The glow my whip gave off cast a soft white light on the stranger’s face, making him easy to recognize. He was the passenger from my earlier glimpse of Szilagyi in the car, but that glimpse hadn’t done him justice. In fact, it was a toss-up as to which was more striking: his youth or his looks. He couldn’t have been much older than eighteen when he was changed. Curly black hair framed a face that would send Abercrombie and Fitch advertisers running for their checkbooks, and full yet masculine lips turned up in a smile that accented sky-high cheekbones. The only other person I’d seen with such flawless, beautiful features was Bones, the vampire Vlad disliked so much.
I stared at him to buy time while my whip recharged, but the stranger obviously thought I did it out of admiration. Copper-colored eyes regarded me with amusement.
“Don’t worry, this happens all the time,” he said, waving a hand with a think nothing of it gesture. “Leila, isn’t it?”
His accent wasn’t just Romanian; it was ancient Romanian, like Vlad’s. That alone had me pegging him to be at least a few hundred years old, and the powerful vibes from his aura confirmed that. No matter how young and pretty he looked, this was no pushover in the vampire world.
“Leila,” I agreed, moving closer. “And you are?”
He smiled almost impishly. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Scraping sounds filled the right side of the antechamber. My first instinct was to look, but I forced myself not to take my eyes off the boy. He wasn’t going to trick me into missing my shot at him. If I could just get him to move a couple feet closer . . .
Countless forms suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision and made me jerk my head to the right. I intended it to only be a quick look, but then I couldn’t stop myself from staring and I instinctively recoiled until my back was pressed against the wall.
Fully formed walking skeletons filled the side of the antechamber. Right before my stunned gaze, more continued to form from the piles of bones in the honeycomb cells before jumping down to join the rest of the horde. I blinked to clear my vision, but the impossible sight didn’t change. Had I accidentally touched something with my right hand? Was I reliving a hallucination from one of the dungeon’s insane former prisoners?
No, I decided as those horrible skeletons began to smash into me with more force than any pile of bones should have. This was real.
Don’t you know who I am? the grinning boy had asked.
I did now. He was the necromancer, and to prove it, the master of the dead was showing off some of his skills.
The skeletons swarmed me en masse, dragging me onto the floor with bony fingers that stabbed at me like dull knives. They hemmed me in so much that I didn’t have room to strike with my whip, so I began to punch, kick, and head-butt them as I tried to get away. Bones smashed and flew from my assault, but what the skeletons lacked in durability, they made up for in numbers, and I was grimly aware of the other danger they posed.
Distraction.
I couldn’t see the necromancer anymore. For all I knew, he was climbing up one of the rows of cells to drop down on me like a lethal spider. Worse, if I was fighting skeletons, then I wasn’t helping Vlad. Where was he? Was he dealing with other supernatural tricks from the necromancer? Or had Szilagyi and whoever else he had down here proved to be a greater danger?
“You have more lives than a cat, you know.”
The necromancer raised his voice to be heard above the sounds of multiple bones smashing. From it, I gauged that he was still near the tunnel we’d used to enter the antechamber. I wanted to keep him talking, so I yelled out, “How so?”
“No one has survived two of my spells before, though to be fair, Cynthiana cast the first one. Such an eager student. I was sorry to lose her.”
“We should have known she had a teacher,” I shouted. “She went from ineffective love spells with flowers to killing a baby for a fireproofing spell.”
My last word was cut off when one of the skeletons scored a direct head shot. Solid, regenerated bone made it feel like a bowling ball had just smashed into my cranium. A few more blows like that could knock me out, then they’d probably rip my head off before I regained consciousness. I switched tactics and quit trying to make it back onto my feet. Instead, I streamlined my body and kicked off the wall, cutting through a forest of bony legs with my whip as I slid across the stone floor.
“That fireproofing spell was yours, too, wasn’t it?” I yelled as I continued to clear a path with my whip.
“Of course,” the necromancer replied. “The only reason I didn’t cast it myself was to avoid you using your abilities to find out about me the same way you did with Cynthiana.”
Speed and the chainsaw-like effect of my whip had me almost to the other side of the antechamber, where there were the fewest skeletons. I was battered and bruised, but that would fade as soon as I quit getting new injuries. If I quit getting new injuries, that was.
Why hadn’t the necromancer taken advantage of the skeleton attack to charge me? Was he that wary of my whip? Or was he gearing up for something worse? He’d bound his suicide-compelling spell into my very flesh. What if his delay was because he was doing something to reactivate it?
I lashed at the skeletal horde with more desperation. I hadn’t brought any weapons with me because I hadn’t wanted to risk using one on myself, but this whip was more than enough to do the job. If I wrapped it around my neck and pulled hard enough, my head would come off.
Twin flashes of green briefly shone through the skeletons that raced over to continue their attack on me. I recognized it as the glow from the necromancer’s eyes. He was coming closer.