Bound by Flames

“Este prea tarziu! Ne vom prabusi!” someone screamed. “We’re going to hit!”

Vlad shouted something back and whipped me around until I was facing him. “Grab my neck,” he ordered. “I have Gretchen.”

I must have done it, because the next thing I knew, Vlad snatched my father from the writhing, screaming mass of people. Then we were sucked sideways with such force, I felt like an ant that had gotten swept up in a vacuum. Darkness and light flashed around us, too fast to pick one point to focus on, followed by a bright orange glow below and a boom I felt more than heard.

We landed hard a few moments later, the orange glow about a mile away, but the stench of burning fuel already reaching us. Vlad set Gretchen and my dad down, and another odor made me realize that Gretchen had pissed herself, either from terror or the voltage she’d absorbed when I first grabbed her. Before I could check to see if she was okay, Vlad gently pushed me down next to my father.

“Leila,” he said in a calm tone, “you need to shock your father’s chest now. His heart has stopped.”

That snapped me out of whatever stunned inertia that had gripped me since I realized the plane was crashing. With a strangled sob, I ripped open my father’s shirt, exposing his chest. Then I laid both palms against it and released a current that made his body spasm. When I pressed my ear against his chest afterward, panic filled me.

No breathing, no heartbeat. Nothing.

“You need to give him mouth-to-mouth while I keep trying,” I said in a gasp, tears making everything blurry. Then I began to push on my father’s chest the way I’d seen people do in the movies, pausing to let Vlad blow air into his lungs between compressions. After several seconds, I said “Clear!” out of senseless desperation, and shocked him again.

This time, I heard a few faint buh-bumps before things went ominously silent once more. I began chest compressions again, blowing into his mouth myself because I couldn’t stand even those brief seconds of not doing something. Then, I shocked him again, using enough current to raise his back all the way off the ground for a few moments. When his body returned to its prone position, I pressed my ear to his chest again, praying.

Buh-boom . . . buh-boom . . . buh-boom . . .

Now that his heart had finally started beating, I laid my head on the ground next to him and cried from relief.

“I don’t understand.” Samir sounded as dazed as I felt. Maybe that’s why he was speaking in English. He usually had to be reminded to do that around me.

Relief over my father had turned to sorrow when we met up with the rest of our group and saw how few of us there were. Aside from me, Vlad, Gretchen, and my dad, only Samir, Petre, and two of the new human recruits had made it. Everyone else perished when the plane slammed into the ground after a near vertical dive. Not even vampires could survive that kind of impact, let alone the resulting fireball that had lit up the sky, and Vlad and Samir were the only vampires who could fly away before the doomed plane crashed.

Vlad had saved me and my family, and Samir had grabbed Petre and the nearest two humans in the frantic seconds before he’d flown out the exit door Vlad had torn open. To my everlasting gratitude, Marty hadn’t been on this flight. His dislike of Vlad had caused him to elect to stay behind with Darryl while the new vampire overcame his hunger.

“Claude and Erin looked right through me,” Samir went on. “I’ve known them both for over two hundred years, yet they were like strangers when I tried to wrestle them off the controls to save the plane.”

Vlad’s head snapped up. “Did they do anything else odd?”

“You mean aside from killing themselves along with several other people?” I asked in disbelief.

Vlad didn’t respond to that, only continued to stare at Samir. “Well?” he prodded.

“They didn’t seem angry,” Samir said slowly, as if trying to remember. “Or afraid, or sorry, or anything I would have expected based on what they were doing. Claude and Erin were just . . . blank, aside from their determination to crash the plane.”

Vlad muttered a particularly foul course in Romanian. “When we were in Vegas, did they ever leave the hotel to feed?”

Samir looked startled. “Of course. It was Vegas.”

Another ear-scorching curse later, I understood. “I acted that way when I tried to kill myself, didn’t I? So you think the necromancer found a way to spell the pilots, too.”

God knows I’d felt blank beyond a single-minded need to take my own head off. I hadn’t cared about anything else, and I’m sure I’d looked right through Vlad when he stopped me, just as Claude and Erin had looked right through Samir when he tried to stop them from forcing the plane into a fatal dive.

“It would explain why people loyal to me for nearly three hundred years suddenly attempted to kill me,” Vlad ground out. “Or at least, kill my wife and the remainder of my most-trusted men, since Szilagyi would know that’s who I’m traveling with.”

Szilagyi. Even when we thought we were going on the offensive against him, we turned out to be fighting for our lives again. How were we expected to take him down if we had to give a wary eye to the people around us, wondering which one of them might have been magically motivated to kill us next?

On the heels of despair, the solution popped into my mind.

“Everyone needs to drink the potion I did,” I told Vlad. “If it’s a lesser spell, it’ll cure them. If it’s the same one, it’ll temporarily turn them blue. Either way, we’ll know who Szilagyi’s necromancer has gotten to and who he hasn’t.”