Once he’d cleaned off his deck, the captain barked an order and the ship started moving away, out of the line of fire. I didn’t blame him. Spell after spell was flying out of the apartment, exploding in the air like fireworks.

I ducked to avoid sparks from a near miss, and Pritkin grabbed my arm. “You have to get out of here!”

“Me? What about you? You’re in my body!”

“I’ll be fine!”

“Yes, you will. Because you won’t be here,” Mircea said, suddenly appearing beside us. His hair had come loose and one of the ends was smoking slightly. I pinched the flame out between my fingers, but considering the conflagration going on behind us, that didn’t make me feel any better.

Pritkin apparently had the same thought. “You’re outnumbered! You need the help!”

“And how much help do you think you would be in your condition?” Mircea demanded, motioning the ship back toward us.

“More than you, vampire! The place is going up like an inferno!”

“That is my concern. Yours is to get her to safety and switch back as soon as—”

I never heard the rest of the sentence, because a spell slammed into me, picking me up and hurling me into the void. It happened so fast, I barely realized what was going on until I was falling. The side of the building flashed by all of three feet away, the windows blurring together into a continual black line, the pavement rushing up at me at a ridiculous pace. And then something snatched me, almost cutting me in two.

I looked up to see the sailing ship above me, the prow dipped low and Mircea hanging off the end of the wooden figurehead. His fist was knotted in my waistband, which explained why I couldn’t breathe. Considering the alternative, I really didn’t mind so much.

Even so, I was surprised his reflexes had been good enough to catch me. He looked kind of shocked himself. For a second, the reserved demeanor cracked open on something wild and fierce and compelling. Then he dragged me up, put a hand on either side of my face and kissed me full on the lips. From somewhere above, I heard Pritkin swear.

“I guess that whole blackmail thing didn’t exactly work out like you planned, huh?” I gasped when Mircea released me.

“Saunders will die for this,” he hissed, staring back up at the balcony.

“That might be kind of tricky,” I pointed out as a swarm of mages burst out of the ley line and fell onto the deck behind us. It looked like Saunders hadn’t been kidding; the vampires hadn’t been the only ones making plans for this meeting.

Of course, plans don’t always work out.The mages seemed to have assumed the ship would be level, because half of them slid down the rough planks before grasping some kind of handhold, and the other half went plummeting over the side. I stared after them for a second as a dozen little shield chutes bloomed against the night sky. Then Mircea dragged me against his side, vaulted over the railing and jumped—straight after them.

We didn’t end up plummeting to our deaths but onto the surface of the yacht, which had quietly come around underneath. I grasped the railing, my heart still stuck on terror, but Mircea pried me off and we ran. The mages who had kept their balance followed us, and there seemed to be an awful lot of them.

“I can’t believe they’re trying this with the consuls here,” I panted as we dodged deck chairs and little folding tables.

“The consuls aren’t here. That’s why I went to Washington State, to my court. I had to welcome them. They’re there now, with the Senate.”

“Something else you didn’t mention!”

He grabbed me around the waist and tossed me over the side. I got a brief, dizzying view of the dark parking lot below before I was caught by a waiting vampire on the Chinese consul’s barge. Mircea jumped the distance behind me, and as soon as we were aboard, it took off—only to be hit with a spell that shuddered it to a halt.

I looked behind us to see a dozen or more mages manipulating the biggest net spell I’d ever seen. It had enveloped the dragon’s tail on the stern of the barge and was slowly drawing us back alongside the other ship.

“I couldn’t very well tell you anything without being overheard,” Mircea said, staring around.

“By whom?” I demanded. “The only people in the apartment were family!”

“Exactly.” His neck craned upwards as he caught sight of something. I followed his gaze to see what looked like a wall of wood descending on us. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sailing ship’s deck. The massive schooner had flipped upside down.

Mircea held me up and a vampire reached down and grabbed me by both arms, his legs enmeshed tightly in the rigging. Mircea jumped up beside him. “You don’t trust your own family?” I gasped, holding on for dear life.

“I don’t trust one of them. Someone tried to kill the Consul, if you recall.”

“But you said you knew who that was!”

He shook his head. “The Bentley was serviced the day before MAGIC was destroyed, and the bomb would surely have been noticed at that time. So it was planted later, after the man to whom you’re referring was already dead.”

“Then why did you say—”

“To make the guilty party feel secure. Kit narrowed it down to eight suspects, five of whom belong to me. I had them transferred here as soon as I received his report and borrowed the consular ships to make it look like the Consuls were meeting here. If an attempt was made to disrupt the meeting, we would have our traitor.”

“That’s why you discussed their visit in the middle of the living room. You wanted everyone to hear!”

Mircea nodded as the clipper began to move away, putting some distance between us and the melee. But some of the mages had managed to get themselves untangled from the net spell in time to launch themselves at us. I thought things were about as bad as they could get, dangling upside down twenty stories up while the Circle’s mages started swarming down the webbing toward us. And then the ship started to rotate.

I think the captain was trying to jiggle his stowaways loose, and he was doing a damn good job—on me. Mircea grabbed me as my grip started to slip and swung us over the side just as the rounded hull came into view. “No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “You aren’t suggesting—”

“I have you,” he assured me, setting my feet down onto the very uneven planks of the hull. “Think of them as small steps.”

“To where?”

“Up there,” Mircea said as the ship slowly began to rise back toward the balcony.

“The people trying to kill us are up there!”

“They’re down here, as well,” he pointed out. “And we have more allies there.”

“One of whom could be a traitor!”

“No. The suspects have been given the night off and instructed not to return before dawn. If one of them does, we’ll have him.”

We’d almost reached the keel, but the mages were right behind us and the balcony looked very far away. And unless I was imagining things, the rotation had picked up speed. “Wait. What if the traitor decided to go with a bomb instead?”

“We’ve checked. The apartment is perfectly safe.”

“Yeah. It looks it!” I said, and then the flat deck was coming up at us again and there was suddenly nowhere to put my feet. Not that it mattered because the ship’s rotation jerked to a halt, with my toes hanging off the edge. “Mircea!”

He didn’t answer, just swept me up and jumped down to the mast, which was sticking out of the deck like a bridge. The mages had nowhere near good enough balance to follow along the curved, polished surface, and so they decided to start flinging spells instead. One of the furled sails went up in flames right beside us and then Mircea put on a burst of speed and we were suddenly out of mast and jumping.

“Did you have to carry her?” Pritkin demanded, as we landed back on the balcony.

Mircea ignored him, beckoning the Chinese barge closer. “Come with us!” I said, gripping his hand.

He shook his head. “If Saunders gets away tonight, he’ll go into hiding. It may be months, even years, before we have him again.”

“You don’t have him now! He has you!”

The Chinese barge slid alongside, and Mircea picked Pritkin up and handed him over the side into the arms of the waiting captain. He said something in Mandarin, and the vamp nodded, setting Pritkin on his feet and reaching for me. I ended up over the side and on the deck before I quite realized it was happening.

“Mircea! Don’t do this!”

It was like he didn’t even hear. He turned and disappeared back into the thick, choking column of smoke that was now billowing out of the apartment. He didn’t look back.

I turned to Pritkin as the barge slipped rapidly away. “We have to get him out of there!”

“I’d be a bit more worried about us, if I were you,” he said as a large white ship appeared in the sky.

I knew it must have come from the ley line, but it had merged with real space so quickly that it looked like a magician’s trick. That made sense, as there were a few hundred mages lined up along the railing—the ones Saunders had boasted about, I guessed. “Tell me again that they don’t want us dead,” I said as a fiery blast exploded out of the side of the vessel, passed a yard in front of us and hit the clipper broadsides.

The ship went up like a Roman candle. The explosion of burning wood, rope and sail hit us, causing our craft to swerve precariously in a wide arc. I held on to the railing and watched burning pieces of the clipper ship plummet to the parking lot below. They crashed onto the rows of employee cars, sending half a dozen somersaulting skyward and setting off a chorus of car alarms. I didn’t see any of the crew make it off.

Even worse, the Lord Protector’s ship was heading straight for the penthouse. If it got there with that number of reinforcements, Mircea was dead. There wasn’t even a question.

I grabbed the captain by the collar. “Stop them!” He didn’t seem to understand, so I shook him and pointed at the ship. “They can’t be allowed to dock!”