Marie’s knuckles shone through her skin as she gripped her chair as tightly as I had a few minutes ago.
“If this is true and you don’t trust my unbound word that I am not the necromancer, why haven’t you tried to kill me?”
Vlad’s eyes changed from copper to pure emerald green. “Because while I will risk a war with your people if you are, there’s no need to start one if you’re not.”
Marie leaned back, her expression icy even as a smile played about her lips. “I, too, would rather keep you as an adversary than make you or your allies my enemy.”
With that, she dragged her palm across her ring, and a tiny point I hadn’t noticed before scored a line in her flesh.
“I swear by my blood that I am not the necromancer you seek,” she said as the red drops fell. “If my words are a lie, may my own blood turn against me as witness to my deceit.”
I almost sucked in a breath, waiting. What would such a thing as someone’s blood turning against them look like, anyway? Vlad must’ve had an idea, because after a tense few moments, he smiled, hoisting his glass and taking a sip as if fire, deadly ghosts, and threats hadn’t occurred between his first taste of wine and his last one. I gave him a sharp look, as if to say, Does this mean we’re done threatening to kill her?
His teeth flashed in a grin that I translated as For now.
I finally sat down, yet unease had me sending more currents into my right hand, which now sparked like a child’s firework sprinkler. Marie glanced at it with more curiosity than concern.
“They say you can discern someone’s worst sin with a single touch, plus read the past and find people in the present through objects they’ve handled. Is that true?”
“Most of the time,” I said in a guarded tone.
Marie held out her hand in challenge. “Then tell me mine.”
If I refused, it wouldn’t go over well since Vlad had forced Marie to take a blood oath with magical consequences. Good thing he hadn’t coated me in his aura this morning or I wouldn’t be able to do anything except touch her and guess. I didn’t want to know the Voodoo Queen’s worst sin, but I took her hand anyway. She jerked from the voltage the contact released into her despite my trying to hold it back. Guess I hadn’t tried hard enough. Moments later, I wasn’t worried about how I’d electrocuted her.
I was in the hidden cellar beneath my house, glaring at the woman who was cradling her baby while desperately trying to shush it. I’d told her to leave the child upstairs, where it could have been explained as one of the servants’ children, but she’d snuck it down here instead. When the child’s whimper became louder, one of the runaway slaves moaned.
“They gonna hear us,” she whispered. “They gonna kill us!”
“Shh!” I hissed, but she was right.
This patrol was known for their brutality, and the slaves huddled in the small, dank cellar beneath my house had all fled after a plantation rebellion had left several of their white masters dead. No one would care about the cruelties the slaves had endured before the uprising, or whether or not these runaways had actually participated in the killings. No, their blood would flow because they had been in the vicinity when white blood was spilled, and whoever died fast would be considered lucky.
The child whimpered again and sucked in a breath as if filling up for a full-fledged wail. I looked at the terrified people I’d sworn to protect, several of whom were children, too. All were doomed once that baby’s wail reached the patrol’s ears, and in that single, frozen second, I made my choice.
I had been born free. They hadn’t, and they deserved the same chances I’d had. I forced back the sob that tried to claw out of my throat as I ran toward the baby. If my life would be the only one lost, I’d gladly let the child’s forthcoming squall lead the patrol here. But if they found us, everyone would die . . . unless I damned myself by ensuring that all except one lived. My heart felt like it exploded from anguish when I cut off the burgeoning cry the baby made by clamping my hand over the child’s mouth . . .
I slammed back into the present, the charred walls of the tomb replacing the packed earth of the underground cellar where Marie had hidden the runaway slaves. I was horrified by what I’d relived even as my heart broke, still feeling the same pain Marie had felt when she did that awful, unimaginable act because she’d lived in an awful, unimaginable time when people of her color didn’t even have the right to live, let alone have any expectation of hope, justice, or mercy.
“What did you see?” Her voice vibrated with command.
I didn’t repeat her terrible act. Instead, I said the name she’d branded her soul with so she’d never forget the crime that had saved twenty-two lives by forever silencing one.
“Louise,” I whispered.
She flinched at the baby’s name, the pain in her gaze echoing the one I felt from the remainder of my link to her worst sin. Then, shockingly, her demeanor changed from a woman haunted by her past to a gracious Southern hostess again.
“Well. Since your abilities are real, it seems we each have something the other wants, don’t we, Tepesh?”
Vlad’s smile was filled with so much deadly intent; I found myself edging away out of pure primal instinct.
“Yes, we do. You can start by giving me the names of sorcerers strong enough to dabble in necromancy, and I’ll finish by having Leila psychically read anyone whose darkest secret you simply must know.”
Chapter 28
When Jacques closed the gates of the cemetery behind us, I was still overwhelmed. Marie had taken a rain check on having me read people for her, but that didn’t make me feel better. If she wanted time to think about who she was selecting, then she was really going for the gold, and who knew what the repercussions of that would be? Still, she’d given us valuable information, and if we didn’t defeat Szilagyi and get this curse off me, we wouldn’t be around to worry about owing Marie a future debt.
We were halfway back to our hotel before I could form questions about the most basic parts of tonight’s visit. “Why didn’t you tell me before we went that you thought Marie might be the necromancer who cast the spell on me?”
Vlad glanced at me with amusement. “Because you’re even worse at hiding your emotions than you are at lying.”
True, but . . . “If you suspected her, why bring me with you?”
“Backup,” he stated. At my questioning expression, he went on. “When Marie grants a meeting, she has specific terms. Only the person requesting it may attend, and that person is guaranteed safe passage to and from the meeting, which is why I didn’t bring any of my guards. If, however, Marie was the necromancer, then I was going to kill her, but to do so, I needed you. As my wife, you are the only person allowed to go anywhere that I do, and also the only person who could have withstood Marie.”
“Me? You’re the one who could kill her in one-point-eight seconds. All I did was stand there and make a light show out of my hand.”
He smiled slyly. “I can kill her that quickly now, since we shook hands to conclude our meeting, but before that, I’d never touched her.”
I stared at him, some part urging me to close my gaping mouth, but the other too stunned to care.
“You lied to her?” I finally got out.
He shrugged. “I inferred. She didn’t remember that I’d met her before with Gregor when she was human, which was true. However, I didn’t touch her. I am very particular about that, as you know, though it’s a fortunate for us that she does not.”
“That’s not inferring, that’s bluffing!”
His grin was almost feral. “About touching her? Yes. About killing her? No. If she’d cast that spell, I would have made it across the room to burn her, Remnant attack or no Remnant attack. On the slight chance that I couldn’t, you were there.”
The notion almost had me sputtering. “If you couldn’t withstand a Remnant attack long enough to torch her, I’d have no chance against them!”
He ran his hand down my arm, tracing the exa
ct path where my old scar from the power line accident would have been.
“Cat can’t control Remnants the way Marie can,” he said, a lift of his brow implying, amateurs, what are you going to do? “Plus, the abilities she absorbs are temporary, but she’s clever, so she thought up a way to keep her grave power, if she needed it in the future. Cat withdrew several vials of her own blood after she drank from Marie and stored them away. When she agreed to help me, she had me swallow one of those vials.”
“Why? You can’t absorb abilities.” Or had he been concealing something else from me, too?
His mouth curled. “No, but their summoner is the only person they won’t attack, unless held back by powers Cat hasn’t mastered yet. When I drank blood containing grave power, the Remnants were tricked into thinking I was one of their summoners, too. That’s why they didn’t attack me when I came for you.”
Wow. At the time, I’d thought that Cat must have been keeping them off us—“Wait, then why didn’t they attack me?”
He continued to stroke my arm. “At first, I was so grateful to find you alive that I didn’t pause to wonder. Later, the answer seemed simple: you are scorched earth to them.”
I didn’t understand. Then, I remembered Vlad’s cruelly satisfied comment as he watched the Remnants tear into Szilagyi’s guards. They feed from energy and pain. Ever since my power line accident, I’d had energy running all through me, yet it wasn’t normal, organic energy. It was pure, electrified voltage, and apparently, the Remnants wanted no part of it.
“That’s why I was your backup.” I was stunned and admiring at the same time. “If Marie had called your bluff, the Remnants would’ve swarmed you but not me, and Marie wouldn’t have expected that. Without her best weapon, I could have cut her down with my whip or forced her into contact with you. Either way, she’d be dead.”
His expression was cold, yet his touch was anything but. “Yes. I trusted you with my life, Leila, and there is only one other person in this world of whom that statement is true.”
Now I really felt humbled. He hadn’t just trusted me with his life, which was incredible enough. He had also suppressed his fifteenth-century tendency to lock me away at the first sign of danger. Instead, he’d treated me as an equal by believing that both my abilities and my resolve would prove sufficient for the challenge.
Because words wouldn’t nearly be enough to describe what that meant to me, I kissed him, trying to tell him with my lips and the arms I wrapped around him that I loved him more than anything in the world. His mouth moved over mine with an intensity that rivaled words, too, but he didn’t need them. He dropped his shields and let his emotions spill over mine. The effect weakened my knees while causing my grip to tighten around him as if a thousand-foot chasm had opened up beneath me.
He broke the kiss far too soon, his gaze wary as he glanced around. It was barely eight p.m., so the French Quarter was filled with people, some of whom would be partying until dawn. Most of them felt human to me, but with the crowds, I couldn’t be sure.
“Szilagyi would be foolish to attack in the heart of Marie’s territory since she’d consider that an assault against her as well, but he’s surprised me before,” he muttered. “Come. We still have several things to acquire before we leave.”
His kiss had roused my body and melted my mind, but at that, I snapped back to mental attention.
“Right, and thanks to the information Marie gave us, we’re now in the spell-casting and necromancer-hunting business.”
A passerby would have been charmed by his quick smile. I, however, recognized the danger it represented, as if rivulets of invisible blood dripped from his mouth.
“We’re not the only ones who can’t report the use of magic to the Law Guardians. After everything Szilagyi has done, it’s time we repay him in kind.”
I expected the spell-ingredient treasure hunt, which consisted of Vlad and me going to various parts of the city to get items that on the surface seemed innocuous, but were intended to magically set Szilagyi back on his ass. That part didn’t take long since Marie had given us an equivalent of a shopping list plus addresses of where to procure each specific item. What I didn’t expect was where we went next.
The hospice facility looked like a smaller, prettier version of a hospital. Inside, beneath the heavy scent of air fresheners, disinfectants, and cleaning solvents, it smelled of grief and death more than the cemetery we’d met Marie in.
“Why are we here?” I whispered to Vlad.
“Recruitment,” he replied without bothering to lower his voice. “Szilagyi killed dozens of my people and more will fall before this is over. I can’t hold off on replenishing my numbers, and while that includes changing over all the humans I’d been grooming, I also need people Szilagyi won’t recognize as being affiliated with me.” Then, to the receptionist, he said, “Tell me if you have any male patients between the ages of twenty and fifty.”
Since his eyes had been lit up, she didn’t ask any unnecessary questions. Just checked the computer and then wrote out names and room numbers on a sticky note before passing it over.
Vlad took it, striding to the nearest room. I followed, still a little surprised by where we were, if not by what we were doing. When I thought of Vlad selecting people to join his line, I never expected him to look in places like this.
The first patient was a man who appeared to be in his early thirties, but whose body had aged from the cancer I could smell before we cleared the threshold. Vlad took one look at the pictures around his bedside showing a much healthier version of the man with his wife and children, then walked out.
“Not this guy?” I asked, with a heavy pang as I glanced back at the sleeping man.
“Too many entanglements,” he said, holding up a hand at my expression. “What I’m offering is not a way back to their former lives. It’s risk, frequent loneliness, and permanent removal from everyone they know. That means I don’t choose fathers, or forcing them to abandon their families would make me even crueler than my reputation paints me to be.”
“But can’t we . . . do something for him?” I said, hanging back.
Vlad sighed. “Even if you distributed pints of your blood to every person here, in their condition, you’d only be adding weeks or months to their lives. Not saving them, as you want to. We’re vampires, not God. We can only take a few, solitary people that the world has given up on and offer them another choice.”
The coldly logical part of me accepted this even as the rest of me ached for the people we saw, both in this facility and the other three we visited. Out of the four hospices, Vlad found two people that matched his requirements, and out of those, only one wanted what he offered. To that man, Vlad gave a mouthful of his blood before instructing him to wait there until one of his people picked him up. The other got a new memory where he was never visited by strangers who broke the news that vampires were real, let alone the offer to become one.
The next places we went to were homeless shelters, where Vlad used his mind-reading abilities to narrow down recruits. He had a bigger harvest from those stops, eventually netting five guys who were left with instructions to wait for retrieval by Vlad’s guards later. Finally, he took me to the last place I expected to look for potential new members of his line.
Death Row.
Chapter 29
The Louisiana State Penitentiary was a huge complex bordered on three sides by the Mississippi River. With guards patrolling on horseback and an entrance that resembled a visitors’ welcome center, it looked more like a working ranch than a prison, if you ignored the high fences with layers of razor wire coiled around the tops.
Unlike the other places, Vlad was here for one specific person. “Clergy to see Darryl Meadows,” he told the guard, the green in his gaze circumventing any requests for identification or questions since Vlad came off as anything but pious.
“Who’s Darryl Meadows?” I asked as we drove to the section of the large compound that housed the Death Row inma
tes.
“Possibly an innocent man,” Vlad replied. “He was imprisoned over twenty years ago on scant evidence and questionable testimony, but since all forensic evidence was lost, he can’t request DNA testing to prove his innocence.”
“You sound like you know a lot about him.”
“I saw a documentary on the death penalty that mentioned him, among other inmates.” At my raised brows, he continued almost defensively, “It was late, you were asleep, and there was nothing else on.”
It was such a normal, human complaint that I laughed, imagining Vlad flipping through channels while muttering under his breath about the lack of decent viewing options. Then I added “secret documentary buff” to the list of things I knew about him. Like, for example, his love of vampire movies. His hatred of Dracula retellings aside, he’d once told me that the varied portrayals of vampirism in film amused him to no end.
“Well, it’s easy enough to find out if Darryl is innocent,” I said, holding up my right hand.
“Yes,” Vlad said, his gaze glinting. “If he is, reading his mind will reveal if decades of unjust imprisonment have ruined him, or hardened him into the kind of man I’m looking for.”
We needed more mind control to get through the additional security checkpoints before we were face-to-face with Darryl Meadows, a lean, handsome African-American man whose hazelnut brown gaze regarded us with suspicion when the guard left him alone in the room with us. Some mind control by Vlad ensured our privacy, plus he’d mesmerized the officers who monitored the video feed from the room. Thus, I didn’t hesitate to break the first rule of visitation by reaching over the metal table and touching one of Darryl’s manacled hands.
“He didn’t do it,” I said a few minutes later when I was back in my own mind. Darryl’s worst sin had been not helping a fellow inmate when the man was jumped and murdered, but since a guard had participated in the crime, I couldn’t blame him.