Gretchen barged through the curtain moments later. “Tell your goon to back down, he won’t listen to me,” she said with a wave at Samir, who was right behind her.
The guard said something rapidly in Romanian, and I’d heard versions of the same thing enough before to know that Samir was asking permission to bodily remove my sister.
“Leave her; she’s fine,” I told him.
Samir hesitated a moment before bowing to me, then going back behind the curtain.
“What happened with Dad?” Gretchen asked at once. “Did you two fight? He looked upset, and he was wiping his face.”
“No. We didn’t fight, although Vlad might have been a little rough on him,” I summarized.
He gave me a sardonic look. “Ask any of my former prisoners if that resembles what I do when I’m being ‘a little rough.’”
“Just because you didn’t torture him doesn’t mean you weren’t rough, but I know why you did it.” I threaded my fingers through his hair. “Thank you for trying to protect me.”
The barest smile touched his mouth. “I prefer simply killing people who hurt you. Much less complicated that way.”
“Then you showed a lot of restraint,” I said, smiling back because I knew that my dad had been in no danger. “And because I haven’t told you this nearly enough, I love you.”
His arms encircled me and he bent his head, but before his lips brushed mine, my sister’s voice rang out.
“In case Leila hasn’t made it clear, you’re not allowed to kill my dad,” Gretchen said, sounding aggravated.
I rolled my eyes as I turned to look at her. “You really think he’d do that?”
“If Dad pisses him off enough,” was Gretchen’s instant response. “Killing is kind of your husband’s thing, or haven’t you bothered to Google ‘Vlad Dracul’ yet?”
“At least you didn’t add an A at the end of the D-word, or I’d be talking him into not killing you next,” I said irreverently. At her widened gaze, I laughed.
“Gretchen! Vlad isn’t going to kill you, Dad, or anyone else who isn’t directly threatening him, okay? Stop believing everything you read online.”
“Notice how he isn’t agreeing to that,” she pointed out.
I looked at Vlad, whose brows rose in false innocence as if to say, Who, me?
“Vlad,” I drew out. “Come on. You’re scaring her.”
His mouth twitched. “Fear is the beginning of wisdom, and your sister needs to start somewhere.”
I made an exasperated noise. “He already promised not to hurt my family back when we started dating,” I told Gretchen. “You don’t have anything to worry about and neither does Dad.”
At that, her frown cleared. “Oh, okay. He’d do anything for you. That much I figured out.”
“Then you’re not as simple-minded as you appear,” Vlad murmured, but thankfully, Gretchen didn’t catch that. She was onto the next subject already.
“When do we land? The homeless guys you picked up ate all the food hours ago and I’m starving.”
As if on cue, the plane began to descend, dropping a little more abruptly than normal, but maybe we’d hit an air pocket.
“Looks like now—”
I didn’t finish my sentence. The plane went from a steeper-than-usual slant to a full nose dive, all so fast I would have slammed into the ceiling like Gretchen did, if not for Vlad’s grip on me. Gretchen screamed, hitting the seats next as the plane’s trajectory briefly made her bounce from the ceiling to the floor. My stomach lurched nauseatingly as I grabbed her, gripping her so hard she screamed in pain this time.
“Ce faci?” Samir’s shout rose above the other passengers’ screams. Some part of my mind translated it as “What are you doing?” but the rest of me was too shocked to care what he was saying. All I could focus on was what was happening. Moments ago, I hadn’t seen any lights outside the windows. Now, I did, and they looked like they were rushing toward us.
We weren’t landing. We were crashing.
Chapter 31
Everything that happened next happened so fast, it reminded me of the first time I’d seen Marty move with inhuman speed: I couldn’t do anything except stare, struck stupid by what my eyes were processing, yet my mind still refused to believe.
Vlad’s grip on me turned to steel, then he was flying us toward the front of the plane with me yanked against him and Gretchen clutched in my arms. We didn’t even reach the curtain before we were bombarded by bodies hurtling at us from the plane’s downward velocity. The horrible sound of overstressed metal mixed with screams, forming a deafening screech. Then the rapid changes in cabin pressure hit me with almost as much force as the multiple limbs that struck us as Vlad forced his way through the living barriers between him and the front of the plane.
“Este prea tarziu! Ne vom prabusi!” someone screamed. “We’re going to hit!”
Vlad shouted something back and whipped me around until I was facing him. “Grab my neck,” he ordered. “I have Gretchen.”
I must have done it, because the next thing I knew, Vlad snatched my father from the writhing, screaming mass of people. Then we were sucked sideways with such force, I felt like an ant that had gotten swept up in a vacuum. Darkness and light flashed around us, too fast to pick one point to focus on, followed by a bright orange glow below and a boom I felt more than heard.
We landed hard a few moments later, the orange glow about a mile away, but the stench of burning fuel already reaching us. Vlad set Gretchen and my dad down, and another odor made me realize that Gretchen had pissed herself, either from terror or the voltage she’d absorbed when I first grabbed her. Before I could check to see if she was okay, Vlad gently pushed me down next to my father.
“Leila,” he said in a calm tone, “you need to shock your father’s chest now. His heart has stopped.”
That snapped me out of whatever stunned inertia that had gripped me since I realized the plane was crashing. With a strangled sob, I ripped open my father’s shirt, exposing his chest. Then I laid both palms against it and released a current that made his body spasm. When I pressed my ear against his chest afterward, panic filled me.
No breathing, no heartbeat. Nothing.
“You need to give him mouth-to-mouth while I keep trying,” I said in a gasp, tears making everything blurry. Then I began to push on my father’s chest the way I’d seen people do in the movies, pausing to let Vlad blow air into his lungs between compressions. After several seconds, I said “Clear!” out of senseless desperation, and shocked him again.
This time, I heard a few faint buh-bumps before things went ominously silent once more. I began chest compressions again, blowing into his mouth myself because I couldn’t stand even those brief seconds of not doing something. Then, I shocked him again, using enough current to raise his back all the way off the ground for a few moments. When his body returned to its prone position, I pressed my ear to his chest again, praying.
Buh-boom . . . buh-boom . . . buh-boom . . .
Now that his heart had finally started beating, I laid my head on the ground next to him and cried from relief.
“I don’t understand.” Samir sounded as dazed as I felt. Maybe that’s why he was speaking in English. He usually had to be reminded to do that around me.
Relief over my father had turned to sorrow when we met up with the rest of our group and saw how few of us there were. Aside from me, Vlad, Gretchen, and my dad, only Samir, Petre, and two of the new human recruits had made it. Everyone else perished when the plane slammed into the ground after a near vertical dive. Not even vampires could survive that kind of impact, let alone the resulting fireball that had lit up the sky, and Vlad and Samir were the only vampires who could fly away before the doomed plane crashed.
Vlad had saved me and my family, and Samir had grabbed Petre and the nearest two humans in the frantic seconds before he’d flown out the exit door Vlad had torn open. To my everlasting gratitude, Marty hadn’t been on this flight. His dislik
e of Vlad had caused him to elect to stay behind with Darryl while the new vampire overcame his hunger.
“Claude and Erin looked right through me,” Samir went on. “I’ve known them both for over two hundred years, yet they were like strangers when I tried to wrestle them off the controls to save the plane.”
Vlad’s head snapped up. “Did they do anything else odd?”
“You mean aside from killing themselves along with several other people?” I asked in disbelief.
Vlad didn’t respond to that, only continued to stare at Samir. “Well?” he prodded.
“They didn’t seem angry,” Samir said slowly, as if trying to remember. “Or afraid, or sorry, or anything I would have expected based on what they were doing. Claude and Erin were just . . . blank, aside from their determination to crash the plane.”
Vlad muttered a particularly foul course in Romanian. “When we were in Vegas, did they ever leave the hotel to feed?”
Samir looked startled. “Of course. It was Vegas.”
Another ear-scorching curse later, I understood. “I acted that way when I tried to kill myself, didn’t I? So you think the necromancer found a way to spell the pilots, too.”
God knows I’d felt blank beyond a single-minded need to take my own head off. I hadn’t cared about anything else, and I’m sure I’d looked right through Vlad when he stopped me, just as Claude and Erin had looked right through Samir when he tried to stop them from forcing the plane into a fatal dive.
“It would explain why people loyal to me for nearly three hundred years suddenly attempted to kill me,” Vlad ground out. “Or at least, kill my wife and the remainder of my most-trusted men, since Szilagyi would know that’s who I’m traveling with.”
Szilagyi. Even when we thought we were going on the offensive against him, we turned out to be fighting for our lives again. How were we expected to take him down if we had to give a wary eye to the people around us, wondering which one of them might have been magically motivated to kill us next?
On the heels of despair, the solution popped into my mind.
“Everyone needs to drink the potion I did,” I told Vlad. “If it’s a lesser spell, it’ll cure them. If it’s the same one, it’ll temporarily turn them blue. Either way, we’ll know who Szilagyi’s necromancer has gotten to and who he hasn’t.”
Vlad pulled out his cell phone, dialing. “Mencheres,” he said moments later. “I need the ingredients for your cure.”
Chapter 32
We’d crashed in Slovenia, but we didn’t go to Vlad’s house there. No surprise, he no longer trusted whoever might be waiting for him. We trusted Samir and Petre because they’d tried to save the plane, which meant that they weren’t spelled, and the two surviving men from the homeless shelter were human, so the necromancer wouldn’t bother with them.
Instead, we went to Lake Misurina, in Italy. On the outside, the small hotel Vlad pulled up to struck me as a formerly grand structure that time and progress had left behind. It also had a supremely gothic feel, with mountains that towered like dark giants behind it, while the lake in front reflected the hotel and backdrop as if it were a huge, glassy mirror.
Inside, the hotel appeared spotless and renovated with all the latest amenities. It also wasn’t occupied, which became obvious when Vlad walked us right past the empty reception desk.
“Is this place empty?” I asked, my voice echoing off the high ceilings in the grand entryway.
“Most of the time,” he replied. “This is a safe house for members of my line, so it’s kept up by locals, but they don’t remember why it hasn’t been reopened as a business.”
“Whatever, please tell me there’s a hospital nearby,” Gretchen said, helping our dad keep his balance since his cane had blown up with the plane. “He needs a doctor.”
I also didn’t like the grayish tone to my father’s skin, but his heartbeat had been steady the entire way here, which consisted of driving and flying via Vlad Air. That might have given my father another heart attack, if Vlad hadn’t mesmerized him beforehand into thinking that we drove the whole way.
“I’m fine,” my father gritted out. “I just need to lie down for a little while.”
“No doctors,” Vlad stated. “We can’t have our presence exposed to more people than absolutely necessary. Besides, what I have will heal you faster and more thoroughly.”
At that, my father whitened. “I will not drink your blood.”
“And I will not let you die after I soiled my mouth with yours breathing air into your lungs,” Vlad replied at once. “Leila loves you and she’s been through enough without dealing with the loss of her father, so you don’t get to refuse, Hugh.”
I didn’t know which appeared to shock my dad more: discovering that Vlad had given him mouth-to-mouth, or hearing that he had no choice about drinking Vlad’s blood. I was still very concerned about my dad’s health, but I didn’t want him to be forced to do something against his will. Maybe if I talked to him, he’d see that this was his best choice, and it could be my blood instead of Vlad’s, too.
“Dad, I think you should—”
“Open wide,” Vlad interrupted, then slashed his wrist with a fang and clapped it over my father’s mouth.
My dad’s eyes bugged, but with Vlad gripping him from behind, he couldn’t dislodge the red-smeared wrist from his open mouth. He could only attempt to kick Vlad in silent, furious protest, but with one leg crippled, he was having a hard time doing that, too.
“I’ll get to that next,” Vlad muttered.
I watched this, torn. On one hand, I hated seeing my father manhandled. On the other, this was for his own good and it beat the hell out of seeing him dead, which I briefly had.
“This won’t be a regular occurrence, Dad,” I said, trying to make the best out of a bad situation for him. “When it’s safe, we’ll get you to a doctor and you won’t have to drink vampire blood again.”
“Of course not,” Vlad said, shocking me by dragging my dad down onto the floor next. “At least, not after this.”
With that, his hand crushed my father’s bad knee before I could scream at him to stop. Then he bit his wrist again, willing out such a spurt of blood into my dad’s mouth that it overflowed on both sides. My father coughed and gagged, his shout of anguish cut off by that crimson flow.
Gretchen gasped. “Look!”
I didn’t need to because I hadn’t taken my eyes off my father’s knee. A split second after seeing Vlad crush it into pulp, I realized what he was doing. Months ago, he’d said he could heal my dad’s knee. My father must have remembered that, too, because his disbelief turned to understanding as the bloody, misshapen lump began to knit itself back together.
If Vlad hadn’t crushed it first, the healing properties of vampire blood wouldn’t have caused new bone, tissue, and tendons to replace the old, damaged ones. I didn’t need to see my dad bend his leg in a way that he hadn’t been able to do in years to know that the “irreparable” injury from the roadside bomb that had crippled him was now gone.
Vlad forced him to swallow one final gulp, then he released him, giving him a charming smile as he stood over him.
“If you think this is unforgivable, wait until you see what I’m going to do to my other father-in-law.”
At that, Gretchen finally found her voice. “You’re a bigamist? Leila, did you know this?”
“That wife died over five hundred years ago,” I said, watching my father’s expression to judge if he was going to lose it. “Dad, I know you’re upset . . .”
“Don’t coddle him; if nothing else, he’s a soldier,” Vlad said, drilling my father with a hard stare. “You’ve seen my abilities, yet if the vampire who sired me were still alive today, I would be considered weak compared to him. That’s how powerful he was, and when I first realized it, I was terrified, but I surrendered my humanity to him because it was the best way I could protect my country and my family.”
He glanced at me next, his stare no less hard, b
ut the emotions that spilled over mine when he dropped his shields were wave after wave of raw, unadulterated love.
“She is my family and my country now, so there is nothing I won’t do for her, including healing a man who keeps failing her. You’re angry that I gave you blood, strengthening you and repairing the damage you’d suffered from a previous battle?” His tone became matter-of-fact. “You should have begged me to, just like hundreds of years ago, I begged someone far more frightening than me to do the same.”
Once he finished speaking, he held out his arm to me. I stared at it, my emotions in a maelstrom. Part of me was upset at Vlad for his complete disregard of my father’s wishes. Even if my dad was wrong, he was a grown man who was entitled to be. The other part of me—vampire? survivalist?—agreed with what he’d done. My dad was letting stubbornness dictate his actions, and in a war where both his daughters could become collateral damage, he shouldn’t. Vlad had made sure that Dad’s health or former injury wouldn’t be a weakness our enemies could exploit, and a career military man like my father would know that they would, if he stopped being so angry about his circumstances.
So, after only a second’s hesitation, I took Vlad’s arm. Like I’d told my father earlier, we were a package deal now, which meant whatever issues we had would be worked out together.
Samir coughed to get our attention as he came over to us, Petre and the other crash survivors behind him. “I’ve been here before, so I can show you where to go to get cleaned up.”
“Great,” Gretchen said, tearing her gaze away from Dad’s newly healed knee at last. “I need a shower like I’ve never needed one before.”
We’d lost all our spell ingredients in the plane crash, so our plan to make magical versions of grenades was put on hold. Instead, Vlad took me with him to get what we needed for the “cure,” which I now referred to as the spell-detector test.
“Maybe I should stay with my family, see if Dad can be reasoned with,” I’d suggested.