It didn’t just knock me on my ass like Mencheres’s unleashed aura had done. This one plowed me several feet into the dirt as if I’d been dropped from a plane.

“What I meant to say was, nice to meet you,” I panted, stunned. Damn! Pretty baby was fierce.

She moved in a blur of speed to beat Vlad into offering me a hand up, coolly returning the glowering look that he gave her.

“No one calls you Dracula without regretting it, and no one disrespects me without remembering it.”

“Oh, I’ll remember it,” I agreed, accepting her hand up.

In addition to regretting my words for obvious reasons, I also felt bad that my rude comment had hit her in what must be a sore spot. The vampire world could be a very sexist place at times, much like the human one. It must be hard in general for a woman to attain the exalted position of Law Guardian. Doing so while also looking as if you were better suited to be a high school prom queen had to have been even harder.

“Sorry,” I said as stood up. “I didn’t mean to—”

That’s all I got out before her ridiculously pretty features hardened and she yanked me close, sniffing deeply.

“Dagon,” she hissed. “You’ve been with Dagon.”

At once, Vlad yanked me out of her grip. Veritas yanked back. Soon, I was being pulled back and forth between them as if I were a toy and they were two dogs playing tug-of-war.

“Stop!” I snapped, with a worried glance toward the church. We could not be caught arguing near the place we intended to attack in a few minutes! “Yes, I was with Dagon, but—”

“Where?” Veritas interrupted again, her sea-blue gaze glittering with a thousand emerald lights. “I need to find him.”

Why? “You know he’s a demon, right?”

“Oh, I do,” she said with a malevolent purr that sounded uncomfortably like his had.

Why would anyone want to see a demon? “You’re not trying to deal your soul away for something, are you?”

“No, I’m going to kill him,” she snapped, then looked unsettled, as if she hadn’t meant to reveal that.

I gave Veritas a sharp look. Ian had said that Dagon was too powerful to kill, even for someone who wasn’t affected by his pausing-time trick. Veritas knew the demon well enough to recognize his scent, so she had to know what he was capable of, too. She was either suicidal for going after him, or . . .

“Pause time like Dagon can, and I’ll tell you what you want to know,” I said, taking a huge leap of faith.

Her eyes widened. Then, before I had a chance to feel stupid about my misassumption, the snowflakes halted in midair, all sound vanished, and everyone around us stilled as if doing the world’s best impressions of living statues. And Veritas narrowed her eyes when she saw that I was unaffected by it.

“Demon kin,” she said after a surprised moment of silence.

No point in denying it, even if the ruling body of vampires had been responsible for wiping out most trueborn witches, aka demon descendants. “I prefer Leila, thanks.”

“How did you know that I could do this?” Her wave indicated the supernaturally paused world around us. “No one knows, not even Mencheres, and he is my oldest contemporary.”

I gave her a jaded look. “Mencheres doesn’t know that pausing time is one of Dagon’s many tricks. You do, and you’re too old and powerful to be an idiot, so to me, that left only one explanation: you can pause time, too. I don’t know how and I don’t care. What I do care about is that Dagon tricked a friend of mine into signing away his soul. If you kill Dagon, he’s free, and since they have some bad blood between them, I’m betting that he knows how to find Dagon.”

Veritas leaned forward, then caught herself, as if she didn’t want to reveal how eager she was. “Who is this friend?”

“His name is Ian, and if we live through tonight, I’ll tell you where he is.” Banging his way through every whorehouse between Minsk and wherever he was headed was my guess, but I’m sure I could narrow it down more than that.

Veritas gave me a measured look. “I have waited millennia to find Dagon. This little fight will not stop me.”

That’s what she called a death match against an unknown number of necromancers? She’d better be as good as she was cocky. “Then let’s get to it, and feel free to use your time-pausing trick. That’ll make things a lot easier.”

She frowned. “It requires too much power. It will take me days before I can do this again.”

I gaped at her. “Then why did you do it before the fight?”

“Because you insisted that I do it now,” she countered.

“If I’d known that you could only do it once—” I began, then stopped. “Whatever, it’s too late now. Hit the start button again; we have a battle to fight.”

Her gaze became so hard, her eyes resembled ice-encrusted sapphires. “You will not reveal to anyone that I can do this.”

“Fine,” I said, fighting a sudden shiver.

She smiled, revealing that she had a dimple next to her mouth. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen when she was changed, and here I thought Gretchen had been too young at twenty-three. “Good,” she said. “I would have disliked killing you.”

With that dubiously comforting statement, our surroundings abruptly returned to normal.

“No need for impossible tests, Leila,” Vlad said, unaware that Veritas had already passed with flying colors. “Veritas, after this is over, you can ask Leila everything you want about Dagon, but until then”—he gave a predatory look at the church across the valley divide—“we have work to do.”