“A few years ago.”
I gave him a jaded look. “Pretending she doesn’t matter enough to remember? Then why did you keep her bedroom exactly the way she had it when she lived here?”
He folded his arms, the silver chains he’d draped over his shoulder rattling with the motion.
“If she still mattered to me, I wouldn’t have married you. This room remained unused because you were my next lover and you slept with me.”
I glanced away, my gaze drawn to the bed. Gossamer material wrapped around the bedposts before pooling at the floor in elegant heaps. What would I see if I touched that bed? Cynthiana had over three hundred years of experience on me. Maybe I’d see Vlad looking happier with her than he did with me.
“Leila.”
I glanced back almost guiltily. That’s when I became aware that my fangs had come out and I’d been grinding my teeth so hard, I’d ripped open my bottom lip.
“Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I muttered, sucking my lip so I didn’t drip blood on the thick white carpet.
“Don’t apologize.”
No censure colored his expression, and the emotions that slid over mine had the soothing caress of satin. “All vampires are overly possessive when it comes to what’s ours.”
I could blame my seething jealousy on vampirism? Done!
Then Vlad began to bind my wrists with multiple lengths of chain. With how strong he was, I doubted this was necessary even if Cynthiana had managed to add a vampiric form of hara-kiri to her linking booby trap, but if it made him feel better . . .
“Going to save some of that for later?” I joked.
The look he gave me made me forget how unpleasant the silver felt against my wrists.
“When I tie you up, I’ll use silk, and I’ll leave your hands free because I love to feel them on my skin.”
Not if. When. Despite the erotic promise, being chained up while in his ex’s bedroom should’ve cooled my response. Instead, I felt all the desire Vlad usually elicited in me along with a visceral urge to assert my claim on him in the very place that someone else had dared touch him.
Overly possessive? Yeah, I had it bad.
“If you leave my hands free,” I asked in a throaty voice, “what’s the point of tying me up?”
His wicked smile affected me as much as the heat that swept over my emotions, lashing me with thousands of invisible, sensual whips. Then he leaned in, the soft sandpaper of his jaw grazing my cheek.
“Why tell you when I can show you?”
I closed my eyes, taking in a breath to smell the rich spiciness of his scent. Now I knew how I wanted to spend the rest of the evening, but first things first.
He drew back, continuing to drape chains around me until they went all the way up to my elbows. If I still had circulation, my hands would have been numb. Then he threaded more silver through them to secure my bound arms to my body with more loops of chain. Now all I could do from the waist up was wiggle my fingers and bite.
Satisfied, he dropped the remaining chains onto the floor and went over to the bed. I tensed, but all he retrieved was a lamp from the night table.
“Gently,” he warned as he held it out to me.
Did he think I’d never touched something fancy before? I grasped the smooth crystal base with my right fingers—and it shattered like I’d smashed it with a crowbar.
“What the hell?” I exclaimed.
He gave me a sardonic glance as he brushed the shards from my hand. “You’re not used to your new strength. Until you are, treat everything as though it’s more fragile than eggshells, and whatever you do, don’t touch a human.”
I looked at the glittering shards with a wince. Now I had another reason for not giving my sister a hug good-bye later.
“Were those dried flowers on the mantel hers?” I asked, seeking something that wouldn’t cost a lot if I broke it.
“She picked them, yes,” Vlad replied, pulling a chunk out of the arrangement without care for how that spoiled it.
I told myself it wasn’t petty to enjoy seeing something of Cynthiana’s ruined. She’d killed me, after all.
I stroked the flowers when Vlad held them out. Most of them disintegrated on contact, telling me I was still using too much strength, but something flared in the remaining batch.
There you are, I thought with dark satisfaction, and then everything around me changed.
I walked through the meadow, adding flowers to the growing pile in my basket. Vlad’s staff would be happy to add to the garden outside my room, but I was careful not to have all the spell’s ingredients in one place. Just in case someone recognized the significance of these particular flowers.
The beautiful spring day did nothing to improve my foul mood. It had only been six months since the last spell, yet Vlad was already acting distant again. I yanked out a handful of lilacs, damaging them in my frustration. Any other man would be madly, irrevocably in love with me, but after seven spells, I could barely keep Vlad from leaving me.
The problem, of course, was the same reason why he was such a valuable protector. His power. It was why I’d worked so hard to gain his attention in the first place, and also why he was practically immune to my spells. I didn’t dare use stronger magic on him. He might dismiss all the flowers as feminine fancy, but he’d notice ingredients for darker magic. What the Law Guardians would do to me would be nothing compared to his wrath if he found out I’d been using spells on him.
I grabbed another handful of lilacs, refusing to dwell on the repercussions of being caught. That wouldn’t happen as long as I was careful, and besides, I had no choice. Most vampires had Masters to protect them. Others had enough strength to protect themselves. The rest of us—Masterless with only average power—were left to fend for ourselves. After my sire was murdered, lovers gave me the protection other vampires took for granted. When that wasn’t enough, magic made up the difference. The day I became a vampire, I swore no matter the cost, I’d never be helpless again. I had my fill of that as a Scottish peasant living under English rule. I brushed off those memories to give a critical look at my basket’s contents. Perhaps more mallow would make the spell last longer . . .
When I morphed back into my own mindset, I stared at the crumbled bits of dried flowers in my hand, torn between rage and incredulousness.
“Do you know what these are?”
He shrugged. “Lilacs, poppies, amaranth—”
“Ingredients for a spell,” I cut him off. “Lilacs to prompt love, red poppy for true love, mallow for being overwhelmed with love, blue poppy for the unattainable made possible, amaranth for undying love . . . see where she was going with this?”
“I never loved her.”
His voice vibrated with forcefulness. I smiled grimly.
“Yes, and it ticked her off that you were too strong for her spell to fully work. Still, you stayed with her for the better part of three decades so her efforts weren’t a total bust.” Vlad opened his mouth and . . . nothing. I’d never seen him speechless before, but finding out your free will had been messed with would be upsetting for anyone. Finding it out when you had his level of arrogance would be stunning.
“See if you can find her” was what he bit out. I wouldn’t want to be Cynthiana for all the money in the world right now.
I stroked the dried flowers again. The memory of her picking them was fainter now, allowing me to push past it to focus on her essence trail.
There. Like a fishing line with her swimming at the end of it. I concentrated, but every time I pulled on that line, I came back with nothing. I kept trying, an internal clock pitilessly noting the passage of time as I continued to fail to reach the other side. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
“Leila, stop.”
Vlad brushed the floral bits out of my hands. Frustrated, I watched as they scattered to the ground.
“I don’t know why I can’t see her. I used to glimpse her before my health went haywire. Now, I don’t even get th
at.”
“You’ve been a vampire exactly one day,” Vlad said as he began to unwind my chains. “Every cell in your body has been drastically altered. It’s remarkable you’re able to use any of your abilities this soon.”
“Remarkable. That and four quarters will get me a dollar.”
I had reason for my glumness. Even if Vlad’s people didn’t breathe a word about Shrapnel to outsiders, any day now, Cynthiana would figure out something was wrong and go into hiding. When she did, it could be years before she resurfaced again. Sure, Shrapnel would eventually break, if Cynthiana hadn’t bewitched him into never revealing her location, but she’d be long gone by then. I might have all the time in the world to hunt her now, but my family didn’t. I couldn’t expect them to stay in hiding for years until we caught her, yet if they didn’t, they were walking targets.
It might already be too late. Cynthiana would be expecting new word from Shrapnel already . . .
“I know how we can get her,” I said, struck by inspiration. “Send Sandra into town to leave another message, this one telling Cynthiana where and when Shrapnel wants to meet her.”
Vlad unwound the final chain from me. “She’s not foolish enough to fall for such a trick.”
“Foolish? Maybe not. Arrogant? You betcha,” I countered. “This woman cast spells on you under your own roof, knowing all the while that you’d kill her if you found out. That’s so arrogant it’s like she had two boulders in a sack for balls.”
His lips thinned at the reminder of how she’d manipulated his willpower. I continued on as if I hadn’t noticed.
“No wonder she hates my guts. You said vampires were psycho possessive. In a few months, you offered me more than you offered her after three decades under her magical influence, yet I left because it wasn’t good enough. She probably had Adrian making that bomb even before Shrapnel gave her my location.”
More whitening of his mouth, and then suddenly, he smiled.
“I know why you’re goading me, but you will not get me to act rashly out of injured pride.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said, holding his gaze. “But she would. Since news of our marriage must’ve reached her by now, I bet she’s hit a whole new red zone of woman-scorned rage.”
Vlad stared at me. “Perhaps,” he said at last.
I couldn’t help but glance at the bed again. In fairness, I shouldn’t point fingers at Cynthiana for crossing into insane jealousy territory. The thought of the hours, days—hell, years!—Vlad had spent entwined with her in that bed upset me far past normal “vampire possessiveness.” In fact, my urge to manifest an electrical whip and start lashing the bed into pieces was so strong, my hand began to spark.
Vlad glanced at my hand and then at my face. Before I could say anything, the bed burst into flames.
My mouth opened in disbelief. In the few moments I took to close it, the wooden frame had buckled from the extreme heat and nothing was left of the blankets, pillows, and mattress except a smoldering black heap. Instead of that delicate floral fragrance, the room now stank of burnt foam and smoke.
The violently tender emotions sweeping mine told me why he’d done it, and it had nothing to do with his anger toward Cynthiana. He simply wanted to destroy something that hurt me.
I said nothing. Neither did he. Words were unnecessary now.
Chapter 43
I woke with the same suddenness as on the past five days, going from unconscious to on my feet in less time than it took to say, “Good evening.” The only difference was that tonight, my first thoughts weren’t of hunger.
“Did she buy it?” I asked at once.
Vlad had been standing by the open slot in the wall. In response, he held out the blood bag I hadn’t leapt upon.
I ignored it despite my fangs popping out and my stomach clenching as though it were a fist opening and closing. Four days ago, Sandra left a message for Cynthiana telling her where Shrapnel wanted to meet. The next day, the bookstore owner, also mesmerized into betraying Vlad, drove seventy miles away to make a call that wouldn’t be routed through the cell tower Vlad owned. Today, while I was asleep, Sandra went back to the bookstore to see if The Odyssey contained Cynthiana’s RSVP.
“Did she?” I repeated.
“Yes and no.”
He stroked his jaw in a seemingly absent way, yet he only did that when he was in deep contemplation.
“She agreed to meet him tomorrow at seven, but changed the location to the Bucharest Metro.”
I’d never taken the main Romanian subway for obvious reasons, but it wasn’t hard to figure out the problem.
“She picked rush hour in a busy public place.”
We’d chosen a warehouse in a sparsely populated town. Easy to surround, fewer bystanders to worry about. Cynthiana must’ve figured that out, too. Looked like Vlad and I were both right about her. She might be arrogant enough to come, but she wasn’t stupid enough to do it without adding protections. “It presents several difficulties, starting with being impossible to secure.” He gave me a brief, sardonic smile. “Many members of the Romanian government are in my line, yet I can’t order the entire Metro shut down. Even Mencheres couldn’t freeze tens of thousands of commuters and dozens of trains to catch her.”
“And if the Metro is suddenly filled with vampires, she’ll get suspicious and bolt.” I sighed. “Is tracing the bookstore owner’s call the next move?”
Vlad continued to stroke his jaw. “Already done. It went to a burner phone that led to nowhere. That leaves the Metro.”
“Did she even say which station?”
He snorted. “No, but it’s obvious.”
I let that alone. “Vlad, if she catches sight of you, she’ll run. In fact, after living with you for three decades, I bet she knows most of the vampires in your line and your allies, so a glimpse of one of them would make her a rabbit, too.”
He didn’t dispute any of the above. “After tomorrow, she’ll realize Shrapnel has been compromised. I’ll put a large bounty out on her, but catching her will take time. Difficult or not, the Metro is still my best chance.”
“Yes,” I said steadily, “it is, but you’re forgetting something important.”
A brow arched. “And that is?”
“Me.”
“Not this again,” he muttered.
“I’m the obvious choice. She doesn’t know what I look or smell like, so I could be standing right next to her and she wouldn’t feel the slightest bit threatened.”
“Why should she? She’s three hundred years older than you.”
His tone was scathing, but I wasn’t going to let him sidetrack me taking it personally.
“When we met, you insisted that I learn how to use my electrical abilities to fight, and you were right. They ended up saving my life when I took down vampires a lot older than me. But more than that, you keep saying ‘I’ when this isn’t only about you. Cynthiana killed my friends at the carnival. She had me kidnapped. Then it was her spell that stole my mortality from me before I was ready to give it up. If I was the type of person who’d let all of that slide, you wouldn’t love me because that sure as hell isn’t who you are.”
His stare could’ve bent a laser from its intensity.
“You expect me to forgo my vengeance in favor of yours?”
“No,” I said, adding with an inward smile, “they call you Vlad the Impaler, not Vlad the Emasculated. All I want is to go into the Metro and find her. Then I’ll either flush her out or tail her and give you her location. Either way, you’ll be the one to bag and tag her, but she’ll know—and so will I—that I helped take her down.”
He was silent for a long while. Then he said, “You’ve never even seen her face.”
Not a Hell, no! I began to feel a tingle of anticipation.
“Don’t worry. I’ve seen enough to spot her.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been surrounded by so many people. Maybe it was American snootiness that made me assume a Romanian subway w
ouldn’t be much busier than some of the larger carnivals I’d worked; maybe it was being underground that made everything feel more crowded. Whatever the reason, as I crossed the fourteen platforms of the Gara de Nord, I actually had to fight back a sense of claustrophobia.
At least I didn’t have to worry about electrocuting any of the commuters that brushed past me on their way to or from one of the Metro’s many trains. Underneath my business casual pants and blazer was a full body wetsuit, the rubber thicker because it was normally used for icy water dives. A silk scarf hid where the suit rose to the base of my neck, while theater-thick makeup covered my scar.
Aside from the annoying squeaking noises it made when I walked, the wetsuit could be a new wardrobe staple. I hadn’t been able to pass through a crowd without worrying about electrocuting people since I was fourteen. If it wouldn’t have attracted undue attention, I might have hugged a stranger just because I could.
Of course, there was another issue that being so close to thousands of people brought up. My hunger. Everywhere around me, countless veins bulged with the tantalizing nectar I now craved like a drug. Under normal circumstances, I’d be slowly introduced into limited-contact settings with humans to make sure I had enough control to handle it. Going into an underground Metro at rush hour was akin to jumping in the deep end to sink or swim. More than once, my fangs popped out and I had to hastily put a drink to my face to hide it. Good thing Vlad had suggested getting a cup of coffee as a prop.
The unpleasant smell of my surroundings helped curb my hunger, actually. With the bustle of people and the different sections of tunnels came all types of odors. Certain parts of the Metro were only a few shades more aromatic than Vlad’s dungeon. My first trip by a public bathroom almost made me throw up.
A screeching noise preceded a train on the M1 line coming to a halt. I sipped my coffee and watched the throngs of people load and unload, paying special attention to the women. No thick walnut-colored hair or telltale skin a shade too creamy, plus the only vibes I felt came from the electricity running through the tracks. I glanced at my watch. Six fifty-nine p.m. Time to check the next set of tracks at the Basarab stop.