“Fall? Then you are back on your feet?” He sounded hopeful as well as slightly breathless, which was odd since vampires don’t actually need to breathe.

“More or less.” I bent down and felt around underneath me until I found a stair. I plopped my bruised butt onto it and closed my eyes, because the double vision was giving me a headache. And got another surprise, when that actually allowed me to see better.

Not that there was much to see. It looked like he was in some kind of tunnel, cut through dirt instead of rock, with a few stones poking out of the walls, ceiling and floor. I couldn’t tell much more than that, because it was dark enough that I wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, except that I was looking through a vampire’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where are you?”

“Not Kansas,” he said, as a commotion came from down the tunnel somewhere.

And then he giggled.

I sat there for a second, unsure of what I’d heard. Mircea did not giggle. He laughed sometimes, a rich, infectious sound that brightened the dark eyes and crinkled their edges, and made the handsome face even more so. Hearing him laugh wasn’t unusual, as he somehow managed to combine a reputation as a fearsome master vamp with a decent sense of humor, and preferred to rule his family through bonds of affection and loyalty rather than fear.

But he did not giggle.

And then he did it again.

“Mircea, what—” I began, but had to stop when he snatched something from the ground and took off down the corridor with it, so fast that the walls blurred together into a single, dark line.

We slammed back into a crevasse a moment later, where we panted and giggled and panted and giggled. One of us was losing our minds, I thought. And, after today, I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t me.

But then Mircea’s voice came again. “It’s not you.”

“Why are you out of breath?” I demanded. “And what’s so funny?”

“My apologies, dulceață. I believe I am—I think the word is ‘high’?”

I stared at the uninteresting dirt wall in front of us. It had an overlay of Gertie’s stairs and back hallway on it, because my eyes had flown open in surprise. I shut them again.

“Did you say high?” I asked, before catching sight of what he’d dumped unceremoniously at his feet. “Is that Pritkin?”

“Yes, he’s high, too.”

“Mircea, what—”

“One moment.” And then we were back on the move, Pritkin thrown over our shoulder, his head and arms dangling comically behind us as we all but flew down the tunnel, while frequently glancing back, looking for something that even Mircea’s eyes couldn’t see.