My alarm turned into barely controlled panic. They had only gone in there less than ten minutes ago! How powerful were these necromancers if things had gotten that bad, that fast?
I ran into the crumpled church, Mencheres using his power to pull aside the flaming piles of debris in front of me. With those cleared away, it didn’t take long to find the trapdoor leading to the tunnel entrance below the church, and I jumped into it while sending more currents surging to my right hand.
Chapter 47
Bodies littered the tunnel. Some had had their heads ripped off, but a few were in charred heaps, so Mencheres had been right and not everyone here was covered in grave magic. I assumed the ones that hadn’t been were average guards instead of the necromancers, not that that made me feel any better. Vlad’s fiery SOS hasn’t been sent because the fight was too easy. Something was going very, very wrong.
I kept charging my whip as I ran deeper into the tunnels, careful not to lose my footing when they sloped steeply downward. They forked once or twice, too, but it was frighteningly easy to know which way to go. I only had to follow the sounds of strange chanting and intermittent screams.
An orange glow lit the next section after I rounded a sharp corner, and my pace quickened. Fire meant Vlad. This long stretch of tunnel didn’t have any bodies, and from how the echoes grew louder, the source of the screams and the chants was at the end of it.
I sent so much voltage into my whip it was raining sparks and coiling like an angry snake when I reached the door-shaped opening at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to charge right through, especially when I realized that the screams came from Marty, but I forced myself to slow down. I might not be a pro, but I wasn’t amateur enough to run in and get ambushed on my blind sides by whatever was making Marty scream.
The last ten feet, I slid and sent my whip out in front of me. My little push for momentum plus the downward slope caused me to rocket forward and I leaned back, making myself as low as possible.
I’d been right to worry. Something big smashed through the air instead of my head as a guard hiding on the right side of the door struck. I slid right past him, snapping my whip at his legs. It cut through them and he dropped like a felled tree. I snapped my whip again when he hit the ground, aiming for his neck. It ripped his head off and sent it flying through the air, yet my first clear look into the large antechamber had me not even noticing when his head bounced like a ball as it landed.
Vlad, Maximus, Veritas, and Marty were all in the room, yet none of them seemed to notice me. Veritas was kneeling on the floor, scratching something into the stone, and the rest of them were staring at the huge, pale thing that rose up from what looked like a fire pit in the center of the room.
At first glance, I’d thought it was some kind of weird smoke. It reached all the way to the twenty-foot ceiling, yet it didn’t spread out like normal smoke. Instead, it was almost man-shaped, if giants existed. Even stranger, it appeared as if individual, separate smoke trails were slowly coming out of Vlad, Maximus, and Marty. Those trails fed into the manlike smoke mass, and although Marty was the only one screaming, Vlad and Maximus also looked as if they were in a lot of pain.
“What’s going on?” I said, running over to Vlad.
He didn’t move even when I shook his arm roughly, but Veritas’s head whipped up.
“Leila,” she said with relief. “You are demon kin, so the soul spell won’t work on you. I’ve tried to counter the magic, but even with the added supernatural benefit of the convergence of ley lines in this place, I do not have what I need to do it. I have to kill the necromancers who cast it to stop it. Until then, your electricity should buy us time.”
Veritas leapt up, but I yelled “Wait!” before she disappeared through the door at the other end of the room. “How am I supposed to electrocute all of them at once?”
“Not them,” she said, with a swipe at the huge, smoky thing. “That. Every time a life is taken by force, a trace of dark energy from the murdered person remains on their killer. This spell pulls that energy out and magnifies it into the creature you see before you. Yet you are filled with natural, electrical energy, so it should counter the creature’s strength. You must hurry, Leila. Once the last of the dark energy remains are pulled from your friends, their own souls will follow.”
I looked at the wispy trails leaving Vlad, Marty, and Maximus with new, horrified understanding. Those weren’t thin, scarflike puffs of smoke. Those were dark energy fragments from all the people that Vlad, Marty, and Maximus had killed during their very long lifetimes.
I lashed my whip at the creature. It turned its faceless body toward me and let out a roar that blasted out my eardrums and made me clutch my head. If every voice silenced by the grave could suddenly scream, it would sound like that.
Then I forced myself to lower my arms and to strike the creature again. Another roar had blood coming out of my ears, but I didn’t stop to grip my head this time. Instead, I continued to lash it, noticing with fearful hope that every time I did, it seemed to slow the progression of dark essences that were trailing out of Vlad, Marty, and Maximus. For once, I was glad that Vlad’s past had been an almost nonstop array of brutal battles. He had plenty of slain dark energy remains in him, and Maximus was a thousand-year-old former Templar knight, so he did, too.
But Marty didn’t. Aside from when he’d been mindless from hunger as a new vampire, he’d only killed in self-defense, and he’d hardly led a violent life on the carnival circuit. His screams intensified, and fear for him made me lash the creature harder. My whip couldn’t cut him down, however. It sailed right through the thing, and those writhing, dark energy essences immediately re-formed back to their manlike shape.
This wasn’t working. I needed more electricity. I cast a quick look around the antechamber. It must have been the site of a lot of dark magic rituals because its walls were covered in symbols, and now that the creature had moved away from the pit, I saw that it was filled with various bones and other strange, menacing-looking objects. But it didn’t appear to have any light sockets or electrical wiring that I could pull more voltage from. Whatever rituals the necromancers had held here, they must have only used torchlight for illumination.
Marty’s scream grew anguished and he fell to his knees. “Hold on!” I shouted, lashing the creature so madly that it swung at me. I was slammed back against the stone walls. Pain exploded in my head and I heard the sickening crunch of bones as my skull fractured.
Blood filled my vision and the pain was so intense, I wanted to throw up. Yet I pushed myself to my feet, using the wall for balance since everything seemed to be swaying. Then I stumbled back toward the creature, my whip recharging as my body began to heal. I raised it, bringing it down once again.
Marty’s screams abruptly stopped. He fell forward, something shimmering rising from his body. Then it tore free and flew toward the creature. The worst kind of horror filled me when I saw that what had flown out of Marty was a mirror image of him, except in filmy, diaphanous form.
“No!”
The scream tore out of me with more force than what the creature had used to yank Marty’s soul from his body. Rage and grief slammed into me, filling me until my skin felt like it would burst. At the same time, ferocious determination sent a surge of power to my voltage that I didn’t know I had in me.
I wouldn’t just kill the thing that had killed Marty and was still trying to kill Vlad. I would fucking destroy it.
My vision blurred from the tremendous surges of electricity building in me. This time, I didn’t hold any of them back. I let them come, using my seething emotions to feed them, until I was shaking from the overload of electricity that had sparks flying from every part of my body.
The creature swung that couch-sized fist at me again. This time, I ran toward it, flinging myself into the air with such force that my leap caused me to clear it. I landed on the creature’s torso instead.
At once, I blasted out all that raging voltage, howling
like a banshee surrounded by death on a battlefield. The sharp scent of ozone filled the air as bolt after bolt of pure electricity shot from me, as fast and deadly as lightning. The creature screamed, exploding my eardrums, but I loved the pain. It fueled my voltage, joining all my other raging emotions and making more electricity shoot from me. I had never let myself fully embrace my power before, yet I did now, and it was viciously glorious. Soon, I was mindless from giving myself over to it, and the electricity kept shooting out of me to slam into the horrible, magic-made monster that had dared to hurt and kill the ones I loved.
A boom penetrated the haze of my grief-soaked battle lust, and my vision cleared enough to see the dark energies from the creature began to crumble. They took me down with them before spilling onto the ground as if whatever inner structure that had allowed them to stand upright had shattered. I tumbled onto the ground along with them, landing only a few feet from Marty, and something broke inside me when I saw that his body had already started to wither.
Then I forced that pain back and ran over to Vlad when he, too, crumpled to the ground. Terror paralyzed me and a ball of pure agony rocketed up into my throat. No, no, NO!
But he didn’t start to wither. He shook his head as if clearing it and his coppery gaze immediately searched the room.
“Where are the necromancers? There were six of them; three chanting in a circle and three fighting us.”
“They were gone when I got here,” I said, throwing my arms around him. “God, Vlad, I thought you were dead!”
He hugged me back for only a second before pulling away. “Not yet, and I intend to—” He stopped talking and a harsh sound escaped him.
I followed his gaze to where Marty lay, his body shrinking as it rapidly decomposed to match his true age of a hundred and thirty-nine years. Another painful ball clawed its way into my throat and I almost choked swallowing it back.
“I know.” Then I forced myself to look away from him. He would want me to finish this and avenge his death. Not stare at his body while his murderers had the chance to get away.
“Veritas went after them,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “She must have killed the three who cast the spell that made the creature, but that means there are three more that could still be alive.”
Vlad didn’t run; he flew through the door that she had disappeared through. Maximus walked over, giving Marty’s body a quick yet sympathetic glance, then he held out his hand to me.
I took it, fighting back the tears that threatened to blur my vision for a different reason this time. Instead, I fed the rage that had allowed me to weaken the creature enough to buy Veritas the time she’d needed to kill its spell-casting creators. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if she’d done it as quickly as it seemed, or if I’d been lost to the rage, grief, and power for longer than I realized.
“Stay behind me,” Maximus said, running toward the door after picking up two silver knives he must have dropped at some point.
“Who just saved who?” I muttered, but followed him.
The door opened to a fork, but it was easy to see which way to go. Vlad had left a thin trail of fire behind, and we followed it, careful not to step on the flames and burn ourselves. Maximus could have flown, so he must be running to stay close enough to me to protect me.
A scream up ahead made him grab me and fly us both the rest of the way. The tunnel was narrow and he was big, so both of us hit the sides a few times, yet seconds later, we had descended into the darkest-veined section of the mountain. A huge stone that appeared to be pure morion quartz was leaning against the side of an open doorway, and the screams were coming from inside it.
Chapter 48
The first thing I saw was the body parts. They were strewn around the black quartz cavern we entered as if the people they’d belonged to had been killed by a tornado. Then I saw Veritas circling a tall, black-haired man who kept trying to dart past her. Vlad was beyond her, and though I couldn’t see all of him around the solid black hunk of rock that interrupted this section of the cavern from the next, judging by the screams and the sudden stench of burnt flesh, he was burning someone.
“Don’t try it,” Veritas warned the black-haired man when he feinted to her right again.
I stared at him with a morbid sort of fascination. He was part of the group of necromancers that had made the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen, yet stripped of his spell-casting power by the black quartz cell they’d used to imprison Mircea in, he seemed so helplessly normal.
But he was here, so he’d helped to kill Marty. Fury crashed through me as I thought of my best friend’s body slowly withering in the room beyond this tunnel, and I pushed past Veritas while cracking my whip.
“No,” I said in a growl. “Do try it.”
He charged me at the same time that Veritas yanked me back. Even though she was blindingly fast, my whip wrapped around the black-haired vampire as if they’d been lovers long separated. Then I ripped it backward, and everything from his shoulders up flung forward while his lower body did a short, mad circle that spurted blood everywhere before it crumpled to the floor.
“Stop burning him! I need the other one alive!” Veritas shouted to Vlad.
I didn’t pay attention. I kept lashing the man, not satisfied when he was in more pieces than he could ever heal from. Marty was dead. Gone forever. He wasn’t only my best friend; for years, he’d been my only friend after he’d taken me in when no one else had wanted me. And he’d died screaming because I hadn’t been able to save him the way he’d saved me all those years ago.
“Leila!”
Mencheres’s voice caused me to pause in my near-frantic lashing and turn around. I hadn’t heard him come in. Then again, I’d been pretty focused on turning the necromancer into bloody, tiny little pieces.
“Stop now,” Mencheres said in a gentle tone. “He can’t feel it anymore.”
No, he couldn’t, and yet I could still feel all the grief that had led to me to julienne a person.
Then, as if moving in a daze, I pulled my whip back inside me with more speed and control than I’d ever been able to use before and walked past the black quartz boulder that had cut off the other part of the cavern from view.
Vlad stood in front of a raven-haired woman who was on her knees, fire circling her in ever-growing waves. If she moved at all, she’d get burned, and from the charred state of her hair and clothes, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Then I saw something else that made me keep walking, until the farthest corner of the cave was revealed. One look at Mircea and I understood why he hadn’t been able to contact me. He was now entirely encased in glass, preventing him from even twitching, let alone forging a connection through our flesh by cutting himself. The tight cluster of black quartz that had previously surrounded him now surrounded the glass, and while I wasn’t about to touch that since it negated Mircea’s abilities, I did punch the glass around his head hard enough to cause it to shatter and fall.
“You found me,” were his first words.
“A friend helped,” I said, thinking about what it had cost Ian to get the power he’d used to yank Mircea’s location out of the other necromancer’s mind.
Mircea shot a half-defiant, half-wary look over my shoulder, where I felt Vlad come up behind me. “Well, well, stepfather dearest. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Both too long and not long enough,” Vlad said, his eyes turning green as he stared at Mircea.
A scrambling sound followed by a scream had both of us spinning back around, then Vlad let out a dangerously charming laugh as he saw the female necromancer dousing the new flames on her arms and legs.
“Did you really think you could escape those if I merely turned my back?”
She hissed something rapidly at him in a different language. It might have been a spell, because her face crumpled a second later when we didn’t drop dead or turn into frogs or something equally awful.
“Your magic doesn’t work here, Ner
yre,” Mencheres said, coming into this section of the cavern.
Her dark gaze snapped up to him. “Menkaure,” she said in a venomous tone, calling him by his Egyptian birth name.
“Is she the sorceress you knew way back when?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mencheres said, shaking his head almost sadly. “Why did you align yourself with this group, Neryre? They are not true Imhotep acolytes. They twist everything he stood for.”
“They fight for what he gave up on,” she snapped. “What you gave up on. Your powers could have been great, Menkaure.”
“They are,” he replied without sounding arrogant. “But not in magic. They are great in what I have honed myself. Now tell me, Neryre, why did your coven try to force Vlad to murder me?”
Vlad’s head swung around, although the fire prison around the necromancer didn’t waver. “You knew?”
Mencheres glanced at me and a smile ghosted across his lips. “My wife just texted to reassure me that she would tell no one that the video going viral in the vampire world was fake.”
Vlad looked at me in disbelief next. “You told her?”
“Kinda. I didn’t have her cell number, so I told Ian to tell her.” Guess he’d checked his text messages after all.
“You didn’t merely hide this from me, Vlad. You lied to me. Why?” The words, softly spoken, still fell with the weight of a thousand bricks.
Vlad met Mencheres’s gaze, and though his shields cracked and a poignant sadness flitted through our connection, his stare was unflinching.
“You know why.”
Mencheres stared back and his incredible aura began to flare. Alarm flashed through me, covering even my overwhelming grief over Marty. Vlad’s meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Was Mencheres about to retaliate for Vlad admitting that he would have killed him if his glamour ruse hadn’t worked? Good Lord, could we even fight him off if he did retaliate?