I clapped a hand over his mouth, turned him around and pointed him at the damned vamp. Who was now blind, and missing a hand, but not deaf. “They’ll hear the elevator, assume I’m crazy enough to come down that way, and get themselves blown up.”

Ray wrenched out of my grip and turned around to stare at me. And then at the elevator. And then at me again. And then he started shaking his head and gesturing and mouthing something I didn’t even try to interpret because I could guess pretty well.

“Meanwhile, I’ll run down the stairs on the other side of the building and get ’Du,” I told him. “Do you get it now?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get it,” he said savagely, as the elevator doors started to close. With me inside, because regardless of what I’d just told Ray, I didn’t have the ammo or the firepower to fight my way down twelve floors of vamps. The idea was just to make them think I did, and buy me some time for what I really hoped would be a quick trip.

And yes, Ray had a point. This was insane and stupid and a whole list of other things, but it was also the only plan that might work. Only it didn’t look like he thought so.

He stared at me for half a second, looking mad as hell for some reason I didn’t particularly get. And then he apparently went crazy, too. Because he turned sideways and slipped through the narrow crack, right before the doors shut. Leaving me with nothing to do but glare, because I was holding down the twelfth-floor button and the close-door button at the same time and didn’t have a hand free to slap him.

It was an old trick that worked for a lot of elevators to take you straight to your floor regardless of who else might have mashed a button. In other words, it was the express route down. Not that I expected to make it the whole way, but even half would improve our odds a lot.

At least, it would if there hadn’t been any senior masters on duty tonight. I was assuming that was the case because of the speed of the takeover. It looked like the necromancer had used Slava’s boys as a kind of Trojan horse, and they couldn’t have gotten here more than half an hour before I did. And Radu had been in distress ten minutes after that.

That didn’t say senior master to me.

At least, I really hoped not, or this was going to be a very short trip.

Of course, it might be anyway.

An arm suddenly punched through the door panel when we were on level six, only to get withdrawn, missing a good deal of flesh, when we hit seven. Where several more tried to widen the gap, but I kept my finger on the button and Ray grabbed my .45 and shoved it through the hole and just kept on firing. I don’t think he could see what he was aiming at, but it didn’t matter; it kept them back from the door, which was all we needed.

Or more or less kept them back. By level eight, the door was dented all over as fists and feet caved in the heavy metal, and by nine it was buckling and by ten there were faces staring at us through gaps big enough to drive body parts through and by eleven enough of those parts had been wedged inside that the elevator shuddered to a halt. I could still hear the gears grinding, trying to take us down, but nothing was happening, and that wasn’t good.

“You have a plan for this, right?” Ray said, not looking at me because he was too busy hacking at body parts with his cleaver. Which wasn’t working so well, because the acid had mostly eaten through the blade.

“Get out of the way!” I told him, hitting the button to go back up.

The sudden reversal, along with a few blasts from the shotgun to clear the door, worked to get us going again. But in the wrong direction. And some of our newfound friends thought we were leaving too soon, because now the floor was starting to dimple, too, as fists and feet hammered at it from underneath.

“How are they holding on?” Ray yelled, firing his rifle as we shot back up, because he’d already emptied my .45.

“Vampires!” I said, knocking him out of the way and grabbing two grenades. I tossed them out the shredded door on level ten, went up to nine, hit stop and waited.

“What the—” Ray began, but I cut him off.

“How many upper-level masters were here?”

“What—I—” His head jerked up as somebody landed on the roof. And somebody else stared at us through the slashes in the door, just two dead eyes that didn’t glow anymore in a darkened corridor.

“Ray!” My voice snapped his attention back to me.

“I dunno. I dunno. Not many. Most are at the games; everybody with enough clout traded shifts and got off.”

“Good,” I said, as an explosion from the floor below rocked the elevator around us.

But it still worked when I hit the button to go back to level ten, the doors opening onto a smoking war zone of twisted metal and acid-etched walls, and blown-apart bodies that were still moving. Like the intact ones tearing through the elevator floor behind us. And the ceiling above us.

“Now what?” Ray demanded, as I grabbed two of our last three grenades, pulled the pins and tossed them into the elevator as we left it, right after I hit the button for eleven.

The doors closed, the elevator of doom plunged, and we ran flat out. Down the dark hall and into a now deserted stairway, since most of the bad guys on this level were currently grease marks on the walls. Most but not all.

I slit the throat of one right outside the door, bisecting it in passing all the way to the bone. Had to shoot another at the bend of the stairs, because he was leaking acid and I couldn’t get too close, and the sound drew the attention of three vamps in the corridor at eleven. Who turned and started tearing our way, just as the elevator exploded behind them. They ended the journey in pieces, landing against the hall door with meaty thuds and a wash of red against the small square window.

Ray stared at it as we ran down the last flight, maybe because the vamps’ body parts were already thumping against the metal kickplate. And then at me as I paused to reload outside the door to level twelve. But he didn’t say anything, just reloaded his own gun with slightly shaking hands, his eyes flicking back and forth between the stairs behind us and the door ahead.

And then I kicked it in and we were through.

Into nothing.

Nothing weird, anyway. Just an empty, quiet corridor, fresh and clean and smelling faintly of some kind of pine cleaner, odd only because nothing was. There were no homicidal body parts, no corpses, no gore.

And no Radu.

I kicked open doors on one side of the hall while Ray took the other. But all we found was a few offices, a couple of holding cells and what looked like an interrogation room complete with two-way mirror. It was coldly clinical, completely unlike the baroque facade upstairs or the luxury guest and meeting spaces on the upper floors.

I guess nobody made it down here who needed to be impressed.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Ray said, looking around the empty interrogation room. “Okay. He isn’t here. So where the hell is he?”

“Level fourteen.”

“There is no level fourteen!”

“There has to be. There’s no lab on this floor.”

“But you saw—”

“If it’s a restricted level, they may not have put it on the elevator pad. That doesn’t mean it’s not here. We probably need a key for an override.”

“Which we don’t ha—”

I clapped a hand over his mouth as the door was kicked open. It was the one to the other half of the room, where a conference-type table sat surrounded by chairs and harsh lights. We watched through the mirror as a couple of long-haired corpses came in.

A lot of the older vamps have long hair, because they like it or because it tended to be the norm in earlier centuries or because human fads can bite them. But most of them keep it closely confined, not straggling in bloody clumps over acid-pitted faces. The one closest slowly turned his head in our direction, and I saw that half his cheek was gone, leaving just a raw, red cavity that looked like it was getting bigger as I watched.

And how the hell did that work? If the acid ate through them, too, why were they even mobile? Why weren’t they a bunch of blackened bones on the floor?

And then I noticed: the one who looked the worst was one I knew. Not personally, but I’d seen him on guard duty a time or two when I came to get paid. But the other—well, judging by the tux, I had to assume he was one of Slava’s guys.

And he looked a little different.

A good bit of his once expensive tux had been eaten away, giving him the look of a yearlong castaway on some desert island. But the skin underneath, other than being corpse white, was fine. And while he had some blood on him, I didn’t see any obvious wounds, meaning it probably wasn’t his.

So Slava’s boys weren’t harmed by whatever corrosive was flowing through their veins, but everybody else was. And that didn’t spell coincidence to me. That spelled forethought and planning and deliberation and—

And setup.

My eyes widened as the implication hit. We’d just been played. Again.

But not by Slava, who had been as toxic as the rest of them. And who didn’t have the skills for messing around with vamp DNA. So by the necromancer, obviously, and whoever he was working with, which I was suddenly having a hard time believing was just a group of smugglers.

But there was no time to work it out now, not with the tux reaching for the doorknob.

I shoved Ray at the hallway door, shot out the window and dropped our last grenade. Then I went pelting out after him, only to find him looking from the smoking elevator shaft to a horde of vamps coming down the stairs. And apparently deciding on the latter, because he yelled and started to charge like a crazy man before I grabbed his collar and threw him the other way.

“What good is that going to do?” he yelled. “It won’t go up!”

“Good. Because we’re going down,” I said. And pushed him into the elevator shaft.

The grenade went off as we dropped, rattling the walls around us and sending a billow of smoke into the air over our heads. Which probably would have bothered me more except that I’d guessed right. The shaft didn’t stop at level twelve.

And while that was great as far as the plan was concerned, a two-story drop isn’t fun even when you’re at your best, which I definitely wasn’t. And even when you don’t land in a mass of twisted metal from the elevator you just blew to smithereens. And even when you don’t look up and find a bunch of bloody vampires glaring down at you from the doorway you just jumped out of. Although they worried me less at the moment than the smoking remains of the elevator on the floor above them, which was sparking and swaying and looking like it was about to—