Bound by Flames

My hair was back! I tugged a black handful, expecting to feel the give of a wig, but all I felt was the pull on my own scalp. I even had eyebrows again. I tugged them, too, even yanking out a hair for confirmation. Ouch! Yep, real. A glance inside my sweat pants revealed that my hair wasn’t back everywhere, but the parts that made me feel like me again were. How, I had no idea, and I was too grateful to care.

I happily finger-combed my hair as I went back through the bedroom to another door that opened into a large marble room with dozens of vases. They looked Grecian, as did many of the other decorative touches including more pillars and columns. If not for the floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed me to glimpse a stunning pool area surrounded by what was clearly a hotel, I would have sworn that this was a former Roman ruler’s residence.

“Vlad?” I called out, walking through the vase room into what looked like an elegant pub complete with a lounge, pool table, and a full bar area.

“Here,” he called out, sounding faintly surprised.

He met me halfway through the next extravagant room, an outdoor covered patio that faced the pool area. It even had a sunken hot tub, but since Vlad was fully clothed and dry, he hadn’t been partaking of that amenity.

“I didn’t expect you to be awake yet,” he went on, and though his gaze roved over me, he made no move to touch me.

“I’ve gotten better at waking up earlier,” I said, squinting at the late afternoon sunlight that poured over the patio. Then I fingered a lock of hair. “How did you manage this? It’s even the same length as . . . before.”

I stumbled a little over the last word, not wanting to remember the skinning any more than Vlad probably did.

He looked at my hair from my scalp to where it ended several inches past my shoulders, but once again, only his gaze touched me. His hands stayed almost rigidly at his sides.

“Magic.” At my shocked expression, he shrugged. “I don’t practice it, but before the Law Guardians outlawed it thousands of years ago, Mencheres had already forgotten more of the dark arts than most living sorcerers will ever learn.”

“Mencheres is here?”

A nod. “In the next villa.”

“Won’t he get into trouble if someone finds out that he did this?” I asked, still trying to come to terms with Vlad outsourcing a spell. He hadn’t been a fan of magic before he found out Cynthiana had used it to manipulate him for decades, and he’d really hated it when one of her spells had killed me.

His teeth flashed in the briefest of grins. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

I smiled back a bit tentatively. “Where are we, anyway?”

“Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.”

“Vegas?” Why? He couldn’t have had a sudden, uncontrollable urge to gamble.

Vlad shrugged. “Szilagyi could only hope to defeat me with an ambush more powerful than the one that destroyed my home. If he did that in the heart of the Vegas strip, it would result in mass human casualties and enough international attention to rouse the Law Guardians’ wrath. He can’t afford to fight me as well as them, so even if I announced my presence on a billboard, he couldn’t do anything until after we left.”

I took comfort in him saying “after we left” instead of “after I left.” I wasn’t sure where things stood between Vlad and me, but if he did still regret marrying me, at least it didn’t sound like he had any immediate plans to leave me.

He will when he finds out what you did, my insidious inner voice whispered.

My jaw ground. One day, I promised that voice. Dead!

“I have something for you,” Vlad said, yanking my attention back to him. His mouth twisted as he pulled a rubber-lined glove out of his pocket. “Seems you already have need of it.”

I glanced down to see two tiny sparks emanating from my right hand. Nothing compared to what I used to manifest, but seeing them made me almost as happy as my new head of hair.

“Thanks,” I said, sliding the glove onto my hand.

What I really wanted to do was stick my fingers in the nearest light socket. I never again wanted to feel as helpless as I did when I thought that my best means of defense had been literally ripped out of me. Maybe, in order to manifest the deadly voltage that I used to, I’d need to manually recharge now. Or would my electrical abilities, much like the rest of me, just need time to return to the way they were?

Vlad watched me, his humorless half smile telling me nothing of what he was thinking. As for what he was feeling, well, he had that under tighter security than Fort Knox. I wanted to ask him, but since I wasn’t able to give him honesty yet, it didn’t seem fair to expect the same from him.

“So, I’ll, ahem, get cleaned up and see you later,” I said, almost tripping over my words at the invisible wall between us.

His look said he knew I was hiding something, but he replied, “Later, then,” in a light tone and returned to where he’d been sitting on the patio.

I walked away, guilt making me feel like I carried a huge boulder on my back. I had never been good at lying, nor had I ever wanted to be the type of person who was. Now, I was clinging to a huge lie of omission. Though I was terrified at the thought of losing Vlad, I couldn’t keep this up much longer. Plus, he deserved to know everything that had happened during my captivity, even the parts that might change his feelings for me.

I’ll tell him later tonight, I decided, trying to ignore how my stomach twisted at the thought. In the meantime, I really did want to scrub myself until I’d gotten every last vestige of my former experience off of me, and that would take a while.