Into the Fire

  Before they began dealing with the still-unconscious necromancer, all the guys took off the feminine clubbing outfits they were wearing and put on clothes that protected against the frozen atmosphere. I was waiting to change until I took a shower, but first, I wanted to make sure I didn’t need to whip out the mirror to re-up on the spell. I wasn’t sure if the instructions Leotie had left me were set with the same six-hour time frame that she’d used to keep all of us trapped in the mirror spell.

  After changing, Vlad spent about five minutes texting who I assumed was Mencheres since who else would he urgently need to talk with right now? Finally, we carried the necromancer down into the basement’s cellar since that room was surrounded on all sides with the hard, packed earth.

  I expected the chains that Vlad and Maximus began to restrain the necromancer with, but I was surprised when Vlad began to melt some silver knives he’d also brought down here with him.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “So I can do this,” he replied, and wedged the necromancer’s mouth open. Then he poured the now-liquidized silver down the vampire’s throat.

  I couldn’t stop my wince as I imagined how much it would hurt to have a belly full of slowly-hardening silver. If the spell wasn’t still rendering the vampire into a comatose state, he’d be going nuts right now. As it was, he shuddered, his body registering the pain even if his mind was numbed to it.

  Then Vlad heated up another handful of silver knives. He didn’t melt them into liquid this time, but left their pointy tips intact while molding their handles and over half their blades into something that looked like a grisly version of one of the snowballs he’d made today. Once the spherelike mass had hardened, he shoved it into the necromancer’s mouth, where the whole brutal bundle now doubled as a spiked silver ball gag.

  “Now we won’t have to concern ourselves with him attempting any spells once he wakes up,” Vlad said.

  I was actually starting to feel a little sorry for the necromancer. Sure, he’d tried to kill us and we intended to kill him as soon as we found out what he knew, but I wasn’t comfortable with torture.

  Ian, however, regarded Vlad’s handiwork with his usual twisted mentality. “Blimey, if his pipes still worked, he’d be shitting silver for a week.”

  “Now bleed him,” Vlad told Maximus, ignoring that.

  Maximus took a spare silver knife and then sliced open every artery the vampire had and kept reopening them after they healed. If he’d had anything resembling a normal heartbeat, blood would have been gushing out from the necromancer. Instead, slow red drips began to pool onto the floor. This was to further weaken him once the mirror spell broke, and that might make the difference between him escaping or not. Still, I’d seen enough.

  “I’m going upstairs to get some fresh air,” I muttered.

  Vlad gave me a look I couldn’t read, then said, “I’ll be finished here soon. Ian, stay with her.”

  I didn’t remind him that Marty was also here, or that “here” was in the middle of snowy nowhere. Or mention the fact that earlier, Vlad himself had set up cameras all around the perimeter to make sure that no one snuck up on us. We’d all had a stressful night and all our nerves were stretched. If it made Vlad feel better to have two vampires tasked with keeping me safe in addition to all the above, so be it.

  However, some things I was going to do alone. When we left the cellar and entered the main room of the basement, I turned to Ian and said, “I’m taking a shower to wash this soot off, so you can stand down until I’m done.”

  He didn’t smirk, wink, or offer to help, which I would have expected. Instead, he shrugged. “I’ll stay outside the door.”

  I snorted. “You don’t have to take Vlad’s instructions that literally. Besides, Marty’s watching the perimeter and our only interior hostile is still spellbound.”

  “If he wakes up early, you’re the one who trapped him, so you’re the one he’ll most want to kill,” Ian pointed out. “Besides, I’m not doing it for Tepesh,” he added, an eye roll indicating Vlad back in the cellar. “You surprised me tonight. Very few people do that, so I tend to respect the ones who do, and what I respect, I also willingly protect.”

  He seemed to be sincere, but that was something I hadn’t seen from Ian before. “You respect me, but not Vlad?”

  Now it was his turn to snort. “I said I respect people who surprise me. Your husband’s brutality, ruthlessness, and cunning are not surprising. They’re what I expect from him.”

  “There’s more to Vlad than that,” I said quietly.

  He met my gaze with a frankness that continued to throw me because it was so unusual coming from him. “There’s more to all of us. Yet most times, we still only see what we expect to see.”

  Then his tone brightened and his expression changed into that arch, part-mocking, part-lecherous one I was used to.

  “Now, if you insist that I treat you like the luscious little morsel you are, I’m all too happy to oblige—”

  “I’ll stick with respect,” I interrupted.

  He winked. There was the Ian I knew. “Your loss, poppet.”

  I took my time in the shower, telling myself that I kept the water cold because there were six of us and I shouldn’t be greedy by taking all the hot water.

  Right, that’s why you’re doing it, my inner voice mocked. It’s totally not because you’re more affected by nearly burning to death than you’re letting on, to the point where you don’t want to feel anything hot touching you.

  I hated that bitch, but the few times that she was right, she was really right.

  Okay, so I might be dealing with some mild post-traumatic stress after what had happened tonight. Admitting that didn’t mean I was weak; it meant that I was strong enough to own my true feelings, even my traumatized ones. This new issue might end up causing me to stumble or fall a few times, but it wouldn’t break me. And even if it did, I wouldn’t stay broken forever. I’d heal.

  Until then, I didn’t need to indulge in an imaginary argument with my hated inner voice. I needed a real conversation with the necromancer who still hadn’t popped up in my mind to either take a bow or tell me that he was okay.

  Mircea had to have survived. I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t. So why was he suddenly being so silent?

  “Someone’s coming,” I heard Marty shout through the video feed that fed in from the exterior cameras.

  I threw a sweater and jogging pants on and left the bathroom. Ian was already on his way up the stairs, a silver knife in each hand. I grabbed one from our weapons cache in the main room and called out toward the cellar, “Vlad, company!”

  “I heard,” he replied, saying, “You know what to do,” to Maximus before they both swept out of the cellar.

  “You want me to stay and watch him?” I asked, surprised that they were leaving the necromancer unattended.

  Vlad grabbed my hand. “He’s fine. Come with me.”

  Now I was really surprised. I’d expected him to insist that I stay below in the basement, not half drag me up the stairs with him to meet whoever this new threat might be. Once we reached the main level, the holes in the house’s frame revealed that a car was headed toward the farmhouse.

  No one would accidentally stumble across this place. Vlad had chosen it for its remoteness. I started willing electricity into my hand. My psychic powers might be smothered by Vlad’s aura, but my voltage worked just fine.

  “I can see the driver . . . it’s Mencheres!” Marty called out.

  I relaxed and stop charging my hand. Ian tucked his knives into his back pocket. “That was fast,” he commented.

  True, but with his mind-manipulation skills, I supposed it wouldn’t take long for Mencheres to mesmerize a bunch of cops and fireman into believing his story. Besides, a pyrotechnic display gone wrong was pretty close to the truth, anyway.

  Mencheres pulled up to the front of the house and got out. In addition to compelling someone to give him a car, he also must have green-ey
ed someone into giving him a change of clothes. Now, instead of his former female club gear, he wore black pants, a dark green sweater, and a long black coat.

  “Mencheres,” Vlad said, walking up to him. Then, he began to stroke his face in a public display of tenderness that he usually reserved for me. “I need you to know that I am sorry.”

  “For what?” Mencheres said, clasping Vlad’s hand and squeezing it with equal affection.

  “For this,” Vlad said softly.

  A loud pop sounded, like what you’d hear if a balloon was burst by force instead of by a pinprick. But there was no balloon. Instead, I watched with stunned disbelief as Mencheres’s head exploded right off his shoulders.

  Chapter 43

  “NO!”

  Ian’s agonized shout coincided with Maximus grabbing him from behind. I hadn’t noticed him coming up on Ian, but he must have, and now he bear-hugged Ian with brute force.

  My mouth opened and closed, but no words came. I could only stare in mind-numbing shock as Vlad’s now-flaming hands slowly lowered to his sides at the same pace that Mencheres’s headless body crumpled to the ground. Then Vlad knelt in the snow, the flames on his hands extinguishing as he picked up the largest, smoldering piece of what used to be Mencheres’s head and gently placed it next to his slowly withering body.

  “What the fuck?” Marty got out, his gaze swinging back and forth between them as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  That made two of us. My eyes registered that I’d just watched Vlad kill Mencheres, but my mind refused to accept it.

  “How could you?” Ian howled, struggling fiercely against Maximus. “He loved you!”

  “And I loved him.” Vlad’s voice rang out like a sword smashing against a shield. “Yet it wasn’t Samir’s name that Mircea’s captors burned into Leila’s flesh when they made their demand. It was Mencheres’s, and if I didn’t kill him, they were going to kill her.”

  But that . . . that’s . . . that . . . My mind sputtered like a car engine that wouldn’t turn over. Then, as if to make up for it, a slew of images and memories began to bombard me.

  The look on Vlad’s face when he first read that message. How he’d paused before saying that Samir was the target. The hurricane of rage and regret I’d felt from him before he shut me out. Mircea’s warning that we were both dead because Vlad would never agree to his captors’ demands. The female necromancer’s shock when Mencheres revealed who he was, and her strange accusation of “You lied to us, Impaler” afterward. Vlad’s insistence that we kill her no matter what, and his strange, fervent relief when I told him she was dead . . .

  That’s why he’d been so emphatic about our killing the female necromancer. She’d seen Vlad with Mencheres and reasoned that Vlad was partnering with Mencheres instead of carrying out their demands to kill him. If she’d lived, she would have no doubt repeated that revelation to Mircea’s captors.

  And my death would have probably followed.

  I sank into the snow because my legs refused to keep me upright anymore. “You loved him like a father.”

  “Yes.” One word that vibrated with the pain of six hundred years’ worth of memories. “But I love you more.”

  Maximus suddenly flew backward with such force that he smashed through the entirety of the house behind him and kept on going. I didn’t know how Ian managed to do that, and I became even more alarmed when Ian snatched one of his silver knives from his back pocket.

  “Don’t,” Vlad said in a deadly tone.

  “Oh, I’m not going to kill you,” Ian hissed, then to my disbelief, began stripping off his pants. “I’m going to let Mencheres do that.”

  Then Ian grabbed the side of his crotch and hacked something off.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped out at the same time that Ian roared, “Dagon, I summon you!”

  Vlad lifted his hands, fire breaking out over them—

  And everything froze. Not in the normal way where time felt relative because shock or fear caused everything to seemingly slow down. It froze as if this moment had been transformed into a living picture that I was somehow still a part of.

  Vlad stood statuelike about a dozen yards from me. His arms were still in mid-lift, and the fire that had been erupting from his hands didn’t even flicker. Instead, it now resembled pale orange and blue ribbons around his fingers. Marty was facing me, one foot off the ground as if he’d been in the process of leaping to my aid. Ian still had the knife in his hand and his pants down around his ankles. A gaping wound between his groin and the crease in his thigh showed where he had hacked off a large piece of flesh. Incredibly, some of the blood from the wound still hung in the air instead of splattering to the ground. Even the snowflakes that had been swirling moments ago were now in the same eerie state of suspended animation.

  I was the only one who seemed to be unaffected. I took a few steps forward to prove that I could still move of my own free will. Yep, it worked. This had to be the result of a spell, but why was I not frozen in place, too?

  A twig snapped, breaking the new, complete silence. I whirled, expecting to see Leotie since she was the only one who had been powerful enough to render all of us simultaneously helpless before. Instead, a tall, square-jawed man with champagne-blond hair cocked his head at me, his smile turning crooked as he looked me up and down.

  “And who are you, my pretty one?”

  “Who are you?” I countered, putting my right hand behind me while I filled it with as much electricity as I could.

  He laughed, tossing that light gold hair. “I’m Dagon, of course.”

  That’s right, Ian had shouted, Dagon, I summon you! right before everything had frozen. The word summon along with everything getting really weird and a guy showing up out of nowhere told me who the blond stranger was. I gave his Icelandic blue eyes a wary look. They weren’t red now, but I’d bet my electrified right arm that he was a demon.

  “You did this,” I said, a sharp nod indicating the artificially suspended world around us.

  He hopped forward with the kind of gaiety usually reserved for children. “Isn’t it beautiful? I bet you’ve often wished that you could hit a pause button on life. Behold”—he spun around in a blissful circle, his smile beaming—“paused.”

  Just as abruptly, that smile and his childlike glee vanished, and he became as menacing as a nightmare.

  “Yet as much as I enjoy this, it’s time to start the killing now,” he said, striding past me as he headed toward Vlad and the others.

  I snapped out the whip I’d been hiding, lashing it at him. Fear focused my aim and it followed my intended path, cutting right through the demon’s neck and coming out the other end.

  “Yes!” I shouted with an overwhelming sense of relief.

  But the stranger’s head didn’t fall off. Unbelievably, it stayed on. Then, to my complete and utter shock, Dagon turned around and gave me a chiding look.

  “Never celebrate unless your opponent is truly dead, and you must not know much about demons if you thought that could kill me. Decapitation doesn’t work on my kind.”

  “I—I can see that,” I managed, stunned into stuttering.

  He gave me a cheery grin. “I’ll overlook your rudeness this time, but here is your second lesson about demons: Don’t piss us off. Ian didn’t learn that lesson, which is why I’m going to kill him now. Don’t interrupt, or you’ll make me angry, and as I just taught you, you don’t want to do that.”

  So saying, he snapped his fingers, and Ian suddenly came to life. After a brief shiver as his eyes met the demon’s, he glanced down, then pulled up his pants in a nonchalant manner as he gave Dagon a one-handed wave.

  “I expected you to be prompt, and you didn’t disappoint.”

  “Oh, I’ve been waiting a long time for your warding tattoo to be damaged enough for me to find you.” Dagon’s easy tone was at odds with his truly murderous expression. “I don’t know why it appears as if you cut it off yourself, let alone why you summoned m
e, but no matter. I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

  “Killing is always fun, but I have an even more enjoyable offer,” Ian said, leaping back as Dagon swiped at him with a hand that had somehow morphed into a monsterish paw.

  “Nothing could be more enjoyable than your death,” Dagon growled in a voice that suddenly sounded more animalistic than human.

  Ian continued to leap out of the way while wagging his finger at Dagon. “Haste makes waste. Why kill me only once when you can do it countless times over the course of eternity?”

  Dagon stopped in the middle of his latest cat-playing-with-a-mouse charge. His hand changed back to normal, and he jerked it upward. At once, Ian was propelled forward as if hauled by a tractor beam.

  “You’re offering me your soul?” Dagon asked, sounding both surprised and intrigued.

  “Not offering, bargaining,” Ian corrected, with a rakish smile that was completely out of place for the topic. “Nothing this corrupt should be given away for free.”

  “Ian, don’t,” I said with a gasp.

  “Shut her up, will you?” Ian said in a casual tone. “Don’t know why you animated her in the first place.”

  The demon shrugged. “I didn’t. This power doesn’t work on one of our own, however far removed the connection.”

  “One of your own? I’m not a demon,” I said, aghast.

  Ian let out an impatient snort. “You did catch the part about all magic originating from demons and your being a trueborn witch, right? ‘Trueborn’ means exactly that: born of the originating line. What’s the originating line? Demons.”

  When put like that, it sounded obvious. However, I’d thought that demons had only taught magic to the first witches and warlocks, and the magic had somehow infused in them, similar to the legacy transfer. Yeah, it had infused, all right, just not the way I’d first realized.

  “Now that we’ve cleared that up, kindly stay out of this, Leila.” To Dagon, Ian said, “Her piece of shite husband killed my friend, but you have the power to undo that. Therefore, in exchange for making Mencheres alive again, I will give you my soul . . . after the usual waiting period, of course.”