We hit a cross tunnel, turned sharply to the left, and found another depression. It was shallower than the last, leaving Pritkin’s head and shoulders sticking out into the corridor when he was dumped on his ass again. Or they were until Mircea kicked them back inside.

“Mircea!”

“He weighs a ton,” Mircea panted, unrepentant. “And I have been lugging him about for the last half hour, barely ahead of our enemies—”

“What enemies? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I was unconscious when I first arrived—”

“You’re a vampire. You don’t do unconscious.”

“I don’t normally leap through booby-trapped portals, either,” he said fiercely, as another distant commotion came to my ears, this time including gunfire.

Mircea swore.

“Mircea, if you don’t tell me what’s happening—”

“The creature we retrieved from the fey dungeon escaped the hotel and headed out into Las Vegas. The mage and I traced it to a disused part of the run-off tunnels under the city, where it activated an illegal portal. Likely to some part of Faerie—the mage said the fey can sense their own type of magic, and it probably honed in on that.”

“And you followed it inside?” I didn’t know why I bothered to ask; this was Mircea. Of course, he had.

“Of course, I did! I didn’t come this far to lose it now! But that put us outside the grip of Earth, which is why the incubus brought our minds to you instead of our bodies.”

“You… remember that?” I said, biting my lip.

He glanced down at Pritkin. “I remember a great many things, some of which are frankly… disturbing. But I cannot currently tell fact from wildly exaggerated fiction—”

“You should probably go with the fiction,” I admitted. “The wilder, the better.”

Mircea scowled; I could feel the muscles stretching his face, since it was currently my face, too. “In that case, we need to talk—”

Great.

“—but not now. Sometime when I can think, which I can’t at the moment! The portal must have been rigged to explode if any non-fey passed through—”

“Explode?” I suddenly forgot about my personal life. “Are you okay?”

“No.” It was flat. “The explosion was a potion bomb, filled with something that knocked us both out. It appears to have worked on the body rather than the mind, allowing my subconscious to remain active, and thus be able to assist you. But as soon as I came around…” He shook his head violently, then clutched the wall, hard enough for his fingers to sink into the earth. “The last time I felt this way was after feeding on a human high on LSD, back in the sixties—”

“Okay, we need to get you out—”

“—not one of mine, you understand. I was visiting the consul, and she offered—did you know she calls them blood-pigs? I haven’t heard anyone do that in centuries, and many of us—”