Yeah, I already knew that. Then I met Vlad’s gaze. One look into his simmering copper depths, and I knew that Leotie had told him why she’d done this, too. His emotions were locked down, but his smoky cinnamon scent sharpened with barely controlled rage, and if his hands got any hotter, my clothes would catch fire.

“Leotie said not to bother linking to either of them because she’d block your attempts,” Vlad said, confirming my suspicions that she’d talked to him, too. “You still need to try. Needless to say, I don’t trust her word on anything now.”

Marty came over, and I felt the tremble he didn’t show as he gave me a comforting pat and then slipped his hand into mine.

“Don’t mean to be rude because Leotie’s your family,” he said in a laconic tone. “But if I see that witch again, I am kicking every inch of her spell-casting ass—”

He stopped speaking when something slammed down hard enough to make the whole house tremble. Whatever it was, it had landed right outside the cabin. Vlad let go of me, his hands bursting into flames. I tried to snap out a whip, then cursed when nothing happened. I had spent myself on those damn unbreakable mirrors and now who knew what danger had shown up outside!

“Knife!” I hissed. Marty still had those two long silver daggers on him. He tossed one to me and I grabbed it out of the air when the flames on Vlad’s hands abruptly extinguished.

“It’s all right,” he said tersely.

At the same moment, the front door tore itself from the hinges as if yanked by huge, invisible hands. Then it was flung away and Mencheres swept into the room. His aura broke out with the intensity of multiple tidal waves, causing me to stagger back. I’d never felt anything that strong before. Mencheres must have always been masking his aura before, but he wasn’t now, and those currents continued to grow until I expected to either fall over completely or start spontaneously combusting. Good God, he felt like the power line I’d touched back when I was thirteen!

Mencheres’s dark, piercing gaze swept the room before touching each of us with quick, assessing glances. Then he visibly relaxed and that incalculable power whooshed back into him as if sucked by an invisible vortex. At last, his gaze settled onto Vlad and he arched a single, inquiring brow.

“So,” Mencheres said in a casual tone. “What did I miss?”

Chapter 32

I caught the reason for his dramatic manner of entry when I went downstairs to see if Leotie had taken all the blood bags with her. Apparently, Mencheres had been calling Vlad over and over and had gotten worried when there was no response. That’s why he’d opted for his sudden, explosive arrival instead of merely showing up by car or helicopter. Not that I could blame Mencheres for being worried. A few minutes ago, all of us had been caught in a witch’s trap.

A glance at the clock showed that we’d been in our mirrored prisons for over six hours. It had felt much longer than that, and I was now so hungry that I didn’t trust myself to feed from a human. Thankfully, I found a blood bag that Leotie had left behind by accident or because she knew how ravenous I’d be once I was finally out of her trap. I drained it, feeling oddly guilty even though Gretchen was long gone by now.

I tried not to worry about her as I listened to Vlad fill Mencheres in on everything that had happened since they’d last spoken. Leotie wouldn’t hurt Gretchen, I reminded myself. She’d gone to rather extreme lengths to prove that, in fact, but I hated that my sister was still with a virtual stranger at the most emotionally vulnerable and turbulent point in her life.

And dear God, I didn’t even want to think about what would happen when my father found out that Gretchen was now a vampire and I’d let someone snatch her away to parts unknown. To say he’d be angry was an understatement. He’d only recently started speaking to me again after my own transition from human to undead several months ago. Once my dad discovered that Gretchen had chosen to go all creature-of-the-night, too, he might pop a blood vessel.

Then again, my father might also go looking for a silver knife to stab me with. He’d consider Gretchen’s change and her subsequent kidnapping to be my fault since I’m the one who exposed Gretchen to vampires in the first place. I doubted that telling him about our even-freakier witchy lineage would soothe my dad, either. Family. Why was nothing easy with them?

“Imhotep?” I heard Mencheres say, and my ears perked up. “But Imhotep has been dead for over a thousand years.”

“It appears that his followers live on,” Vlad replied in a brusque tone. “What do you know about them?”

I slipped back upstairs during Mencheres’s pondering silence. When I reached the main room, he was looking out the window and Vlad was standing near the fireplace.

“Imhotep was unusual,” Mencheres said. “History remembers him as one of the earliest known architects, physicians, and engineers. He was a vampire, of course, or we never would have met because he was born a full hundred years before me. He was also the person who taught me most of the magic I know.”

Now we were getting to the meat of it. I moved closer, not wanting to miss a word of this. Mencheres turned around, his dark gaze flicking between me and Vlad.

“But despite Imhotep knowing far more of the dark arts than he taught to anyone, even me, he didn’t view magic as a weapon. Instead, he sought to use it for knowledge, for healing, and for securing Egypt against her enemies. He had many followers, yes, but he taught magic to very few of them because he was concerned about it being misused. If all practitioners of magic had been as principled as Imhotep, the Law Guardians might never have outlawed it in the first place.”