Undeterred, I called the airline next and tried to book a flight to Romania. That’s when I found out that all of my credit cards had been canceled. When the guys refused to let me use one of their cards, I went into the lobby, grabbed the first well-dressed person I saw, and green-eyed him into letting me use his credit card instead.

That’s when I also found out that my name was now on the no-fly list. No airline in the country would book a flight for me, and I couldn’t green-eye my way past a national computer system. Finally, in desperation, I called Vlad. No surprise, he didn’t answer.

“I told you,” Maximus said without any smugness. “Vlad has made up his mind. When he does that, he doesn’t let anyone stand in his way, even someone he loves. It’s not your fault, Leila. You can’t save Samir, but you might be able to prevent Vlad from ever having to do this again.”

It didn’t seem nearly enough, yet I had run out of ideas, and the clock was ticking. Maybe the only way I could stop this was by finding out something useful from my mother’s people. I certainly hadn’t been able to do anything here at the casino.

“Fine,” I said shortly. “Let’s do this.”

We checked out of the hotel—not even vampire hypnosis could hide the fact that the fire in our suite had been responsible for shorting the electricity in the entire hotel. Only mesmerizing the hotel manager kept us from going to jail. Hypnosis had also cleared Gretchen’s memory of where Vlad had gone and why, once we met back up with her.

Marty did that last part. I hated altering her memory, but I agreed with the reason behind it. Gretchen would have a fit if she remembered Vlad’s grisly task, not that I could blame her. No, I had to focus on other ways to save Samir, and to stop whatever Mircea’s captors had planned for Vlad next.

We drove past the “Welcome, Cherokee Indian Reservation” sign that must’ve annoyed my mother a lot because it was one of the few things she’d mentioned about growing up here. Technically, the Eastern Band of Cherokees didn’t live on a reservation. The government hadn’t given them part of their own land back—it had been purchased by the tribe as a trust back in the nineteenth century. The trust still gave the Cherokees the same tribal sovereignty that true reservations had, so when we crossed over the Qualla Boundary, we were now under the authority of the tribe instead of the state.

I expected that the part of the land trust where people actually lived would look different from the rest of it, and I was right. The hotel, casino, museum, and other attractions were glitzy, tourist-ready versions of the Eastern Band of Cherokees, complete with more than a few people dressed in old-fashioned Native American garb. The residential area didn’t have any of those things.

The economic downturn once we left the tourist areas was also readily apparent, and that hurt to see. I wondered how my life would have changed if I’d grown up here instead of on different military bases because of my father’s frequent change of duty stations. Gretchen looked around with wide eyes, too. When she saw two little black-haired girls playing in a yard, I knew she was flashing back to our childhood like I was.

Despite my longing to know more about our roots, we needed to find out things that couldn’t be discovered by researching tribal records. However, I couldn’t just knock on doors and ask if anyone knew whether my mother had been a descendant of the Ani-kutani. Maybe no one here even remembered my mother. She and my aunt Brenda had left over thirty years ago.

We were stopped by a tribal officer before we had gotten halfway through the first section of the residential area. “I’ll do the talking,” I said, rolling down my window.

“You lost?” the grizzled, white-haired officer asked.

“Osiyo,” I said, which was exactly one third of all the Cherokee words I knew. “No, I’m not lost. My mother used to live here. I’m, ah, trying to see if anyone here knew her.”

The officer gave me a jaded look. Clearly, greeting him in Cherokee had done nothing to endear me to him. “There are over ten thousand residents here. Do you even know what street your mother used to live on?”

“No,” I said, embarrassed. Why had I never asked her that?

His expression said he’d expected that. “How about which of the seven clans she was from?”

I paused. Mom had always said we were from the Blue clan, but if the demon was right, we weren’t. Still, at some point, Mom’s ancestors must have been adopted by the Blue clan in order to help them hide, so would talking to those members help?

I took another look at the officer. Multiple wrinkles gave his skin the appearance of worn leather, and his white hair had only a few sprinkles of black left in it. He might be old enough to remember my mom. Even if he hadn’t known her, maybe he’d been around long enough to know something else useful. Sure, it would sound crazy to come right out and say why I was really here, but I had a way of getting around sounding crazy, didn’t I?

“I just found out that my mom might have descended from the Ani-kutani clan,” I said, putting the full force of vampire power into my gaze. “I need to know if that’s true. Can you take me to someone who would know about Ani-kutani survivors and if their descendants had inherited any special magic legacies?”

“Holy shit,” Gretchen breathed. Right, I hadn’t filled her in on that yet. Well, no time like the present.

The officer nodded, his expression becoming glazed. “I can. Follow me,” he said, and got back into his vehicle.