I rolled to my feet. Slayer felt wrong in my hand. The weight was off.

Reality hit me like a brick in the face. Oh. That’s right. It wasn’t Slayer. Damn it.

A sour smell hit my nostrils. To the side Andrea bent over and vomited into the grass. She wiped her mouth and straightened. “I was thinking that my best friend was stuck in Mishmar and she would need my help getting out.”

“I meant to talk to you about that,” I said.

“I’m all ears,” Andrea said.

“This is a suicide mission and you’re pregnant. What the fuck were you thinking?”

“He already said that. You guys are no fun. How about ‘I’m happy for you’ or ‘How far along are you’ instead?”

“You’re a moron,” I told her.

“They needed a shooter and someone who knows something about Roland and Mishmar besides Christopher.”

“You’re pregnant,” I told her.

“You’d do it for me,” she said. “Now excuse me, I’m going to go pee and puke some more.” She wandered off and disappeared behind the greenery.

Curran shook his head and held out a container of Doolittle’s wonder food for me. I took it and began eating. “How long was I out?”

“Two hours.”

“No vampires?”

“No.”

I looked around. Curran, Christopher, Nasrin, Jim, Andrea, and Ghastek, bleary-eyed. That’s right. He had to stay awake. If he fell asleep now, his vampires would rip into us. “Where is everyone else?”

“The rats and Naeemah went ahead to scout the way,” Curran said.

I reached out with my magic. Constellations of vampires surrounded us. Some above, some to the sides . . . Their numbers had swelled while I slept. Fifty . . . Sixty? If they jumped us now, even with my help, we might not survive. I asked Curran for Slayer’s pieces and tucked them away into my clothes. It was broken, but it made me feel better. I’d crushed vampire minds before, when trapped in Hugh’s castle. I could kill some off, but making their heads blow up took a big chunk of magic out of me.

Ten minutes later, I was about halfway through eating the food when Thomas, Robert, and Naeemah came through the door in the back of the garden.

“Do you want bad news or bad news?” Thomas said.

Curran sighed. “Give me the bad news.”

“There’s only one way out of here,” Robert said. “Directly behind that door is a huge round room, extremely deep. There’s a metal bridge that controls the only access to the other side.”

“Is it broken?” I guessed.

“No, it’s retracted. From the other side.”

“If it’s retracted, there must be a mechanism to extend it,” Ghastek said.

Thomas grimaced. “That’s the other bad news.”

• • •