“Go easy, they can’t hurt me,” I said, grimacing when I watched a guy go limp after a hard fall to the floor.
Ian was also trying for the nonviolent approach. “This is a regrettable misunderstanding!” he shouted, ducking a series of wine bottles that began to torpedo into him. “Elena, we can—”
“He killed Klaus!” she roared, waving at the crowd, who had paused in their gang rush after Vlad’s ruthless response. “What are you waiting for?” Elena continued. “Get them!”
“Imbeciles,” Vlad muttered. “Still, this is the quickest way to find out if any of them has real ability.”
I would’ve argued, but Klaus had ruined doing this the peaceful way. Yet if he’d succeeded in shouting out Vlad’s name, we may as well have carved out a message in my skin to let Mircea’s captors know that we were after them. Plus it probably wouldn’t have taken long for the Law Guardians to hear of it, too, and we didn’t need more people trying to kill us.
“Don’t hurt them too badly,” I said. “And let’s split up, it’ll be quicker that way.” When Vlad didn’t move from his position in front of me, I gave him a firm shove. “If I see any hint of dangerous magic, I’ll yell for you, okay?”
“You’d better,” he growled, his eyes glittering.
I smiled wide enough to show that my fangs were out. “Go.”
He did, albeit after kicking aside the first group of people who charged us again. Then I was the one ducking as bottles from the bar came flying my way. Glass shattered as my quick maneuvers caused some to hit the wall behind me. My victory was short-lived as the velvet couches I’d admired were the next salvos. One briefly knocked me flat, although others knocked over the people trying to tackle me, so they helped me more than harmed me.
My blithe attitude changed when the next items magically hurled my way were knives. They came at me as fast as I could bob, weave, or knock them away, and the ones I avoided turned around in midair before zooming toward me again. Even with my speed, two sank into my back, and when I still felt searing pain after I’d yanked them out, I looked more closely at the blades.
Ragged bits of another metal coated them, and that lingering pain in my back meant only one thing.
“Silver!” I shouted, spinning around to put my back to the wall before any more of those deadly blades struck me from behind. That left my front vulnerable, but I grabbed a thick crystal ashtray and shoved it inside my bra. Now, I had a knife-proof patch over my heart. Vlad didn’t, though, and more silver-edged knives were coming from seemingly out of nowhere.
Something sparkly caught my eye. A large grouping of rings, necklaces, bracelets, and other jewelry floated about twenty feet above the bar. As I watched, a necklace flew off the throat of one of my attackers, joining that mass. Then slivers from the jewelry bundle split off and stuck to the kitchen knives that were hovering in the air next to the jewelry bundle.
If our lives weren’t in danger, I would’ve admired the spell caster’s cleverness. Talk about making the most out of what was available. Yet that same someone had taken this fight to a whole new level. Who was it?
Not one of my attackers, I decided, since they were putting all their efforts into a physical assault. I shoved them aside more viciously than I’d done before and looked around for the spell caster.
Elena was on the floor about twenty feet away, her legs still bent at odd angles. She wasn’t crawling away from the chaos or doing anything else a normal person would. Instead, her hands were up as if in supplication, and beneath the various sounds from the fight around us, I caught a hint of her muttering in a strange language.
I couldn’t translate what she was saying, but I recognized what she was doing. I started toward her, then stopped when a cloud of silver-edged knives suddenly formed a protective barrier around her. I might not be able to reach her, but I knew someone who could.
“Elena’s the spell caster!” I shouted.
Just as quickly, Ian yelled, “Whatever you do, don’t kill her!”
Vlad spun around, not even looking at the person who smashed a chair into him as soon as his back was turned. “Stop,” he ordered Elena, holding up a flaming hand in warning.
She spat out an unfamiliar word and raised her hands higher. Vlad clenched his fist, and Elena’s whole body exploded as if she’d swallowed a bag of grenades. I winced, but he’d warned her, and that was more than he normally did.
The people attacking us cast a horrified look at Elena’s flaming, scattered remains. Then everyone stopped fighting and began to run for the elevator. I thought it was fear over what Vlad had done, but then I felt the ground start to shift. The entire room began to plummet downward as if it had morphed into an elevator whose cables had been cut.
“What’s going on?” I screamed.
Ian reached me first, grabbing my arm and ignoring the electricity that shot into him. “Elena’s death triggered a spell that opened a thousand-foot sinkhole beneath us, so if you value your arse, we need to leave!”
Vlad reached us right as a shower of concrete began to rain down from the ceiling. The walls cracked and folded, too, until it looked as if the room was also squeezed by a giant fist during its mad free fall. Vlad crushed me to him, huge bursts of fire shooting from his other hand. Ian flung his arms around my waist the instant before Vlad vaulted us upward.
The force of the fire blasted through the chunks of debris that threatened to throw us into the destruction below. I had to shut my eyes from all the rocks and ash that blinded me as Vlad continued to blast a path to the surface. I couldn’t count all the impacts I felt along the way. One briefly knocked me unconscious, and more than once, fire came so close that I felt it melt off parts of my clothes.
Then the pain ceased and the awful sounds of destruction dimmed. I blinked hard, and through clouds of smoke saw that we were now clear of the underground club. In fact, we were now over the entire city block. Well, what was left of it. The sinkhole had claimed far more than the decoy bar. Now, instead of a row of tightly clustered buildings, there was only a smoking hole the size of a football field several stories deep.
“I told you not to kill Elena,” Ian muttered, his tight grip on me causing new bruises to appear faster than the old ones could heal. “She might have been only a mediocre shag for me, but she fucked you right and proper, Tepesh.”
Chapter 9
We had barely cleared the sound of police sirens before Vlad dropped us into the middle of a section of deserted buildings. Then he backed Ian against the nearest wall and hauled him off of his feet with a single hand to the throat.
“You lied,” Vlad said, biting the words out. “First you brought us to a place where you knew we wouldn’t find the caliber of sorcerer we needed, then you failed to warn us that Elena’s death would trigger a massive sinkhole. I should kill you right now for such betrayal.”
“. . . not . . . ’etrayal . . .” Ian got out, the words garbled.
Vlad’s grip on his throat didn’t loosen. I touched his arm. “At least let him explain.” Then I gave Ian a warning look. “And it had better be good.”
After a moment, Vlad let go of Ian’s neck. “Talk.”
Ian rubbed his throat where a blistered handprint now faded as his skin healed with vampiric swiftness. “For starters, I didn’t tell you because you gave me no other choice.”
I braced for Vlad to blow Ian to kingdom come, but all he did was say, “These may be your last words, so choose them well.”
“You’re used to being the most powerful person in the room, but in this world, you’re not,” Ian said, sound highly irritated. “Not that you’d take my word for it. That’s why I took you to a place with more posers than practitioners. Knew you’d storm in with your ‘I’m Vlad the Impaler, bow before me’ approach, and you didn’t disappoint. You also didn’t listen when I told you not to kill Elena, and you wouldn’t have listened if I’d warned you about her fail-safe. Besides all that”—a shrug—“if we couldn’t survive a mid-level prac
titioner’s booby trap, we bloody well couldn’t survive real sorcerers. Now that we have, perhaps you’ll heed my advice instead of continuing to assume that you know more about this world than I do.”
Vlad stared at Ian. Ian stared back, oozing a mixture of aggravation and defiance. On one hand, I wanted to kill Ian myself for his show-don’t-tell approach that had almost ended all our lives tonight. On the other hand . . .
“He’s right,” I said, shooting Vlad an apologetic glance. “You probably wouldn’t have listened if Ian had warned you in advance. For that matter, I wouldn’t have, either. How would I know a mid-level witch could cause the ground to swallow half a city block? We’re both learning as we go, so for now, we need to trust that Ian knows better than we do.”
Vlad didn’t say anything. At last, he smiled at Ian. Not his charming, you’re-about-to-die grin, but a flash of teeth that struck me as one predator acknowledging another.
“You are correct,” he said. “I would’ve assumed cowardice made you exaggerate Elena’s abilities since Mencheres had to force you into accompanying us. But since he did trust you for this task, I suppose I should’ve known there was more to you than the insipid whore you present yourself to be.”
Instead of being insulted, Ian smiled almost flirtatiously. “Oh, I am all the whore you can imagine and more, but I do have other talents. Few people see them, although you and your lovely wife are about to.”
“Then for now, we’ll follow your lead, and you’ll take us to where the true sorcerers gather,” Vlad replied, his tone silky with challenge. “Once there, we will see if any of your supposed other talents can actually impress me.”
If there was any good news about our disastrous visit to Selenites, it was that we were probably the only people to make it out alive. In addition to decimating the underground bar, Elena’s spell had also claimed most of the city block above it, so the human bartender and the customers at the decoy bar had died, too. Thus, it was doubtful that anyone knew Ian had shown up at Selenites with one vampire who could manifest fire and another who could electrocute people. Our secret partnership with Ian was safe.
Then again, even if word had filtered out, no one would believe we were the same people in The Pirate’s House parking lot in Savannah, Georgia, with Ian the next night. For starters, Vlad now looked like a short-haired redhead with a square face, a crooked nose, and light blue eyes. His lean, muscular frame had also expanded to a stocky build, and he’d lost over an inch in height. I, too, had a new face complete with shoulder-length blond hair, brown eyes, pouty lips, and a body with even more curves than Marilyn Monroe.
Ian had brushed off my admiration over his appearance-altering spell, saying that “glamour” was only mid-level magic and the effects would wear off by dawn. Since glamour wasn’t rare magic, he had reminded us that we needed something else to disguise ourselves. Something no one would question.
“Unless you want the sorcerers you seek to know that you’re swimming in their waters, we need to hide your identities, agreed?” Ian had asked the night before.
“Of course,” Vlad had said impatiently. “But I’m known to many people, as Klaus proved, and since vampires can spot theater makeup or a mask, I assume real sorcerers can spot those, too.”
“Oh, easily,” Ian had agreed.
Vlad’s gaze had narrowed. “I am not staying behind, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ian had replied with a smirk.
That smirk had raised my suspicions. “You know a way around this, don’t you?” I asked.
“First, let’s establish that you’d do anything to find a sorcerer strong enough to break the spell on your wife, yes?” Ian said, not answering my question.
“Yes,” Vlad replied without hesitation.
“Depends,” I amended. When Ian’s smirk widened into a full-fledged grin, I knew that my suspicions were well founded.
So here I was, about to play my role as part of a happy, horny threesome. As Ian reminded us, no one would believe that the homicidally possessive Vlad the Impaler would be into such a thing. Hell, Vlad had blown a guy’s head off for merely grabbing my ass, and I’m sure word of that had made the undead rounds because he’d done it in front of hundreds of people.
I tried not to focus on what came next, so I allowed myself to enjoy the unusual perks of my new body. So this was what it felt like to have boobs and a bubble butt! Never before had I felt things bounce while I walked. I even put an extra sway in my step just to feel it all bounce a little more.
Vlad caught what I was doing, and a sideways grin curled his new, wider mouth. “Do I need to memorize this spell so we can use it for our private enjoyment later?”
Before I could answer, Ian spoke. “If you think this is impressive, I know a fellow whose wife can shape-shift into an actual dragon. I ache with envy at the thought of shagging one of those.”
My jaw dropped. “You’d seriously bang a dragon?”
“Oh, for days,” he responded at once. “Can you imagine the Internet videos? I’d be a bloody legend.”
There was something very wrong with him, but tonight, we’d find out if Ian’s ties to the magical world were everything he’d promised.
“Remember your roles,” Ian said as we approached the entrance to The Pirate’s House. He pushed himself between the two of us, linking an arm around each of our waists. “And whatever you do, don’t kill anyone, Tepesh,” he added.
Vlad’s response was a low growl of “I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I?”
Yeah, but now our real disguise was about to begin. I took a deep breath to center myself. Showtime. I’d been a carnival performer for years, so I was no stranger to acting. This might be a different sort of role, but whatever, I could handle it.
When Ian’s arm slipped lower around Vlad’s waist, however, Vlad’s anger pierced his shields enough to singe my emotions. Saying that Vlad was prickly about being touched was like saying that God was mildly annoyed by the Devil. I stopped even though we’d only made it a couple feet away from the car.
“Are you sure about this?” I said, holding Vlad’s gaze.
It felt like molten steel coated my emotions with the resolve behind his reply. “Yes.”
Ian glanced at Vlad, assessing the situation. Then, moving so fast that he startled me, he grabbed Vlad and kissed him.
Vlad’s rage flash-fried my emotions with the intensity of a dozen wildfires. But he didn’t shove Ian away or burn him with the flames I could practically see beneath his skin. Instead, he bent Ian backward with the force of his answering kiss. When Vlad released him, Ian gave him a crooked grin.
“Guess I was wrong to fret about your past experiences being stronger than your willpower.”
I was so aghast at Ian’s casual reference to Vlad’s childhood imprisonment and rape that I slapped him as hard as I could. If I hadn’t been wearing thick rubber gloves, my whip might have spontaneously shot out and taken his head off, too. Ian rocked back a few feet, and a group of people entering the parking lot let out shocked sounds as they gaped at us.
Ian straightened and gave me a single glare before he turned to the crowd and waved at them. “She loves to play rough,” he told them. “That’s why it takes two of us to handle her, the fierce little vixen.”
One of girls let out an admiring giggle while the rest of the group averted their gaze as they walked by. Ian gave them another saluting wave, then he turned back to me.
“Seems Tepesh isn’t the only one with a temper,” he said in an exasperated tone. “Do I have to make you promise not to kill anyone, too, poppet?”
I stiffened even as part of me acknowledged that I’d gone too far. Vlad was more than able to defend himself, if he’d felt the need. At least our cover was still intact, even if it now looked like I was a sadist as well as a sex groupie.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Don’t be,” Vlad said. His fingers traced up my arm and he dropped his shields long enou
gh for me to feel satisfaction rising in him, mixed with the remains of his anger. He liked that I’d overreacted on his behalf, even if there had been no need. Then he fixed Ian with a laserlike glare.
“Don’t ever bring that up again,” he said, his pleasant tone belying the scent of smoke starting to emanate from him.
The smile wiped from Ian’s face, replaced by an expression I hadn’t seen before. On anyone else, I’d call it sincerity. “I wasn’t making light. Men handle such things differently. Some heal and go on to live completely normal lives. Some abhor contact with others afterward, and some”—a shrug—“seek out all the contact they can get to prove that it’s their choice now. I simply needed to know if your history, combined with your well-documented dislike of personal contact, would be a stumbling block to our goals tonight.”
Ian continued to hold Vlad’s gaze, and the tension in the air changed. Anger gave way to an unspoken acknowledgment that made me glance away, suddenly feeling like I’d walked in on a very personal conversation. I wanted to tell Ian that I was sorry for what had happened to him, which was how I interpreted the subtext of his statements. But if I was right, Ian wouldn’t want my pity. No, if he was anything like Vlad, he’d scorn pity because he’d turned the pain from his former rape into steel that now made him unbreakable.
Then, abrupt as a thunderclap, Ian’s expression transformed into his usual mocking smirk.
“But, since we’ve established that you’re a very convincing actor—blimey, I’ll fantasize all night about that blazingly hot tongue!—let’s go find some sorcerers, shall we?”
“At The Pirate’s House restaurant,” I added, fighting a stab of ridiculous jealousy that made me want to inform Ian that Vlad’s tongue and every other scorching part of him was mine.
“Not The Pirate’s House, poppet,” Ian said, his grin turning knowing, as if he’d guessed at my surge of possessiveness. “Next to it.”