“Vlad said you probably thought you were protecting us by this deception. Is that true?”
“Yes.” A lump rocketed its way up my throat. He knew why I did it, too. I couldn’t have felt more ashamed.
“Well.” My father gave me a wintry smile. “I’d say more, but I think Gretchen’s slap covered it. Try to use better judgment next time, will you?”
I swallowed hard, regretting so many things that I didn’t know where to start with the self-recriminations.
“I will.”
A vampire named Oscar escorted me to the same room I’d stayed in before Vlad and I started dating. It was on the second floor, a full two levels below Vlad’s room. The sight of the lace canopied bed, marble fireplace, enormous antique wardrobe, and indigo walls shouldn’t have been depressing, but it was. Months ago, I’d dubbed this the Blue Room because of its color and the psychic impression I’d picked up from the crying woman who’d stayed here before me. Her relationship problems ended up being resolved, as I found out after meeting her and her husband. Mine were irreparable.
It was just after ten a.m., Romanian time, but convert that to Greenwich Vampire Time and it was practically the middle of the night. Therefore, I made no attempt to talk to Vlad. I might have slept on the flight over, but he could’ve been awake the whole time making sure my hand didn’t short-circuit the jet. Besides, I wasn’t sure what I was going to say.
I showered and changed into an outfit I selected from the packed wardrobe, not surprised to find it was my size. Vlad’s house was always stocked with all the amenities. Then I went down to the first floor, passing by several magnificent rooms in search of one on the farthest eastern corner.
Once inside the kitchen, I was glad to see a familiar face.
“Hi, Isha,” I greeted the rotund, gray-haired woman who was one of the house’s several cooks. Vlad’s guards were vampires and so was his staff, but he made sure that the human blood donors who lived here ate like kings. So did his guests. I could’ve ordered room service, but I didn’t want to put on airs.
Isha stopped chopping. “Miss Dalton,” she replied in her heavy Romanian accent. “How may I assist you?”
I blinked. It had been “Leila” before, and was it my imagination, or was she politely glaring at me?
“Don’t mind me. I just came to grab some fruit and cheese.”
Isha blocked the front of the huge refrigerator before I made it two steps into the kitchen.
“Miss Dalton, please indicate where you would like your breakfast served, and I will be happy to have it sent there.”
Now I stared at her in disbelief. I couldn’t count all the times I’d helped myself when I lived here, usually while having a pleasant chat with Isha or one of the other chefs.
“It’s no trouble, I’ll get it myself,” I tried again.
Isha’s gaze narrowed even as she smiled, crinkling lines that showed she’d been in her sixties when she was changed.
“Nonsense, it will be my pleasure. Shall I send a plate to your bedroom, or to the second-floor lounge?”
Her tone couldn’t have been more civil. Same with her words, and still, I felt like I’d been reprimanded.
“The lounge is fine. Ah, thank you, Ms. . . .” Crap, I didn’t know her last name. “Call me Isha, dear!” she’d said when we met, and we’d been on a first-name basis ever since.
She turned away without another word, going back to her cutting board. Faster than a machine, she julienned a pile of vegetables, the morning light glinting off her knife.
I left, but decided to take the long way back to my room. There was something I wanted to test first.
As I wandered around downstairs, I made it a point to greet every person I recognized. They were all impeccably polite, but people I’d once counted as friends now made Stepford Wives seem warmer by comparison. If I had undead senses, I’d bet the scent of disapproval would’ve clogged up my nostrils.
No great stretch to figure out why. Guess I’d done the unforgivable by breaking up with their Master. Even if they’d overheard my reasons, obviously they thought I should’ve been grateful to accept whatever crumbs of affection Vlad offered me.
Now I knew how a pinball in a machine felt—everything I touched seemed to bounce me away as fast as it could. His staff’s coldness shouldn’t bother me, but it did. My stomach growled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten in over a day, but instead of going to the second floor, I went to the small stairway behind the interior garden. Then I followed it to an enclosed stone hallway and opened the second door past the chapel.
The gymnasium. I’d spent most of my childhood in one of these, so the pulleys, mats, weights, trampoline, and uneven bars meant more than exercise. They were time machines transporting me to a carefree past before I touched that downed power line. I went to the trampoline and started a series of flips, but they reminded me too much of my act with Marty. I jumped off and went to a mat, fighting a surge of grief.
There, I began to do the routine I’d perfected back when I was thirteen and had a shot at making the Olympic gymnastics team. My body wasn’t as conditioned nor was I wearing the right clothes, but I did the entire set of floor exercises anyway. Then another one, and another. Soon my jeans and T-shirt were sweaty, but I didn’t stop. Some days, if I pushed myself hard enough, I could almost hear my mother’s voice.
Who’s my little champion? I’m so proud of you, sweetheart . . .
“Leila!”
The feminine voice didn’t come from my imagination. It came from a strawberry blonde across the room.
“Everyone, Leila’s back!” Sandra called down the hallway. Then she rushed forward with a grin. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
Her genuine happiness was like a balm on a stinging burn. If it wouldn’t have electrocuted her to death, I might have hugged her for an hour.
“I, ah . . .”—was afraid I’d get yelled at or rejected again—“wasn’t sure if you’d be awake,” I finished lamely.
Sandra laughed. “I wasn’t an hour ago, but that would have been fine. Why are you back? Did you and Vlad—”
“There she is!” Joe called, cutting off Sandra’s question. In no time at all, I found myself saying hi to old friends and meeting the new live-in donors for the a.m. shift of the house’s feeding schedule.
“Come, you must tell us everything,” Sandra commanded. Then she grinned. “I didn’t really want to exercise anyway.”
I couldn’t tell her everything, but I could give her some details. Besides, there was a kitchen down here, too, and unlike the one upstairs, it didn’t have any vampires who held a grudge against me in it.
Chapter 19
After a pleasant couple hours where I caught up with Sandra and the others, I went back upstairs. There, I spent a not-so-pleasant couple hours with Gretchen and my dad, trying to explain that someone had planted the gas line bomb and that same person would’ve considered my family excellent bait if he—or she—realized I’d survived. My father, a retired lieutenant colonel, understood and seemed willing to forgive me. I wondered if Gretchen ever would.
At last, I went back to my room and took another shower. Once clean and redressed, I looked out my window at the darkening sky and tried not to wonder if Vlad was waking up. Out of all the people who were angry at me, he had the most right to be. Despite how coldly he’d ended our relationship and how hard it was to be near him, I still owed him an apology for believing that he’d been behind the carnival bomb. The next time I saw him, I’d pay up on that debt.
Until then, I distracted myself by wondering how Maximus was doing. I wasn’t about to ask the staff, and asking Vlad might make him blow his lighter fluid. However, I had another way to see if Maximus had recovered.
I ran my right hand over my skin, finding the essence trail Maximus had left. Then I focused on it until the Blue Room vanished and complete darkness surrounded me. For a second, I was confused. Then I saw a green glow and heard Vlad’s voice.
“—wasn’
t my preference. I’d rather kill you.”
A heavy sigh. “Then why don’t you?”
Maximus’s voice. I still couldn’t see him, but he sounded sane, to my vast relief. Where were they that the only light came from Vlad’s eyes?
“Leila.” My name hung in the stygian air. Vlad let out a short laugh. “She refused to tell me where she was until I swore an oath not to torture or kill you.”
Maximus laughed, too, and it sounded equally humorless. “She left a few things out, like eternal imprisonment.”
“She’s young,” Vlad said, “and it may not be eternal. In a century or two, I might get over my anger and let you out.”
Something clanked together, and then another flash of green filled the blackness. Maximus’s eyes, illuminating enough for me to see that his face was pressed against thick metal bars.
“She’ll be long dead by then,” he rasped.
Vlad’s gaze gleamed brighter. “Will she?”
Now I knew where the two of them were, and rage shot through me. Maximus wasn’t back at Mencheres’s house. He was about a hundred feet below me in Vlad’s underground dungeon!
“Leila refused your offer to turn her into a vampire.” Maximus’s tone hardened. “She’s done with you, remember?”
Vlad’s laughter rolled out, low yet relentless, like thunder during a spring storm. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have lied to me about her being alive. You must have guessed that I was letting her leave me, but I wasn’t letting her go. That’s why you kept her from contacting me by convincing her that I might be the one behind the bomb.”
“You could have been,” Maximus growled.
Vlad’s hands flashed out, closing over Maximus’s. Only those thick rods of metal separated their faces as he leaned in.
“That, you must want to believe,” he said softly. “Otherwise, you betrayed me for nothing.”
Their matching glowing gazes showed every nuance of their flinty expressions. Finally, Maximus’s mouth curled and he yanked his hands out from under Vlad’s.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say it was for nothing.”
My jaw dropped. His insinuation was clear, as Vlad’s hands bursting into flames proved. Part of me was offended by the false intimation while the other cheered Maximus for scoring a hit despite his helpless circumstances.
Which I was going to do something about. Locking him away in a dungeon counted as torture in my book, especially since Vlad intended Maximus to stay there a century or two.
Vlad barked out something in reply, but the room swam around me, blackness giving way to an avalanche of blue as I lost the link. After I was reoriented, I felt dizzy and didn’t need a mirror to know what the warmth trickling from my nose was. Fury made that irrelevant. Vlad might think he’d pulled one over on me, but I was about to show him otherwise.
I swiped the blood off my upper lip and stormed out of my room, practically running down the stairs to the interior garden and the staircase behind it. Those steps I took two at a time, making a left turn at the tunnel instead of my usual right. My footsteps echoed in the enclosed space, but I slowed down the last twenty yards. I had a plan to get past the guards, and running up to them wouldn’t help.
The hallway curved and narrowed, dead-ending with two vampires in front of an iron door a foot thick.
“I’m sorry, Miss Dalton, you can’t be here,” the sandy-haired one said. Then he frowned. “You’re bleeding.”
I gave him my best helpless-female smile, hoping he’d mistake the rage wafting off me for something else.
“I know, that’s why you have to let me through. I need Vlad to heal me. It might be serious.”
The guards exchanged a wary glance. “He didn’t authorize you to come down here,” the beefy, redheaded guard stated. “However, I would be glad to give you my blood—”
“Wouldn’t that make him angry?” I interrupted, widening my eyes. “If I drank your blood when he was so close by?”
The guards exchanged an even warier look while inwardly, I smiled. That’s right. Think about how territorial you vampires are and how I only drank Vlad’s blood when I lived here before. For further effect, I swayed, and though the sandy-haired guard steadied me, as soon as I straightened, he snatched his hands away while looking around guiltily.
Checkmate.
“I’ll secure permission to let you through,” the redhead guard said. He wasn’t so easily deceived. Must be married.
In response, I let myself go entirely limp. As expected, I didn’t hit the floor before strong arms caught me. Then I was lifted up, the wind rushing past me from how fast whoever had grabbed me ran down the narrow staircase that led to the dungeon. I kept my eyes shut and my head drooping as we were ushered through more checkpoints. None of Vlad’s guards wanted to be responsible for me dying, yet they were all too afraid of him to give me their blood.
By the time the fourth and final door creaked open, I sat up and pushed at the arms supporting me. No need to make it easier for me to be hauled away once the jig was up.
“Let me down,” I told the guard, who turned out to be the blond instead of the redhead. No surprise.
My feet had barely hit the ground before Vlad’s voice thundered through the cavernous darkness around us.
“What the hell is she doing here?”
Chapter 20
An orange glow preceded his appearance, showing the stone monolith in the center wasn’t empty like the last time I’d been in the dungeon. Two vampires hung from the spiked silver chains embedded in the rock, a third impaled in front of them. When Vlad came closer, more light from his flaming hands showed which part of him the long wooden pole had entered by first.
“That’s sick,” I breathed, temporarily distracted.
He ignored that, stabbing a flaming finger at the guard. “You’ve bought yourself some painful time to think, Jameson.”
“But she’s bleeding!” the guard protested, giving me a little push forward.
“So you come and get me,” Vlad said icily. The flames on his hands vanished as he seized my jaw, turning my head and forcibly preventing me from looking at his prisoners.
“You don’t bring her down here without permission, ever,” he continued, still speaking to Jameson while he stared at me. “A week on the pole will remind you of that.”
“I wasn’t about to let you pull one of your usual disappearing acts, so I tricked him by pretending I’d fainted,” I snapped, trying without success to knock his hand away. “You want to punish someone? Punish me.”
He grasped a handful of my hair. Between that and his grip on my jaw, I couldn’t move as he leaned down, placing his lips directly over my ear.
“I am punishing you,” he whispered. “You’ll suffer from guilt every day he’s on that pole. Then perhaps next time, you’ll think twice before tricking my guards.”
I shoved at his chest the same instant he released me, so I ended up pushing away only air. Vlad stood a few feet off, almost invisible against the darkness with his charcoal-gray shirt and black pants. If not for the emerald glow coming from his eyes, I wouldn’t have known where he was.
“Now, apologize for intruding.”
Not whispered. Instead, the command resounded in the cavernlike interior. Despite that, I couldn’t contain my snort.
“I’d rather bleed to death.”
“If you were anyone else, those would be your last words.”
All of a sudden, I was reminded that the dungeon was a place where most people that entered never left. I’d looked at storming in here from my perspective: I was going to tear my ex-boyfriend a new one for his underhanded way of breaking a promise, and I had to get through a few of his cronies first.
From a vampire’s perspective, I’d deceived highly trained guards into betraying their Master by taking me into what was supposed to be the most secure area of his house. That I’d done so in front of enemy combatants probably made it worse. I suppose the human equivalent would be bitch slapping my e
x-boyfriend at his wedding while telling everyone what a small penis he had, though that would have short-term consequences. With the fear-based, feudalistic system vampires lived under, the repercussions from this might reverberate for centuries, and I couldn’t even claim the girlfriend exemption anymore.
“At last, you begin to understand,” Vlad said, irony threading into his tone.
I no longer saw the blond guard I’d duped into taking me down here, but even if Jameson had left, he was still listening. All the guards I’d fooled would be listening, and they’d repeat my next words to the rest of Vlad’s staff, who’d repeat them to other vampires, who’d eventually repeat them to his enemies. I might prefer whatever retaliation Vlad would be forced to dish out to apologizing, but this was about more than me.
That didn’t mean I was overlooking what he’d done to Maximus. I’ll play along now, but if you refuse to see me after this, I’ll make you impale me with the fit I throw, I thought defiantly. Then I cleared my throat and uttered an apology I never intended to give.
“Please forgive the intrusion. I shouldn’t have come down here and I’m sorry.”
My tone was good, but if tiny sparks shot out of my right hand in protest, I couldn’t do anything about that.
A smile flitted across Vlad’s face.
“I forgive you, but only because you said ‘please.’ ”
Smartass, I thought. Then I groaned at the instant chorus of “Please!” mixed with cries for release from Vlad’s prisoners. No wonder he got so sick of the word.
“I’m only merciful to one person a day,” he threw over his shoulder. “As the saying goes, today isn’t your day and tomorrow doesn’t look good, either.”
Then his gaze landed back on me. “Now, ask me to heal you.”
You are REALLY pushing it, I thought, glaring at him.
He bared his teeth in a charmingly ferocious grin. “My dungeon, my rules.”
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