Once Burned

crowned by bushy brown hair. Marty, not willing to hang back and let me deal with it. God, please don’t let the other vampire be faster than him! I couldn’t risk letting a deadly lash of energy fly, either. Not when it could cut through Marty instead of Szilagyi’s guard. All I could do was wait, hand at the ready in case another guard heard the disturbance and came to investigate.

After a few seconds that shredded my nerves, the guard fell back, Marty on top of him. His hand gripped a knife handle half as long as his thick forearm, the blade buried deeply into the guard’s chest. Then he jumped off, executing a low bow.

“And the crowd goes wild,” he said smugly.

“Could you just let me handle it next time?” I hissed to cover how worried I’d been.

Marty rolled his eyes. “Please. I was fighting to the death before your grandparents were born. Now, let’s finish this.”

He jogged deeper into the tunnel. I hurried after him, only then realizing that in my moment of panic, I’d said a prayer to a god I didn’t believe in. Strange.

When we reached a fork in the tunnel, I paused. Rend hadn’t been the one to take Maximus and Shrapnel here, so I hadn’t seen which way to go through his memories. If I made the wrong choice, I could be dooming them. No matter how quietly I moved through the tunnels, unless Szilagyi was so busy focusing on Vlad’s attack, I was now close enough that he’d hear my thoughts and know why I was here.

No time for indecisiveness. I went right and Marty followed, silver knives gripped in each hand. As I ran, I also stroked underneath my thumb, seeking Vlad’s essence. I couldn’t wait despite him being busy with the attack. He had to know about the tunnel. Szilagyi couldn’t be allowed to escape.

I’d intended to relay a quick message and then disconnect—not just because time was of the essence, but also to limit his fury with me once he discovered where I was—but when the tunnel fell away and I saw Vlad as though I hovered above him, I stared in disbelief. A pile of stone, brick, and rubble surrounded him that once had been the tower rising imperiously into the mountainous horizon. No, he hadn’t brought a wrecking ball with him, as I wondered upon hearing the noise and feeling the tremors. He was the wrecking ball.

Vlad tore through layers of rock and earth with nothing more than his bare hands, flinging huge chunks aside in a maelstrom of destruction. Fire blazed over every inch of him, making him look more like Dante’s version of a demon than a vampire. The light coming from him allowed me to see even as he tore deeper into the earth, ferociously annihilating everything in the way between him and his enemy. The mountain shuddered as if it could feel pain over the force of Vlad’s assault, parting deeper and deeper beneath his merciless barrage. For a second while watching him, I was so stunned that I forgot to breathe.

“What are you doing here?” I thought I heard him shout, but the continuous smashing of rock and stone was thunderous.

Not sure if he could hear me, I mentally yelled my reply. There’s an escape tunnel on the lower east side of the mountain about three hundred yards from the river. Send people to guard it. Maximus and Shrapnel are still alive. I’m going to get them.

Then I did disconnect, whatever he would’ve said lost as the tunnel rushed back around me. Marty had carried me while I was in my trance, and now we were in front of a large crevasse that looked to me like the open throat of a stone monster. Inside it, barely visible in the light of Marty’s glowing green eyes, were Maximus and Shrapnel.

Marty jumped into the depths with me still in his arms. I grunted at the hard jolt when we landed. The pit had to be fifty feet deep. Then I sprang away from him, my right hand extended and ready to shoot a cutting whip through anything that moved.

Nothing did. Maybe Vlad’s attack had cleared out the guards who were interrogating Maximus and Shrapnel. I thought I’d have to kill whoever was in here, but aside from the two vampires restrained to the wall in sickening ways, the pit was empty.

“Leila.” Maximus’s voice was unrecognizable from the silver harpoon still embedded in his throat, and he was so covered in dried blood that it took me a moment to realize that was all he had on. “What are you doing here?”

I let out a harsh imitation of a laugh. “Oh, you know. I was in the neighborhood.”

Chapter 42

Marty began to rip out the knives and harpoons that he could reach, muttering something to Shrapnel about karma. I wasn’t strong enough to pull out the restraints like he was, but I wasn’t helpless. Cold satisfaction filled me as I cut through their harpoons and manacles with a laserlike beam of electricity, allowing the weight of their bodies to do the rest of the work. No, not helpless at all.

Szilagyi had thought I was when he brought me into this fight back when he had Jackal kidnap me. Ever since, I’d been nothing but a pawn to him. Now that pawn had killed three of his people, led Vlad to his hideout, and freed two men who’d risked their lives trying to protect me from Szi-lagyi’s latest attack. I only wished I could see the puppet master’s face when he realized that all his carefully laid plans had come crashing down around him.

“Leila,” a male voice with a distinct accent said from behind me. “We meet at last.”

I didn’t need to look to know who it was. Be careful what you wish for! rang through my mind. Why hadn’t I waited until I was out of the mountain to gloat about my victory?

I turned. As expected, there was Szilagyi, wearing the same sort of nondescript sweater and thick cotton pants that he had the first time I saw him. But what really held my attention were his two guns; one pointed at me, one at Marty.

“Do I really need to say don’t move?” he asked pleasantly.

The current spiking from my hand died away. He’d blast a hole through me before I could even twitch, and from the malevolent gleam in his dark brown eyes, I didn’t know why he hadn’t already.

“You may want to consider running for your life,” I said, speaking calmly the way one did to an unpredictable animal.

His generous mouth curled in derision. “Why? I know who’s here, and you already told him about my tunnel, didn’t you? So I can’t escape.” He cocked the guns. “But neither can you.”

I didn’t say any of the cliché things that sprang to my mind, like You don’t want to do this (yes he did), or We can talk (we were way past the talking stage). Instead, a grim part of me wondered if I had enough vampire blood in me to snap out an electric lash while dying from a gunshot wound. If he pulled that trigger, I intended to find out.

Screams rang out from above, so anguished that I winced in instinctive sympathy even though they must’ve come from Szilagyi’s remaining guards. Then a large form appeared in front of me like a shadow come to life. It happened so fast that it took a moment to realize what I was looking at—the back of a vampire, dressed all in black, his hands lit up with orange and blue flames that cast an eerie glow over the inside of the pit.

“Hello, Vlad,” Szilagyi said, and to his credit, he didn’t sound afraid. “I must admit, I’m surprised. You chose to protect her instead of strike out at me. How unexpectedly soft of you.”

I had the option of cringing behind my boyfriend’s back or hurrying to get Maximus and Shrapnel out of their restraints. It was a no-brainer. I backed away slowly, but once I reached them, I whirled and yanked, cut, or pried away the last of the silver pinning Maximus and Shrapnel to the stone walls. I glanced over at Szilagyi several times while I worked, but he didn’t move, and those two guns were now pointed at Vlad.

“Why would I kill you quickly when I can take you with me and spread out your torment over years?” Vlad replied in a caressing voice. “I owe you for so many things. My captivity after I became a vampire, smearing my name, your betrayal of Romania to her enemies, your murder of my son, all my people you’ve killed, and finally, your abuse of Leila.”

Then his voice deepened, and those flames licked up his arms. “Though she seems to have recklessly set out on her own quest for vengeance, hasn’t she?”

Vlad glanced at me during that last sentence, and despite the seriousness of the situation, I cringed. That