“I have one as well,” Mencheres said, ignoring her question. He opened his palms, revealing that he’d caught some of those strange floating orbs in his hands. Then he put them to his mouth and breathed them in, pulling up the back of his shirt at the same time. True to Ian’s warning, as soon as he inhaled the lights, his glamour vanished and his well-muscled, very male physique burst through his former schoolgirl mirage.
He did have a tattoo on his back with another series of strange shapes contained within two parallel lines. The vampire gasped more at that than she did at him suddenly morphing from an Asian teenage girl into an older, imposing Egyptian man.
“Mine is the mark of Menkaure, my birth name,” Mencheres told her darkly. “And yours is the mark of Imhotep . . . necromancer.”
Chapter 35
What happened next happened very fast. Mencheres’s power shot out, filling the room with the force of a dozen wrecking balls. That knocked me off my feet and even staggered Vlad, but the female necromancer was unfazed. She spun around and then shot forward as if she’d been fired from a gun, launching herself right at the glass wall behind us.
“Stop her!” Vlad shouted, his hands bursting into flames.
Incredibly, Mencheres didn’t freeze her with his telekinetic abilities, and the fire that Vlad unleashed at the necromancer seemed to skip over her body instead of burning it. Shock over that combined with being knocked on my ass from the force of Mencheres’s power cost me a precious second of inaction that the vampire used to dive through the glass wall.
Then I jumped through the glass wall after her. Shards slashed me in various places, but I ignored the pain. I also ignored the screams from the dancers as the female necromancer and I suddenly fell on top of them. She shoved people aside hard enough to fling them into the air as she ran away, and I hit more than a few of them by accident as I chased after her.
More screams sounded behind us. I didn’t turn around as I fought to keep sight of her. She was headed for the door, and I didn’t need Vlad’s shout of “Stop her!” to know that I couldn’t let her make it.
Fire erupted along the entire wall where the exit was, and the people inside naturally began to panic. The necromancer threw a fraught look over her shoulder, screaming something that could have been Russian or Polish. I remembered Elena’s huge sinkhole spell and lunged toward her, now shoving aside people with the same disregard she’d shown. I could not let her activate a fail-safe spell.
Two forms whooshed over my head. Vlad and Mencheres flew over the crowd, their clear path causing them to reach the necromancer before she made it to the wall of flames blocking the door. They dropped out of sight as they tackled her, and that caused her to stop whatever she had been saying. Seconds later, I’d forced my way through the people to reach them.
Vlad had her in a choke hold, one arm locked around her throat, the other over her mouth to prevent her from completing whatever spell she’d been uttering. His hands were still lit up with flames, yet again, she didn’t catch fire the way she should have. However, the walls of the club were burning just fine, and from the countless coughs and chaos, it was becoming dangerous.
“Do something; people can’t breathe,” I told Vlad.
The fire instantly vanished, although clouds of smoke remained. Vlad and Mencheres hauled the necromancer away from the door and Mencheres telekinetically flung it open. At once, a swarm of people headed for the exit.
“Your powers didn’t work on her. Why?” I asked, looking around for Ian, Marty, and Maximus in the crush of bodies.
“She must be infused with grave magic,” Mencheres replied, referring to the most formidable form of magic because its power came from harnessing the darkest energies of the dead. “It’s the only thing immune to my abilities as well as resistant to Vlad’s.”
Resistant. Not entirely immune. That’s why the necromancer’s body now smoked like a wet log thrown onto a fire beneath Vlad’s hands. Still, we didn’t have much time to get the answers we needed since our cover had been more than blown.
“Where are the other necromancers?” I demanded. “And if you utter one more word of a spell, you’ll regret it.”
Vlad removed his arm from her mouth so she could answer. “You lied to us, Impaler,” she spat, only to be immediately silenced by Vlad before she could say anything else.
“Lied? I don’t know what game you’re playing, but you’d better stop,” I told her tersely. “You might be throwing off their power, but my abilities aren’t affected.”
I wasn’t bluffing. Vlad had once likened my seeming immunity to grave magic as my being “scorched earth” to those dark energies due to all the electrical currents in my body.
“So talk now, or talk after I cut you into ribbons with this,” I finished, sending currents surging into my right hand. When she saw the whip that snapped out while sparks rained out of it, her eyes widened. Then a thunderous boom shook the club behind us. Alarmed, I spun around to see what had caused it.
Two unfamiliar vampires rose above the panicked throngs of people swarming toward what I assumed was an exit at the other side of the club. Their hands were held out, and what looked like a growing web of eerie light grew between them.
You’ll know them when you see them, Mircea had said about the necromancers. This seemed proof enough, although Mircea’s cryptic comment had probably been an allusion to the tattoos that marked the necromancers with Imhotep’s name. I couldn’t see if these two had them, but I wasn’t going to wait until I did to assume that they were the other necromancers.