Not that there was much to see. The tunnel itself was claustrophobically small, to the point that it seemed impossible that trains actually ran through this. It was also warm and damp, and reeked of dust and mildew. I was kind of glad I couldn’t see details. I could hear, though, and it wasn’t helping my nerves.
There were odd rumblings of trains that shook the ground under our feet and seemed to come from every direction at once. There was a weird echoing effect that threw our footsteps back at us, making it hard to listen for others up ahead. And then there were some very suspicious squeaks.
“I think there may be rats,” I said, my grip tightening on Mircea’s arm.
“At least one,” he said softly, about the time I saw the dim glow of another light bouncing off the concrete walls ahead. It was surprisingly distant, considering that we couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind them. But if they got far enough ahead to break the fragile connection, that lead might well become permanent.
I started to run.
And almost bumped into the kidnapper booking it from the opposite direction. I hadn’t seen him in the dark until he was right on top of us, but suddenly there he was, his blue eyes wild, his hair sticking up everywhere and his mouth open in the O of Oh, shit. He almost knocked me down with the damn suitcase, gangly legs churning up the dark as he and Mother headed back toward the platform at a dead run.
“What the—” I didn’t get a chance to finish before Mircea grabbed me around the waist and flung us at the wall.
I hit hard, bruising my knee and smashing my cheek against the filthy concrete. But I didn’t complain. Because at almost the same instant, a bolt of red lightning sizzled through the tunnel, electrifying my hair and raising gooseflesh on my skin. Goddamnit!
“They’re supposed to be dead!” I said, furious.
“Perhaps this is a different group.”
“Jonas said there were only supposed to be five!”
“Yes, we’ll have to mention that to him when we return,” Mircea said grimly, as a bunch of pissed-off demigods blew past us.
I thought there were four, not five, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to see anything at all with bright green afterimages leaping across my vision. And then it was impossible, when so much spell fire lit up the tunnel that it looked like a sophisticated security system had been installed in there.
Laserlike spells bounced off walls and ceiling, crisscrossing each other in a deadly web of crimson fire. They turned the small, round space into something straight out of hell, and gave me plenty of light to see that the spells weren’t the kind meant to stun. Everywhere they hit, they blackened the heavy concrete, sparked off the rails and sent a thick layer of dust from the floor billowing into the air.
Mircea cursed and pulled me behind him, which would have been fine, except that a bolt slammed into the wall just down from us a second later. It must have hit an electrical line, because a great shower of sparks spewed across the tunnel, a few flaming out against my dress. Mircea cursed again and pulled me back the other way, near the stillsmoking blast mark from the previous spell.
“Get out!” he rasped.
I stopped staring at the fireworks long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“Shift out of here! Now!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through this. If they kill her, I’m dead anyway! Why do you think my power brought me back here?”
“I’ll deal with it!”
“You can’t! Mircea—”
He pushed me against the wall, his body shielding me, his eyes reflecting the sparks. And their expression was pretty damn scary.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“What?” He looked at me like he thought I’d gone mad.
“Would you protect the Consul if she was here?”
“Of course not!”
“What would you do?”
“Whatever she needed—”
“You would help her.”
“Yes!”
“Then help me.”
“You are not the Consul, Cassie! She has abilities you cannot possibly—”
“—understand. I know.” And from the little I’d seen of them, I was really okay with that. “But I have abilities she doesn’t. She can survive a direct hit from one of those blasts; I can shift out of the way and miss it. It’s the same—”
“It is not the same! You are this.” He gripped my arms, hard enough to bruise. “You are flesh, soft and sweet and yielding and vulnerable. You need protection, but I can’t—”
“Mircea! They’ve been trying to kill me for three days and I’m still here.”
“Due to luck!”
I stared at him. “Then I must be the luckiest person alive!”
He just looked at me, and I’d never seen that expression on his face before, like he was really going to lose it. There was something going on here, some issue I didn’t understand. But there was no time to figure it out.
“I have to fix this,” I told him, as clearly and calmly as I could. “If you want to help me, then help me. Don’t shield me, don’t protect me, don’t bury me alive. Help me.”
He stared at me a moment longer and didn’t move. The fight was escalating and also getting farther away from us, back toward the crowded platform. And I didn’t think the Spartoi cared much how many people they killed, as long as my mother was one of them.
“Mircea, please!”
“What do you need?” It was harsh.
“To touch her. That’s all I ever needed. One second and we’re gone—all of us—and this is over.”
He nodded briefly and let me go.
I pushed off the wall and back into the corridor, trying to get a glimpse of my mother. I only needed to touch her for a second to shift her away, but I couldn’t just appear beside her. Spatial shifts required me to see where I was going, or risk ending up in a wall or a ceiling or part of a mage.
And right now, I couldn’t see shit.
Except for billowing clouds of dust, crisscrossing spells—and the crazy-ass kidnapper, erupting from the fray and screaming bloody murder.
He was headed straight at us, but he wasn’t running this time. Instead, he and Mom were levitating on something I couldn’t see, thanks to their flapping coats. But I felt it just fine when it slammed into my stomach, picked me up off my feet and sent me careening backward into the far reaches of the tunnel.
And now there were two of us screaming, me and the mage, as we pelted into darkness, him trying to push me off and me holding on for dear life, struggling to reach behind him, to grab her, to touch—
But either he figured out what I was doing, or he was the worst damn driver in history. Because we went weaving across the narrow space, bouncing off the sides and scraping across the ceiling, red bolts of spell fire following us into the gloom. And then he got smart and tipped over, dumping me ass-first onto the hard gravel between the tracks.
I cursed and scrambled back to my feet, about the time that a blinding radiance flooded the air. It sent wildly leaping shadows dancing around the walls, disorienting me almost as much as the deafening sound of a horn and the tracks vibrating under my feet and the dirt shimmering like gold dust in the air—
“What’s happening?” I screamed.
“Train,” the kidnapper shrieked.
I stared up at him. “Train?”
“Train!” Mircea yelled, flinging one of the Spartoi against the side of the tunnel. And then the guy’s friends leapt for Mircea and he leapt for me and I leapt for my mother—
And grabbed a handful of something soft and rubbery and gelatinous instead, completely unlike human flesh. That wasn’t surprising, because the bastard of a mage had flung a shield around the two of them and I’d grabbed a handful of that. It stretched, encasing my arms like thick latex as I tried to punch through, and Mircea tried to keep the mages from incinerating us all, and the damn kidnapper tried his best to kick me in the head.