Tempt the Stars

Anything that takes place on the ground!”
    “Man up,” Caleb advised.
    “I’m a
vampire
—”
    “Yet you’re afraid of heights.”
    “Yes!” Casanova said hysterically. “They’re one of the few things that can kill me! I hate fire and I hate
    heights!”
    “How do you feel about stakes?”
    “Very funny! Very goddamned—” He broke off when a familiar streak of red lightning tore across the roof and exploded against the lip of the building.
    “What are they
doing
?” he screamed.
    “Trying to get a payday,” Pritkin snarled. And I remembered what he’d said before, about having enemies, even at court. But damn it, Rosier was here—
    Only he wasn’t, I realized. There was no slick gray suit among the blue robes leaping from the other roof to ours. He must be down on the street, keeping the card flip going. And that meant—
    “Oh, shit!”
    And I guess Casanova agreed. Because he grabbed Caleb, who grabbed the other bit of rope. “No, Caleb takes Cassie!” Pritkin said. “You come with—”
    I didn’t hear the rest, if there was any, because I was being shoved brutally backward. I hit concrete hard, just as red lightning exploded where we’d all been standing, and part of the roof disintegrated into a mass of flying stone. I would have ducked and covered my head, but it was the part Caleb and Casanova had been standing on, and I was screaming and scrambling up and—
    And watching them zoom away along the slender lifeline that Caleb had somehow managed to snag even as they dropped. An almost dizzying wash of relief flooded me. They were going to be all right; as long as the line held, they were going to be—
    “Cassie!”
There were spells going off everywhere, deafeningly loud, but I heard that and my head jerked around. To see Pritkin, lit for a second by unnatural spell light, and silhouetted against a massive ball of boiling energy coming this way. And then I was grabbing him because he couldn’t grab me and the rope, too, assuming he was able to grab it at all when I couldn’t even see it with all the weird jumping light—
    And then we were jumping, too, and falling, and the roof was exploding and—
    And there was a disorienting moment of free fall amid flying debris and hot, rushing air, and
no, no, no, no, NO—
    But then we caught—a barely perceptible jerk on a filament of line that hardly changed the feel of things at all because this was almost free fall, too—a crazy mix of whistling wind and abject terror and pant-wetting desperation. And that was just the initial descent. Then we hit the curve at the bottom, where the line dipped almost all the way down to the street and I felt loose pebbles in the roadbed roll under my filthy toes for a moment, a completely surreal experience that would have lifted my heart to my throat if it hadn’t already taken up permanent residence there—
    And then we took off, our momentum shooting us up and forward at the same time, on a mad slalom down a constantly changing street.
    For a long moment, I couldn’t see anything but a rush of neon on either side, colorful streamers like kites in the night, rising and falling as signs and buildings sprang in and out of existence and taxis honked and people shouted at us or ran to get out of the way.
    But for some insane reason, I was
laughing
as we ran up a car’s roof, pushed off, sprang over top of a bus, swooped down on the other side right in front of another madly honking car, and then bounced up onto a red, double-decker bus that caught us just as our improvised zip line gave up the ghost.
    I hit the open aisle, still gasping on wild, insane, out-ofcontrol laughter to match a crazy situation that couldn’t possibly exist, but somehow did, and it took me a second to realize that Pritkin was laughing, too. And then we were running down the spiral stairs and jumping onto the sidewalk and crashing into Caleb and Casanova as they ran up to us on the street.
    “Show-off,” Caleb said breathlessly.
    From there it was a short dash through the doors of the great building, and across a strangely normal-looking lobby, and down a not-so-normal looking hall, and then through a set of double doors—
    Into a seemingly endless dark oval, slick and seamless, and littered with stars.
    And a voice that crashed like thunder all around us. “Council is now in session.”

Chapter Thirty
    I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe a courtroom or a boardroom, something made to look comfortingly