A boom penetrated the haze of my grief-soaked battle lust, and my vision cleared enough to see the dark energies from the creature began to crumble. They took me down with them before spilling onto the ground as if whatever inner structure that had allowed them to stand upright had shattered. I tumbled onto the ground along with them, landing only a few feet from Marty, and something broke inside me when I saw that his body had already started to wither.

Then I forced that pain back and ran over to Vlad when he, too, crumpled to the ground. Terror paralyzed me and a ball of pure agony rocketed up into my throat. No, no, NO!

But he didn’t start to wither. He shook his head as if clearing it and his coppery gaze immediately searched the room.

“Where are the necromancers? There were six of them; three chanting in a circle and three fighting us.”

“They were gone when I got here,” I said, throwing my arms around him. “God, Vlad, I thought you were dead!”

He hugged me back for only a second before pulling away. “Not yet, and I intend to—” He stopped talking and a harsh sound escaped him.

I followed his gaze to where Marty lay, his body shrinking as it rapidly decomposed to match his true age of a hundred and thirty-nine years. Another painful ball clawed its way into my throat and I almost choked swallowing it back.

“I know.” Then I forced myself to look away from him. He would want me to finish this and avenge his death. Not stare at his body while his murderers had the chance to get away.

“Veritas went after them,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “She must have killed the three who cast the spell that made the creature, but that means there are three more that could still be alive.”

Vlad didn’t run; he flew through the door that she had disappeared through. Maximus walked over, giving Marty’s body a quick yet sympathetic glance, then he held out his hand to me.

I took it, fighting back the tears that threatened to blur my vision for a different reason this time. Instead, I fed the rage that had allowed me to weaken the creature enough to buy Veritas the time she’d needed to kill its spell-casting creators. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if she’d done it as quickly as it seemed, or if I’d been lost to the rage, grief, and power for longer than I realized.

“Stay behind me,” Maximus said, running toward the door after picking up two silver knives he must have dropped at some point.

“Who just saved who?” I muttered, but followed him.

The door opened to a fork, but it was easy to see which way to go. Vlad had left a thin trail of fire behind, and we followed it, careful not to step on the flames and burn ourselves. Maximus could have flown, so he must be running to stay close enough to me to protect me.

A scream up ahead made him grab me and fly us both the rest of the way. The tunnel was narrow and he was big, so both of us hit the sides a few times, yet seconds later, we had descended into the darkest-veined section of the mountain. A huge stone that appeared to be pure morion quartz was leaning against the side of an open doorway, and the screams were coming from inside it.

Chapter 48

The first thing I saw was the body parts. They were strewn around the black quartz cavern we entered as if the people they’d belonged to had been killed by a tornado. Then I saw Veritas circling a tall, black-haired man who kept trying to dart past her. Vlad was beyond her, and though I couldn’t see all of him around the solid black hunk of rock that interrupted this section of the cavern from the next, judging by the screams and the sudden stench of burnt flesh, he was burning someone.

“Don’t try it,” Veritas warned the black-haired man when he feinted to her right again.

I stared at him with a morbid sort of fascination. He was part of the group of necromancers that had made the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen, yet stripped of his spell-casting power by the black quartz cell they’d used to imprison Mircea in, he seemed so helplessly normal.

But he was here, so he’d helped to kill Marty. Fury crashed through me as I thought of my best friend’s body slowly withering in the room beyond this tunnel, and I pushed past Veritas while cracking my whip.

“No,” I said in a growl. “Do try it.”

He charged me at the same time that Veritas yanked me back. Even though she was blindingly fast, my whip wrapped around the black-haired vampire as if they’d been lovers long separated. Then I ripped it backward, and everything from his shoulders up flung forward while his lower body did a short, mad circle that spurted blood everywhere before it crumpled to the floor.

“Stop burning him! I need the other one alive!” Veritas shouted to Vlad.

I didn’t pay attention. I kept lashing the man, not satisfied when he was in more pieces than he could ever heal from. Marty was dead. Gone forever. He wasn’t only my best friend; for years, he’d been my only friend after he’d taken me in when no one else had wanted me. And he’d died screaming because I hadn’t been able to save him the way he’d saved me all those years ago.

“Leila!”

Mencheres’s voice caused me to pause in my near-frantic lashing and turn around. I hadn’t heard him come in. Then again, I’d been pretty focused on turning the necromancer into bloody, tiny little pieces.

“Stop now,” Mencheres said in a gentle tone. “He can’t feel it anymore.”

No, he couldn’t, and yet I could still feel all the grief that had led to me to julienne a person.

Then, as if moving in a daze, I pulled my whip back inside me with more speed and control than I’d ever been able to use before and walked past the black quartz boulder that had cut off the other part of the cavern from view.