Tempt the Stars (18 page)

“Layering spells isn’t easy under the best of terms,” Pritkin told him. “Which these are not!”

“What layering? Just move this thing!”

“Levitation spell—one,” Caleb said, holding a finger in front of his face. “Keeping the damned carpet stiff and level—two.” Another finger. “And now you want a propulsion spell, which is three, and which ain’t happening.”

Casanova stared from him to Pritkin and back again. “You mean, you threw us off the balcony and you didn’t have a plan
for getting us down
?”

“Someone once said, if you’re in a burning building, you jump out a window. You figure everything else out on the way to the ground.”

“It’s the ground I’m worried about!”

And I didn’t blame him. A drop like that was one of the few things that could kill a master vampire. But it wasn’t like we could go any lower. The red lightning balls seemed to have a range, and we had drifted too high for them to reach.

We’d also started moving forward a little, barely fast enough to ruffle my hair, although that would have been an improvement—if the guards hadn’t just switched to other spells. These looked different, with long tails and a wider dispersion; I guess because they were harder to aim at this distance. But the result was a sky full of what looked a lot like fireworks, red and pink and yellow and orange, and would have been really beautiful . . 

If we hadn’t been flying through the middle of them.

Casanova shrieked as another spell burned past, shedding yellow sparks that ate tiny holes in his robe before something Caleb muttered put them out. I was more worried about the shock waves from the explosions, which were rocking us every which way, like a boat on the high seas.

I’d just had the thought when another wave hit us, heavier than the rest, tipping the rug I was clinging to with both hands and a foot by at least thirty percent. I slid to the edge, and for a second, I stared straight down at a city full of deep blue shadows and orange lantern-light and exploding spells and streets full of people staring back at us. But I didn’t scream.

Because there was one thing, at least, that I wasn’t seeing.

“Why aren’t the incubi coming after us?” I gasped as Pritkin grabbed me and the rug wobbled back into place. “They can reach us no matter how high we are!”

“Yeah, except that we shot one a few minutes ago,” Caleb reminded me, the light from a passing bolt staining his face gold.

“With what?” Pritkin demanded.

Caleb held up the little silver gun I’d given him.

Which is when Pritkin started cursing.

“We didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Which is more than they’re trying to do to us!”

“There are many among the lords who would gladly see me dead,” Pritkin said, reaching over and snatching his gun back. “But they aren’t going to attack me—or those under my protection—right in front of my father. Unless you two give them a perfect reason by shooting at them!”

“It was only one,” Caleb said diffidently.

“You’re as bad as she is!”

“Why do they want you dead?” I demanded. “You’re Rosier’s heir—”

“And as such stand between them and power. I pushed everyone a step farther away from the throne the day I returned.”

“But if they can’t kill you in front of your father—”

“
They
can’t. At least not openly, although half the guards around here are in the pay of one faction or another. But they’re not the main—”

“Augghhh!” That was Casanova, bloodstained face lit up by a ruddy spell, giving him a truly hellish look. Not that he needed the help right now. “Am I the only sane one here? Am I the only one who realizes
this is not the time for a chat?
I don’t care what you do or how you do it, but flying carpets are supposed to
fly
!”

“In the movies, maybe,” Caleb said. “But in case you didn’t notice,
this
is not in a movie.
That
”—he pointed at the glittering city, so far below us now—“is not CGI and
you
are going to get shoved off this rug if you don’t shut up and let us think!”

Only that didn’t seem to be going so well.

And that was before something rumbled the air around us like thunder. Only this place didn’t look like it got a lot of thunder. And I didn’t think thunder would put quite that expression on Pritkin’s face.

“What is that?” Casanova asked, voice strained. Like he couldn’t take any more bad news right now. Which was too bad, since that was the only kind we seemed to get.

“A demon prince in the seat of his power,” Pritkin said tightly, as a massive sandstorm broke over the cliffs.

It dwarfed the city, making the considerable sprawl look like a child’s toy in comparison. All along the horizon, as far as I could see in both directions, it came, a boiling mass of dirt and dust and outraged fury dozens of stories high. Casanova stared at it for a second, wild-eyed and disbelieving, like a man who had successfully dodged death for centuries seeing it come straight at him.

And then he started stripping.

He ripped off the dusty robes he’d worn all day even as the first gusts hit us and sent them billowing out all around him. He was fumbling and cursing and acting like a crazy man. But for once, I didn’t think he was.

For once, I thought he had a damned good idea.

I grabbed Pritkin’s pretty green caftan.

“Take it off!” I yelled, over the howl of the winds that were already almost on us, and for a miracle, he didn’t argue.

Maybe he’d figured it out, too, or maybe the noise made discussion impossible. All I know is he skinned out of it, and thankfully, it was good, heavy wool, comfortable, but warm for those cold desert nights. And sturdy—I hoped.

I lashed one end of it around a corner of the rug and reached for the other one—and realized we didn’t have it thanks to the spell that had burned it away. There followed a mad scramble to get the robe untied and to crawl around to the other end of the rug and get it into place with Pritkin’s help. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him with the wind howling in my ears and the first flurries of dust scouring my face and panic making my hands fumble as badly as Casanova’s, who I couldn’t even see anymore.

But we got it tied, and the makeshift craft turned just before the storm hit. A furious blast of wind and sand slammed into us, with enough force to have launched us to the moon. Or across a city at insane speeds, like a bullet shot out of a gun.

A really, really unsteady gun. The jury-rigged “sail” bowing out in front of us was only tied at the bottom, meaning that Pritkin and I had to hold on to the top ends because we didn’t have a mast. We also had to cling to the far side of the rug, so we didn’t get launched over the top and end this whole thing real quick. But crazily enough, it worked, maybe because the spell keeping the rug level also seemed to stabilize it, leaving only one small problem.

The human body wasn’t designed as sailboat rigging.

Really, really wasn’t, I thought, glancing desperately over at Pritkin. He was holding his end of the rug in his teeth and fumbling with something he’d looped around one arm. But I couldn’t tell what it was, or what he thought he was doing, because I was too busy feeling tendons stretch and ligaments pull and muscles shriek that this was not good, not good,
not good
—

And then I was bouncing onto the middle of the rug.

I panicked for an instant, thinking I’d just screwed us over, but we were still skipping ahead of the storm, and were as level as a jury-rigged vessel made out of scraps could be. Pritkin must have grabbed the piece I’d been holding, and was somehow managing to control both of them at once, because the sail was as full as ever. But I couldn’t turn around to find out how, because I was half-blind from the sand and trying desperately to cling to a bucking magic carpet that wasn’t nearly as fun as the legends would have you believe—

Until it suddenly evened out.

I twisted around, desperately hoping that Rosier had reconsidered, even knowing the odds on that. But over my shoulder was the same boiling mass of fury, just darker now as it swallowed the lights of the city we’d just left behind. But I barely noticed, because Pritkin was . . 

“No,” I said, immediately rejecting what my eyes were telling me.

I blinked, and then I pushed a fluttering scarf out of my face and blinked again. But the scene didn’t change. Pritkin was still leaning off the back edge of the rug, his feet were still anchored behind a rigid wrinkle in the cloth, and he was still arching back, to the point that he was lying almost flat. But now his forearms were looped around the ends of the long fabric sash he’d been wearing, which were tied securely around the top two corners of our sail.

Our wind-filled sail. That he was directing by pulling on one side of the makeshift rope or the other, or by turning his body this way and that. So, basically, he was—

“No!” I said again, because he was absolutely, positively not windsurfing in hell. It hurt my brain, my relatively sane-no-matter-what-Casanova-said brain, to even think the words, because things like this didn’t happen.

Unless I really had gone nuts. An idea reinforced a second later, when Pritkin suddenly grinned—
grinned
—at me, and said something that the wind blew away.
“What?”

“Why do these plans of yours always involve me getting naked?” he yelled, making me blink again. And then scowl, because damn it, brain, this was no time to lose it.

“You’re not naked!” I yelled back, because it was true, if not by much. He still had on a pair of silky gold trousers, ruffling in the wind and looking ridiculous next to the hard lines of his body.

And because what else do you say to a grinning, windsurfing demon?

He said something that sounded like “disappointed?” but wasn’t because that would be absurd.

And then Caleb and Casanova dove by, just missing the front of our crazy contraption, because they didn’t seem to have figured out Pritkin’s modification. But with vampire strength and Caleb’s brawn, they seemed to be doing okay just holding the ends of the sail, although that gave them a lot less control than we had. But the bucking, weaving, crazy course they were on didn’t seem to bother them.

At least, it didn’t seem to bother Caleb. Who I finally saw laughing and whooping and giving a good representation as to why war mages were viewed as being slightly off by the rest of us. Like Casanova, who was upholding the banner of sanity with a lot of horrified screeching.

I turned toward Pritkin, to point out that, see—that was how a normal person reacted when being chased by a giant storm of a demon lord through the skies of hell. But I didn’t, because he yelled something. Something that sounded like “the gate.”

And oh,
crap.

I turned back around, flattened out, and stared underneath the rigid edge of our sail. And saw to my horror that in a few short minutes we’d managed to cover almost as much ground as it had taken us hours to walk. Which meant that the portal to this world was coming up, and coming up fast.

It was already visible, the twin peaks of the canyon where the doorway to Rosier’s court originated, well away from the city. So, I assumed, he’d have some warning if he was attacked. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t know for sure that I could do this, and Casanova’s outraged face demanding why I hadn’t tested Mother’s theory was starting to sound a lot more like the voice of reason and—

“Shiiiit!” I yelled as the wind howled and the dust whirled and the guards around the portal saw us and hit the ground. And Casanova and Caleb screamed by again, and somehow snagged hold of the side of our carpet in the process, slinging us around in a huge arc. Because no one knew if the gate would stay open for anyone who wasn’t with me.

Assuming it was going to open at all.

I couldn’t tell if I was doing anything, because we spun back around, and then around again, still headed for possible oblivion, but in wild, whipping arcs that made concentration all but impossible. Or sight. Or anything that wasn’t clinging to our crazy craft and screaming.

But vaguely, through the bands of golden-red sand I saw another swirl of colors, a bright azure twist that glowed from the inside. And that was all right, but I couldn’t tell if the shield was covering the portal or not because it was mostly transparent even in good conditions and these
weren’t good conditions.
But Pritkin, damn him, was doing his best to aim for it like I knew what I was doing when we’d conclusively proved that that was pretty much never the case, and suddenly Casanova and I were shrieking in unison but I didn’t care because
oh God—

And then we were through, tearing across a mad swirl of colors that usually made me dizzy but—too late—and then out into darkness.

But not that of Rosier’s secondary court. That darkness was filled with sandstone and hushed servants and stately foreign elegance. This one was neon streaked, with flashing lights and peppy spend-more-money music and screaming slot machines. And a screaming guy, too, who we’d scooped up from the floor when Pritkin tried to course correct to keep us from plowing straight into some butt-ugly carpet, and instead sent us careening straight for a stalactite-littered ceiling.

Including an enormous one looming like a dagger directly in our path.

“Auggghhhh!” said the guy in the pink pig shirt.

“Auggghhhh!” said Casanova, straight in my ear, because he’d somehow ended up on our carpet.

Auggghhh, I didn’t say, because he’d grabbed me around the neck, trying to hold on, and was strangling me in the process.

Which wasn’t healthy but wasn’t any worse than hitting the giant mass of fake rock that was about to skewer all three of us—

Until Caleb sent a spell at the last second that burst the thing into a cloud of plaster dust and a zillion flying pieces.

And then I was just coughing and hacking and trying to hold on. And simultaneously working to throw off Casanova’s death grip while also attempting to keep pig-man from sliding off the rug ahead of me. Because we were at least half a dozen stories up, careening around a cavernous space like a . . 

Well, actually, there is nothing else quite like a speeding, sand-filled flying carpet full of freaked-out passengers.

And then Pritkin finally managed to get it stopped, pulling up hard and sending us falling back into him. And then sprawling back onto the middle of the rug as it flattened out, the spell that had felt so flimsy in hell perking right up now that we were back. On earth?

I didn’t understand, but the view through the carpet fringe was unmistakably Dante’s main drag, where the theme was supposed to be ghost town, not Aladdin, but nobody seemed to care. A crowd was gathering, and staring up at us expectantly, like we were a better variation on the street performers who usually prowled around trying to scare people. Only this time, it was the other way around, judging by the way Casanova was still shrieking.

I wasn’t, for the same reason that I hadn’t been yelling.

“Help,” I choked, not able to get any air past the hundred and seventy pounds of vampire lying on my back. And as a result, a certain porcine T-shirt and the panicked guy wearing it were slowly sliding out of my hands—

Pritkin reached over and grabbed the guy, jerking him back onto the rug, right before he gave the crowd the spectacle they were hoping for. A bunch of Dante’s security ran up underneath us, a moment too late, and then just stood there, staring upward like everyone else. Because their training stopped just short.

Until the boss crawled across me, dirty and naked except for a battered pair of tighty whities, and stuck his no-longer perfectly coiffed head over the edge. And screamed again. Only this time, it was actual words.

“Get me down, you cretins! Get me down, get me down, get me down!”

The guards started looking at one another, and then a bunch of them linked hands and looked back up at him. Hopefully. Which you had to kind of admire considering who their boss was.

I’d have thought he’d beaten that out of them years ago.

I guess Casanova did, too, because he started yelling some more, but I couldn’t hear it. The wind had just picked up noticeably and blew the words away, like it was suddenly wafting my sweaty hair against my face. And since we were inside, that probably wasn’t a great—

“John!” Caleb said urgently.

“I know.”

“Get us down!”

“No time.”

And there wasn’t. A second later, a storm swept through the hotel like a cyclone on a prairie. The crowd screamed and ran for cover, a couple of tumbleweeds went spinning by, and we started wafting around again, our makeshift sail partially reinflating before Caleb could snatch it off.

I clung to the gently rotating rug, but it wasn’t the fear of falling that had me worried. It wasn’t even the storm, which we seemed to be in the eye of anyway. No, my fear was kind of occupied with the pair of elegant boots that were materializing on the carpet, as the storm swirled and spun and came together into the shape of a very pissed off demon lord.

Who grabbed for me almost before he’d finished consolidating, but I rolled to the side and he got pig-man instead.

Who he promptly dropped over the side.

“Oh my God!” I lunged for the edge of the rug, and got a split-second glimpse of a stunned-looking TV reporter sitting on a bunch of crossed vamp arms, until they unceremoniously dumped him on the floor. And then I was jerked up to meet a pair of furious green eyes.

“Try again,” Rosier breathed.

“Drop her!” Pritkin snarled, pulling his knife and causing Rosier’s eyes to briefly flick to him.

“Good plan,” he said, and dangled me over the edge. “It was the woman!” he yelled, apparently at the storm. “She deceived him! Take her and do as you will!”

But the storm didn’t seem impressed. If anything, it got louder and more ferocious, and new shapes started to coalesce out of the blowing sand. One landed on our rug, causing the whole thing to bounce and throwing me into Rosier.

Who promptly threw me off, only that turned out to be a good thing.

A flash of light seared my retinas as I fell back, and the piece of rug right beside my body went spinning off on its own trajectory, with Casanova clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor to the last barrel left afloat.

For a second, I didn’t realize what was happening, until Pritkin shoved me behind him. And lashed out with his knife, sending a hand and the curved sword it held spinning out over the void, neon running along the blade like blood until it hit one of the fake storefronts. And stuck there, quivering.

But not as much as I was when a now one-handed demon in black robes lunged for me. He was kicked viciously back onto Caleb’s carpet by Pritkin, where two of his buddies had been about to launch themselves at us. But his added weight sent them flying before they were ready, one onto a nearby roof and one straight at us—