His hair was everywhere, he was barefoot and swaying slightly, and he appeared to be wearing only a blue bathrobe. But he was holding a rapier so thin and sharp that it was barely even bloody. And okay, I thought.

I guessed I knew what Louis-Cesare’s master power was.

He looked at me, pupils blown huge and dark and vague, like his vampires’ had been earlier. “Who…” He swallowed, and finally managed to focus on my face. “Who am I?”

He sounded a little desperate.

“My boyfriend, come to get me out of this?”

Louis-Cesare blinked. “That’s right.”

And then he pulled me to him and kissed me.

For a second, until Ray pushed us apart. “Can you do that again?” he demanded.

Louis-Cesare looked at him haughtily. “Of course.” And he gave me another kiss, this time with tongue.

“No! I meant that thing you just did.”

“The Veil,” Zheng added enviously.

“Yeah, yeah, that. Can you do that again?”

Louis-Cesare looked up, blue eyes narrowing. “Why?”

“Because I think I have an idea.”

Chapter Forty-five

The balcony was occupied when we slipped back through the portal, but only by a couple of mages. They were looking surprised at not seeing anyone there. But not half as surprised as when they did.

“All right,” Zheng said, after they hit the floor. “Let’s hear it.”

Ray licked his lips, suddenly looking less sure of himself. But then he straightened his shoulders and met Zheng’s eyes. “Okay,” he said briskly. “The fey have to go through the portals to get to us, right?”

“Obviously.”

“But they haven’t cut them all the way through to the other side yet, or we’d have been seeing a lot of gates with nobody coming out of them, and I haven’t.”

“Of course not,” Zheng said impatiently. “They don’t want to telegraph where they’re coming, in case we booby-trap the area.”

“Right. Which is what gives us a chance.”

I was looking at Louis-Cesare, who was still swaying and appeared slightly cross-eyed.

He caught my eye. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere in Faerie. Svarestri lands, I think.”

“Oh.”

“What chance?” Zheng was demanding. “Unless you can collapse a bunch of portals on the fly—”

“Well, yeah.”

“What?”

“Closing a portal is easy,” Ray said impatiently. “It’s cutting it to begin with that’s hard. But that won’t do no good, because if we close ’em, they’ll just open more. They gotta have the people here to do that, given how many—”

“Pardon,” Louis-Cesare interrupted politely. “But you did say Faerie?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Zheng demanded.

I sighed. “He’s brain-fried. He shouldn’t even be here.”

“That makes two of us.” Zheng looked at Ray. “Get to the point.”

“I’m trying! Look, destroying the portals won’t work, ’cause then they’ll know something’s up and just cut more. But what if we reroute ’em?”

“Reroute them how?”

“With this. I—”

Zheng snatched the little device Ray had just pulled out of his wallet. “What’s this?”

“My own invention,” Ray said, snatching it back. “I use it to cut into portals. And to link them.”

“Holy shit,” I said, catching up.

The little thing didn’t look like much. Just a basic charm, like the kind people used for everything from opening warded doors to hanging around their necks for a quick glamourie: flat, gold, vaguely roundish, like an old-fashioned watch fob. Only this one had a couple metal prongs sticking out of it.

Ray was looking smug. “I cut into the Senate’s line, remember? To link up some of my portals. So it’s in my network, so to speak.”

“So you’re going to do what?” I asked, wanting to be sure I got this.

“The same thing Olga does when she wants to make more than one stop on the same line,” Ray explained. “You gotta tell the portal which destination you want, don’t you? Or you could end up at any gate along the line.”

“So you’re going to use that thing to tell the fey’s portals to let out…somewhere else?”

He nodded.

“Like where?”

“Do you care? Somewhere that isn’t Earth, okay? I got a lot of locations preset—”

“Wait,” Zheng said, his forehead knitting. I didn’t think it was from lack of intelligence; he’d always struck me as fairly bright. But it didn’t look like portals were his thing any more than they were mine. “You’re saying you can link the fey’s portals…and then…reroute their army somewhere else?”

Ray sighed. “For like the third time. Yes, that is what I’m saying.”

Zheng looked skeptical, but he nodded. “Okay. Go for it.”

“Well, I can’t do it from here,” Ray said, as if it was obvious.

“Why not?”

Ray rolled his eyes. “Do you see that line of portals? There’s gotta be twenty of them—”

“Twenty-four.”

“—so I’m gonna need all the juice for linking them, not for straining across half an acre of space. I have to be close.”

“How close?”

“The closer the better. Preferably right next to one.”

“Right—” Zheng looked at him like he was crazy, which, okay. Couldn’t really argue with that.

“We can’t get over there,” I told Ray, wondering how this wasn’t apparent. “The fey are facing the portals.”

He scowled. “Like I don’t see that? What am I, blind?”

“No, but you intend that they should be,” Louis-Cesare said, sounding slightly more alert.

Ray nodded. “See that? The crazy guy knows what I’m talking about.”

“There’d be a reason for that,” Zheng muttered.

“I am not crazy,” Louis-Cesare told Ray. “But your plan may be.”

“But you just said you can do it—”

“I can—for a limited amount of time.”

“Wait,” I said, looking at Ray. “You want him to work that thing for you? When he’s never done it and in his condition?”

“No, I want him to get me over there so I can!”

“Which is the problem,” Louis-Cesare said. “I can shield another, but it decreases the amount of time that I can hold the Veil even further.”

“How much?” Ray asked, starting to look worried.

“Under the circumstances?” Sculpted lips pursed. “Thirty seconds.”

“Thirty—”

“Perhaps. Certainly no more.”

Ray looked outraged. “Well, what the hell kind of a master power is that? What good is that to anybody?”

“In a duel?” Zheng asked sardonically. “A lot.”

“Yeah, but we’re not in a duel! And we’re not gonna be, even if they see us. A massacre would be more like—”

“How much of the thirty do you need?” I cut in. Because this was no time for Ray to get going.

He looked at me incredulously. “How much? Like all of it? If I can even—”

“It could work,” I said, looking from Zheng to Louis-Cesare and back to Ray. “Just.”

“How?”

I told them.

“I don’t know who’s crazier,” Ray muttered a few minutes later. “You or me.”

“Me.”

“Then why am I doing this?”

“Because you’re the only one who knows how?”

“God. I hate being useful.”

“First time for everything,” Zheng said.

Ray didn’t even bother to reply, which was how I knew he was bad off. And I really couldn’t blame him. “Just…concentrate on what you’re doing and leave the rest to us,” I said, trying to sound confident.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll…I’ll do that,” he said, as Louis-Cesare got an arm around him. And then Zheng got one around them both. Because there was no obvious route down to the portals from here, and no time to traverse it if there had been.

Ray needed the optimum amount of time at the gates, and we were going to give it to him.

“Just…try to land quietly,” I told him, and got a vicious look in return.

“The Veil masks sound,” Louis-Cesare said.

I looked up. “Really?”

He nodded. “It would be little good otherwise, vampire hearing being as it is. But when under the Veil, I cannot be seen, heard or smelt. Even wards have difficulty perceiving me. I have heard it speculated that it places me slightly out of phase with our world, and that is why—”

“Can we just do this?” Ray asked tightly, clinging to Zheng’s already slightly elongated arm. Because Louis-Cesare wasn’t the only one with a master power around here.

“Let go,” Zheng told him. “I’m the rubber band; you’re the spitball. And spitballs don’t hold on to rubber bands.”

“Die in a fire,” Ray told him savagely. But he let go.

And Zheng’s analogy was, for all its strangeness, pretty apt. He grabbed hold of a protrusion in the rock near one of the portals and braced himself, and I slunk over as near to the drop-off as I dared, holding his hand from something like six yards away. And then Louis-Cesare started backing up, at what would have been the elbow if Zheng had anything left that looked like one anymore.

Instead, it suddenly felt like I was holding on to a thick rubber hose with a hand-shaped glove at the end, neither of which was giving me a lot of traction. The idea was to use Zheng like a human slingshot to launch Louis-Cesare and Ray over the heads of the fey and to the line of portals. But to do that, we needed tension—a lot of it. And there wasn’t anything else to provide it but us.