“Wrong strategy,” Ian muttered. “I enjoy pain, so between biting me and the deliciously agonizing bolts of electricity your whole body is giving off, you’re making my entire morning.”
I stopped biting him. From the disappointed noise he made, he hadn’t been kidding. He also removed his hand from my mouth slowly, as if giving me the chance to bite him again. Great, I hadn’t stopped Vlad from leaving, so all my struggles had succeeding in doing was panicking me, making Ian happy, and hurting Marty. I was furious with them for the surprise ambush, but I didn’t want to truly hurt them.
Plus, if my voltage got too out of control, I might inadvertently kill one of them.
“Let me go,” I said, trying to power myself down so I no longer shot dangerous electricity out of every pore.
“Not yet,” Ian answered grimly. “Need a little help in here holding her,” he called out in a louder voice.
Moments later, I heard another metallic key card being used on our hotel room door. Good, Vlad had come back. He might think the matter was settled and Samir was as good as dead, but I hadn’t begun to give up this fight—
It wasn’t Vlad. Instead, a very tall, very blond vampire filled the doorframe. For a moment, all I did was stare, my emotions swinging like a pendulum.
I hadn’t seen Maximus since we killed Szilagyi and met Mircea in that underground, ancient Turkish prison. Maximus had saved our lives that day from a deadly self-destruct sequence that Szilagyi had set off, just like he’d saved my life before that from Szilagyi’s horrible napalm attack on Vlad’s castle. Those and many other brave deeds had more than made up for Maximus’s brief disloyalty to Vlad over me, and I considered him to be a very dear friend.
But . . .
I looked at Maximus, and a cold, creeping fear swept over me that was as irrational as it was unfair. It wasn’t Maximus’s fault that Szilagyi had treated me so brutally when I’d been his captive. Maximus had saved me from even worse torture while pretending to be Szilagyi’s ally, and I wouldn’t have been able to psychically transmit my location to Vlad if not for Maximus. Yet just looking at him made me feel a double onset of the same post-traumatic stress disorder I’d fought so hard to overcome, and when he came over to help hold me as Ian had requested, a flood of memories came back, trapping me in the same anxiety I’d felt last time I had been forcibly restrained.
The circle of men around me suddenly changed into the gray rock of an underground cell. Then their hands changed into metal clamps that bit into my wrists, arms, legs, and ankles. That wasn’t the worst part. Once again, I saw a cruel, platinum-haired vampire holding a curved knife with a partial loop on the handle. Szilagyi’s hired torturer smiled as he came nearer. I twisted until blood ran from every clamp restraining me, but I couldn’t get away . . .
Random snatches of dialog broke into the nightmare that held me in its merciless grip. They were faint compared to the echo of my own screams and the horrible memory of my flesh being sliced and ripped from my body, but I still heard them.
“Something’s wrong.”
“There goes the power.”
“Leila? Kid, you gotta stop that!”
“Where’s a bloody fire master when you need one?”
“Try letting her go, see if that helps.”
“No, it’s only getting worse.”
“She’s drawing in too much electricity!”
“Stand back, I’ll handle this. I said, stand back!”
Color suddenly exploded in my mind, shattering the memory and hurtling me into the present. I fell forward only to pull away with a gasp of pain. What had I just burned myself on?
The carpet, I realized. It was still smoldering despite the sprinklers in the hotel room shooting water in every direction. I shook my head, feeling as if I were waking up from a particularly bad hangover, then looked around in shock.
The power in the room was off, smoke and sprinkler water clogged the air, the carpet was burned in multiple places, and the ceiling looked as if a kid had set off fireworks that scorched their way half through it to the floor above us. Ian, Maximus, and Marty were all sopping wet, and their clothes had dozens of tiny burn holes in them.
And I didn’t know how any of this has happened.
“Where’s Gretchen?” I said, filled with a different kind of panic when I didn’t see her anywhere.
“She’s on the first floor waiting by the front desk,” Marty replied, tapping the side of his eye for emphasis. “I used these, so she won’t go anywhere else.”
I gestured at the destruction around us. “And, um . . . I’m guessing I’m somehow responsible for this?” I didn’t remember doing it, but what other explanation was there?
“Too bloody right,” Ian said instantly. “You started shooting electricity from your body as if you’d transformed into a living lightning bolt. Burned the shite out of us, the carpet, and the ceiling, and then you got truly destructive—”
“That’s enough,” Marty said curtly.
“Hardly,” Ian countered. “If she doesn’t know what she’s capable of, she can’t begin to control it. As I was saying, then you upped your electricity by siphoning more voltage from the power outlets. You didn’t even need to touch them—the currents streamed out and fed into you as if summoned. You kept doing that until you’d short-circuited the whole bloody hotel. After that, you were so amped up, no one could touch you without catching fire. Thought you were about to self-detonate and blow us all to hell, so I threw a reality spell at you. Thankfully, it snapped you out of whatever crazy trance you were in.”