“Pia,” it whispered.
She nearly leaped out of her skin. What she had taken for a dead body was someone who was all too clearly alive—and whoever it was knew her.
Falling to her knees beside the person, she gently helped to shift them around. It felt like holding a bag of sticks in her arms. Horrified compassion washed over her as she stared down at the skeletal face.
The skin was stretched tight over the facial structure, making it look skull-like, unrecognizable. It wore clothes that were well-made and feminine, but they were falling off the bony body. That, together with the untidy shock of luxurious auburn hair, brought a sick realization.
She breathed, “Oh my God. Carling?”
The figure opened its eyes. They were red.
“I’m afraid so.” The Vampyre’s voice was weak and thready. She had become so desiccated she had lost all semblance of her famous beauty. Even the fullness of her lips was gone, which brought her extended fangs into prominence. “I’m sorry to see you here. I had hoped you might be someone I wouldn’t care about.”
Carefully Pia eased her against the wall and backed into the sunlight. If Carling had been human, she would have unquestionably been long dead. Only the fact that she was a Vampyre had kept her alive. Or as alive as the undead ever got. But the differences between this ruin of a figure and Carling’s normal vitality and strength were terrible.
“I’m sorry to see you too,” she whispered. “I heard one of them, the leader, give the order to drain you while you were unconscious. Is that what—what—”
“What caused this? Yes, it’s severe exsanguination.” With a dry sound like the rustle of bones, Carling shifted against the cave wall. “It’s an effective method for weakening a Powerful Vampyre to keep them under control. It’s also an effective method of torture. With the exsanguination, the sun, and the spelled bars, they could hold me here indefinitely. How did they get you?”
Pia told her about the confrontation at the Riverview. “I’m worried about Eva. They hit her really hard.” She paused. “How did they get you?”
“They shot me. I’d said good night to Claudia and Luis, but then I’d gotten a message that a package from Rune was waiting for me at the front desk.” She shook her head in disgust. “I didn’t want to leave my room so close to morning, but I also didn’t want to wait to see what he had sent me, so I had them deliver it. When I opened my door, they tagged me with a silver arrow that was spelled with something. They have a very good magic user.”
“Ah yes, that would be me.”
The voice came from behind Pia. She spun around to stare at the scarred Elven woman who stood on the other side of the bars along with another Elf who carried a tray.
The Elven woman held a crossbow pointed at Pia’s belly. The woman was shaking and tears ran down her grimacing face.
“After all these centuries,” she said. “After watching that horrible dragon prosper and gather power for so long, right now all I have to do to kill him is shoot you. I can’t tell you how wonderful that feels. I hold his life in my hands. So you see, I’m torn. Do I feed you or do I pull the trigger?”
Slowly Pia backed up until she stood flattened against the cave wall. Carling rose to stand beside her.
Carling said, “Take a moment to think. You don’t want to do this.”
Laughter burst out explosively from the woman. “You have no idea how much I want to do this. That monster killed everybody I loved!”
Everyone? Pia didn’t have to know the details to recognize the other woman was telling the truth. Either Dragos had gone to war, or the Elves had. Their hatred for each other had lasted for eons. This was a wound from one of those ancient battles, and it had never healed.
There was nowhere to go, and nothing she could do except talk. She didn’t bother trying to convince the Elven woman that Dragos had evolved and changed. Looking into that implacable face, she knew the other woman would never listen.
Forcing herself to remain steady, she said as calmly as she could, “When my father died, my mother lived for sixteen more years. I don’t think this is going to get you the results that you want. I can see how badly you want my mate to die, but he may simply choose not to, for as long as his will can hold him here. And if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, Dragos has an indomitable will.”
The Elven woman pulled the trigger.
And that was it, that was it. For one hellish split second, Pia knew she and the baby were dead. She didn’t even have time to draw in a breath to scream.
But in the same moment, Carling blurred beside her, and suddenly the Vampyre was clasping the arrow. Frozen, Pia stared into Carling’s fierce red gaze, just inches from her own. Carling had just saved her life. Had saved Stinkpot.
Then the Elven woman wiped her face and laughed. “I guess that’s enough of a decision for now. You have more strength than I had expected, Carling Severan. You should be a useless pile in the corner.”
“Clearly you know who we are,” Carling said. “Who are you?”
“I am Caerlovena. I rule this place and everyone in it.” She gestured to her companion, and he slipped the tray through a slot in the bars. She said to Carling, “When I heard you were coming to Las Vegas, I knew I had to capture you somehow. I had waited so long to get this kind of chance. If I held your life over his head, I could force your Wyr to kill Dragos—and he would have. The Wyr will do anything to protect their mates.” Her tigerish gaze shifted back to Pia, and she bared her teeth in a ferocious facsimile of a smile. “But then I heard you were attending their wedding, and that opportunity seemed too good to be true, if I could only find a way to take you too. Now, one way or another, I know he’s going to die. I just want to know how much pain I can make him suffer before he does. And I really want him to suffer, so it’s just as well you stopped me from killing her.”
“Okay,” Pia said. Halfway through Crazy Elf’s speech, her head had started to pound. She could feel her heartbeat racing too fast, and a watery weakness filled her limbs. “Things are bad, and they are going to get worse. Got it. Can I have my purse, please?”
“What?” Caerlovena stared at her with baffled contempt, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard.
Gritting her teeth, Pia repeated, “Can I have my purse, please?”
The Elven woman didn’t bother to reply. She said to Carling, “Sooner or later, the blood thirst is going to take you. Enjoy your time with each other.”
She strode away, followed by the other Elf.
“That was staggeringly awful,” Pia said.
Carling looked down at the arrow she still held. “It could have gone worse.”
The world began to spin. Moving unsteadily over to the wall, Pia used it to help her ease to a sitting position. She lost track of the world around her as it faded into a formless white, but then she came alert with a jerk as Carling knelt beside her.
Heart pounding, she shrank back. Looking into the Vampyre’s face was like looking into a nightmare. But, she noticed, while Carling’s eyes might be red, they were also calm.
She managed to make her rubbery lips shape words. “How bad is the blood thirst?” Carling looked so terrible it had to be bad.
Carling put her hand on Pia’s shoulder. “Listen to me,” she said. “Caerlovena is wrong. I have been starving before. I have been tortured, and I survived. I can survive the blood thirst as well. I will not let her take away my choices or my sense of self. You are safe with me, Pia.”
She nodded. She could tell that Carling wanted her to believe it, and she did, up to a point, but they might have another conversation entirely if she went into labor. Giving birth was a messy business. How would Carling deal with the blood if that happened?
“I really needed my purse,” she said.
“You need a drink, but unfortunately I can’t help you with that.” Carling looked at the tray where it sat in sunlight. “And your pulse is far too thready and fast for my liking. You have to get
that tray. Can you do that?”
She shook her head. “Maybe in a minute.”
Carling eased down beside her, keeping one bony finger on the vein at the inside her wrist. Pia allowed it. A listlessness was washing over her.
She roused herself to say, “You know they’re tearing apart Las Vegas to find us.”
“I know. Unfortunately, we’re not in Las Vegas.” The Vampyre tapped her finger on Pia’s wrist. “Caerlovena. I know that name.”
“Her goons,” Pia said thickly. Her tongue felt funny and kind of swollen.
Carling’s skull face frowned at her. “What about her goons?”
“They had logos on their chests. Devil’s Gate Security.”
Carling snapped her twiggy fingers. “That’s where we’re at. Devil’s Gate. Duncan and Seremela came here once to rescue Seremela’s niece, back when the Djinn Malphas was still alive. They said there were a number of dangerous power brokers here at the time, and Caerlovena was one of them. She must have either taken out the other power brokers or driven them away. Did you see how twisted the vegetation is at the edge of the clearing? I think she’s trying to create an Elven forest in the desert. I’ve heard there is no better warning system than an Elven forest that is awake, aware, and attuned to you, but this isn’t the right climate for that kind of land magic. She must be straining the land’s resources for miles around.”
“I don’t care,” Pia said simply. Leaning her head back against the wall, she closed her eyes. “Do you know what I care about? I care that Dragos and I have been fighting the past couple of weeks, and those are the last things we may be able to say to each other.”
She waited for Carling to reassure her, to tell her that of course everything was going to be all right, but the Vampyre didn’t.
Instead, after a moment Carling asked, “What have you been fighting about?”
“A couple of weeks ago, Stinkpot—that’s our nickname for the baby—became viable. We were so happy we had a viability party, just the two of us. But now Dragos wants me to induce labor, and I told him no. The baby might be viable, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to be born yet. If he was ready, he’d let us know—he’d already be here. I’m going to hold on to him for every minute I possibly can, and he will be safer, stronger, and healthier because of it.”
Carling said gently, “This pregnancy is hard on you.”
“Of course it is.” She made a face. “It has fucked me up, and Dragos hates that. I can feel him watching me. I know what he’s doing, and I know how he thinks. To him, it’s measuring one statistic against another. If the baby’s viable, then it’s less danger and hardship on me to induce, and then we all win. But I don’t see it that way.” A tear slipped out of the corner of her eye. “The thing is, neither one of us is necessarily wrong… except I’m right. We just needed to stop fighting about it.”
“He does not handle opposition well,” Carling said dryly. “I’m no soothsayer, but I’ll guess this isn’t going to be the last time you and he argue.”
A small snort escaped Pia. “Probably not. I’m a lot more easygoing than he is, so usually we make things work without too much fuss. I think it has surprised him how adamantly I’ve dug in my heels over this.”
“Well, take heart,” Carling told her. “The sun has just gone behind a cloud, so I’m going to get that tray while I can, and you’re going to drink some water.”
Pia watched her shuffle over to the tray and drag it back across the cave floor. Carling’s brief burst of speed and energy were a thing of the past. Now she moved like a very old, sick woman.
The tray held a plastic jug of water, warm from the sunlight, an apple, and some kind of meat sandwich. Ignoring the sandwich, Pia drank half the water, until her thirst was sated. Then she inhaled the apple, core and all. It wasn’t enough food, but at least it was something.
“You should eat the sandwich too,” Carling told her when she was finished.
She shook her head. “Not if I want to keep that apple down. There’s meat in it. Just the smell is making me queasy.”
“Not even the bread?”
She grimaced. “Meat juice.”
“Okay, well, it’s better than it was. And there’s another thing.”
“What’s that?”
The Vampyre held up the arrow. “We have one more tool than we did a little while ago, and it’s got a strong metal tip.” She narrowed her eyes at the bars. “That concrete is fresh enough maybe I can scrape at the base of those bars and weaken them.”
She thought of the slow, old-woman way Carling had shuffled across the cave. The Vampyre hadn’t even been able to lift the tray. She sighed. “You need to drink too.”
The Vampyre’s red gaze and terrifying visage turned back to her. Carling said softly, “I can’t do that.”
“You have to. Right now you can barely stand upright on your own.” Pia injected strength into her voice. “I have a lot of blood right now because of the pregnancy. If you take a little, it’s not going to put me into labor.”
No, Pia was going to do that all on her own. Without the protocol to dampen her immune system, her body was going to start rejecting the baby.
You’d better get here soon, Dragos. Or your baby mama is going to give birth in prison.
“Are you sure?” Carling asked.
“It’s okay.” She could hear the lie in her own voice, and she was certain that the other woman could too. The last thing she wanted to do was to offer her wrist up to the nightmarish creature crouching beside her. Gritting her teeth, she stuck out her arm. “Really. Here.”
Carling’s red gaze held hers as she took hold of Pia’s arm. Pia had more than enough time to regret her offer. Carling was severely undernourished. What if she couldn’t stop drinking once she had started?
Then the Vampyre lowered her head. With a flash of white fangs, she bit into the soft flesh at Pia’s inner wrist and drank. When she finished, she licked the puncture wounds to seal them, thanked Pia, and eased away. She didn’t look any better—she had lost far too much blood to be adequately nourished by the small amount she had taken from Pia—but at least she did seem to move more easily.
There was nothing left to do. Pia drank more water, curled on her side, and tried to nap, but the cave floor was too hard, and she was too anxious to relax. As soon as the sunshine had shifted away and the outside ledge lay in shadow, Carling edged over to the opening. Using the arrow, she began to scrape at the fresh concrete base at the bar in the farthest corner. Neither woman spoke.
Pia’s first contractions started just as the sun went down.
Chapter Six
The wait to hear from the kidnappers was excruciating.
The part of Dragos’s mind that was so good at statistics kept running calculations on the odds of Pia’s and Carling’s survival. As time passed, that calculation turned grim.
The person who had texted with him clearly had a sadistic bent. Most kidnappers would have been eager to get to the point. They would have made their demands known by now, because the longer they kept their hostages, the greater their risk of discovery.
No, this person wanted to hurt him. That did not bode well for how they would be treating the women.
As Dragos and the rest of the wedding party combed the city for clues throughout the night, they coalesced into a coherent team. Every casino in Las Vegas agreed to lift their magic dampeners and close their gambling floors. The police assigned a liaison to work with Dragos and the others.
Word of Eva’s condition came back from the hospital. She had needed surgery and was being kept in an induced coma until the swelling in her brain went down, but the doctors were confident she would make a full recovery over time. It was one bright spot in the grim, black night.
The Light Fae Queen, Tatiana, opened the Riverview Casino’s resources to them, and they set up operations in the casino’s conference rooms.
“I do not forget how your sentinel Graydon helped when my daughter was kidnappe
d,” she told Dragos in a quick phone call. “I also remember the assistance you and Pia gave us when we were attacked by my sister Isabeau. If there is anything more the Light Fae demesne can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask.”
It was a significant offer. That fact managed to worm its way through the savagery winding like a serpent around Dragos’s heart.
Even the owners of the Bellagio were less than apoplectic at the damage done to their property. Instead, they approached the issue in a businesslike manner and engaged a team of insurance assessors without delay.
Local and national news outlets picked up the film clips of Dragos’s impulsive offer of rewards, and the Wyr crime hotline number was inundated with hundreds of phone calls. That number would soon be in the thousands. The great majority of the calls were useless, but every one that seemed like it could be substantive needed to be verified.
Politicians still condemned the cavalier destruction of public property, but they also expressed their deepest sympathy for the difficulty of the Wyr lord’s situation.
As far as the investigation went, several people were arrested and detained for questioning. Fifteen workers at the Bellagio had been bribed by an unknown party to report details on the wedding party’s activities and whereabouts, which was no doubt why the resort owners were so subdued at the damage Dragos had caused.
And as the night bled away into another fierce desert day, they analyzed the security footage from the Riverview frame by frame.
Dragos and Rune watched the footage of Pia’s kidnapping obsessively. There was no security footage on how Carling had been taken. With facial recognition software, they were able to manipulate individual frames to get partial snapshots of the kidnappers’ faces. They saw something that looked like it might be a logo on a few members of the team, but when they tried to blow the images up, it blurred too much to be legible.
They had several shots of the Elven woman, who was clearly the leader, but the scar across her face prevented the software from analyzing her features enough to get any hits from criminal databases. Either that or she had managed to avoid being caught and catalogued up until now.