But Mircea was, and he knelt and did it for me, revealing the gray breeches, worn vest and old-fashioned shirt of a hired coachman. That had been our cover story, to explain the lack of the Basarab family ride: that it had broken down on the way to the party, and we’d had to rent one at the last inn we passed. But it left Pritkin looking like an overgrown Oliver Twist who’d taken to drink and was sleeping it off.

The good news was that there weren’t any obvious wounds, except for a few scratches on his hands and arms that the goat thing had probably given him. But anything strong enough to knock out a master vamp would kill most humans, and while Pritkin wasn’t entirely human, it clearly wasn’t doing him any good. And the fact that he’d been unconscious for something like a day now seriously worried me.

Of course, his incubus had been busy, hadn’t it? So maybe it had kept him unconscious so he couldn’t rein it in. But it had faded a while ago, at least an hour and probably more, so why hadn’t he come around?

I didn’t know, but getting him to a healer was a priority.

“How high are you?” I asked Mircea. “What are the odds of you fighting your way out of here?”

It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Under normal conditions, he could have drained that platoon of every drop of blood, row by row, while they double timed it beneath him. Only not today, it seemed, because he laughed again, a little madly.

“Fuck all?”

“I’m serious, Mircea—”

“As am I. I do not know what was in that bomb, but it was devastating. Concentration is difficult; thinking is difficult. I have my speed, but the rest of my senses are dulled and I am currently mind blind, unable to communicate even with family. I managed to reach you through the spell, but you are the only one I can see. Otherwise, I am alone.”

There had been no emotion in that last line, deliberately so. But there didn’t have to be. Mircea had been a vampire for well over five hundred years. He’d started building a family early, so for most of that, he’d never been alone. There had always been voices in the back of his mind, chatting, laughing, arguing, teasing, something.

To have it all suddenly go silent must be terrifying.

“It’ll wear off,” I said.

“Let us hope so. In the meantime, we have to find—”

A high-pitched squeal, distant but deafening, cut through the air. It sounded like a cross between an animal’s desperate cry and torn metal, and felt like someone had stabbed me through the brain.

“—that,” Mircea said, grabbed my hand, and took off.

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty