The horrifying thought almost made me miss a step. The necromancer whirled around and lunged at me, but I recovered and jumped backward, missing his swipe at my arms. Once out of his reach, I wound another length of whip around my throat, feeling vicious delight at seeing the new welt appear on him.
“Nice try,” I said evenly, “but fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
Might not be as colorful, but it was straight to the point. My generation got that right.
He gave me a look filled with hatred. “We’re almost there. How do you intend to fight off Szilagyi’s men, if you don’t remove that from your neck?”
I’d already thought of that, and I smiled at him. “You’re going to say you captured me and compelled me to wrap this around my neck. Kind of like holding a gun to my head, but more magical.”
“You’re insane,” he breathed.
“I don’t think so,” I shot back. “I’m even willing to bet my life that you haven’t admitted the ramification of your spell’s backfiring to anyone, right? That would be too embarrassing for you, and man, would that piss Szilagyi off. The spell he had you cast that was supposed to guarantee my death now has you protecting me.”
“He doesn’t command me,” the necromancer all but snarled. “I outgrew him in power a century ago!”
That was frightening information, but I didn’t let him see how it rattled me.
“All the more reason for everyone to believe that I’m a prisoner,” I said. “Hell, everyone probably thinks I’m a captivity magnet already, but what they don’t know is that I freed myself two out of the four times by single-handedly killing my captors. So, I’ll play the helpless victim, you’ll play the triumphant captor, and we’ll both walk out of here alive afterward—”
The tunnel shaking with sudden, violent force cut me off. Cracks appeared in the stone around us, and the layer of ground rock that coated us was an ominous sign of things to come.
“How much farther again?” I asked.
His smile did nothing to quell my unease. “We’re almost there.”
A few turns later, we reached another open area. At least a dozen bodies were strewn around this new antechamber, each one burned so badly that little more than charred bones remained.
“So much for the captor/captive charade,” the necromancer said, barely glancing at the ones we passed. I didn’t pause to stare at them, either, but that was because I couldn’t risk him trying to wrest the whip away from my neck again.
“These are your people dead at your feet, and you could care less. You’re a real prize of a leader.”
He glanced at me, his mouth curled in scorn. “No, they were Szilagyi’s people. Not mine.”
I kept sneaking wary glances as I followed him to the only exit to this chamber aside from the tunnel we’d entered it by.
“Oh? I thought Szilagyi didn’t command you, so if these were his people, then aren’t you here under his authority?”
“You’re not going to get me to reveal any more information than I already have,” he replied shortly.
Maybe, maybe not. He was arrogant enough to have given me a couple important tidbits already. If I kept poking at his pride, maybe I could get another nugget out of him that we could use.
As we entered the new tunnel, a deafening noise combined with the ground heaving as if shaken by an invisible fist threw me forward. I used my left arm to steady myself, but kept the right one to my throat. Even still, the brutal jolting cut the whip deeper into my neck than I would have liked.
“Let go, you’ll kill us both!” the necromancer shouted, clutching his neck while blood seeped out between his fingers.
My throat burned, too. Not from the electricity, which I was immune to, but the cut. Still, I wouldn’t unwind the whip. If I did, Vlad was as good as dead.
“Not gonna happen,” I spat.
The necromancer stared at me as if measuring my resolve. “Then hurry up, he’s progressing faster than I thought him capable of.”
The tunnel shook again while more thunderous crashes sounded, followed by countless booms and an ominous cloud that rushed into the tunnel. I knew what that meant, and I ran after the necromancer, who had quickened his pace without prompting this time. The cave-in blocked the exit behind us, but after a few seconds of running, we were free from falling debris and the cloud of ground stone.
“He’s already blasted through the three outer barriers around Mihaly,” the necromancer muttered, almost to himself. “If he breaches the door, he’ll kill himself and us.”
“How?” I demanded.
He gave me an irritated look. “Because Mihaly destabilized every part of the dungeon except the room where he is. The door to that part is rigged so that if it goes down, the floor outside of it blows up, then the rest of the dungeon piles on top of the remains.”
And thousands of pounds of rock coming down onto whoever was trapped below would be lethal, even to someone as strong as Vlad. I ran faster, turning the corner almost in unison with the necromancer—and then nearly plowed into him because he stopped so abruptly, I thought he was making a play for my whip again.
“If you,” I began, not finishing the threat when I saw what was right in front of him.
Flames blocked the tunnel. Since he wasn’t trying to scare tourists anymore, Vlad hadn’t bothered to form the fire into wolflike creatures. It was just a solid wall that burned so hot, the heat made my skin start to blister even from several feet away.
“Vlad!” I shouted, fear rising when he didn’t respond. Was he too far away? Or did the continuing sounds from the cave-in plus the roar of the fire drown me out so he couldn’t hear me? “Vlad, listen to me!” I tried again, shoving the necromancer behind me and going as close to the flames as I dared.
That didn’t work, so in desperation, I switched my wedding ring from my left hand to my right, fingers rubbing over the wide, flat stone until I found the essence trail Vlad had left when he put it on my hand again.
Vlad, I shouted with all my mind when I followed it and saw him amidst an inferno. Shattered rock littered the ground and his hands were stretched out toward a wall of black stone in front of him. Vlad, don’t do it! I’m here!
He didn’t lower his hands, but his head cocked. “Leila?”
I could only hear him through the link, so he must not be able to hear me the other way, either. I responded with an instant, mental roar of Yes, it’s me. Let me through the fire, quickly!
His emotions were still entwined with mine, so I felt it when his surprise turned to angry concern.
“Get out of here,” he said, returning his gaze to the charred wall. “You won’t survive what I’m about to do.”
Neither will you! I yelled back, hoping he could hear everything I said. He hadn’t been able to the last time I tried this. Szilagyi rigged the door. If it comes down, so will the floor beneath you and the entire prison will dump on your head.
Not sure if he’d gotten all that, I repeated the word trap over and over, hoping that did the trick. The necromancer watched me, not making any move at the whip around my neck. That, plus his grim expression, let me know that he hadn’t been lying or exaggerating the seriousness of the situation. If Vlad ignored me and blasted through that last door, we were all dead.
The wall of fire abruptly pulled back as if yanked, until the long, empty tunnel was revealed. I ran ahead, not checking to see if the necromancer followed me. He had no choice. The way behind us was blocked by a cave-in.
When I reached the end of the tunnel, I had to step over piles of charred rocks. Vlad was in the clearing beyond. I couldn’t call it a room because I don’t think that’s what it originally was. Instead, it looked like it had been wall after wall of fortifications, which had been blasted into an open space from the power of Vlad’s fire assault. The final door that the necromancer referenced was easily discernable from the rest of the rock. That was a dull, grayish-brown color, like the tunnel walls had been. The door was black, smooth like slate, and as in
viting as a welcome sign to the vampire who wanted nothing more than to kill his enemy hiding behind it.
Vlad remained exactly as he was when I’d glimpsed him through the link: legs braced in a wide stance, arms extended to the door, and fire flowing from him as if his entire body was sweating flames. His emotions felt more explosive than the damage he’d done to this room, which was why I didn’t run over to him. I stayed by the entrance to the tunnel, not wanting to exacerbate his already volatile state.
“Don’t touch that door. It’s rigged to trigger a detonation that will take down the rest of the dungeon,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage, and just in case he hadn’t heard that from my mind.
He didn’t ask me how I knew that. He didn’t even look away from the black rectangle, as if doing so would allow Szilagyi to escape him once again. “Just the door? Or the walls around it, too?”
I glanced down the tunnel at the necromancer, who, as anticipated, had followed after me.
“Just the door? Or the walls, too?” I pressed him.
“Door only,” he replied, crossing his arms and cocking his head as if curious to see how Vlad got around that.
Vlad stared at the smooth black slate and smiled. Then his power began to blast through the room in ever-increasing shockwaves, until it felt like he was manipulating gravity into a weapon that kept hammering me with full-body punches. I sucked in a breath to try and balance the awful squeezing sensation, as if my guts were being pureed by the violent pummeling. Behind me, I heard the necromancer moan, and then a thump that might have been his legs giving out when the awful sensations continued.
“What are you doing?” I managed to gasp.
Vlad ignored me. From the virulent emotions scalding mine, I wondered if he even heard me. He felt lost to the hate that he allowed to consume him, until those pulses of power coming from him became so punishing that I fell to my knees, too.
With sudden, shocking swiftness, it felt like he sucked all the power back into himself. All the air seemed to leave the room, too, in a whoosh that popped my ears and made my head throb like it was about to explode. He centered that incredible power and then hurled it at the walls, with a blast of heat that made my skin feel like it was going to melt off.
It didn’t, but as I watched, amazement replaced my fear. The stone walls around that black door shined with pure, white heat. After a few moments, they began to waver, then concaved in places like candle wax. Then holes appeared, growing and stretching, until what looked like molten rock puddles began to form.
I couldn’t believe it. Vlad was melting the stone. It was one thing to do that to thin glass shower doors, but this rock wall had to be a foot thick at least. What kind of temperature would that take? I found myself wondering almost dazedly. Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit? Three thousand? The only thing more incredible than Vlad channeling fire into that kind of heat was how he contained it to the walls in front of him. I should be in a puddle on the floor. So should the black door. Yet the only things dissolving were the walls.
With another blast of power, they shuddered and began to fall, collapsing into slowly moving pools of dark brown lava as the room beyond the black door was revealed. And in that room, staring in disbelief at the stone walls that continued to puddle into piles on the floor, was Mihaly Szilagyi.
Vlad looked at him and smiled with wolfish anticipation. “Hello, old friend.”
Chapter 37
Szilagyi lunged for the weapons on the other side of the room, which was surprisingly modernized. I didn’t have a chance to glimpse more than the wall of computer screens that funneled feed from the still working cameras before he had a machine gun in his hands. Before the barrel finished its upward swing, the metal went from black to glowing orange. Szilagyi screamed as the metal melted, coating his hands in the scalding remains of his weapon.
“How?” he almost croaked.
Vlad’s smile turned cruel. “You wanted to drive me into recklessness by what you did to Leila. Instead, you drove me into the next level of my power. When I burned my castle down, my near-insane rage caused my abilities to overload until I began to melt stone. Once I knew I could do that, it was only a matter of focusing my power to improve upon it.”
He’d said something similar to me the first time he’d goaded me into turning my electrical whip into a weapon. Wow, had he followed his own advice.
“The last time we were face-to-face, I intended to capture you so that I could torture you for a long, long time,” Vlad went on, his smile dissolving from his face. “This time, what I want more than anything is your agonizing, screaming death, and I want it now.”
Then he grabbed Szilagyi by the shoulders. The necromancer sighed deeply and looked away. I tightened the whip around my neck in warning, but the necromancer seemed more resigned than vengeful. Maybe, after seeing Vlad melt the walls right off Szilagyi’s version of a panic room, the necromancer had reconsidered his role in Szilagyi’s plan to take Vlad down.
Fire spilled from Vlad’s hands to cover Szilagyi like a bright, full-body halo. Yet nothing burned under those orange and blue flames.
“You coated yourself in another fireproofing spell?” I didn’t understand the wave of savage pleasure across my emotions until I heard Vlad’s next words, spoken in a chillingly genial tone. “Spells, no matter how powerful, wear off.”
Szilagyi began to fight with the only weapon he had left: himself. Punches, kicks, head-butts, and brutally aimed knees bashed into Vlad, who absorbed the blows without trying to protect himself. Instead, he kept his hands planted on Szilagyi’s shoulders while more power spilled out of him, intensifying the heat from the fire.
After a few minutes, Szilagyi began to scream as first his clothing began to burn. Then his hair went up with a stench that would’ve made me gag if I still breathed. His struggles became more frantic when his skin began to blacken, and when it cracked and split, revealing raw, red flesh that quickly turned dark, he wasn’t just screaming. He was pleading in between agonized shrieks that caused me to do something I didn’t think I was capable of.
I pitied him.
Szilagyi had been behind my kidnapping and torture a few times. He’d intended to rape me himself before passing that off to Maximus under the auspices that it would be more brutal for Vlad that way. He’d murdered my friends, tormented my husband, tortured my best friend, and would have gleefully tortured and killed my family if he could, yet listening to him scream from the kind of pain that made his pleas incomprehensible and his body violently contract made me wish that his suffering was over. I’d thought I would be glad to see him in awful, extended pain. Instead, I couldn’t even look anymore. His high-pitched, agonizing screams would already haunt my nightmares.
“Please,” I said to Vlad, not knowing if he could hear me through the horrible sounds Szilagyi made, let alone his own near-consuming need for revenge. “Please, Vlad. End it.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the necromancer jerk his head as if surprised to hear me plead for mercy on Szilagyi’s behalf. I didn’t look at the necromancer, though. I stared at Vlad, silently willing him not to drag this out. With how vampires healed, he could, and though he wouldn’t bring Szilagyi back as a prisoner to torture him over weeks or months, he could make his death last for hours, at least.
Vlad didn’t respond and he didn’t look away from Szilagyi’s charred form, which was only still upright because Vlad hadn’t released his iron grip on his shoulders. Yet I knew he’d heard me when I felt the strangest emotion thread through mine. It wasn’t frustration, or annoyance, or admiration, but a blended version of all three. When the flames covering Szilagyi went from orange and blue to a shimmering, white haze, I almost sagged against the tunnel entrance in relief.
I’d thought myself incapable of pity for Szilagyi and been proved wrong. Now, I was proved wrong again. I hadn’t really believed that Vlad would show mercy to his oldest, worst foe, but as that white haze increased, Szilagyi’s screams were cut o
ff. Then his body shrank with the suddenness of a balloon being popped, and in seconds, Vlad had nothing left to hold on to.
A charred skeleton dropped to the stone floor, where it began to stick in the still-cooling rock. Vlad knelt, holding his hands over the bones. That white sheen over them brightened, and with an almost imperceptible noise, the bones burst into a powdery substance that Vlad burned until nothing but faint smears on the rock remained.
A door at the back of the small room opened. I jumped, startled into almost yanking my whip off to confront this new threat. Maximus walked out of a closet lined with electrical panels, like the switchboard for a large fuse box. The lights on the tabs flashed in a sequence of colors before going dark, one by one, until they were all off.
Vlad’s emotions flared with an intensity that almost matched the fire he’d just manifested. Then a wall of blankness slammed into me as he raised those impenetrable shields to cut off what he was feeling from me and the other vampire he’d sired. Maximus.
“As soon as he saw you on camera, he had me go in here to start the self-destruct sequence,” Maximus said, his tone oddly flat. I couldn’t read anything from his expression, either. Those striking, rugged features were as closed off as Vlad’s emotions. “Unless the cancel code was entered in time, the bombs beneath the floor would have detonated and started the cave-in. It was his backup plan in case you killed him.”
At that, my gaze swung to the necromancer. “Looks like you forget to mention something really important, huh?”
He gave an oblique shrug, but his eyes were all for the vampire over my shoulder. “Mihaly hid some final contingencies from even me, it seems. And it also seems that his early mistrust of Maximus was well-founded.”
“Who’s that?” Vlad asked sharply, just now noticing that I wasn’t alone in the tunnel.
“Meet the infamous necromancer,” I said, and moved aside to let him enter the room, although I tapped the whip around my neck in warning as I did so.
When he emerged from the tunnel, Vlad got his first look at the vampire who was now bound to me in a frightening way. Even if I hadn’t felt the instant shock icing my emotions as his shields cracked, I would have realized that Vlad knew him, because he stared at him as though thunderstruck.