The smoke shifted again, blown back due to the hole above him where his fire had burned away that entire section of the roof. I stared at Vlad, filled with the heartbreaking realization that I would probably never see him again. Either I would die if I stayed, or he would eventually be killed if I left.
After all we’d been through, how could it have come down to this?
Chapter 40
After another aching moment, I blinked in shock as a new gust of wind cleared away the smoke around his feet. Could that be real? It looked like there was a narrow, half-foot radius encircling Vlad that wasn’t even sooty, let alone burned. How?
A second later, I answered my own question. With all the power he was unleashing, Vlad’s aura would have flared out, too, rendering that narrow radius as fireproof as he was. I looked at the circle with new hope. It would be tight, but it might be wide enough for me to be protected from the flames.
It was my only chance, and I ran over as fast as my still-healing limbs could take me. If you believe in God, I told Mircea as I pressed as close to Vlad as I could, then you’d better start praying.
Great, we’re all going to die now, my hated inner voice commented, popping up to join the mental party. Looks like you’ve finally succeeded in killing yourself, Leila.
Fuck off, all of you! I snapped back while shooting pain-and-desperation-fueled voltage into Vlad. We’re not dead yet!
We will be if you don’t stop this and run, Mircea retorted.
I ignored him as I kept shooting currents into Vlad while telling him over and over that I was there and none of this was real. All the while, he stared through me with those empty eyes, seeing what the magic compelled him to see instead of what was right in front of him.
When his power flared and I felt that deadly eruption of heat again, I wrapped my whole body around him, tears streaming from my eyes. It hadn’t worked. How could my voltage save me from that spell, yet not be enough to save him?
Leila, run, this our last chance! Mircea shouted with almost crazed desperation.
I’m not running! I shouted back, steeling myself. If I can’t save him, at least I’ll know I died trying.
The truth of that gave me comfort even amidst the clawing, awful pain that started along the entire back of me. I was as close to Vlad as I could get, yet it must not be enough, and he’d just started with this new wave of flames. By the end of this, I’d be finished, and even if I changed my mind, which I hadn’t, it was now too late to run.
At least I also had the satisfaction of knowing that I was taking Mircea down with me. In fact, I was almost sorry that Mircea couldn’t see my pained grin because my face was buried in Vlad’s chest as I hugged him for the last time.
Bet you’re regretting casting that spell on me now, aren’t you? I thought with the dark amusement of the condemned.
Fine. You insist on staying? Then I refuse to let Vlad kill me through secondhand means, Mircea snarled, his former frightened tone gone. If I am to die by his hand, he will damn well show me the respect I am due by killing me in person! Now listen to me, you ignorant amateur. Magic this powerful can’t be broken, but it CAN be tricked into ceasing on its own. If your voltage makes you immune to grave magic, what you need to do is disrupt the grave magic in Vlad with your electricity while you reach his mind to tell him that what he’s seeing isn’t real.
You think I haven’t tried that? I shot back because answering him was better than focusing on the appalling pain. Those flames were increasing, engulfing my legs, back, and head.
Don’t try, do, Mircea stressed, the word ending on a scream as that pain ripped through him, too. The voltage won’t make Vlad immune as it does with you, but it should give you a brief window. Use that window to reach his mind and make him see you.
Another scream caused Mircea to stop speaking, then he went on in a rush.
Once Vlad’s mind sees you instead of the memory from his curse, the curse will consider itself completed and stop. If you didn’t doubt yourself so much, you could have already finished this because you are more than powerful enough to reach him!
If I wouldn’t have been in agony, I would have laughed. Now you suddenly believe in me?
Another burst of fire claimed both our attention. I tried to push my way through it by talking to Vlad and focusing on the voltage that I kept pushing into him, but it kept growing, until it was all I could do not to run out of sheer, mindless panic.
Your abilities have saved you more times than I ever believed they could, Mircea said, pain making his voice a ragged roar. You linked to me through this spell despite that requiring the skill level of a powerful sorceress, not a second-rate psychic. I don’t know how you have such power, but you DO—
Our combined screams cut him off as the flames kept eating through my skin faster than I could heal. The pain was horrific, all-consuming, and relentless, until I was convulsing against Vlad and barely able to think. Yet Mircea’s voice still reached me because it was a roar of defiance.
You do HAVE the power, Leila! Now, for the sake of both our miserable lives, stop doubting yourself and fucking use it!
I latched on to Mircea’s confidence because my repeated failures had drained away all of mine. Then I tried to push past the crippling, madness-inducing agony to try one last time since I had done all those other things and it might not be too late to do this, too!
With the last bit of strength and coherence I had, I slapped my burning hands onto Vlad’s face and forced back the screams that continued to rip from my throat. Instead, I used my mind to release the agony that caused everything in my body to viciously contort as my muscles began what I knew to be death contractions.
I’m here, I’m here, I shouted with my thoughts instead of my voice. None of what you’re seeing is real! It’s the spell, and you need to stop burning everything. You’re burning me, too, so put out the fire, Vlad! Put it out, out, out, out, OUT!
My thoughts lost cohesion at the next flash of fire. It burned me right through to my bones, and I fell back, my charred legs snapping beneath me. For a torturous moment that seemed to stretch into forever, all I knew was pain, and I could no longer see the fire because my vision had gone black.
Then, as if coming out of a nightmare, I heard my name and felt the unbelievable relief of something warm, not agonizing, running over my body.
“Come on, Leila, you need to heal. Heal, my darling, heal, please!” an anguished voice bellowed.
I opened my eyes. Vlad’s face was a blur from either the soot in my gaze or my eyes still healing, yet when that haze finally cleared after I kept blinking, I realized that he was staring at me and seeing me, not just looking through me. That, plus not being on fire anymore, let me know that the spell’s grip on him had finally ceased.
“You said please,” I whispered, smiling when his relief flooded my emotions with the force of a thousand dams breaking. “I’m never going to let you live that down.”
Chapter 41
Vlad wouldn’t let go of my hand. Not when he stripped off his shirt to cover me because my clothes had burned off, and not when Marty, Maximus, and Mencheres all enveloped me in hugs after they ran into the room, knowing from the sudden lack of fire that my efforts had succeeded.
“You are remarkable,” Mencheres said, brushing my other hand with a formal kiss after he released me from his embrace.
“I had help,” I replied, still feeling stunned by it all.
Mircea, who had been the reason behind the countless awful things that had plagued both Vlad and me this past year, had also been instrumental in saving us. Yes, he’d done it because it had saved his own skin, too, but the fact remained that I owed my life and Vlad’s life to him. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, so for now, I didn’t want to dwell on it.
Ian was the only one who didn’t give me a celebratory hug. Instead, he stared at me, a smile ghosting across his lips. “Seems that next time, I’ll know to bet on the Chihuahua instead of the werewolf.”
“Yeah? Well, ‘though she be but little, she is fierce,’” I quoted with an answering, if much wearier, smile.
Ian laughed, but the look he gave me was appraising, as if he were mentally ranking me into a whole new category.
“More authorities have arrived,” Mencheres unnecessarily noted as a new wail of sirens joined the other noises outside the warehouse. “You should all leave. The necromancer needs to be secured before the mirror spell wears off. I will stay behind to reinforce the story that a performing band’s faulty pyrotechnic display caused this blaze.”
I was all too happy to get out of here, so he didn’t need to tell me twice. When we reached the other room, Maximus scooped up the necromancer and hoisted him over his shoulder as if he were a sack of potatoes. As soon as we stepped outside, a blast of freezing wind cut through the thin shirt I was wearing and felt like it formed ice crystals on my newly bald head. I shivered even as the irony struck me. How strange to be cold now when mere minutes ago, I’d been burning to death.
Vlad felt my shiver and stopped the police officer nearest us, green-eyeing him into removing his coat.
“Don’t, he needs that,” I protested.
“He’ll get another one,” Vlad said shortly.
From his intractable stare, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. After an apologetic glance at the cop, I put the coat on. It might be frigid out, but this place was now crawling with authorities, ambulances, and fire trucks, so there were plenty of blankets and additional coats for him. Most of the rescue workers spoke Russian or Polish, but from the few snatches of English I caught, they were dumbfounded that the huge warehouse fire had been extinguished without a drop of water being used.
Mencheres had his work cut out for him explaining that one.
We piled into both cars since there was no way all of us could fit into one. We were leaving Mencheres without a ride, but he could either mesmerize someone to drive him back or he could simply fly, which would probably be quicker. Maximus rode with Vlad and me, taking the driver’s seat out of habit, no doubt. Vlad pulled me tight against him when we settled into the backseat. The necromancer was unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of Ian and Marty’s car, and we drove behind them to monitor the trunk in the very unlikely event that the spell broke early and he tried to escape.
The first twenty minutes of the drive passed in absolute silence. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, then made sure not to look again. Every single strand of hair on my head had been burned off, and I was so covered in soot; I looked as if I’d dived into a pool of it on purpose.
Mencheres knows a hair-growing spell, I reminded myself. This was the second time this year that I’d need to use one. Between the tortures, the gas line explosion, the skinning, getting shot, and now this, if my body could talk, it would probably tell me it wanted a divorce.
Oddly, I wasn’t devastated over this loss the way I had been after Szilagyi’s henchman had cut all my skin off. Maybe it’s because this had been my choice versus someone’s cruel whim. In fact, Vlad was probably more upset over it than I was. Not that I could tell from his emotions. He’d concealed them behind the wall he’d dropped into place as soon as the rest of the guys had come into the warehouse.
I didn’t press him to talk. For one, we had an audience, and for another, it might be too soon. I could only imagine how traumatizing it must have been to come out of the horrible memory loop only to find me nearly burned to death at his feet by his own fire.
And it only would have taken a few more moments of my being exposed to that fire before I would have been all the way burned to death. If Mircea hadn’t told me to trick the spell into thinking that it was completed by psychically invading Vlad’s mind and interrupting the loop—
“Mircea,” I said out loud, suddenly sitting straight up instead of leaning against Vlad. “He hasn’t contacted me since we came out of this.”
Vlad gave me an inscrutable look. “Why would he?”
To rub it in that he had helped to save us, to insult me for not thinking up the secret of disrupting the spell earlier, to complain about getting repeatedly torched . . . “To make sure that we’d succeeded in keeping one of the necromancers alive,” I said, going with the most pertinent reason.
Another unreadable look. “Why would he know we’d attacked them tonight?”
“Come on, you think he wouldn’t reach out to me to find out why he was being burned within an inch of his life?” His expression clouded, and I was instantly sorry I’d reminded him of that. “I mean, um—”
“Leila.” Now the look Vlad gave me was jaded, even though his feelings briefly burst their walls to scald me with a geyser of regret. “There’s no glossing over what I did.”
“What the spell did,” I instantly corrected.
His mouth tightened as another, darker emotion shadowed his face, yet when he spoke, his tone was deceptively light. “Of course. Now tell me, did the necromancer who cast it escape?”
A swell of deep satisfaction filled me at the memory of her head rolling down the embankment. “No. I killed her.”
His shields slipped again and I was puzzled by the relief that flowed through our connection before his walls went back up. Gladness I could understand. Hell, if I were Vlad, I’d want to dance on her bones for trapping me in that nightmarish spell. But why would he be relieved by her death? He had to know that killing her hadn’t worked to stop the spell.
Or maybe, he didn’t know that. All he knew since he came out of the spell was that at some point, he’d almost burned me to death. Maybe he didn’t remember how it had been broken, or more accurately, how it had been tricked into stopping itself.
I’d tell him all that later. Right now, we had more important things to focus on.
“I’m going to link to Mircea and make sure he’s still where he was before. It would suck if we went through all this, only to find out that he’d been moved to a new location that our captive doesn’t know.”
I raked my palm across my fangs, cutting a deep line into my skin. As the blood welled, I focused on thoughts of Mircea, summoning his face in my mind and blocking out thoughts of everything else.
Nothing. I frowned, cutting myself again after that wound healed. No telltale haze indicated my surroundings falling away, no thread appeared in my mind so I could pull on it and find him on the other end . . . there was absolutely nothing. It was if my psychic abilities suddenly had an “Out to Lunch” sign on them.
Vlad stopped me by catching my hand when I was about to cut my palm to try again. “What’s wrong?”
“I must be tired,” I muttered. “Or maybe, I maxed out my abilities before because I can’t seem to reach him—hey!”
I tried to snatch my hand back as his suddenly caught fire. He held on, his mouth tightening when a fear-driven current surged into him in response. I hadn’t thought I’d been affected by what had happened, but apparently, I was now afraid of fire. How ironic, considering who I was married to—
“I’m not burning,” I said in surprise, feeling no pain as the flames caressed my skin instead of scorching it. “Why?”
“I must have coated you in my aura when I was dousing the flames on you. I didn’t intend to do it, but it’s not as if I were thinking clearly at the time.”
“Fuck,” I said with feeling.
Now I wasn’t only rendered fireproof; I was also rendered psychically impotent! “You mean we’re stuck with hoping nothing’s changed with Mircea’s location?”
Then I felt instantly guilty for being so vehement over my dismay. “I mean, it’s not your fault, of course—”
“Stop worrying about me,” he cut me off, and his eyes flashed green. “I will carry pain over tonight whether you wish me to or not. Yet it will not break me, Leila, so you need not walk on eggshells around the topic. I am stronger than what I feel, and more than that, it is my pain. Don’t try to protect me from it.”
“I can’t do that,” I said with naked frust
ration. “I understand what you’re saying. I do, and you’re right. You’re not some fragile little thing that needs coddling, but just like you couldn’t stop yourself from overreacting and coating me in your aura before, I can’t see you in pain and not try to ease it. It doesn’t mean that I think you’re less of a badass vampire or even less of a man. It means that I love you.”
He let out a rough sound even as he kissed me. “Even if I hadn’t known that before,” he said against my lips, “I would certainly know it after tonight.”
When his mouth finally left mine, he pulled away so he could stare into my eyes. He didn’t speak, but he dropped his shields, and his naked, unguarded emotions flooded into me. At once, I felt drowned by his love, scalded by his regret, humbled by his pride, and overwhelmed by his determination to keep me safe at any cost. Those emotions grew until tears began to trickle down my cheeks, and I held his face while I tried to find the right words to tell him that I loved him in the same recklessly fierce way.
“I wish you could feel me like I feel you,” I whispered, finally giving up because words would never be adequate to convey what he meant to me. “Then you’d know I would go through tonight all over again, a thousand times if I had to, if it meant being in your arms like this.”
The faintest smile curled his mouth and deeper, richer swaths of emotions began sliding through mine. “I don’t need to feel you to know it, Leila,” he murmured, leaning forward until his forehead touched mine. “Every day, I see the truth of it in your eyes.”
Chapter 42
I should have guessed that there was more to the ramshackle farmhouse than appearances first suggested. Yes, the exterior frame looked held together by frozen termites and I wouldn’t dare walk on the second floor for fear of falling through the ceiling. But, as I had found out earlier, it had a fully furnished, two-bedroom, very stocked basement. Even better, the frozen ground all around it acted as a natural, reinforced barrier.