Destined for an Early Grave(72)
“Why do you do this!” he shouted, giving up his false exterior of calm. “I offer you everything, and you scorn me as though I were lower than that whore of a lover who left you!”
His anger was drawing his power back into himself and away from me. I pressed my advantage.
“Because I’m happier being the castoff of a whore than I’d ever be as your wife.”
Gregor shoved me away from him. I landed back in the tar pit, up to my shoulders in that sticky black goo. He stood over me and shook his fist.
“You are mine whether you prefer it or not, and you can think about this as you continue to hide from me. I will find Bones again when he doesn’t have his people surrounding him. It’s only a matter of time. And then, chérie, he will die.”
I didn’t have a chance to scream out my hatred of him, because the tar closed over my head in the next instant. I was moving downward very fast, like I was being flushed, and then—
I sat bolt upright in bed. The sheets around me were damp, but not from tar. I was covered in a cold sweat. And I was madder than hell.
“I’m going to kill you, Gregor,” I growled to the empty room. Whatever leftover positive emotion I’d had for him as a teenager was gone. If I had another chance with a silver knife stuck in Gregor’s back, I’d twist it with a smile. You should have before, my mind mocked. No good deed goes unpunished.
Vlad walked in my room without knocking. “Your rage has been seething in my mind for the past five minutes.”
“I hate him,” I said, getting up from the bed to pace.
Vlad stared at me without blinking. “I have no cause to war with Gregor, Cat, but it does pain me to see you like this.”
“It’s so maddening,” I went on. “Bones might be able to kill Gregor, if he got him alone in a fair fight, but Gregor won’t go for that. And I’m not strong enough to take Gregor down. I breathe, bleed, I don’t heal instantly—I’m not tough enough for him. Being half-human was great for my old job. All those things I mentioned lured my targets and made me a more effective hunter. But with really old vampires, like Gregor, it just makes me…weak.”
Vlad didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. We both knew it was true.
“What are you going to do about that?” he asked at last.
I stopped pacing. That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?
The next night, Vlad, Maximus, Shrapnel, and I were upstairs playing poker. Vlad had been winning all night, a feat I attested to his mind-reading skills—though he swore he wasn’t using them on me—and the fact that Shrapnel and Maximus were probably afraid to beat Vlad even if they could. It was almost midnight when there was a loud knock downstairs. The three vampires leapt to their feet in a blur of motion. Flames were already shooting out of Vlad’s hands.
Vlad hadn’t been expecting anyone; that much was clear from his reaction, so I understood the cause for their alarm. Whoever it was had managed to get past Vlad’s formidable guards without notice, chosen to knock to show us they didn’t need the element of surprise, and had done all this without the very powerful vampire striding out of the room realizing they were even here.
In short, we were in deep shit.
I started after Vlad, but he whirled around with a snarl.
“Stay here.”
I responded with a mental roar of how he could go straight to hell if he expected me just to wring my hands and wait, when something moving outside the window caught my attention.
I pointed. “Look.”
About three dozen of Vlad’s guards were elevated in stark relief against the clear night sky, all twirling in lazy circles about twenty feet off the ground. They were opening and closing their mouths, unable to speak, but apparently trying.
That gave me a pretty good idea who was downstairs knocking on the door. Only one vampire I knew could cloak his power level to avoid detection and twirl hardened undead guards in the air like fireflies.
Vlad must have guessed also, judging from the flames slowly extinguishing from his clenched fists.
“Mencheres,” he muttered.
I froze in the hallway, wondering if the mega-Master vampire was alone—or accompanied.
The knock sounded again. Now it seemed even more ominous than when I thought it was enemy forces.
Vlad motioned for Shrapnel and Maximus to lower their weapons. “Stay here,” he said to me again, but with none of his prior vehemence. “I’ll find out what he wants.”
“Mencheres,” I heard Vlad say moments later, to the echo of a door flinging open. “You are welcome in my home and may enter. You”—and here my heart skipped a beat, because the venom in that one word confirmed my suspicions—“may not.”