Even with the changes, being back here had to hurt. Every ruin that had survived since the fourteen hundreds must be filled with memories for Vlad, not that he was letting on. Even with my body pressed along his, I couldn’t detect his aura. He’d tamped it down to undetectable levels and his emotions were just as securely locked up.
For a few seconds, we hovered in the air, Vlad checking the images on his satellite phone to verify that we were in the right section of the city. The brief delay gave Samir a chance to catch up. He had Petre clasped in his arms, and the two vampires looked as grimly determined as I felt. The four of us made up the entirety of our forces tonight, but a larger presence might have alerted Szilagyi to our arrival. Even if Szilagyi did have security systems scanning the skies over his hideout, we could easily be mistaken for a small flock of birds.
“There,” Vlad said, pointing to one of the city’s many bridges. Then he angled his body to swoop us toward it.
We landed at the beginning of a stone bridge that ended at a smallish island. On the island, a tall triangular tower rose at least sixty feet in the air. The tower was illuminated by exterior lighting so that it drew the eye, but that wasn’t what held Vlad’s attention. He let me go and stared at the bridge, his hands clasped behind his back and his entire body rigid.
I wanted to take one of his hands and squeeze it in silent support. Or wrap my arms around him, yet I remained where I was. He’d told me what he needed from me tonight, and it hadn’t been handholding or hugs. Besides, he didn’t want comfort. What he wanted—needed—right now was bloody, fiery revenge.
And so did I, but we had a problem.
“Is this the place?” I asked quietly. “There are people on that island. Humans.”
His mouth curled with a coldness I’d rarely seen from him. “Yes, on the other side of that bridge is where the former imperial palace used to be, so it’s a tourist attraction.”
“Maybe we should wait until later.” It was only an hour after dark. The site was bound to empty out soon—
“No.”
The vehemence in that single word had Samir and Petre taking off their backpacks and unloading their contents. I stared at Vlad, momentarily speechless. He couldn’t mean to take out a bunch of innocent people along with Szilagyi, could he?
“I want him dead, too, but not over the bodies of people whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Do you know what tourists do very, very well?” Vlad asked, the new silkiness in his voice more frightening than his previous granite tone. “Run at the first sign of danger.”
Then he started striding down the bridge, ignoring the backpack that was meant for him, his only weapons the two silver swords that he had in sheaths crisscrossed on his back.
“Time to give them something to run away from,” he muttered. Fire shot out in front of him, which had me, Samir, and Petre exchanging stunned looks. We had agreed that we would approach Szilagyi’s base quietly. When had that changed?
“New plan,” Vlad called out, as if in answer to that. “Keep Leila on this side of the island. I’m going in alone.”
The people on the island saw the streaks of fire lighting up the bridge and began to murmur in concern. Those murmurs turned to screams when large creatures seemed to form out of the flames, surging ahead of Vlad and rushing onto the island. Then the fiery creations howled, the sound channeling the ominous roars of an inferno. More and more of them formed, until it appeared as though the island were being overrun by wolves made entirely of fire.
That’s when the stampede started, proving that Vlad was right. Tourists ran away very fast at the sign of danger. Samir, Petre, and I were almost trampled by their mad scramble over the bridge to the mainland, which was now the only place that wasn’t swarmed by fire creatures. Vlad was already a hundred yards ahead of us, his hands lit up by orange and blue flames. Suddenly, a pack of the fire creatures merged into one large, whirling ball that shot into the air before rocketing back down with an impact that made the ground shudder as if gripped by an earthquake. When the fireball cleared away, a tunnel was revealed in the ground to the right of the triangular tower. Vlad dropped into it and disappeared.
Samir finished unloading the weapons that his backpack contained. “We hold the line here,” he said crisply. “If Szilagyi manages to run from Vlad, we will stop him.”
“No, we won’t, because he could fly out,” I argued. “Or swim, or jump, or whatever! Vlad made a mistake by going off-plan, but we shouldn’t compound that mistake by complying.”
“He is the voivode,” Samir said, as if that settled it.
My jaw clenched from the effort it took to keep from screaming at them. “That means ‘prince,’ not God, so he isn’t above making a mistake.”
They continued to stare at me as if I were speaking a strange language. I cast a frustrated glance at the island. It was rapidly emptying of people, but Vlad was there, and in all likelihood, so was his worst enemy and the most dangerous kind of sorcerer: a necromancer. I wasn’t about to just wait here, cross my fingers and hope for the best.
“Fine. Don’t disobey Vlad by going in there to help him. Do it to protect me, because I am not staying here.”
“You can’t, you could be a danger to yourself,” Samir said, grabbing my upper arm.
“Believe me, I’m the farthest thing from suicidal right now,” I snapped, yanking away. “But Vlad’s acting like he is, so we’re going to do what we planned when we were all thinking clearly. One of us stays at the bridge while the rest of us go to back up Vlad.”