Liam’s smile was brittle, ready to crack. He held onto it steadfastly, though. “Vlad is a traditionalist. He’ll want to do things the old way.”
“Why? Just because he was asleep for so long? Just because he’ll want to bring back the old days? Liam, did Vlad ever have a mage in those old days?”
“He–” Liam faltered.
Fulk wanted a plaque made to commemorate the moment. He said, “You see, back then, Vlad had a contingent of wolves. The same wolves that had served his father, and his mother. Family wolves. Their own pack. But a mage never darkened the door of the palace at Tîrgovişte. In fact, he’s said he doesn’t like mages.”
Liam swallowed, the movement of his throat visible in the low light of the wall sconces. “He’s no longer fighting a border skirmish against humans. He’ll see the reason in having a true triumvirate this time.”
“Or so you hope, lest you’ll be out of a job. What happens if he doesn’t want you, Liam? Do you get sent back to your bolt hole, tail between your legs?”
Liam’s laugh sounded more like a cough. “Which of the two of us has a tail, hm? Vlad will want me.”
“Yes, because he’ll see reason, was it? And if the history books tell us one thing, it’s how reasonable Vlad the Impaler was.”
Liam opened his mouth to respond–
And an alarm sounded.
~*~
Mia pulled the zipper up on her second boot, free hand resting on Val’s shoulder for balance, and an alarm went off. It wasn’t on their floor, was obviously coming from somewhere much deeper in the house. But her reaction was immediate and instinctual: she slammed her foot down and clapped both hands over her ears. She felt a vibration in her chest, and it took her a moment to realize she was growling.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that Val and Anna were wincing, but hadn’t resorted to covering their ears like big babies. Slowly, she lowered her hands, teeth gritted against the onslaught of the alarm. Having heightened senses was going to take some getting used to, and at the moment, she wasn’t sure it was a good thing.
“You good?” Anna asked. She carried a long knife, unsheathed. When she’d come in the room ten minutes ago, she’d brought Val his sword, which he wore buckled over his shoulder; the blade was so long it had to hang down his back, rather than along his hip.
Mia took a deep breath. Yes, her ears hurt from the sound, but she was strong, and not sick, and she felt a humming energy under her skin like nothing she’d ever known before.
She nodded. “I’m good. Lead the way.”
~*~
Blood. She could smell it, taste it; it was in her eyes, and thick in her throat, choking her. She heard the thump of rotors – medivac. Medivac for her. Everything hurt. She didn’t know where the pain ended and her body began. Did she have a body? She had at least part of one, because hands gripped her arms, and shoulders, and supported her head.
Voices:
“Do you see her foot?”
“Just…pieces.”
A warm hand touched her face – spanned it, really, thumb on her jaw, fingers along her temple – and pushed her head to the side. Not rough, but not gentle. Not tender. A military touch. The thump of the rotors grew louder. Whump-whump-whump. Hot air on her neck. Breath. And then pain there, stabbing, like needles, like…
Fangs.
She opened her eyes. Ceiling above: the stone of the basement, crawling with modern wires and tubes; harsh lights droning. Too bright. She squinted, and tried to bring her hand up to shield her eyes. Something tugged: an IV. Turned her head: a hospital bed, laid flat, machines humming and beeping.
She remembered the ride. The stream. The bear. The sense of not being in control, and hating the way it made her afraid. The fall…
She jackknifed to an upright position.
“Adela! Whoa!”
She’d awakened from more than her fair share of surgeries – they’d operated, right? Her right leg was encased in white bandages – and it had always been a slow, groggy, sick affair. Having to press the buttons on the bed to sit up, swallowing with difficulty, face numb. But right now, she was alert. Her heart throbbed in her chest and temples, and her vision was crystal clear, and adrenaline coursed through her veins; she wanted to leap off the bed, go running out into the hall. Wanted to…wanted to…
Something was wrong.
“Adela,” Jake said. He’d stood up from his chair, and stood frozen in the middle of the room, open palms held toward her in a universal calm down gesture. He was too loud. She could smell him. “It’s okay. Don’t panic.”
“I don’t panic,” she snapped. And then she growled. The sound started in her chest, a deep vibration, and rolled up her throat; slipped out through her teeth. She gasped afterward. “What – what the fuck – what did I–”
“It’s alright,” he said. “Take a deep breath, please, and I’ll explain everything.”
A deep breath, right. Her lungs worked like machines, perfect and strong. She wanted to claw her own skin off, the itchy, awful energy buzzing under it trying to get out.
“What did they do to me?” Her voice was an inhuman snarl.
One of the monitors, it must have been her heartrate, started to whine.
Jake inched closer, hands still held up – the posture looked more and more protective the closer he got; like he was shielding his face. “Easy now.”
“‘Easy now’? I’m not a fucking horse, Treadwell. What the fuck is going on?”
Another inch. She’d seen his face like this before: carefully blank save his traitorous eyebrows, which knitted together. “Do you remember coming back here? You were unconscious at first, and you’d lost a lot of blood.”
She remembered…flashes. Hands gathering her. Rocking motion of the horse. Arms around her. A low, emotionless voice.
“Vlad.”
Jake grimaced. “Yeah. Yeah, he carried you back on his horse. Like something out of a goddamn book,” he muttered. “Listen, Adela.” Serious again. Concerned. And his scent – man, and sweat, and metal, and something acrid she couldn’t place and shouldn’t have been able to place – projected a sense of fear. She’d seen him scared before, like he’d been when they faced Ruby Russell in Wyoming. But she’d never smelled fear before. She could now, and the knowledge cranked her panic up another notch. “Your leg was really fucked up. They couldn’t save it.”
She looked down, wildly, at her bandaged leg. She saw her toes – her donor toes – sticking out the end. She wiggled them, and the movement didn’t hurt. In fact, nothing hurt.
The heartrate monitor went off like a tiny alarm, and it hurt her ears. She ducked away from it, wincing. “What’s happening?”
“They couldn’t save your leg,” Jake said, in a rush, “but Vlad said he could, so he bit you. He turned you, Adela. You’re a vampire now.”
She sucked in a breath. “What–”
The door flew open, and in poured guards in their featureless black garb. God, she was starting to hate those fucking uniforms. The one in the front held a clear riot shield, and they all wore helmets, gleaming black like beetle shells beneath the lights.
Jake gestured toward them viciously. “Get out! What the hell? You’ll spook her!”
Like she wasn’t there. Like she was an animal.
Well, wasn’t she?
The Institute clearly thought so, if they were sending guys with batons in to handle her when her heart monitor went off. No nurses with crash carts here, just a nice ass-beating.
No one had ever accused her of being indecisive.
She ripped out her IV. Blood beaded up on the back of her hand, and before she could question the instinct, she passed her tongue across it. The blood tasted – well, she couldn’t think about that, even if it set off a sequence of snaps and pops in the back of her mind. When she lowered her hand, the pinprick wound seemed like it was already closing. She reached for the bandages on her leg next.
“Hey.” Jake moved around the end of the bed, pl
acing himself between her and the guards. He made an abortive reach for her hands, pausing when she growled at him. “Hey,” urgent now, “you have to calm down.”
“Why, or they’ll knock me out? Lock me up like the fucking basement prince?” She was…so many things. Furious was just one element of it; she chose not to name the other emotions. They glittered, their edges jagged, and trying to lay claim to them would cut her like broken glass. “Where’s Vlad? I want to talk to him.” And something low in her belly tugged. She needed to see him.
“We’ll find him later,” Jake soothed. “Just sit tight. Let’s figure this out.”
She lifted her head, and saw that there were more guards, logjammed in the door, spilling out into the hall. Jake was starting to sweat, a sheen building along his temples.
“What do you all think I’m going to do?” she asked.
He swallowed. “We…we don’t know.”
~*~
The alarm didn’t sound anything like war drums, but the sound of it had the same effect on Vlad’s body. A tightening in his stomach, a quickening in his lungs…and then an intense flood of calm. He’d been terrified when, at seventeen, he’d laid siege to his own home city, wresting it back from Vladislav. But he’d been thrilled, too; he’d been born a boy with violence inside him, and having a chance to let it loose was always a blessing. An indulgence, like sex or good wine.
He’d been sitting too long, planning, scheming – things better left to his brother. Now it was time for battle, and he was past ready.
He was seated on the floor of the training room, cross-legged, alone, his sword resting across his thighs.
When the alarm went off, he got smoothly to his feet, and strode down the hall to the main part of the lab, hand steady around the pommel of his sword.
It was chaos.
Techs running away, guards running to, and in the middle of it, hospital gown sliding off one shoulder, freshly-healed leg trailing bandages across the floor, was Sergeant Ramirez.
Adela. That was her name. He’d turned the woman; might as well think of her more intimately.
She had her arms outstretched, feet braced: a defensive stance. There was blood on her hands, and Vlad knew it wasn’t hers. The guards circled, wary, and there was Treadwell, trying to talk down a situation that had been doomed from the first.
There was shouting, and the alarm blaring overhead, red lights strobing along the ceiling as if the noise itself wasn’t enough of a call to arms. But Vlad saw the moment she caught his scent.
She froze, and her head swung toward him, black hair fanning across her shoulders. Her nostrils flared and she showed her teeth, and her eyes went wide.
Slowly, the tension bled out of her face, and she stared at him, open-mouthed. She could feel his blood in her veins, same as he could feel hers. Whether it ever meant anything to either of them – and he guessed it probably wouldn’t, knowing himself, knowing what he did of her – a link existed between them. The unbreakable kind.
Her moment of distraction gave one of the guards the chance to catch her in the side with one of the electrically-charged stun batons Vlad had used to threaten his brother. She gasped and staggered, reaching for her ribs.
The growl that rippled up his throat was mostly for his brother, for the memory of the pain he’d caused him, but some of it was for this girl, the fledgling vampire of his own making. In that way, she was his, and he didn’t take kindly to having his things mishandled.
The guard reached in with the stun baton again.
The growl became a roar. It echoed off the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the stone sending it back harsher, deeper, more threatening.
Everyone froze.
Vlad crossed the distance in two long strides, lifted his sword in a long, smooth motion, and separated the baton-wielding guard’s head from his shoulders. It landed with a wet, heavy sound against the stone, and then the body followed. The baton clattered to the stones, useless.
In the stunned silence that followed, Vlad could hear Adela breathing, harsh and fast through her mouth. He could smell her pain, and fear, and confusion.
And her yearning, too. Whatever happened now, he had her.
~*~
Annabel was slammed with a wave of déjà vu when they hit the top of the servants’ staircase. Her feet knew these steps; her hands knew this black, velvet-flocked wallpaper. A half-dozen mortal lifetimes ago, Fulk had herded her down these stairs, energy frantic, but hands gentle as he steadied her. She’d been an eighteen-year-old human girl then, just before her turning. The sconces had held candles rather than electric bulbs, but it was otherwise the same: scents of beeswax and savory cooking odors from downstairs.
Her heart was pounding now, same as it had then, only now she had a wolf bristling beneath her skin, ready to leap out fang-first if her human shape couldn’t handle whatever trouble they encountered. And it wasn’t her mate behind her, but her master, and his mate.
Val’s binding sat comfortably in the back of her mind; it felt like he smoothed a hand down the back of her neck, soothing. She was glad of its comfort as they hit the floor below, and found two black-clad guards awaiting them.
Shit.
She’d thought the alarm would draw everyone within jogging distance to the basement. That was the plan anyway. She had no great affection for Ramirez, but she felt a little bad that the freshly-turned vampire had been sacrificed as a distraction.
Vlad was down there; he would handle it.
Though she wished Vlad were here now, to handle this. It had been a while since she’d gone hand-to-hand with anyone.
“Hey!” a guard said, shouting to be heard over the wail of the alarm. His gaze was trained over her shoulder, on Val. “What are you–”
His sentence choked off into a wet gurgle, and the sharp point of a knife burst through his throat, just below his Adam’s apple.
Val put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to push past her, but she held her ground, growled at him. He could have shoved her aside, but he didn’t. He waited, letting her take point. Letting her watch the knife withdraw. The guard fell face-first on the carpet, breath dying with wet rasps in his ruined throat, and before his partner could even turn all the way around, the bloody knife was going into the side of his neck. Arterial spray up the wallpaper, shiny-black; heavy gun clattering to the floor.
Kolya withdrew his knife and wiped it carefully on the sleeve of his jacket. He looked up at her with his blank expression, face dead, eyes riotous.
When she could, Anna let out a deep breath. “You were supposed to disarm them, Fulk said. Knock them out. Not kill them.”
“Oh.”
“Wait.” She heard Val inhale behind her, and this time when he urged her over, she complied. He took the last step down and came to stand in front of Kolya, who drew himself upright and went very still: poised to strike. Val opened his mouth, scenting the air. He smiled. “My God. Kolya Dyomin.”
Oh shit, no one had thought to tell him. “Yeah, boss,” Anna said in a rush. They had to keep moving. “That’s him. Liam brought him back, but he’s with us now.”
Val lifted his hand, as if he meant to touch, and Kolya flinched. Val retreated. “It’s true, then. He really is a necromancer.”
“Yep, really true, come on, we gotta go.”
Val laughed. “Oh, this is perfect.” He turned to Anna, grin wide and sharp. “When we show up in New York, we’ll have quite the gift for our hosts.”
She sighed…but felt herself smiling. His simple delight was infectious. “That’s if we get out of here first. Come on. Kolya, try not to kill anyone else.”
As Anna headed for the next set of stairs, she cast a glance back over her shoulder and saw that Mia held a hand over her mouth, face pale with shock. Poor thing, but she’d adjust soon enough. Shock was a luxury for those who’d lived dull lives. And after tonight, Mia Talbot’s life would be anything but dull.
~*~
So. That was a head. On the floor. Fulk had s
een many decapitated corpses in his many years on this earth, but he hadn’t quite expected to see one here in the midst of this modern laboratory.
Vlad stood over a slumped Ramirez, sword bloody, shoulders thrown back in the sort of pose that rallied bone-weary troops on the battlefield. His clothes might have been contemporary, but there was nothing modern about this man. This prince. This son of old Rome.
“Jesus,” Liam murmured beside him.
Fulk said, “I thought you didn’t believe in him.” He caught the arm of a tech who was attempting to belly-crawl his way toward the elevator. “Turn off that alarm.” He let the man go, and a moment later, the alarm cut off abruptly.
The silence hummed. Several people were crying quietly; Fulk could hear their choked-off sobs.
Ramirez breathed in rough shudders, her ribs shaking under the thin gown she wore. She leaned sideways, and pressed her shoulder into Vlad’s thigh. She’d chosen to align herself with him, then.
Good, Fulk thought. That would make this easier.
Sound of a throat clearing, obscene in the quiet. It was Talbot, stepping boldly forward, exposing himself to the slow, animal stare of Vlad…and to the reach of the bloodied sword.
Talbot took a quick, unsteady breath. “Vlad. Your grace. Please. I promise that no one meant Sergeant Ramirez any harm. I know this looks–”
“It looks like your people were going to beat her into unconsciousness,” Vlad said, toneless. “This morning she was one of your trusted guards, and now you want to lock her up. Is it just because of what she is now? Or is it because I’m the one who turned her?”
Fulk smelled the sharp tang of fear sweat.
“I assure you,” Talbot said, “that this is only a temporary measure. We don’t want Sergeant Ramirez to hurt herself or anyone else. She’s in shock. She’s confused, and she’s panicked. All perfectly reasonable reactions! But we have to contain her until she calms down. I’m sure you understand.”
Dragon Slayer (Sons of Rome Book 3) Page 77
