are going to die if we don’t get out of here and I cannot hold the Veil much longer!”

“Then what do you suggest? I have to talk to ‘em, make ‘em understand—”

“They sent someone after you! They’ll understand!”

“They sent someone after Dorina, who’s basically the queen’s new champion! They don’t know much about me, and probably care less. I’m gonna need a minute—”

“We don’t have a minute!”

And Louis-Cesare was right on the money there.

Because the door behind us suddenly blew off its hinges, the pixies gave a battle yell and charged, and I saw someone I knew standing in the ruined frame.

Steen had come himself, it seemed, to get his revenge, to destroy the royal line and to dissolve the remaining dark fey resistance to his master, all at one go. I didn’t know if he’d already found the queen and dealt with her; didn’t know if that was Antem’s blood dripping from the maw of the hulking beast I could see like a shadow over his human form; didn’t know anything except that he wanted the baby, he wanted Dorina, and he was getting neither of them.

Because he had to get through me first.

I grabbed a knife off of Louis-Cesare’s belt. It was broken, with the remaining blade less than an inch long, another casualty of the day we’d had. But if you use it right, that’s enough.

I used it right.

Steen’s human form staggered back, blood gushing from a severed artery; we stumbled into real space, because Louis-Cesare hadn’t been wrong about that, either; and Steen’s dragon form popped into the Veil at basically the same time we left, to find out what the hell was going on.

It never had that chance, but not because of me.

But because the queen, whoever she was, had chosen her guard well. They fell on the wounded man like a swarm of locusts, if locusts had magic, genuine hate for the people attacking their city, and every weapon in the medieval arsenal. Not that most of said weapons touched him, because he was hit by a couple dozen spells before they could, which had him covered in a rainbow of snapping, snarling, hissing pain.

He screamed and fell to the floor, thrashing, and a second later his dragon self attempted to emerge back into our world to save him. It managed to heal the wound I’d made in his neck, but then abruptly disappeared again. Only to re-surface a second later and have the same thing happen all over again.

Steen was glitzing like a T.V. on the fritz, with his two forms repeatedly replacing each other and making it hard for the pixies to approach. One moment, his massive dragon body took up the entire hallway and half of the room besides, and the next, an old, screaming man lay in the floor outside, wrestling with nothing we could see. It was as if his dragon form kept trying to claw its way back into our world, but something kept pulling it back in.

And then I noticed: Louis-Cesare was missing.

“No!” I screamed, staring around at nothing and startling a pixie.

He slashed a sword at me before stopping and looking confused, but I barely reacted to the two-inch gash on my arm. Because my husband was battling Steen in another world, having not dropped out of the Veil along with the rest of us. And I couldn’t reach him.

But I could damned well reach something else.

“Fuck!” Ray grabbed for me as I launched myself at Steen. I had no weapons worth mentioning, having lost everything I’d brought with me at one point or another, but that was okay. I had myself.

Or I would have, if Ray would get. The hell. Off!

“Louis-Cesare . . . in the Viel . . . we have to help him!” I panted, and saw his eyes get big.

And then two of us were beating the ever-loving crap out of Steen, alongside two of Ray’s boys, who burst in at the last minute and clearly had no idea what the hell was going on. But the boss was shit kicking somebody, and that was all they needed to know. They leapt on, and while neither was exactly powerful, they were decent enough street fighters.

And we needed them, because despite the pixie’s spells, and despite whatever was going on in that other realm, Steen was a goddamned beast. He sent one of Ray’s guys, a popinjay in turquoise silk, flying through a door with a ward that caught him like a spider’s web and minused one from our team almost immediately. And then broke the neck of the other guy, but not before he’d gotten a knife into the shoulder joint of Steen’s right arm.

It didn’t actually separate from his body, but it didn’t seem to be working so well, either. That was a major help, as the armor the bastard kept manifesting had destroyed my knife and the pixies’ weapons weren’t doing any better. But it was moving armor, sprouting up in places where he was being threatened, then fading away to pop up somewhere else. Maybe because he was having to fight in two realms and didn’t have enough to go around.

Which was how I got in a couple of good blows, by waiting for it to fade and then hitting the unprotected spots hard. But he returned the favor, and even with his injured right arm, the blows were stunning. But he couldn’t use his left because Ray had wrapped his body around it and appeared to be trying to gnaw it off.

That was how my Second lost a fang and got pulverized between the floor and the wall of the hallway, with Steen slamming him back and forth repeatedly. But Ray hung on, immobilizing one of Steen’s pile drivers, because he was nothing if not tenacious. And I guessed that was a trait he shared with his boys, who leapt back into the fight a moment later, Turquoise having wrestled his way free of the ward at the cost of his snazzy outfit, and the scrawny little bastard with the impressive knife skills lurching back into the fray despite his lolling neck.

They tipped the balance, because while they weren’t all that dangerous as far as vamps went, Steen didn’t know that. And with four of us now on the attack, he didn’t have enough armor to go around. Not without removing the heavy gorget around his neck, which had never budged until now.

I paused in surprise as the gorget was sacrificed to protect his chest, leaving his throat unprotected. Only he knew that, too, because his dragon face emerged a second later, and sent a torrent of flame at the ceiling of the hall, evaporating it in one go. Just as he would anyone who got too close.

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