It looked like a bizarre modernist sculpture: a fusion of the tower and the huge splash of liquid, with the still-burning helicopter tacked on at one side. Even the fire had frozen, the water vapor congealing around it, giving me the extremely odd sight of flames dancing behind the ice for a moment. Before lack of oxygen snuffed them out, leaving black smoke trapped in their place.

Okay, I thought dizzily, that went better than expected.

Or maybe not. Because when I spun and tried to shoot Æsubrand, nothing happened. Except that his battered face acquired an evil smile and Marlowe’s acquired a dark scowl and then they were at it again, falling to the concrete in a snarling pile of thrashing limbs.

Marlowe must have been too depleted for his super-duper master power to be available, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. And he’d figured out the same thing I had on that wild ride with Slava—Æsubrand’s power didn’t work so well up close, because it caught him, too.

And speaking of Slava—

Where the hell was Slava?

In the few seconds my attention had been diverted, he’d disappeared. Which was stupid; it wasn’t like he could just get up and walk off. Except that that was exactly what he had done.

Sort of.

After a couple seconds of panicked looking around, I finally spied him. A frozen, pantsless vampire drifting out over the void between buildings, like a balloon a kid had just let go of. One that was getting farther away by the second.

But that wasn’t yet quite far enough.

I stuck the empty gun in my waistband, hiked up my skirt and ran, straight for the roof’s edge. I heard Marlowe yell something, but it was lost in the massive gust of wind that was rushing up behind me, trying to beat me to my target, to send him skittering out into the void ahead of me. But either Æsubrand was tiring or I was getting my second wind, because for once, my luck had turned. The gust hit me at almost the same moment that my feet ran out of roof, and actually worked in my favor, propelling me up and out farther and faster than I could possibly have hoped for on my own, almost making me overreach my target.

But not quite.

My fingers grabbed the frosty, slippery surface, and my arms and legs wrapped around it, and my head tucked low, and then Slava and I shot ahead, like an odd-shaped bullet barreling through the Manhattan sky.

It was a mad rush, surfing the crest of a wave of wind across the city. No, it was more than mad; it was breathtaking and death-defying and so stupid it made my head hurt. But it was hard to care with the wind whistling past my ears and the city streaming by below and Slava’s building fast retreating into the distance.

I clutched him harder, little half-crazed gasps of something I finally recognized as laughter slipping out from between my lips, because, crazy or not, it was working.

At least it was until the charm suddenly gave out.

It took me a second to realize what had happened, because I’d assumed that the freezing process would have stabilized it. And maybe it had. Maybe it had lasted longer than it should have on a body, although that was cold comfort considering that in a second we had gone from tearing across the sky to tearing toward the ground.

Battery Park was coming up, the greenery a dark swath against the brighter buildings, with the city lights wavering in black water beyond. But it didn’t look like we were going to make it that far. And even if we did, hitting the ocean from this height and speed would be virtually the same as hitting concrete.

I tried to think, in the few seconds I had left, to remember all those rules about what to do if falling from a height. But the thing about those rules is, they were made by someone safely on the ground. And it’s a little hard to take them seriously when your eyes are tearing up and the wind is roaring in your ears and the ground is rushing up at you at a rate that is clearly not survivable unless you suddenly grow wings. And while I have a fair number of skills to call on in an emergency, I don’t number flying among them.

Fortunately, someone else did.

Slava and I were heading straight for a hard ribbon of sidewalk snaking through the park when something caught me. For a second I thought the charm had suddenly reengaged, until the force of being jerked skyward again almost bisected me, and caused me to lose my grip on the frozen bullet. Which continued on our former trajectory, plowing through the air and then—

“No!” I yelled, but it was too late. Slava hit the ground at something like eighty miles an hour, with a sound like a gun going off. And he didn’t shatter like the other vamp so much as disintegrate. Some larger pieces hit the ground here and there, but a good third of the body went up in a cloud of sparkling, icy particles that melted on the hot August breeze, shimmering away into nothingness as I watched.

I cursed silently, too out of breath for anything else, but someone heard.

“You’re welcome,” a rich voice said behind me.

My feet gently touched down on springy grass a moment later, and I whirled drunkenly around to see Slava’s floor show standing in front of me. He looked a little different, with those huge wings outspread, blocking half the sky. Until they folded up against his back again, somehow managing not to tangle in the long black hair.

The eyes were the same color, darker than mine, to the point that they didn’t seem to have a pupil as they regarded me quizzically. “For such a small creature, you cause a lot of trouble.”

“So people…keep telling me,” I said, dizzy and weaponless, and wondering what this new hell was.

But hell wasn’t looking particularly threatening. If anything, hell looked vaguely amused. “Those people would be correct. But you are, if you’ll forgive me, playing a tad outside your league.”

“And what league…would that be?”

But he just shook his head. “This is more dangerous than you can handle, dhampir.”

“I can handle a lot.”

“And that goes for your people, as well.” He smiled at me gently. “Tell them to leave it to us.”

“Who is us?” I yelled—at no one. Because he was suddenly airborne again, his massive wings beating the night hard enough to knock me down. And by the time I got back to my—very shaky—feet, he was gone.

Leaving me with a dead vamp, a bunch of bruises and no answers.

Chapter Twenty-four

“Okay, very funny. Now let me in!”

Nothing. I might as well have been talking to the brick wall instead of the speaker set into it. And it did not make me happy.

It was raining, Verrell’s omelet was long gone, and I had a dead vampire in my trunk. And considering that the damned Senate were the ones who had wanted him so freaking bad, the least they could do was open the door. I pushed the button again, a long, sustained buzz that I really hoped gave somebody in there a headache, but the result was the same.

Great.

I got out, leaving my car blocking the entrance to the garage, and skirted the building. The East Coast Office of the North American Vampire Senate, Central Manhattan Branch, aka Central, was located in a mansion built around the turn of the century by some robber baron with more cash than taste. Improvements had been made in the years since, but most of them had involved privacy. Which was why, despite the glass inserts in the ornate mahogany doors, I saw only my own face staring back at me: pale, bruised skin, mascara that had run everywhere, and rain dripping off the end of my nose.

It was spotting my new leather jacket.

Goddamn it.

I should have left the jacket in my car, but I’d needed it for modesty’s sake, since Marlowe’s magical fabric hadn’t proven so magical after all. Of course, it might have been fine if it hadn’t started raining halfway through the long hike back to Slava’s. Which I’d chosen over explaining to a cabbie why I was wandering around Manhattan looking like a war victim.

So in addition to being bruised and bloody and barefoot, I was close to indecent by the time I slogged ten blocks in a downpour.

And found Slava’s all but deserted.

The guests had fled, Æsubrand had taken off immediately after I had, and Marlowe and his senior vamps had taken off after him. The younger ops had been left to pacify the human authorities, who were out in force by the time I returned, and to chisel out the ice cubes upstairs, who were being carted away for interrogation on the off chance that they knew anything. And to deal with me.

Only they hadn’t seemed to know how to deal with me. They hadn’t said anything as one of them brought my car around, and another gave me his phone—because mine was in my purse and my purse was God-knew-where—probably so the boss could call and cuss me out later. And then a third handed me a couple of trash bags, because Marlowe wanted a delivery.

Oh yes, he did.

I’d stared at the vamp and he’d had the grace to look embarrassed, because we both knew what this was. Okay, yes, some top-notch necromancers, like the kind the Senate had on call, could occasionally extract information from a recently dead vamp brain. But “recent” did not equal the hour and a half Slava had been out of commission by the time I dragged him back. The necromancers who had prowled the battlefields in the bad old days, searching for important corpses to brain-loot, had known they had only minutes at best. And those corpses hadn’t been frozen, broken into chunks and half vaporized.

So, yeah, I was going with the revenge theory. But I’d taken the damned bags anyway, because I doubted I’d get paid for tonight—and I was so getting paid for tonight—if I didn’t. And because it was SOP to clean up your own mess, especially when it involved a bunch of vamp parts littering a popular tourist area. And now all I wanted was to drop them off and have this nightmare of an evening finally be over.

Only I couldn’t if nobody ever let me in.

I pulled out my phone and stabbed in Marlowe’s number, even though it was already programmed, just for the satisfaction. But I may as well have saved myself the trouble. I wiped the rain off the phone’s little face and the mystery was solved: no bars.

I shook it, even though that never helps.

It didn’t this time, either.

“You’re going to make me do it, aren’t you?” I demanded.