Queen's Gambit Read online

  And slit his throat.

  I looked up, panting, but while there were plenty of black clad forms running around, no more were targeting me. Maybe because Hassani had just given a shouted order and his vampires had rushed the invaders, making me think for a second that it was all over. But the army in black pushed back against what should have been an overwhelming show of force, half of them somehow stopping the charge while the rest . . .

  Went for the warded cases of artifacts.

  And I finally got a clue. This wasn’t an attempted assassination; this was a heist. Somebody wanted the fey artifacts badly enough to risk attacking Hassani’s court for them—and they were getting away with it.

  An explosive charge was slapped onto the blue column of a shield to my right, and I heard it go off as I ran. Another just ahead wreathed a shield in black smoke, and a second later it cracked and then shattered like glass. Artifacts disappeared into black plastic garbage bags, which would have usually gotten a reaction from me, since they were our responsibility. But right then, I couldn’t have cared less.

  “Louis-Cesare!”

  I finally saw him, over near the shattered main shield, looking down over the city. He turned his head to stare at me for a second, before yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the fires and cries and roar of a furious Hassani. Who leapt over the fleshly breakwater of clashing forces with a scimitar in one hand and a long knife in the other, and began demonstrating, that, yes, his assassination skills were as sharp as ever.

  The enemy army broke and stumbled back into me, and the vampires yelled and charged. And by the time I fought my way through all of that and ran over to the opening, Louis-Cesare was gone. Or almost.

  I spotted him in the distance, running hard into the night, chasing . . . someone. It was almost dark and I couldn’t make out who it was. But I could see the shadows that peeled off the walls all around and followed.

  Goddamnit!

  “No,” Ray said, running up beside me as I tore the trailing hem off the damned evening dress. “No, you are not going to—”

  And then I threw myself onto the roof below, and took off.

  Chapter Two

  Open space is at a premium in Cairo, so many people live partly on the rooftops. And even those not made up like an outdoor living room are full of stuff: laundry flapping in the breeze, satellite dishes—so many damned satellite dishes—old tires, abandoned refrigerators, piles of rubble and broken furniture that someone intends to do something with at some point, inshallah. But not today, which left it in my way.

  It didn’t help that Louis-Cesare had had a head start, and was faster than me, although usually by only a fraction of a second. But tonight—tonight he was flying. I’d never seen him move like that; hell, I’d never seen anybody move like that.

  Except for the creatures pursuing him.

  There were dozens of them, leaping across the rooftops of Cairo like mad things. And they didn’t look like the shorter types doing the heist; they were at least as tall if not taller than he was. At least as far as I could tell, based on the brief glimpses I got around old stone walls, flapping sheets, and five thousand damned satellite dishes!

  I jumped onto a terraced rooftop, grabbed a ladder to vault up to the taller story, and paused. Adrenaline was telling me to hurry, hurry, hurry, but older instincts, the kind that live in the lizard brain, were telling me something else. And I learned a long time ago to listen to the lizard brain.

  I glanced around, while palming my knife.

  The whole area was dark, with the last rays of the setting sun having just disappeared over the horizon. The only light came from the stars overhead and a few dim windows of illumination, darkened by curtains, in the surrounding buildings. Nothing moved; nothing stirred. My straining ears could hear only distant traffic, faint Arabic from a T.V., and the cooking sounds of somebody fixing dinner in a nearby apartment.

  And the tell-tale slice of a blade through the air.

  I lunged to the side, a split second before a knife appeared, vibrating in the wood of the ladder. I grabbed it and threw it back—in the same direction that it had come from, because you learn a thing or two in five hundred years. And finished my turn to see it sticking out—

  Of the chest of Anubis, the jackal headed god of death.

  All right, I thought.

  I had not seen that one coming.

  The maybe nine-foot-tall creature stepped forward, seeming to coalesce out of the shadows. Starlight limned the muscles on the broad, human-like chest, on thick arms banded by gold, and on strong, athlete’s legs. The latter emerged from under a white linen, pleated skirt, the ancient Egyptian version of a kilt, with a golden jackal’s head in place of the sporran. But they ended with huge, very non-human clawed feet, which along with the elongated snout on the head and the slitted, golden eyes, were enough to give me the creeps even before a spear the size of a small tree was shoved at me.

  I caught it in a rung of the ladder and sent it spinning off into the night. Only to have the creature materialize another out of thin air. And then three more jackal headed bastards leapt into the fray from the terrace above.

  Okay, then.

  Done here.

  The creatures came along as I jumped for a nearby roof, slashing and hacking at me while we were still mid-air. I received an impromptu haircut from a razor-sharp sword, watched the inch-long fringe arc against the starlight, and got my own knife in my attacker as I hit down, rolling. And saw the creature pull eight inches of steel out of its side and throw it away as if it had been a splinter.

  All right, then.

  A little-known fact about dhampirs is that we are fast. Not Louis-Cesare fast, but compared to almost anybody else . . . yeah, I could move. Which I proved by taking off like a bat out of hell.

  And had one of them pass me in a classic flanking maneuver, without so much as breaking a sweat.

  Son of a bitch, I thought, ripping up one of the ubiquitous satellite dishes and flinging it at the nearest snout. Only to have it be caught midair and snapped back, so fast that I ended up bending over backwards to miss it and fell off the building. I grabbed a laundry line on the way down, which would have been more of a comfort if one of my attackers hadn’t immediately started reeling me in.

  I began overhanding it for the other side—fast—only to find that there was a jackal on that end, too.

  Why they didn’t just skewer me on one of those huge spears I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t matter in a minute.

  Dorina, I thought, some help here!

  And I wasn’t talking to myself.

  Well, okay, I sort of was, but . . . it’s complicated.

  My name is Dory Basarab, daughter of the famous vampire senator and general Mircea Basarab, and recently a member in my own right of the North American Vampire Senate. I’d been promoted for two reasons: it was assumed that I’d vote the way that daddy wanted, thus giving his faction on the senate additional power. And because of Dorina—my “twin” as she called herself—which I guess was a reference to Siamese twins.

  Only instead of being joined at the hip, we were joined everywhere.

  We’d been born one person with a duel nature—half human, half vamp—but a single consciousness. Until, that is, our father Mircea—a master mentalist—had decided to put a barrier between our two halves when I was just a girl. The idea had been to give the human side of me a chance to grow up separately from my vampire nature, which had already been stronger than I could handle.

  That was why so few dhampirs lived for very long: their two sides ended up at war with each other, and ripped their minds apart. Mircea had helped Dorina and I to avoid that, but at the cost of remaining separate people for something like five centuries. And a division like that . . . tends to be permanent.

  I hadn’t even known she existed until recently, when Mircea’s barrier finally failed, since we had never been awake at the same time. I’d just thought I had fits of dhampir-induced madness when I bl
acked out and killed everything in the room. It had kept me apart from society for most of my life, under the assumption that I was a dangerous monster.

  It didn’t help that I was sort of right.

  Not that Dorina was a homicidal maniac, but she had all the ruthless practicality of a vampire, blended with centuries of being a virtual prisoner in my mind. Mircea had left human-me in charge of our union, which allowed her limited freedom, mainly when I was asleep or freaked out and my control lessened. She was therefore both very old and yet also strangely naïve in how she thought about things, with much less real-world experience than I had.

  And, like a child, anything that startled her was likely to get beaten up.

  But damn, if I couldn’t use some of that ferocity right now.

  However, Dorina had the ability to leave our body behind for mental jaunts on her own, and this looked like one of those times. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass handed to me—possibly literally in a minute—by creatures faster and stronger and more numerous than I was. And my damned purse, which had some items that might have evened the odds, was back on the terrace, assuming there was a terrace anymore.

  I was starting to find Egypt less romantic.

  And then somebody grabbed me—from behind, just as I was being hauled over the edge of the roof.

  “If you stake me, I swear to God!” Ray shrieked, before I could retaliate. Or figure out what was happening. Because we were going up, I realized, as one of the jackal-headed bastards jumped for me—

  And missed.

  I saw the creature flail in the air, its fingertips just missing the fringe of what appeared to be a rug from somebody’s living room, which I’d been slung across. It was an ugly rug, and its fringe was an unraveled mess. Even stranger, it appeared to be the only thing underneath us at the moment.

  “Hold on!” Ray yelled. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!”

  That’s reassuring, I thought, as we took off, soaring over the rooftops of Cairo on what appeared to be a flying carpet. At least as far as I could tell with the wind throwing what remained of my hair in my eyes and my fisted hands clutching the hard-to-grasp surface for all I was worth. I almost fell off three times anyway, felt my stomach lurch alarmingly when we jackknifed around a building, and then we stopped—abruptly enough that I did hit the ground.

  Or another dusty rooftop, at least, with my head spinning and the stone underneath my hands feeling like it was undulating while I stared up at Ray. “What the—”

  He was off the rug with a hand over my mouth before I could blink. “Shhhh! I don’t know what kinda hearing those things have, all right?”

  “Whhmpphwhhmmmmhhh?”

  “What?”

  I removed his hand. “Then why did we stop?”

  “Why did we—” he looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know how to drive that thing!”

  He gestured back at the rug, which was levitating a couple feet above the roof and looking pathetic. Like, really pathetic. For one thing, it wasn’t even close to being a rectangle, which was one reason I’d had so much trouble holding on. For another, it had a “pattern” that would have embarrassed a cross eyed two-year-old, with nothing repeating or making sense. It looked like somebody had scribbled a picture . . . in a hurry . . . in the dark . . .

  I glared at Ray. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Shh! Shhhhhh!”

  “Where is it?”

  The blue eyes shifted. “Where is what?”

  “You know damned well!”

  “All right, all right! Keep your voice down—”

  I didn’t wait for him to finish pulling an object out of an inside pocket of his tux, and instead jerked it out myself. And then shook it under his nose. “You said it wasn’t finished yet! You said—”

  “I say a lotta things,” Ray hissed. “Cause I got a master with a death wish! I wanted to test it out first—”

  “Well, it obviously works!”

  “Yeah.” He glanced back at the lopsided rug. “You know. Kinda.”

  “Close enough.”

  I stood up and looked around, but as I’d feared, there was no Louis-Cesare. There were no jackal-headed thugs, either, including the ones that had been after me. And there’d been at least a dozen, as more had zeroed in on my location from surrounding buildings.

  What the hell was going on?

  “How does this thing work?” I asked Ray, returning to the business at hand.

  He shrugged. “Same as the other, more or less.”

  I examined it. It resembled a child’s toy pistol, but with an extra-large barrel. But what it shot out wasn’t water.

  Ray and I had gotten the idea for a new weapon from a recent adventure in supernatural Hong Kong. A hidden city that existed out of phase with the normal world, it didn’t have to hide its weirder elements like most enclaves did. That had allowed some . . . peculiarities . . . to become every day sights, including magical ads that could jump off their billboards and follow you down the street.

  They were “drawn” onto the side of a building by a gun-like object that contained a reservoir of magic and a spell to animate it. You sketched whatever you wanted on a little screen, pointed the gun, and presto! An instantly mobile, and occasionally vocal, advertisement.

  Thanks to a buttload of magic supplied by a crazy war mage we’d met, Ray and I had managed to use the gun to animate ourselves a little help. Giant ads had become warriors in a very strange battle, and while their fighting ability had been debatable, they’d served admirably as a distraction for our attackers. But a distraction wasn’t what I needed right now.

  I drew a figure, aimed the gun at a wall, and pulled the trigger.

  A second later, what had been bare bricks had a glowing, golden stick figure on them, the size of a six-year-old child. I waited, biting my lip and hoping this would work. Ray and I had taken the idea of the makeshift weapon we’d put together on the fly in Hong Kong to a master wardsmith—the father of a friend—who liked to tinker with crazy magic. He’d refined it, upgraded it, and added some special features.

  Including that one, I thought, as the “child” started spilling off the wall like an accordion, not one figure anymore but dozens.

  “Thought you were an artist,” Ray said, checking out the toons’ oversized, lopsided heads and mismatched eyes.

  I ignored that. The dial control on the device was as hard to use as an Etch-a-Sketch, which probably explained the rug. I pawed through my oversized purse, which Ray had slung over his back, pulled a picture of Louis-Cesare out of my wallet and held it up in front of the nearest little glowing stick figure. It had been toddling around aimlessly along with the rest, having received no instructions yet.

  So, I gave it some.

  “Find him—fast—and signal me when you do.”

  The lopsided head got a little more so, tilting in an almost human-like way as it regarded the picture with its big, missing eyes. I hadn’t bothered to fill it in much, so it was mostly just a collection of glowing lines, showing the darkened city scape beyond. But there was obviously something at work inside that empty head. Because a moment later the stick guys were gone, just golden blurs against the night, shooting off in all directions.

  “Get on!” I told Ray, while clambering back onto the rug.

  “Yeah.” He eyed it. “Only I was thinking maybe you could make another one. I was kinda in a hurry and—”

  “It’ll do. Come on!”

  “—it ended up too small. And lopsided. And—”

  “Ray! The magic cartridges are $10,000 a pop—”

  “I know that—”

  “—so I’m not making another one. And, anyway, we don’t have time. Get on!”

  Ray was not getting on. Instead, he was backing up, his eyes on the tiny sort-of rug that I was straddling like a motorcycle. He did not appear to want another go.

  “Did I ever mention I get airsick?”

  And then a couple of jackals jumped onto the roof, and Ray s
creamed and threw himself at me. “Go! Go! Go!” he yelled, which I guess was all the command the little rug needed.

  It took off like it had been shot out of a cannon, with Ray’s last word being exaggerated into a single long line that I thought might actually be his last word, as we dodged spears and flipped over and somersaulted in mid-air, which had me wanting to scream, too, only I was the master.

  It wouldn’t have been dignified.

  We finally stabilized high over the city, with Ray in front and me holding on behind. Old Town was spread out in a warren of broad avenues and narrow alleyways below, through which my tiny golden men were flickering. Not running down the streets as humans would, but appearing briefly on walls, on parked vehicles, and on the shuttered side of shops, the corrugated metal making their distorted shapes even more so. But they were flickering fast.

  “Come on,” I breathed, watching them. “Come on.”

  And then I saw it: a little man who was no longer golden. He was red—blood red. And no sooner had the color washed over him than it spilled outward to his closest brothers, who turned unerringly on his location. And then more did and more, until I had a bright red arrow spread out below me, fritzing like a neon sign in the darkness—

  And pointing straight at where my lover was likely fighting for his life.

  “There!” I yelled, gesturing—and forgetting how the carpet worked. The syllable had barely left my lips when it leapt ahead, causing Ray to yelp and me to clutch his waist as we took off at what could only be described as an extremely unwise pace.

  I didn’t care. “Faster,” I breathed, and swore that I felt us speed up even more.

  “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit!” Ray screamed, because there were no safety protocols on this thing, which had just fallen like a stone. But it had fallen in a slanting, forward motion-y kind of way, which literally seconds later had us hitting the Khan-el-Khalili, the huge bazaar in the center of the city.