An enraged master vampire is a terrible and strangely beautiful sight, what you can see of him. Which wasn’t much in this case, because Mircea was little more than a blur against the gray stone walls. But then, I didn’t have to see him move.

I saw the results.

Fey warriors suddenly appeared, writhing, on those no-longer-empty meat hooks, as abruptly as if I’d shifted them there. Others disappeared down the well, tripped or thrown, one with the aforementioned cleaver sticking out of his forehead, right between his surprised looking eyes. The fey in our time had fought an army of master vamps recently and gotten their asses handed to them, but these hadn’t. I wondered if they’d have been so gung-ho to follow us if they’d realized what they were getting into.

But what they lacked in vamp-killing ability, they made up for in numbers. I had no idea what they were doing here—they weren’t supposed even to be on Earth in this era—but they were flooding down the roof like the water tumbling over the stones below, and just as deadly. And just as impossible for us to kill, because we were in the past, damn it!

I grabbed for Mircea as he streaked by, and somehow managed to snare an arm. “You can’t kill them! We’ll destroy the time line!”

He paused to stare at me as if I was mad, a fey in each hand. “Then what would you have me do?”

“Run?”

He looked vaguely offended. I half expected him to remind me that the great Mircea Basarab did not run. But then a dozen arrows slammed into him, into the wall, into a still writhing fey body on a hook, and into the remains of my updo.

And, a second later, he had knocked his prisoners unconscious, scooped me up, and we were pelting through a series of storerooms full of half frozen, hanging carcasses.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Meaty thud, thud, thuds punctuated the air, as arrows hit flesh that was thankfully far beyond feeling it. I was not beyond feeling it, and my hand burned like somebody had shoved a red-hot poker through it. But worse than that was not knowing what was happening to—

Pritkin, I thought, as the scene skewed around me. My eyes blinked and I was suddenly looking at another corridor, this one full of old stones and torchlight, and a bunch of screaming, running fey. They were chasing not one, not ten, but maybe a hundred Pritkins, who were racing through side corridors and down cross-tunnels and into rooms where what sounded like major battles were going on.