Tempt the Stars

time-traveling, border-crossing menace? You could go back in history, destroy us all! Although you seem to be doing that well enough as it is!”
    “I’ve told you before, I’m no threat to the council—”
    “Yes, and it’s so reassuring to have your word on that. Unfortunately, they’d prefer something a bit more certain—like my son’s head!”
    “Why not mine?”
    “You’re needed for the war effort,” Rosier said bitterly. “He’s expendable—”
    “He’s no such thing!”
    “Tell them that.”
    “Summon them and I will!”
    Rosier’s eyes flashed neon, and if looks could kill . . . well, they would have saved him some trouble. “Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he snarled.
    Pritkin cursed. “Do it! There’s no choice!”
    “You planned this,” Rosier hissed. “You planned this all along. I know damned well she didn’t come up with it on her own—”
    Pritkin cursed again, although not as much as when the guards wised up, and four of them decided to attack us together. Four hit down onto our rug at the same time, landing between me and the two demon lords, and their combined weight sent me flying. Off and up and into the void, arms flailing and body desperately trying to shift—and failing.
    And staring into Pritkin’s panicked face as I started to fall, because it was a long, long way down.

Chapter Nineteen
    Or it would have been if I hadn’t fallen straight onto Casanova.
    And that would have been great—if my added weight hadn’t caused his bit of rug to dip a full story downward. And then to fly back up. And then to bounce back and forth between the two extremes, yo-yoing us past the battle that was now raging on both carpets.
    “Ooooh,” the crowd said, impressed at our acrobatics.
    “Aaaaaah!” I said, grabbing Casanova around the neck, because I am not a member of Cirque du Soleil.
    “Get off!” he snarled, because I don’t think he’d planned the heroics. He’d been on hands and knees, peering over the edge of his unsteady perch as he tried to get his men re-formed into a safety net. But they were busy running around, trying to clear the crowd away from what they, at least, realized was not an act.
    And therefore there was no one to catch either one of us.
    Not that I was all that interested in getting down. The storm had dropped a few dozen more black-clad figures on the surrounding rooftops, too far away to reach the main battle, but only a few flights of stairs away from the floor. I assumed that was why Pritkin and Caleb were keeping the rugs in the air. Fighting on a tiny, unstable platform isn’t fun.
    But it beats getting mobbed by two dozen otherworldly soldiers all at the same time.
    Especially these soldiers.
    Between the dim light at Rosier’s court and the flurry of activity around our escape, I hadn’t gotten a good look at the elite, black-clad troops before. I was getting it now. One of the creatures’ hoods slid back enough to show me his face—if he’d had one. Instead, a blank bronze faceplate gleamed under the lights, and my stomach abruptly started crowding my toes.
    “Fuck,”
I said, with feeling.
    “What?” Casanova’s head whipped around. “What now?”
    “
That
now,” I said, pointing.
    “What?”
    “Allû.”
    “Allû?” For a second, he stared blankly at the nearest carpet, and then his face changed. “Fuck!”
    And yeah, that about summed them up. The Allû were the council’s personal guards, who were usually camped out in the Shadowland making life in hell a little more hellish for anybody who dared to cross their demonic masters. But occasionally they got sent on errands, like when the council really wanted somebody dead.
    And they usually got their wish, since their freakish army couldn’t actually die. I knew because I’d fought them before. Not that that experience was likely to help much at the moment, since it had mostly involved me getting killed over and over again. I’d been caught in a time loop and kept “resurrecting” whenever time reset itself, until I finally figured out a way to beat them.
    Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have a hundred chances to get it right.
    “Take us closer!” I told Casanova, trying to grab the edge of Pritkin’s rug as we headed back up again. But it was moving, too, as half a dozen men and creatures fought on top of it, and the fringe barely brushed my fingers.
    Which was just as well, since an Allû fell off the rug a second later, burning from a