“It’s okay; I’ve got you.” My hand closed over his, and he felt warm and real under my fingers. “We’ll find you a way out—”

“I don’t want a way out; I want a way to the creature. That is why I brought you here. I can’t trust my own senses, but yours are uncorrupted. You can borrow mine—”

“Mircea—”

“—and help me find it. It’s here; I can smell it—”

“Mircea! Pritkin is unconscious and you’re compromised!”

“—and if it escapes this maze, I’ll never find it again—”

“If you die, you’ll never find it again!”

“And afterwards, we can worry about—”

He cut off abruptly, and my vision slurred once more. It snapped back to show me what looked like another dirt wall, only with the tops of a bunch of heads sticking out. After a few seconds, I realized that I was looking down at the floor from above, and that the heads were those of a bunch of people passing underneath us.

Mircea must have heard them coming and jumped up, and was managing to cling to the ceiling above their heads.

But he hadn’t had time to take Pritkin with him. I could see the light orbs that some of the men were carrying in lieu of flashlights splash his blond hair, highlighting him even among the crevasse’s shadows. All that was needed was for one of them to turn his head—

And then one of them did, but before he could utter a warning, he was up here, too, having been snatched out of the pack so quickly that his companions never missed him.

He wasn’t fey. His height should have told me that already, as a fey’s head would have been a lot closer to the ceiling. This guy was shorter—maybe by a foot and a half—and human. I had a brief impression of a rounded ear, of an acne-scarred, human face, and of the stench of dark magic, like the funk off a week-old corpse, staining the air around him.

And then the mage matched his smell, when Mircea proved the difference between a master and a regular old vamp, and exsanguinated him in about a second flat. It left the skin ivory pale, the eyes fixed and staring, and the mouth still open on a word of warning. One he’d never had a chance to utter, because Mircea had killed him before he even knew what was happening.

But everyone was going to figure it out in a second, because we were no longer steady.