Karen Chance - Claimed by Shadow

As soon as Mac hauled Tomas in the door, I scrambled across the table after them. The shop had landed on the impressive row of steps leading up to the dais on which the table sat, and was therefore tilted towards me. If I made it another few feet, my momentum should do the rest.

I had just managed to clasp the hand Pritkin held out when someone grabbed my ankle. My ward-damn it- didn't flare, but Sheba suddenly got busy. She had ignored Mircea, either because of the null effect or because she didn't view him as a threat. But whoever had grabbed me was another matter. I felt her flow down my body, then there was the sound of a snarling great cat and a surprised yelp from a dignified Senate leader. Sheba launched herself off my foot, and a second later the Consul let go of my leg.

"Come on!" Pritkin gave a heave and I almost flew the rest of the way across the slick tabletop. We tumbled in the door of the shop and suddenly I could see again. Neither Mac nor Tomas was in the front, but I didn't have time to worry about it. At Pritkin's yell of "We're clear!" the whole building started to shake.

The next minute we were barreling through pure stone, on a crazy zigzag course into the middle of MAGIC's foundations. We were making pretty good time, it seemed to me, although I was so busy holding on to Pritkin, who had a death grip on the counter, that it was hard to tell. I did see a dark blur, however, coming down the newly carved tunnel, and the next minute Kit Marlowe tumbled into the wildly lurching room.

He looked grim and determined, and there was an air of danger about him that I didn't remember from our brief childhood meeting. Of course, that night he'd been enjoying Tony's best hospitality, not bleeding from half a dozen wounds. "Oh, bugger it!" I heard Pritkin mutter. He pulled me off his back, pressed my hands around the edges of the desk and yelled, "Hold on," loudly enough to threaten to rupture my eardrum. Then he let go and went flying across the room at Marlowe.

They grappled, but without magic it was down to old-fashioned dirty fighting and pure muscle, and they seemed about evenly matched. Marlowe was yelling something at me, but I couldn't hear him over the racket our tunneling efforts were making. And I was too consumed by the waves of pain coursing through me from the geis to care.

The farther I got from Mircea, the worse they became, to the point that I was barely aware of what was happening. Tears blinded me, spasms clenched my stomach and it was becoming increasingly hard to breathe. I remembered Casanova saying that people under the geis had committed suicide rather than endure the pain of separation and I finally understood why.

Marlowe got Pritkin in a headlock and the two stumbled into the desk, almost causing me to lose my already tenuous grip. Then Pritkin stabbed a knife into the vamp's chest and they broke apart. But the mage, looking dazed from the loss of air, didn't follow up his advantage and for some reason neither did Marlowe. He was grimly pulling out the knife when, with no warning, the shop shuddered to a halt.

My knees knocked painfully against the side of the desk and I barely kept from sailing over it. But I couldn't have cared less. The geis was suddenly gone, cut off like a stereo when someone turns a switch. I gasped for air and found that I could breathe deeply again. My head swam with the influx of oxygen and with relief. But almost immediately I noticed another sensation: hunger.

It was only in the magnitude of its absence that I could tell the true strength of the bond. I wanted to laugh and cry at me same time. Relief from the pain had also brought an end to the addictive, all-consuming pleasure. And the craving started immediately.

I staggered around the desk, feeling strangely hollow and empty inside. Then I looked out the front window and did a stunned double take. What I saw was enough to take my mind off even the geis. In front of us wasn't another sandstone corridor or even an empty stretch of desert. Instead, I saw a large meadow filled with long grasses that bent to the left in a gentle breeze. By the sun's height I guessed it was midday, although the diffused light made it hard to tell for sure. In the distance lay a ridge of sharp blue mountains capped with snow, but the breeze that swept in through the shop's front door was warm and smelled faintly of wildflow-ers. It was beautiful.

Mac stuck his head out from behind the curtain warily, then gave a whoop of pure joy. "All right! And they said it couldn't be done! Bloody hell!" I noticed that his wards had stopped moving, frozen in place like normal tattoos, and light dawned. Mac, that crazy son of a bitch, had driven the tattoo parlor straight through the portal and into Faerie itself.

I left Mac and Pritkin to deal with Marlowe and ran into the back. Tomas was strapped down on the padded table Mac used for doing tattoos. He didn't look comfortable, but at least he hadn't been thrown around the room. I hadn't had a chance to do more than glance at his wounds before, but now I tightened my lips to avoid saying something extremely rude about Jack. Then I decided to hell with it and said it anyway.

Tomas groaned and tried to sit up, but the straps wouldn't let him. That was just as well, since something would have probably fallen out otherwise. Jack had split him open from nipples to navel, like an autopsy specimen or an animal he was about to gut. I stared at the wreck of what had once been a perfect body and grew cold. I really wished Augusta had finished him.

I swallowed and looked away, partly because I had to or risk being sick, and partly because I needed to locate something to use as a bandage. Vampires had amazing recuperative powers-horrific as his wounds were, Tomas could probably heal them in time. But it would help a lot if the edges of the wound were somehow held together, and for that I needed fabric-a lot of it. I started for the cot, which had a fitted sheet and blanket that might work, when I tripped over something. I landed on my knees next to a dark-haired man wearing a bright red shirt. I stared at him in surprise-how had we picked up another stowaway without my noticing? Then he turned his head and I realized that he'd been there all along, just not quite in this form.

"I gotta tell ya," Billy said, sitting up and grabbing his head with both hands, "I haven't felt this bad since I got into that drinking contest with those two Russian bastards." He groaned and lay back down.

I cautiously reached over and poked him with a finger. He was as solid as I was. I lifted his wrist and felt for a pulse. It beat strong and firm under my fingers. I dropped his hand and scrambled back a couple of feet, only to encounter another impossible thing. í felt something solid against my back and looked down to see an orange-brown hand lying on the floor. It was connected to a similarly colored arm, which led to the naked torso of what my brain finally identified as Pritkin's golem. Only, despite the color, he wasn't clay any longer.

I didn't need to check for a pulse-he was obviously breathing, his oddly colored but otherwise perfect chest rising and falling normally. Or what would have been normal for a human. Since he was supposed to be a big pile of clay animated by magic, it wasn't normal for him. A glance that I swear was involuntary informed me that he was also anatomically correct, which he certainly hadn't been before, and that whoever had handled the changeover had been generous. The next second his eyes-real ones this time-flew open to regard me with utter confusion. They were brown, I noticed irrelevantly, and he didn't have any eyebrows or eyelashes. In fact, he didn't appear to have any hair at all.

I looked back at Billy. He was pale and needed the shave he'd been putting off for a century and a half, but otherwise seemed fine. He quite simply had his body back, which was ridiculous because it had gone for fish food ages ago.