“I can see the driver . . . it’s Mencheres!” Marty called out.

I relaxed and stop charging my hand. Ian tucked his knives into his back pocket. “That was fast,” he commented.

True, but with his mind-manipulation skills, I supposed it wouldn’t take long for Mencheres to mesmerize a bunch of cops and fireman into believing his story. Besides, a pyrotechnic display gone wrong was pretty close to the truth, anyway.

Mencheres pulled up to the front of the house and got out. In addition to compelling someone to give him a car, he also must have green-eyed someone into giving him a change of clothes. Now, instead of his former female club gear, he wore black pants, a dark green sweater, and a long black coat.

“Mencheres,” Vlad said, walking up to him. Then, he began to stroke his face in a public display of tenderness that he usually reserved for me. “I need you to know that I am sorry.”

“For what?” Mencheres said, clasping Vlad’s hand and squeezing it with equal affection.

“For this,” Vlad said softly.

A loud pop sounded, like what you’d hear if a balloon was burst by force instead of by a pinprick. But there was no balloon. Instead, I watched with stunned disbelief as Mencheres’s head exploded right off his shoulders.

Chapter 43

“NO!”

Ian’s agonized shout coincided with Maximus grabbing him from behind. I hadn’t noticed him coming up on Ian, but he must have, and now he bear-hugged Ian with brute force.

My mouth opened and closed, but no words came. I could only stare in mind-numbing shock as Vlad’s now-flaming hands slowly lowered to his sides at the same pace that Mencheres’s headless body crumpled to the ground. Then Vlad knelt in the snow, the flames on his hands extinguishing as he picked up the largest, smoldering piece of what used to be Mencheres’s head and gently placed it next to his slowly withering body.

“What the fuck?” Marty got out, his gaze swinging back and forth between them as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

That made two of us. My eyes registered that I’d just watched Vlad kill Mencheres, but my mind refused to accept it.

“How could you?” Ian howled, struggling fiercely against Maximus. “He loved you!”

“And I loved him.” Vlad’s voice rang out like a sword smashing against a shield. “Yet it wasn’t Samir’s name that Mircea’s captors burned into Leila’s flesh when they made their demand. It was Mencheres’s, and if I didn’t kill him, they were going to kill her.”

But that . . . that’s . . . that . . . My mind sputtered like a car engine that wouldn’t turn over. Then, as if to make up for it, a slew of images and memories began to bombard me.

The look on Vlad’s face when he first read that message. How he’d paused before saying that Samir was the target. The hurricane of rage and regret I’d felt from him before he shut me out. Mircea’s warning that we were both dead because Vlad would never agree to his captors’ demands. The female necromancer’s shock when Mencheres revealed who he was, and her strange accusation of “You lied to us, Impaler” afterward. Vlad’s insistence that we kill her no matter what, and his strange, fervent relief when I told him she was dead . . .

That’s why he’d been so emphatic about our killing the female necromancer. She’d seen Vlad with Mencheres and reasoned that Vlad was partnering with Mencheres instead of carrying out their demands to kill him. If she’d lived, she would have no doubt repeated that revelation to Mircea’s captors.

And my death would have probably followed.

I sank into the snow because my legs refused to keep me upright anymore. “You loved him like a father.”

“Yes.” One word that vibrated with the pain of six hundred years’ worth of memories. “But I love you more.”

Maximus suddenly flew backward with such force that he smashed through the entirety of the house behind him and kept on going. I didn’t know how Ian managed to do that, and I became even more alarmed when Ian snatched one of his silver knives from his back pocket.

“Don’t,” Vlad said in a deadly tone.

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you,” Ian hissed, then to my disbelief, began stripping off his pants. “I’m going to let Mencheres do that.”

Then Ian grabbed the side of his crotch and hacked something off.

“What the fuck?” I gasped out at the same time that Ian roared, “Dagon, I summon you!”

Vlad lifted his hands, fire breaking out over them—

And everything froze. Not in the normal way where time felt relative because shock or fear caused everything to seemingly slow down. It froze as if this moment had been transformed into a living picture that I was somehow still a part of.

Vlad stood statuelike about a dozen yards from me. His arms were still in mid-lift, and the fire that had been erupting from his hands didn’t even flicker. Instead, it now resembled pale orange and blue ribbons around his fingers. Marty was facing me, one foot off the ground as if he’d been in the process of leaping to my aid. Ian still had the knife in his hand and his pants down around his ankles. A gaping wound between his groin and the crease in his thigh showed where he had hacked off a large piece of flesh. Incredibly, some of the blood from the wound still hung in the air instead of splattering to the ground. Even the snowflakes that had been swirling moments ago were now in the same eerie state of suspended animation.