Twin points suddenly speared my bottom lip, and I sucked the accompanying drops of blood away while hoping that no one else noticed. What kind of a vampire stabbed herself in the lip with her own fangs? Some days, I was still such a noob at this.
“Bring her back here when you’re done. I’ll use one of the other bathrooms to get myself cleaned up,” Maximus said, thankfully not seeming to catch what I’d done. Neither had Vlad. He was still staring at the open doorway even though Leotie was now up the stairs and out of sight.
“She’s hiding something,” he said, his voice so low that it wouldn’t carry beyond this room.
“Probably,” I agreed, keeping my voice equally soft. At eight hundred years plus, Leotie had to have lots of secrets she hadn’t revealed yet. “But I don’t think it’s the transfer details, and I also don’t believe she wants to do us any harm.”
The look Vlad gave me was jaded to the extreme. “Sometimes we harm the ones we love whether we want to or not.”
I couldn’t argue that point, so with a slight shake of my head to indicate that we’d discuss this later, I went back upstairs with Vlad and Maximus following me. When we arrived at the main level of the house, I saw that Leotie had already disappeared into her bedroom. That was just as well since Vlad’s radar was clearly set to discover-and-destroy mode. Ian and Marty were now out of their rooms, and they hadn’t been earlier.
They both sat on opposite couches in the family room, and they both looked tired. With it being barely an hour past dawn, I had been sure that they’d be asleep. Maybe our arguing below had woken them up. With how tense things had gotten, they might have thought they needed to stay awake in case they had to go downstairs to jump in and break things up. Or join in.
“Don’t get up. I’m just taking Gretchen to my room to clean her up,” I said to Marty, waving him off when he rose to help.
Ian stood up and gave a full-bodied, lazy stretch. “Not that I was eavesdropping, but now that you have your witch relative to assist you with any future magical muckety-mucks and you have a way out of your dastardly spell, it seems to me that I’ve fulfilled my oath and can take my leave. It’s been grand fun—and by that, I mean more boring than an extended version of midnight Mass—but it had to end sometime—”
“You’re not done yet,” Vlad cut him off. “We’re going after a group of necromancers tonight and we need your skills.”
Ian’s mouth curled downward. “Of course you do. Why would I want to survive the task Mencheres forced me into?”
Vlad gave a dismissive grunt. “Save your complaints for him. These necromancers are supposed to be magical Acolytes of Imhotep’s, and Mencheres was a contemporary of his, so he might know more about them than he realizes. That why I texted him earlier and told him to call me.”
I hoped Mencheres knew about Imhotep and his cult. I only recognized his name because Imhotep was the villain in the nineties remake of the movie The Mummy, yet I doubted that would help.
“Grand,” Ian said in a tone that implied he felt the opposite. “Does anyone else feel the sudden need for a shag?”
I blinked. “What?”
He waved dismissively. “’Course you don’t. You and Tepesh already had yours. Thought the two of you would bang the bed right through the floor, and here I had to listen to that while forced into an unnatural state of celibacy.”
Now I was openmouthed at his audacity, not to mention his questionable priorities if he really thought he was going to die tonight. Ian didn’t pay any attention to that. His gaze lit up as Leotie came back into the family room.
“Ah, Leotie, my beauteous poppet, I take back everything I said about you being an uppity crone. Take me to your bed, I promise endless delights. I’ll even limit myself to tongues only. Always happy to accommodate a preference.”
“No,” Leotie said, her tone turning withering. “And if you make me say no again, your blood will be on the floor.”
Ian’s mouth curled into a pout. “Wish you were talking about foreplay, but clearly you’re not. Very well, I can take an honest refusal, so I shan’t bother you again.” Then his tone brightened. “But I will offer one last chance for any takers among the rest of you?”
When all he received back was glares, Ian sighed as if wounded. “Bunch of sexual hoarders, the lot of you. Have you no pity for the last request of a dying man? Blimey, if I do live through tonight, I won’t be responsible for what I do to the next thing in my path that doesn’t require consent. Take that chair over there. Mmmm, looks soft, doesn’t it? Sturdy, too. Why, if that were a La-Z-Boy, I might be pounding the stuffing out of it right now—”
“Here, look at this,” Leotie said in annoyance, holding a small object up. A mirror, I realized. Why would she—?
My surroundings vanished and I was suddenly bombarded by thousands of visions of my own reflection. It felt as if I’d somehow been transported inside the world’s biggest magic mirrors funhouse. At once, I set Gretchen down and tried to find the way out, but with every move I made, our reflections only increased, until I could see nothing except endless versions of myself with Gretchen lying prone at my feet.
Chapter 31
I couldn’t find a way around the mirrors, so I began to beat on them with all my strength. Yet somehow, I was unable to break a single one. I tried lashing them with my whip next, with the same dismal results. Desperate, I began to will the electricity in me into higher and higher levels, until I was worried about becoming a danger to Gretchen, yet my whip still had absolutely no effect on the mirrors. A horrible realization filled me. None of my abilities could free me from this trap.