And his best was pretty damned good.
The fat lady is singing, I thought numbly, right before Jonas grabbed me.
“What is happening?” he demanded, looking pissed that his impressive display of magic wasn’t looking so impressive, after all. “Who is back there?”
“Mircea,” I admitted, and Jonas cursed.
“A first-level master? You didn’t tell me one of them would be here!”
“I didn’t know. And . . . actually . . . it’s two. Marlowe’s with him,” I admitted, glancing behind us. Mircea must have ended up on one side of the hall, when the first wave of animated furniture flooded the corridor, and Marlowe on the other. Which left us caught between the ultimate rock and a hard place, with two furniture dams barely holding back two master vamps and us stuck in the middle.
With nowhere to go.
“I suppose it is too much to hope that you can shift, just at the moment?” Jonas asked dryly.
I shook my head, and he scowled. But he didn’t argue with me. He’d been the lover of the former Pythia, and he knew things about the job that most mages didn’t. Like that the power of the office might be inexhaustible, but the Pythia herself wasn’t. And that a shift, even a spatial one like to get us out to the road, required concentration.
Something that’s a little difficult to manage after being almost choked to death.
Instead, he dropped my hand and raised both of his, mumbling a long string of something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and his already wild mane go positively electric. And all the doors to all the rooms between us and the furniture dams to slam open. And the contents start to stream out, like reinforcements going to the front lines.
“The instant you can, shift us out of here,” he yelled, to be heard over the creak of wood and metal moving in ways the designers never intended, and the high-pitched shriek of the wards. “We’ll have to come back for the other!”
“No . . . need,” I gasped, trying to will air into my starved lungs.
“What?”
I reached up and yanked off the fedora, which was somehow still sticking to the crackling mass on his head, and fished something out. It was a smallish bronze sphere encased in glass, which glowed faintly when I touched it. “Spelled,” I explained breathlessly. “You have to know . . . it’s there . . . or it isn’t.”
Jonas’ blue eyes moved from the paperweight to my face, going sharp and squinty along the way. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about this before?”
I licked my lips. “Uh-huh.”
“Pythias!” He threw his hands up in a manner that reminded me eerily of Agnes, my predecessor, who would probably have had some trick to get us out of this. But the most I could do was to slide down on my heels, put my arms over my head to cut the noise, and concentrate on recovering.
I only hoped I did it fast, because Jonas hadn’t bought us much time. Two first-level masters redecorate quickly, and the rooms were already running out of things to shred. We needed to get out of here.
“Billy,” I whispered. “The train is leaving the station.”
I didn’t get anything back, even though I knew he’d heard me. Billy didn’t need ears to pick up on my call; whether he chose to answer it or not was another thing. But he’d sounded eager enough to leave before.
I started to try again, but Jonas grabbed my arm. “Change of plan. When you can shift, take us back to the office.”
“What? Why?”
“We have the orb,” he explained, less than helpfully.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He looked exasperated. “Yes, but not to take it out of this time stream! The spirit it contains is the only thing keeping the world’s protective barrier in place. To remove it would drop that protection, exactly as our enemy wants!”
“Then hide it somewhere. Someplace where Tony can’t find it. Then we can look it up when we get back to our—”
Jonas shook his head. “We have no idea what Tony used it for between now and then.”
“To hold down papers?”
“And what else?” Jonas asked severely. “We don’t know; therefore we cannot risk removing a piece of a very delicate puzzle. We could inadvertently change history!”
I frowned. “If you’re not going to take it and you’re not going to hide it, then what are we doing here?”
“I needed to see it, to know what I’m looking for. ‘Paperweight’ could mean anything—”
“I described it to you!”
“—and to verify that the vampire Antonio had not lied about your father’s fate merely to torture you.”
Which he totally would have done, I realized. Tony and I had had what you might call a suboptimal relationship. “But he didn’t.”
“No. For once, it seems, he told the truth. Which means we must return this,” Jonas said, shaking the paperweight at me, “lest Antonio realize its importance and alter his actions in the future. Then we may never find it!”
I said something unladylike, which he didn’t hear because it was becoming impossible to hear anything. I felt like screaming right along with the wards, if I’d had the breath and if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t—just like using the last of my energy to shift us to the office, where we’d be trapped all over again, because I wasn’t going to be doing this twice in close succession. Not the way I felt right now, and not carrying two. And that was assuming I could manage to do it at—
“Cass! Get ready to shift!” Billy’s panicked voice cut through the din.
“In a minute,” I said irritably, rubbing the back of my neck.
“Not in a minute! Now. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now!”
My head came up. “What is wrong with you?”
“You know how you said if I ran into problems to come back? Well, I’m coming back. And I got problems!”
“What kind of problems?”
“What kind you think?” he snapped. “I’m trying to lose ’em, but they know this place better than I do and I think they’ve finally found a reason to work together—”
“Wait.” I glanced around. Narrow corridor; isolated part of the house; nobody around but us and a couple of more-or-less indestructible vampires. “Don’t try to lose them.”
“What?”
“Just get back here—now.”
“You don’t get it, Cass. When I said problem, I meant—”
“I got it. Just do it.” I stood up.
“Cassandra?” Jonas was watching me narrowly. “What is it?”
“Um,” I said brilliantly, since explaining this sort of thing usually didn’t go well. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t have time anyway. A second later, a horrible wail cut through the air, making the shrieking wards sound like a melody in comparison.
I whipped my head around, but there was nothing to see. And Jonas didn’t look like he’d noticed anything. Until the air suddenly became thick and cold and hard to breathe, and the hallway started to shake perceptibly, and the light fixtures overhead blew out, one after the other in a long line.
“Cassandra?” Jonas said, a little more forcefully this time.
“I think it’s time for the midnight express,” I said, hoping I hadn’t just made a really big mistake.
“And what does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means choo-choo, motherfucker!” Billy screamed, swooping out of the ceiling. And right on his tail was a train, all right—of what looked like every damned ghost on the property.
Holy shit, I didn’t say, because I was busy grabbing Jonas and throwing us at the nearest door, just before the unearthly wind slammed into the hallway like a tornado.
We crashed into the floor on the other side as it hit, boiling down the hall like a freight train of fury. Merely the wind of its passing was enough to rip light fixtures off the walls, to puff a week’s worth of ashes out of the fireplace, and to send china figurines plummeting to their doom. Half a dozen books went flapping madly through the air over our heads, only to tangle in the wildly twisting drapes as I dragged myself back up.
Jonas lifted his head to stare at me. “What the—”
“Ghosts!” I told him, staggering for the door.
My ankle hurt, my lungs were still crying out for air, and my neck was on fire. But I didn’t stick around to assess the damage. I didn’t even wait until the storm was over. I stumbled out into the hall with Jonas on my heels, the two of us being buffeted here and there by late-arriving spirits.
And then I stopped for a second in awe.
Because there were no ghost trails here. The corridor in front of us was a solid rectangle of pulsing, angry green. There was no furniture dam anymore, either, just random bits of wood sticking out of the plaster like quills on a porcupine.
There was also no pissed-off vamp.
The one behind us was okay, judging by the renewed sounds of destruction battering the mound. But whoever had been on this end . . . well, I didn’t know where he had ended up. But I didn’t think it was a good idea to go looking for him.
Because the train was headed back this way.
“Run!” I screamed at Jonas, and sprang for the office door, just as the storm barreled back at us again, flinging a deadly cloud of debris ahead of it. He dove in behind me, damned spry for an old guy, as jagged shards of paneling whipped by outside like knives.
And then he slammed the door.
I stared at him incredulously. “Ghosts, remember?”
He looked a little shamefaced. “Right.”
And then they were back.
We hadn’t even made it into the inner office when Billy zoomed through the door, screeching something I couldn’t understand because an infuriated tornado was right on his nonexistent heels. Something tore through the outer office as we dove into the inner one, upending filing cabinets and sending a blizzard of paperwork dancing madly through the air. Jonas leapt for the hat rack, I leapt for him, and Billy grabbed me around the neck, still babbling something.