Leotie let the sentence dangle. I picked it up with an almost crushing sense of relief.

“She’ll be over the worst of her cravings, so if I wait to transfer the legacy to her, then what she’ll most need is to be protected from the lethal effects of my spell.”

Leotie nodded, and I wanted to cry from sheer joy this time. Could the solution really be that simple? Was the break we’d so desperately needed finally within our grasp?

“But you’ll have to wait until then,” Leotie said, looking at Vlad now instead of me. “Otherwise, Gretchen’s uncontrollable craving for blood will trick the magic, making it believe that blood is what she needs most. Not only would you lose the chance to protect her from the spell, her gift could turn dark in order to provide ways for Gretchen to fulfill her insatiable hunger.”

A catch. Of course there was a catch. “It can do that?”

Leotie’s smile was grim with the kind of firsthand knowledge that I didn’t want to have. “Oh yes. Magic this powerful can be as terrible as it is great.”

“Okay, so we wait,” I said, glancing up at Vlad. “Right?” When he said nothing, I said, “Right?” more emphatically.

“Right,” he replied in a light tone. Then he flashed a smile at Leotie that caused all my muscles to tense. Why was he giving her his charming, death-will-soon-follow smile? “But you will still show Leila how to transfer the magic now.”

Leotie’s aura flared, sending ripples of power over the room. The accompanying scent of her anger was almost redundant by comparison. “You try to command me, Impaler?”

“No he doesn’t,” I said quickly, giving Vlad a don’t-you-dare glare. “But after Gretchen’s through her hunger craze, we might need to do the transfer right away. If you happen to be unavailable for instructions, we’d be in trouble.”

Leotie smiled although her power continued to fill the air. “I despise most modern American colloquialisms, but ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter’ is appropriate for this moment.”

“So is ‘Don’t test me,’” Vlad replied, his aura bursting forth to bathe the room with dangerous levels of heat.

“Can you two stop?” I snapped, abandoning my attempt to smooth things over. “Vlad, I better not see so much as a spark out of you. Leotie is family, so the agreement you and I made long ago about you never harming any of my family applies to her, too.” Then I rounded on Leotie. “Yes, you’re eight hundred years old, and in additional to your obvious power, I’m also sure you still have some magical tricks up your sleeve. But you shook Vlad’s hand when you met him, so that gave him the ability to toast you before you can say abracadabra. And now that we’ve confirmed everyone here is a scary badass but we agree that no one’s going to hurt anyone, can we move on already?”

Leotie’s smile changed into that weird form of annoyed pride as she looked at me. Then she looked at Vlad, who muttered something in Romanian I hoped she didn’t understand. Still, his aura folded back in like a dragon tucking away its gigantic wings, and Leotie’s aura dissipated until I no longer felt like I had tiny, spiked medieval flail balls rolling over my skin.

“Good, we’re all being reasonable,” I said, blowing out a sigh. Honestly, old vampires were the supernatural equivalent of human flashers sometimes. They just couldn’t stop themselves from showing other people what they had and how capable they were of using it.

“Now, Leotie,” I continued, “please show me how to transfer my magic legacy onto Gretchen, even though I won’t do it until it’s safe,” I said, emphasizing those last few words.

As if she hadn’t been in a dangerous standoff moments before, Leotie lifted her shoulder in something too careless to be a shrug. “You seal your mouth over hers and breathe the power into her while simultaneously willing it out of yourself.”

“That’s it?” I said, my surprise echoed in the dubious expressions on both Vlad’s and Maximus’s face.

Another casual shoulder tilt. “The mechanics aren’t complicated. Only the matrilineal family requirement is.”

That was for damn sure. If it wasn’t, I could be transferring this legacy and its hitchhiking deadly hex to the first evil person I found. Then again, maybe we wouldn’t be able to kill that person afterward. The magic would protect him or her, making us guilty of giving a monster superpowers. Guess that waiting for Gretchen to get over her blood craze was the best possible play for a variety of reasons.

“Okay, well, now we know how to do it,” I said. It still sounded too easy, but then again, what had I expected it to entail? Sacrificing a unicorn? “So now I’m going to do what I came down here to do, which is get Gretchen cleaned up.”

Leotie walked off without another word. Vlad’s gaze followed her, but he said nothing. If he still had doubts that she’d told us the truth about the spell transfer, he was obviously willing to wait until later to confront her. Good. I wasn’t ready to referee another pissing contest between them.

I picked Gretchen up, trying not to notice how my stomach clenched at the heavy scent of blood emanating from her. I glanced at one of the unused blood bags on the floor, then gave myself a mental slap. I couldn’t take that. Gretchen needed all of them, and I could go out later to find my own meal. I was getting pretty good at feeding from the wrist without nicking the wrong artery, in fact. I’d graduate to the neck soon—