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“Talk it out with Mircea; I’m just the hired help,” I informed him, dragging him through more muddy grass.

“You’re about to be the dead help! Let me go!”

“No.”

I didn’t bother to elaborate, because he wasn’t going to give me time to finish a sentence anyway. I’d been in enough fights to know when someone wants to talk and when they want you to bleed, and this was definitely the latter category. And bleed I did, because he flipped over, vaulted up from the ground, and planted a fist square in my mouth.

I went staggering backward, my lip split and possibly half of my head along with it from the way it felt. Dhampir resilience and the borrowed dregs of demonic power was no match for a truly desperate lover. I decided to get serious while I still could.

And hit him back, and like with his blow, I wasn’t playing. I felt the strike in my hand, a lancing pain echoing up to my shoulder; saw his jaw cave in; and then followed it up by another blow with my left hand under his chin. It threw his head back and allowed me time to punch him in the liver and kick him in the ribs, and then to stomp on assorted delicate bits when he slid in the mud and went down.

I wasn’t being vicious for the sake of it. A master could drain me dry in a trice if I allowed him to concentrate. So, I didn’t. I just wished I knew which level of master I was dealing with, because Mircea hadn’t mentioned that, and fighting a sixth was a lot different than fighting, say, a fourth.

Or a third, I thought, cursing inwardly, as he threw me off.

And then demolished a tree right behind and to the left of me with the shiny master’s power he shouldn’t have had until level two at the earliest, but this was not a man who played by the rules. The tree was now so many twigs, what little hadn’t been blasted back through the forest like a bunch of flying stakes. A big bunch, as it had been a big tree.

Bigger than me.

But he was too woozy to aim cleanly, and before he made another try, someone grabbed him from behind.

“You’re supposed to be protecting Mircea!” I said to Louis-Cesare.

“He is well.”

A glance across the glade to where my sire was currently being menaced by half a dozen witches put lie to that. “He is not well!”

“Yet he sent me to you.”

“And I’m sending you back! I can handle this!”

“You were not handling it,” the stubborn man said. “You were about to be—”

I punched Marlowe in the face again. And kneed him in the groin. And broke the other half of his ribs.

“Happy?” I said, and sincerely hoped so. I didn’t want Louis-Cesare anywhere near Marlowe’s ability to make hundreds of flying stakes!

And I guessed he was, because he leaned down and kissed me, bloody lips and all. “Don’t die,” he said, and ran off.

Right before the bastard at my feet, who had slumped over as if ready to collapse, grabbed my ankle. And started feeding. Because of course he did!

I kicked him in the face with my other foot, several times, but he’d already gotten enough energy to slow me down and to heal himself slightly. Enough to be a problem again, and damn it to hell, this wasn’t doing my reputation any good! “Let me go!” I growled.

He looked up, bloody face and missing tooth and all, and grinned at me. And I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “No.”

But then he did it anyway, although not because of anything I’d done. But because several witches had had enough of playing around with spells, and decided to get closer to the fight inside the maelstrom. Which turned out to be a very bad idea.

It sucked them up, a filament of lightning turning one to ash right through her shields, and the other getting thrown into the outer layers of the portal, where she was whirled around and around until—

“God’s Bones,” someone said.

It might have been me.

Marlowe watched the woman get literally shredded for an eyeblink, turning the rim of the portal red before it sucked the rest of her down, and then he was off again. Or he would have been, had I not grabbed hold of his legs. He hit the ground, already kicking me in the face in the process, but I hung on anyway, and managed to seize a stick.

It didn’t have a pointy end, but it would do.

He paused, catching sight of it. “You would kill me, then?”