It was amazingly easy. The steel felt feather light, as if I was holding a needle and was stitching them to the stone like embroidery. If embroidery writhed and bled and tried to stitch you back. I dodged a barrage of fey weapons with liquid speed and grabbed another shield, but I didn’t use it for protection. I threw it like a frisbee, and watched the heavy, iron rimmed edges mow half a dozen bodies down.

I don’t know how I got here, I thought blankly, my stunned brain finally catching up to my actions.

“You are Lady Cassandra, Pythia and guardian of the Pythian Court,” Mircea told me, reading my mind. He was regarding me out of dark, flashing eyes while holding the door shut, which he’d somehow gotten back in place. “And a damned fine one!”

I stared at him for a moment, because I didn’t get a lot of compliments these days, not since I’d started talking back to him and the other vamps. They’d wanted a good, docile little Pythia, and were perfectly happy to pat me on the head and to protect me, as long as I was doing their will. A hard headed, willful little Pythia, on the other hand, who felt like the power had come to her and she should have a say in how it was used, was something else altogether.

Which might explain why I just stood there for a second, until Mircea yelled. “Any time now, dulceață!”

I blinked, and realized that the same thing that had happened before was about to happen again. The door was going to blow in, assuming that the fey left in the room didn’t kill us first, and we’d be overrun. But I still didn’t know what Mircea had meant about—and then I did, when he snatched a sword out of a fey’s body, used it to run another through, and then kept on going, jamming the bloody blade through the door and burying it deep into the stone of the wall.

New hinges, I thought, and grabbed a bunch more swords, short spears, and anything else that might work.

A moment later, I had finished ensuring that a certain door would never open again, and Mircea had a fey in either hand, clearly intending to throw them out the windows.

“Don’t kill them!” I reminded him, which earned me an eyeroll, probably because of our body count. Which didn’t mean we needed to kill any more! Mircea compromised by battering their two, helmet clad heads together.