Pritkin must have realized that, too, because he was fighting hard. But he had no weapons and one of his arms was dangling uselessly at his side and the other had five guards hanging off it—who suddenly staggered back, screaming, when a fireball erupted around Pritkin’s shielded arm and set their robes ablaze.
But a bunch of reinforcements were streaming inside, despite the fact that the odds were already ridiculous. Six of them grabbed tabletops to use as shields and jumped Pritkin and the rest ran to help Rosier. Which left him able to turn toward his son and lift a hand—
And the fire abruptly went out.
Pritkin still had his own shields up, at least for the moment, but it didn’t matter. The guards had obviously had enough of trying to drag a reluctant demon lord anywhere, and with the extra numbers, they didn’t have to. They just hoisted him up, off the floor, and there were too many for even him to fight, and he was almost out the door—
So I did the only thing I could.
And moved it.
Specifically, I moved it onto the ceiling, which was the only place I could think of that might help. But that appeared to have surprised the guards, who were still trying to use it to come in. And who ended up falling through the roof instead, and onto the ones surrounding Pritkin.
Bonus, I thought blankly as they kicked and thrashed and he sprang free, looking a little crazed.
But not as much as Rosier when he spun toward me, and screamed something in a language I didn’t know. And every warrior in the place abruptly stopped. And looked up, too.
And then came rushing straight at us.
“Jodor,” Casanova breathed.
I didn’t say anything, because I was struggling to get on my feet—why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like I had time to do anything, or even to form a plan. But it didn’t matter, because my legs weren’t taking orders, and my eyes kept losing focus and then something hit me on the head.
But it wasn’t a guard.
It was—
“Good one,” Casanova breathed. And started rapid-firing bottles over the bar that we were somehow suddenly behind.
I grabbed my throbbing head, which had connected with the underside of the bar top, feeling dizzy and confused and really pretty unwell. And saw the bartender stooped in a crouched position over by the wall, looking equally bemused. Maybe because he suddenly had nothing to be crouched in back of.
Because we hadn’t moved to the bar; the bar had moved to us. But I hadn’t done it. And then someone came sliding across it, and someone else jumped on top of him, and—
“Was that you?” I asked Pritkin, who was somehow over here now, on his back, his one good hand wrapped around his father’s throat.
“The door,” he said, half-strangled, because the same was true in reverse.
“No, I did the door,” I said, and hit Rosier over the head with one of our dwindling stash of bottles.
“That door!” Pritkin rasped, his eyeballs rolling up.
Which I took for a bad sign until I looked up, too.
And was hit in the face by something hairy.
I pulled it off and found a coil of rope in my hands. Weird, I thought. And then Rosier was somehow gone and Pritkin was looping it around my waist.
I tried to help him, because his hand didn’t seem to work right. But then, neither did mine. “Wer’ we going?”
“Out.”
“Oh, good.”
“Come on!” I heard Caleb’s voice and looked up again. And saw him hanging out of the bar’s front door, which was now opening out of the ceiling above our heads.
And then I was being hauled on a fast ride up and out, onto the roof, where I landed on some nasty shingles that bruised my butt. And then froze it, because the Shadowland was always cold. But that was okay, because it cleared my head slightly.
Enough that I realized that Pritkin and Casanova were still down there.
I scrambled back to the edge of the door, where somebody else was on the rope, somebody heavy enough to cause Caleb to strain. I grabbed for the end of it, but before I could do anything, Casanova was climbing out of the opening.
“I saved one,” he told me, looking a little disheveled.
“What?”
He hauled a bottle of hell juice out of the darkness and set it on the shingles. “Only one left.”
The building shook as some kind of serious spell went off in the room below, and I grabbed his lapels. “Where’s Pritkin?”
And then there he was, struggling to pull himself past the doorjamb with only one functional arm. But he managed, even before Caleb could help him, like he was in one hell of a damned hurry. And a second later I realized why.
When the section of roof I was kneeling on suddenly caved in.
I had a split second to see Rosier’s evil face and a forest of shiny swords and the floor all rushing up at me—
And then my arm was almost snatched out of its socket when someone caught me.
I looked up to find Casanova staring at me, as if he couldn’t believe he’d managed that, either. Especially one-handed, because the damned bottle was still clutched in the other. And then he was screaming and yanking me up and screaming again, because his feet were slipping on the widening edge.
And then Caleb jerked him back and Pritkin grabbed me. “Run!”
Which, yeah. But the cascade of old tiles and half-rotten ceiling beams and moldy plaster that had been the roof made it seem like we were running in place even as we pelted for the edge. Because the precipice was coming along with us, nipping at our heels.
And then consuming them, in a boiling mass of debris, just as Caleb grabbed me and swung me up, which seemed the wrong direction but I couldn’t scream with a throat full of plaster dust. And then we were going down again, fast, but I couldn’t figure out why until—
“Shiiiiiiit!” I screamed, finding dust no match for a zip-line ride down a sparking electric wire, dangling off the bit of rope Caleb had thrown over the top and speeding fast, fast, too damn fast toward a one-story building across the street.
Which we reached just as a bunch of indigo guards burst out of the bar behind us, and took off like bats out of hell. Or servants of one very pissed off demon lord, anyway. And then I couldn’t see them anymore because we were running up some stairs, and then pelting across the second building’s flat roof and running to the edge and no, no, no—
And then jumping across a too-wide cavern we almost didn’t make, Casanova’s feet slipping on the edge and his arms spiraling wildly, and me grabbing him and spinning around, and then Caleb grabbing me and all three of us doing a strange, death-defying dance on a two-inch ledge before Pritkin grabbed us and yanked us back.
And then we were off again.
“Where’s the council?” Caleb yelled as we pounded across the roof.
“Less than a block,” Pritkin said, which should have been good news. Only he didn’t sound like it.
It didn’t look like Caleb thought so, either. “What’s the problem?” he demanded.
“That,” Pritkin said as we ran up to the other side of the roof.
And yeah.
This side had a fire escape going down, but it didn’t do us any good. Because the street below had suddenly decided it didn’t want to be a street anymore. And turned into a culvert.
And then flip, a stone-walled garden. And hey presto, a sewage tunnel. It was shifting so fast, it was making me dizzy, and I wasn’t even down there. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate a yard through the middle of a landscape that was constantly changing, much less a block.
Only it didn’t look like someone wanted us to have even that tiny chance.
Because the building suddenly shook all around us, like the aftershock from an earthquake had hit it. Only the earthquake was coming, not going. And tossing us up—
And up and up and up some more, as the building sprang out of the ground, additional stories popping out of the earth like cars on a freight train heading straight into the sky.
“Oh, shit,” Casanova said miserably. And then, “Fuck that!” as the bits of rope came out again.
And this time, I was siding with Casanova.
Because yeah, there was another electric line, attached to the side of the building. And yes, it had grown up along with the rest of this place. But the building was now a good fourteen stories up, making the line into an almost perpendicular plunge to a tiny pole way the hell down there.
Which might not even be there in a minute, the way things were going.
And then it wasn’t, as Pritkin waved a hand and the pole went scooting down the street-that-was-a-street again for the moment, weaving in and out of the crazy landscape like a skier on a hill, only to stop at the entrance of a large edifice at the very end.
An edifice that looked like a municipal building, but probably wasn’t.
“Oh God,” I said, with feeling.
“Fuck that!” Casanova repeated, backing away.
“It’s doable,” Caleb said staunchly.
“In what universe?”
“You have a better plan?” Pritkin asked, throwing his very thin and not-at-all sturdy-looking piece of rope over the line.
“Yes! Anything that takes place on the ground!”
“Man up,” Caleb advised.
“I’m a vampire—”
“Yet you’re afraid of heights.”
“Yes!” Casanova said hysterically. “They’re one of the few things that can kill me! I hate fire and I hate
heights!”
“How do you feel about stakes?”
“Very funny! Very goddamned—” He broke off when a familiar streak of red lightning tore across the roof and exploded against the lip of the building.
“What are they doing?” he screamed.
“Trying to get a payday,” Pritkin snarled. And I remembered what he’d said before, about having enemies, even at court. But damn it, Rosier was here—
Only he wasn’t, I realized. There was no slick gray suit among the blue robes leaping from the other roof to ours. He must be down on the street, keeping the card flip going. And that meant—