“Oh, shit.”

A churning mass of water, like waves breaking against a shore, boiled up beneath us, coming our way fast as the deck suddenly went from slanted to slanted. And I found myself being pelted by the avalanche of people now pouring down from above. They were screaming, and the frigid spray was drenching us, and the sailor was panicking and using me as a shield, with the arm he’d thrown around my neck threatening to choke me.

And then Louis-Cesare, who had somehow gotten ahead of me and grabbed a railing, flung out a hand. “Dory!”

I grabbed for it, and would have caught it, if three people going crazy fast hadn’t chosen that second to toboggan in between us. He jerked his hand back to avoid getting swept away and I went sliding by, elbowing the sailor and throwing him off and then wrenching back and reaching—

And finally grabbing Louis-Cesare’s hand because he had lunged for me at the same time, his feet hooked under the rail, his body dangling headfirst, like a lifeline.

It was a pretty impressive bit of acrobatics, and apparently everyone else thought so, too. Because suddenly people were barnacling onto the only handhold available by grabbing whatever part of him was closest. Including something that made his eyes pop and his face go crimson and—

And then an angry cloud of darkness loomed up behind his head, blotting out the stars.

Tag, you’re it, I thought but didn’t say, because he couldn’t have heard me over the yelling and the crashing and the ship’s horn. But it must have shown in my face, because he wrenched his neck around and took a look—

And then he let go of the rail.

It wasn’t so much a slide this time as a fall. The ship was fast approaching the perpendicular, leaving us tumbling and flailing helplessly into a dam of people and furniture around a wrecked lifeboat. And then over it, as the impact threw us into the air and through some spray and into—

A big steel door that hadn’t been there a second ago.

And neither had the dark street and the cracked sidewalk and the shiny black, bulbous car that rain was pattering down on the top of.

“Word?”

I went from looking dizzily at the street to looking dizzily at the large guy with the nicotine yellow teeth who had appeared behind a small window in the door.

“Titanic,” Louis-Cesare told him grimly, and the door opened and we were through.

There was a pretty Asian hatcheck girl in a tight red dress on the other side, but we didn’t have any hats. Or shoes, in my case—not that anyone seemed to notice. Maybe because the place was so smoky; I could barely see my hand in front of my face, much less my foot.

But I could still talk, so I did, pulling Louis-Cesare—who was now wearing a standard black tux for some reason—over to the wall. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Trying option two.”

“What?”

He licked his lips. “Once we realized that I could not take you out, your father told me to evade until he could come up with a plan. He said there were three ways to do that.”

“Which are?”

“Hide—”

“Which didn’t work out so well!”

“No.” He grimaced. “We are therefore attempting to lose her. If she isn’t right on top of us when we transition from one memory to the next, or if she becomes distracted by what else is happening, she will not know where we went.”

“But if she figures it out?”

“Then we go to option three.”

“Which is?”

He said something that I didn’t hear because the door opened again and a fat cat with a bunch of squealing girls blew in. Along with a gust of rain and the sound of lightning. And Louis-Cesare took the chance to pull me into the main room.

It was loud, with someone playing bad jazz and someone else trying to sing over the sound of drunken laughter, the call of a croupier and the click click of a roulette wheel. It was all utterly, completely real, like my first mind-trip to the wharf. Only there were no disturbing holes in this picture.

There hadn’t been any on the ship, either, but I hadn’t been in a headspace to notice it then. Maybe it was because vampires’ senses were better? I wondered, staring at the silver shimmy of a showgirl’s costume on a small stage. So maybe their sense memory was, too. Or maybe he was filling in the blanks?

Or maybe I was nuts for thinking about this now.

Yeah, that sounded about right.

Louis-Cesare had snagged two glasses off the tray of a passing waiter, and handed me one, which turned out to be straight bourbon. “You might want to drink that now,” he said grimly, and bolted his own.

I didn’t even ask. I just threw it back, managing to choke most of it down before a bell rang out, harsh and discordant. And had me jumping reflexively and spilling the rest.

And I wasn’t the only one. On all sides, people jerked to attention, glasses sloshed, cigarettes fell from holders and hands disappeared inside coats. And then everything stopped—music, talking, gambling, drinking. And every head in the place swiveled around.

And looked at us.

“Now what?” I muttered to Louis-Cesare, who had gripped my arm.

“Rien.”

“Then why are they staring at us?”

“They’re not,” he said, pulling me to the side as a fist started pounding on the door.

It was loud enough to cut through the din and make me jump again, although I’m not a jumper. But my nerves were a little frayed at the moment. A fact that wasn’t helped when a line of bullets suddenly strafed the door from the other side.

“So I guess we’re going with distraction, huh?” I yelled, as the room went wild.

Louis-Cesare didn’t answer; he just grabbed my hand and pulled me through a horde of waiters beating it with trays of illegal booze, good-time girls fighting croupiers for cash and tough guys pulling guns. And then the door gave way and a bunch of blue-coated cops burst in, yelling orders we couldn’t hear over the din.

Louis-Cesare grabbed my hand and pulled us onto the stage along with the ensemble, who had packed up their instruments and were disappearing behind a cheap red curtain. And down a hall. And behind a set of stairs.

Until we got hung up behind the bass player, who couldn’t get his huge instrument through a narrow exit.

I looked behind us, but there was nothing there. Not even the cops, who had probably assumed that the curtain fronted a wall. “I think we lost her,” I told Louis-Cesare breathlessly, who didn’t look convinced.

Maybe because the lights took that moment to flash out.

“Shit!”

He didn’t say anything. He just picked up the bass, with musician still attached, and threw it behind us. And then jerked me through the doorway. And then on a breathless trip through a stream of memories that went by so fast, they made me nauseous.

I found that the only way to deal was just to concentrate on my feet, which were running over surfaces that changed between steps: scuffed hardwood to mossy stone to cigarette-strewn concrete to inlaid marble to rocky seashore to—

Fire-lit dirt?

I looked up, blinking, when the scene stayed constant for a few seconds. And saw a slur of dark greenery and bright stars that didn’t make sense because I was dizzy and really confused. Like part of my brain was still trying to catch up.

“Where are we?” I slurred, grabbing Louis-Cesare for info and balance.

And got neither. He didn’t answer, and then we lurched and almost went down. I stared at him stupidly for a minute, because Louis-Cesare was a master swordsman; he didn’t stumble. The man practically looked like he was dancing just walking across a freaking room.

Or going to one knee.

Or leaning heavily against me.

Or crumpling to the ground in my arms.

Chapter Thirty-six

I let him down to the ground, and went into a defensive crouch over him, looking wildly around for our attacker. But all I saw was a tree-strewn hillside under a huge black sky, the Milky Way glittering overhead like a starry rainbow. A small, tumbledown shack stood near the bottom of the hill, and a bonfire was burning at the top. But nothing moved, except for a cool breeze rustling the treetops, a rogue meteor burning up along the horizon and the firelight flickering down the hill.

It looked like we’d outrun her—for the moment.

The bonfire was a ways off, but it was still bright enough to send shadows to play over Louis-Cesare’s face, giving the illusion of movement. But that was all it was. Because he just lay there, even when I shook him.

I pushed up his shirt, which had gone from fine linen to rough homespun, thinking maybe she’d caught him between one transition and another. It doesn’t take much time to slip a stake between the ribs, or to run a knife edge over a neck. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had enough practice.

But there were no wounds, no blood. No obvious problems at all that I could see. I ran my hand around his throat, then down through the lacings on the front of his shirt. And encountered only fine, unbroken skin. And sat down abruptly, feeling dizzy again from sheer relief.

For a second, I thought seriously about passing out. But I couldn’t afford to do that. Not when it looked like he’d beaten me to it.

Which made no sense. Master vampires didn’t pass out. Master vampires kept coming until you chopped them into little pieces, and sometimes even then. But people didn’t go running around in other people’s memories, either, so tonight was obviously about new experiences.

I looked up again.

There were people circling the bonfire. I could see their bodies if I squinted, silhouetted against the light. Could hear their laughter when the wind was just right, feel the reverberations of their feet if I concentrated. They were pounding out a rhythm to the accompaniment of drums, a flute and what might have been a lyre. It was almost hypnotic: dark figures whirling around a tower of flame, sparks flying high into the sky, a riot of color and light and movement on an otherwise dark hillside.

It didn’t look like something that should be in Louis-Cesare’s memories. Or even in the consul’s. It looked like a pagan kaleidoscope, something that predated history: violent, primitive, dangerous, raw.