“Go away, Marty,” I muttered.

Even splitting my attention for a few seconds caused those rocks to blur and form back into the trees of my actual surroundings. Dammit! I refocused my attention, cursing again as Marty pulled on me hard enough to knock me off balance.

“For fuck’s sake, Leila, you gotta come with me now!”

Marty never used the F word, so something must be seriously wrong. Concern tore the thread linking me to Mircea, and I fell back into the present. Marty seemed nearly hysterical as he continued to try and drag me along with him.

I shook him off. “What’s going on?”

“Maximus is killing Gretchen!” was his stunning reply.

I didn’t ask any of the shocked questions that instantly sprang to mind. Instead, I ran as fast as I could back to Leotie’s house, outpacing Marty with my much longer legs. I burst through the open doorway in time to see Maximus kneeling on the floor with Gretchen draped across his lap.

Her eyes were closed, her head was back, and blood trailed from both sides of her mouth. More blood splattered her shirt as well as Maximus’s clothes, and from the smell of it, it wasn’t just Gretchen’s blood. It was Maximus’s, too, and for some incomprehensible reason, Leotie and Ian stood like silent sentries behind them, doing nothing about the sight that almost knocked me to my knees from grief-filled rage.

“What. The. Fuck?” I screamed.

Electricity shot from my right hand to whip around like a snake. The only reason I didn’t start lashing Maximus into pieces was because he was still holding my sister. A wrecking ball hit me when I strained my ears and still couldn’t hear her heartbeat. Oh God, oh God, she was dead. More electricity began to shoot out of me, until I was vaguely aware that my entire body was starting to glow from an overload of voltage.

“Power down, Leila,” Maximus said in a steady voice. “She’s not dead.”

I gestured at Gretchen, and without intending it to, my whip tore a five-foot trench in the floor.

“Then why isn’t her heart beating, you murderer!”

“She’s not dead,” Maximus said again, shifting Gretchen in his arms. “She’s just waiting to rise.”

I looked at the blood around Gretchen’s mouth with new understanding. Maximus hadn’t killed her the permanent way; he had changed Gretchen into a vampire. Even amidst my relief that she wasn’t lost to me forever, I was still so furious that crackling noises started to come from the nearby light sockets. Then thin lines of electricity began poking out of them.

“Leila,” Ian said irritably, “if you start another electrical fire, you won’t like the next spell I throw on you.”

I found myself breathing in an effort to force my dangerous rage back. No matter what I was feeling—which amounted to kill Maximus, kill him!—I could not go all voltage-crazy again.

“I tried to stop him,” Marty said, finally making it to the cabin. “He wouldn’t listen, and neither would the rest of them.”

Oh? My gaze landed on Leotie and Ian as I mentally added them to my hit list. Then I continued my inner struggle not to drain this place of all its voltage so I could give full vent to my wrath. Was this how Vlad felt when he was in a near-combustible rage? If so, then he showed a lot of self-control by not having a higher body count than he already did.

Maximus wiped the blood from Gretchen’s mouth and set her down. She slumped onto the floor as if boneless. Seeing it once again struck me like a physical blow. Nothing looked as limp as a dead body, and right now, that’s what Gretchen was.

My gaze landed on Maximus as if I could destroy him with a look. “What right did you have to do this?”

“The right Gretchen gave me,” he replied. “As she said, you keep deciding what she wants for her, but Gretchen’s old enough to do that for herself. So when you stormed out and Gretchen asked me to turn her into a vampire, I did.”

I let out a noise that was more snarl than scoff. “She asks you one impulsive question, and you go ahead and change her very species? Bullshit. You didn’t do this for her. You can barely stand Gretchen. You did it for Vlad. You changed her because you’re prepping her for the hex you want me to transfer to her!”

Maximus stepped over Gretchen and moved within striking distance of my whip, which glowed a brighter shade of white.

“I did it for both of them,” he snapped. “Yeah, Gretchen can be a pain in the ass, but that’s mostly when she’s around you. I realized that a couple months ago when Vlad assigned me to her as extra protection. You won’t stop treating her like a child, so that’s what she acts like with you. The rest of the time, she’s a smart, funny, mostly levelheaded young woman. And Gretchen asked me to change her over many times before today. I kept refusing and warning her of the consequences, but she was undeterred. Humans are easy to kill compared to vampires, so Gretchen knew she would have better odds at surviving all of this if she was a vampire instead of a human. With what we’re up against now, I finally agreed.”

“Liar!” My whip snapped toward Maximus and Ian grabbed my wrist to yank it back. Then he let out a deafening yowl.

“Bloody fucking hell, that fried me right down to my frank and beans!”

I wasn’t surprised. Touching me anywhere near my right hand when my power was up was very dangerous, as the burns breaking out all over Ian attested. Only Vlad could do that unscathed, yet Ian continued to grip my wrist despite his increasing burns.