I fervently hoped so. Otherwise, Mencheres was right and soon, there wouldn’t be a single inch of this place that wasn’t covered in flames. Then the whole warehouse would be a melted-down pile of rubble by morning, and things would only get worse from there.

But Vlad hadn’t fully unleashed his powers yet, so there was still a chance that I could interrupt the spell before that happened. Before I could reach him and attempt to short-circuit the spell’s hold by giving him an overload of electricity, I had to get past two trapped, desperate necromancers first.

I pulled a small, square object out of my bra and ran my fingers over it, careful not to look at it. No feel of cracks, good. The only reason it hadn’t broken was because of the Kevlar vest that Vlad had insisted I wear beneath my top. He’d done so out of concern over silver knives or silver bullets. Instead, the vest had ended up protecting Leotie’s mirror.

Now, I only hoped I hadn’t screwed up the spell Leotie had left for me, because this was my best chance to get past the necromancers without their killing me (worst case scenario) or my wasting a lot of time (second worst.)

“I know a way out,” I called to them as loudly as I could. With luck, they’d assume that I was an innocent survivor trying to help instead of their enemy baiting them into a trap. “If anyone else is still alive in here, follow me!”

Nothing but the creaking noises of overheated, overstressed metal for a few moments, then I heard another rushing noise. At first, I thought I’d misjudged the amount of time between Vlad’s fiery eruptions. Then I heard crashing noises and that rushing sound increased. It was headed right this way, yet there was no intense blast of heat preceding it.

This wasn’t more fire from Vlad. It was the necromancers blasting their way out of whatever debris had been in their path to fly toward the sound of my voice.

I couldn’t wait to act until I saw them. By then, it might be too late. I held up the mirror that Leotie had used to trap all of us earlier and once again called out in a loud voice. “I know a way out. Come with me if you want to live!”

Two large forms suddenly tore through the narrow door, flying so fast that it took a few moments to register that they were completely naked except for the soot covering them. Their speed made me gasp, as did their murderous expressions when they saw me and clearly pegged me to be foe, not friend.

Maybe they recognized me for who I was, now that my appearance was no longer disguised by glamour. Maybe it was enough that I was a vampire and they figured I was with the group of vamps that had done all this damage tonight. Either way, they bared their fangs and arced toward me as if they intended to tear me apart with the impact of their bodies. I couldn’t snap out my whip to defend myself. If I did, then they’d look at that instead of what I needed them to look at. Yet the mirror was hard to see with all the smoke and its small size. Come on, look at it, I silently urged them.

They didn’t. Instead, in the moments right before they were about to hit, they snarled something in a guttural-sounding language that was probably the start of a spell. I braced, trying to power up my hand without releasing any incriminating sparks, and waved the mirror so it would catch any tiny flashes of light that were still left.

Look at it, dammit, look! I silently screamed.

A few feet from hitting me, they suddenly dropped out of the air as if they’d been shot down by missiles. Their bodies thudded onto the floor, and I jumped back just in time to avoid one of them hitting me as he slid from his velocity. When they came to a stop, they were completely limp yet still stretched out in that arcing, torpedoing form they’d used when they’d been about to slam themselves into me.

I snapped out my whip at last. They didn’t move and their eyes stared sightlessly ahead in the eerie way that Vlad’s had when the spell first took hold of him. I wasn’t sure if this was an act, so I lashed the nearest one of them in the leg. My electric cord cut all the way through and severed his limb at the knee, yet he didn’t so much as twitch.

If you catch them in it, they’ll be as helpless as you are now, Leotie had promised me when I was trapped in the mirror spell. Good Lord, she hadn’t been kidding. The two of them looked more than helpless; it’s as if they were catatonic. Was that what had happened to me? Had I only thought that I was banging on the mirrors and hitting them with my whip when all the while, I was as immobile as these two?

Had to be. Otherwise, I might have accidentally slashed the people near me while thinking that I was lashing the mirrors. Come to think about it, Vlad would also have probably burned the whole house down because his first reaction to being trapped would no doubt have been to try and melt the mirrors. We all must have been as immobile and unaware as these two. The power of the mirror trap was truly stunning, yet I didn’t have time to stand here and keep admiring it. I also didn’t have time to abide by “fair” rules of fighting.

It takes a special coldness to kill when your life isn’t in danger and you’re not driven by anger or revenge, Vlad had said. Turns out, I had that same coldness, because I snapped my whip and one of the necromancer’s heads severed from his shoulders while his body began to wither from the effects of true death. The other I kept alive. We’d need to interrogate Mircea’s location out of him later, if we were still alive later.

“The necromancers have been dealt with,” I called out loudly to Mencheres. “Now, drop whatever barricade you’ve got around Vlad so that I can get to him!”