“Bitch,” Hannibal snarled as something red hit the floor.
Part of me was screaming in disgusted horror, but survival instinct trumped everything else. Hannibal lunged at me and I whipped another sizzling current at him. It cut through his shoulder all the way down to his side, blanketing me in a veil of red as his momentum carried him into me.
I shoved him away. He fell, but the half of him that had a head kept flopping toward me. Only a few inches of flesh attached his left side to his torso, yet he still wasn’t dead?
“Bitch,” he rasped.
My eyes bugged. He could talk, too?
I didn’t want to see what else Hannibal could do. Another burst of current turned him from a large Y shape into a dotted i, but I didn’t have time to breathe a sigh of relief. More footsteps sounded in the hallway.
“Not inviting me to the party?” an amused voice asked.
I didn’t wait for him to see that the “party” had taken a lethal turn. As soon as those footsteps got close, I whipped a bolt into the hallway, hitting the Captain Morgan look-alike. He stared at me with the oddest expression on his face. Then everything north of his jaw slid off, hitting the floor with a thud that was echoed by his body moments later.
“What the fuck.”
A fresh surge of adrenaline shot through me. The fourth guard stared at the remains of Captain Morgan with disbelief. Then he disappeared up the stairs with vampiric speed.
I ran after him, desperation or overexertion making my heart feel like it would burst. The vampire was already at the controls, punching a button as he glanced back at me—
The bolt cut him across the face, but I was too far away for it to kill. I lashed another one at him as I scrabbled up the deck so fast that I fell. Immediately, something heavy smashed into me, pinning me down before it bashed my head against the thick fiberglass.
The fifth guard had joined the fight.
My vision swam while pain seared my mind, but if I focused on that, I was dead. Instead of protecting my head as I instinctively wanted to do, I laid my right hand against the vampire, shooting everything I had left into him.
Immediately, his weight was gone. I crawled backward so fast that I almost pitched myself overboard, but I grabbed the railing just in time. Then I held on, looking around with frantic resolve for my attacker.
No one rushed toward me. Nothing moved at all, in fact. I used the railing to hoist myself to my feet, my head continuing to ring while nausea and the pitching waves made it hard to find my footing. I hadn’t taken one step before I tripped, cursing my clumsiness. Then I looked down . . . and stared.
I hadn’t tripped because I was dealing with the aftereffects of getting my head bashed against the hull. I’d tripped because the deck was covered in what looked like lasagna. It took a few seconds to translate the sight.
Not lasagna. The remains of the vampire who jumped me. Had to be; the other vampire was slumped over the controls, slowly withering as all vampires did when they truly died. I’d shoved so much electricity into my attacker that he had exploded.
I was torn between wanting to laugh from relief and wanting to crawl back to the railing and throw up until I passed out. I’d wanted to kill my captors and I had, yet I hadn’t been ready to know the full extent of my abilities. As usual, life hadn’t waited until I was ready to show me what it had in store.
The sound of several hard thumps yanked my focus from the terrible sight around me. They came from below deck, and caution mingled with hope. Was that Maximus? Or another guard trying to lure me down to the same lethal trap I’d used on his buddies?
I went over to the narrow staircase, looking at it with resignation. My whole body was drained but the fight might not be over. Bad guys didn’t stop for time-outs and neither could I.
I didn’t bother to creep down the staircase. At my stealthiest, I couldn’t sneak up on a vampire who knew I was coming. My only defense was my right hand, and it felt like a light bulb that was one switch flip away from burning out. The thumps continued, coming from underneath the floor despite me being below deck now. Did this boat have another level to it?
I flinched at every pitch and roll of the boat, anticipating a sixth attacker about to pounce on me. The only open door along the narrow hallway was the one filled with bodies, but I wasn’t alone. The continued sounds proved that.
I’d reached the end of the hallway when a thump vibrated right underneath my foot. I jumped back, weak sparks shooting from my hand, before noticing the latch in the floor.
A cargo hold locked from the outside. That ruled out an imminent attack by a sixth guard. Another thump sounded. Maximus, I thought, relief making me drop to my knees. I pulled out the bolt, flung open the trap door . . . and stared.
“Please,” a red-streaked girl mumbled. Her eyes were closed and more bloody forms were beside her.
I wanted to pull her up but didn’t touch her. Even drained, the juice in me would harm her and she looked near death already. Hannibal’s directive to Stephen rang across my mind. Fuck someone in the hold instead. I hadn’t been the only cargo Hannibal had picked up.
“It’s going to be all right.”
Fury made my voice sound stronger than I felt. The girl’s eyes fluttered open.
“Who’re you?” she mumbled.
“I’m the person who killed every last vampire on this boat,” I told her. After seeing the contents of the cargo hold, I was no longer repelled by my abilities. In fact, I was glad I’d blasted the fifth guard to smithereens.
She smiled weakly, then that faded and her eyes closed. I rattled the door to get her attention.
“Don’t. You need to stay awake, and if anyone else is alive, you need to wake them, too. Tell me you understand.”
Her eyes opened, their blue color reminding me of Gretchen’s. They looked to be the same ago, too. My anger grew.
“Got it.” Then she began to shake the closest form to her.
“Get up, Janice. Help is on the way.”
I rose, filled with fresh determination. Damn right it was.
Then I opened every door in the tiny hallway. Two were storage closets, one was a bathroom, and the fourth . . .
I rushed forward. Maximus was on the floor in a tiny bedroom, duct tape around his mouth and something that looked like silver razor wire binding him from ankles to neck. It wrapped so tightly around him that it disappeared into his skin in places, as if his struggles had driven it deeper.
I’d cut my fingers off if I tried to mess with that wire, but I could help with the gag. I ripped it off, slapping his face when he still didn’t open his eyes.
“Maximus, wake up!”
No response. If not for the fact that vampires turned into withered husks when they died, I would’ve sworn that I was too late. Then, with excruciating slowness, he opened his eyes.
I stared at him in horror. The whites were streaked with dark gray lines. A closer look revealed that underneath all the dried blood, his skin bore similar streaks.
“They never got the liquid silver out of you,” I whispered.
No response from Maximus. His eyes rolled back and he shuddered so hard that the wire tore away chunks of flesh. Marty had told me what would happen to a vampire if liquid silver stayed in their system long enough. It wouldn’t kill Maximus. It would do something worse: degrade his brain until he became a madman, and once it reached that stage, it couldn’t be reversed. Even if I cut the razor wire off him, the real poison would still be destroying him from the inside out.
Maximus couldn’t help me save the dying humans in the cargo hold. He couldn’t even save himself.
Chapter 16
I searched the dead vampires’ bodies. Hannibal had the only cell phone, yet it was cut in half along with the rest of his upper body. Then I spent a futile several minutes trying the boat’s communications system, but I’d overloaded that when I killed the vampire slumped over it. Even if a 1–900–VAMPIRE helpline existed, I had no way to reach it. I didn�
��t see lights from nearby boats, either, not that I could steer toward them. The engine was as fried as the communications system.
I wanted to scream out of sheer frustration. There had to be something I could do!
Then my frustration began to fade as logic took over. I could wait until I eventually drifted to land or the path of another boat, but that would be too late for everyone else. There was, however, one vampire I could reach without the aid of technology, and despite the many reasons why I didn’t want to, unless I was willing to let Maximus go mad and the humans die, I had no choice.
I sat down on a section of the deck that wasn’t covered in body parts. With the cool breeze whipping my hair, I ran my right hand over my skin until I found a familiar essence trail and followed it. Within seconds, the deck vanished and I found myself looking at the parking lot of the Motel 6 in South Bend.
Lights from three police cars cast a red and blue glow over the ruined exterior of my former hotel room. Most of the window was gone and bullet holes pockmarked the outer walls. With all the gunfire, the inside must look like Swiss cheese, too. Then I noticed the dark-haired figure on the edge of the parking lot, barking furiously into his cell phone in Romanian.
Seeing him at the site of my kidnapping didn’t bode well, but if I doomed Maximus and those poor people by not taking this chance, I couldn’t live with myself anyway.
“Hang up, Vlad,” I said shortly. “We need to talk.”
Shock flashed over his face. He whirled as if trying to pinpoint my location, hanging up without saying another word.
“Leila. Where—”
“Are you here to admire your lackey’s handiwork?” I cut him off, going on the offensive. “If so, you’d be proud. Hannibal shot up this place with an utter disregard for innocent peoples’ lives, all to make sure Maximus was pumped full of enough liquid silver to make him barely able to move.”
Fire erupted from his hands. “I had nothing to do with this, so tell me where you are. Right now.”
He could be trying to find my location in case he realized I’d managed to free myself, but as I told Maximus, if Vlad wanted to kill me, I expected him to be a lot less cowardly about it. I was still asking the most obvious question, though.
“Then why are you here? And put out your hands, cops are crawling all over the place.”
To punctuate my point, a police officer walked up, looking at Vlad in the suspicious way any sane person would. “You. What’s wrong with your hands—”
“Shut up and leave,” Vlad said with a flash of his gaze, though he did extinguish the flames. The officer headed back to the hotel and Vlad continued as if we hadn’t been interrupted.
“I’m here because I tracked Maximus’s cell phone to this area, but I’m not behind this attack.”
“Then we’ve got another problem, because the vampire who grabbed me knew things about my abilities that only you and a few of your guards knew.”
Vlad’s features hardened into diamondlike planes. “Oh?”
“First things first. You’re not surprised that I’m alive, so I really did connect to you in my dreams before, didn’t I?”
His hands didn’t light up again, but they briefly turned orange, as if the fire tried to free itself but he held it back.
“Yes. Perhaps you don’t need to physically touch anything to link to me because we’ve shared each other’s blood, perhaps it’s because your powers are stronger than you realize. Either way, your ‘dreams’ were real.”
I sighed. Deep down, I’d always known that, even when I desperately wanted to deny it. Of course, that meant I had a bargain to work out first.
“Promise me you won’t kill Maximus and I’ll tell you what I know of my location.”
Vlad growled out something in Romanian. I couldn’t translate all of it, but I recognized several curses.
“We don’t have time for games,” he finished.
“I know,” I shot back. “I’ve got several humans who need medical attention and a vampire going insane from silver poisoning, but you said you were going to kill Maximus. So unless you swear on your father’s and son’s graves that you’re not, I won’t give up my location. Oh, and you can’t torture him, either,” I added, remembering the backhanded way he’d kept his promise not to kill Marty.
Vlad’s eyes changed from copper to green, glowing so hotly that I found myself thinking if dragons were real, they’d have eyes just like his. My next thought was We’re screwed, because then he smiled in that lethally genial way I’d seen him do right before he burned someone to ash.
“On the graves of my father and son, I, Vladislav Dracul, swear not to torture or kill Rossal de Payen, the man you know as Maximus.” He paused a moment as if letting those words sink in. “Now, Leila. Where are you?”
Vlad was infamous for his honesty, yet that smile made me feel like I’d overlooked something. Still, I’d done the best I could, and Vlad was the only chance Maximus and those humans had.
“I’m on a boat, and since I wasn’t unconscious long, we’ve got to be on Lake Michigan . . .”
The sun rose three hours ago, but I had yet to see another boat. In some ways, that was good. I’d never explain the mess on the deck to the Coast Guard, and it meant Hannibal’s boss hadn’t discovered his “package” had killed her delivery boys.
I was below deck, alternating between checking on Maximus and doing what I could for the critically drained victims. That didn’t consist of much beyond dropping down blankets, duct tape and fabric for bandages, and cups of water for the conscious ones. I’d considered cutting Maximus to give them some of his blood, but the last time I got close, only a quick leap backward kept him from biting off a hunk of my leg. Either the pain made him lash out instinctively or the madness had started to set in.
I found myself praying to anyone who might be listening that help wouldn’t arrive too late.
I was on my way back to the cargo hold when all of a sudden, I couldn’t move. It was as if an invisible, massive fist squeezed me from head to toe, choking off my breath as instantly as it had frozen me in place. Panic had me mentally screaming, but I couldn’t twitch or draw a breath. It even felt like the currents inside me came to a screeching halt.
Buzzing started to sound in my ears, growing louder as the seconds stretched longer. Then, just as abruptly as it had come, that terrible squeezing sensation vanished. I fell forward, sucking in huge gulps of air. I had to blink repeatedly to chase away the tears and black spots in my vision. Once I could see straight again, I looked up—and then froze for a different reason this time.
Vlad loomed over me, dark hair wildly tangled, lean stubbled features a thunderous mixture of fierceness and triumph. His pants and shirt were soaked, their light blue color making them almost see-through. I blinked, wondering if I’d fallen over the edge of consciousness without realizing it.
A faint smile twisted his mouth. “I’m real, Leila. See?”
He grasped my arms and pulled me up. My legs trembled but held, and with ragged pieces of rubber still dangling from my hands, I touched his bare wrists. Heat scalded my flesh at the same instant that a current sizzled into him.
Oh yes, he was definitely real.
Of all the thoughts to cross my mind in that instant, He looks even better than I remembered was the last one I wanted Vlad to hear. It didn’t matter. His widening smile told me he’d caught it. I let go, seizing on a more important topic.
“What just happened? I couldn’t move.”
“Mencheres is with me,” he said, as if that explained it.
My brow rose. “And?”
He dropped one hand but tightened the other. “Come.”
I followed Vlad up the narrow steps. Once topside, I saw the Egyptian vampire, also soaking wet, surveying the remains of my captors with detached admiration. Then Mencheres turned, shading his gaze against the bright, mid-morning sun.
“My apologies for using my power on you, Leila. We thought it necessary to immobilize th
e entire boat in case some of your captors had survived.”
You think I wouldn’t notice someone else trying to kill me? I thought jadedly.
“One could have jumped overboard and then waited to catch you unawares,” Mencheres replied, reminding me that Vlad wasn’t the only mind reader on board. “That’s why we swam the last few miles. Less to notice when we’re under water.”
“So you’re the reason I felt like I was encased in invisible carbonite?”
The vampire shrugged. “I can control things with my mind,” he said, his tone implying that it wasn’t a big deal.
With that incredible ability, Vlad should take Mencheres with him on all his rescue missions. All his assaults, too.
A growl made me glance up. Vlad’s expression was closed off, reminding me that this wasn’t a happy reunion.
“Thank you both for coming,” I said, my voice turning businesslike. “The injured people are in the cargo hold and Maximus is in one of the rooms below.
Another ominous sound from Vlad. “I know. I smelled him.”
“The humans need blood for healing,” I said, ignoring that. “And Maximus needs that silver out of him. He’s already showing signs of . . . mental instability.”
With that, I headed downstairs, making sure to sing anything that came to mind as I went. Being near Vlad was so much harder than seeing him in a dream. Every emotion I’d tried to suppress resurfaced with pitiless intensity, and that was only how he affected my heart. My hands still tingled from their brief contact with his skin, and if his wet clothes molded any more explicitly to his body, I’d soon smell like eau de slut to any vampire within sniffing distance.
He’ll be gone soon, I consoled myself. Then I could go back to burying those traitorous emotions by hunting for Marty’s killer. Hannibal said he didn’t know who hired him, but a search through the memories in his bones would show if he was lying.
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