Twice Tempted (6 page)

“They must have wanted it to look like an accident.”

I swiped my eyes. Tears wouldn’t help me find who’d killed my best friend. “What does Vlad think?”

Maximus stopped pacing and turned around, an inscrutable look on his face. “I didn’t tell him about the explosion, let alone that you survived it.”

“Why not? We’re broken up, but I doubt he’d be happy to hear that someone tried to
kill
me.”

Maximus said nothing. Underneath those closed-off, rugged features, I caught a glimpse of pity. And understood.

“No,” I whispered. “He wouldn’t.”

Maximus let out a grim snort. “Oh? You came as close to humiliating him as anyone has since Szilagyi faked his death centuries ago. And you saw how Vlad reacted to that.”

“
I
humiliated
him
?” If I hadn’t been so torn up over Marty’s death, I would’ve laughed. “I told Vlad I loved him only to have him make it clear where I’d always rank in his life, which was just a few notches above ‘undead bed buddy.’ ”

“True,” Maximus replied without hesitation, “but that’s more than he offered any of his other lovers, yet you turned him down. Then you had the temerity to leave him.”

“Temerity?” I repeated in disbelief.

“No woman has ever left Vlad. Cynthiana, his lover before you, even seduced Shrapnel trying to make Vlad jealous after he ended things between them.”

“Did it work?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Aside from cutting off his protection for Cynthiana because she callously used Shrapnel for her own gain, he didn’t care.”

“How long was Vlad with her?”

Maximus thought for a moment. “Around thirty years.”

I was incredulous. “That’s longer than I’ve been alive! If Vlad walked away from
that
relationship without a backward glance, he’s probably forgotten me already.”

Maximus slanted a look my way before resuming his pacing. “Not likely. Regardless of what he does or doesn’t feel for you, your double rejection will burn him for years.”

Enough to incite him to murder me? The thought made me feel like a drowning victim who’d been dunked under one more time.

“Let’s say Vlad does want me dead. I doubt he’d be so cowardly as to fake a gas line explosion when he could’ve killed me while I was still at his castle.”

“Yes, but then he’d have to kill Gretchen and your father, too, making the whole business look very emotional on his part.” A weary sort of cynicism replaced the pity on his face. “Being emotional is seen as a weakness among vampires. Vlad knows his enemies would fall on him like wolves if they suspected that weakness in him.”

First Marty’s death, then realizing the explosion was meant for me, now the suggestion that my ex-boyfriend might be behind it. I closed my eyes. How much more could I take?

“You’re Vlad’s right-hand man” was what I said after an extended pause. “Wouldn’t he tell you if he planned to kill me?”

Maximus was silent so long, I opened my eyes. “What now?”

“I don’t think he would,” Maximus finally said. “He’d know I would have a problem with it, and why strain my loyalty if he didn’t have to? Instead, he could’ve ordered someone else to make your death look like an accident. If I hadn’t been here, I might’ve even believed it.”

Back to that question. “Why
were
you here?”

He sighed, returning to the bed across from mine. “Partly because I wanted to make sure Marty really did let you stay with him even though he’d replaced you with that other girl. You need vampire blood to keep your electricity levels from killing you. If Marty wouldn’t have kept providing it, I would have made other arrangements. But mostly, Leila, I didn’t go back to Romania because of how I feel about you.”

If I wasn’t overloaded from grief, I would’ve been shocked. As it was, I could only muster up faint surprise.

Maximus leaned forward, brushing my hair back.

“I told you when we met, you’re beautiful, ballsy, and your abilities fascinate me. I’ve also seen your courage, your loyalty, and your strength in leaving a man you loved because you knew he’d never love you.”

More surprise, but that was trivial compared to my anguish and the growing need I had to avenge my best friend and the young girl who’d never had a real chance at life.

“Maximus, you’re very attractive and I’m flattered, but I can’t even think about this right now.”

He leaned back, a hard little smile curving his mouth. “I know, but we
are
having this conversation again.”

I didn’t argue. I was too busy trying to figure out who was behind that explosion. I still doubted it was Vlad, but if Maximus thought it was possible, I shouldn’t throw caution to the wind by automatically discounting the idea.

Besides, even if I was right and Vlad wasn’t behind this, I doubted news of my alleged death would rock him. He’d gone out of his way to prove that I didn’t mean much to him.

I shook off that thought before it brought me even lower than my rock-bottom state. “I need some clothes.”

Maximus got up and rummaged through the suitcase on the dresser. Then he pulled out a shirt and a pair of boxer shorts.

“These won’t fit, but the fire burned your clothes off and I haven’t had time to get you new ones.”

“This is fine,” I said, accepting the bundle. As soon as I touched it, colorless images exploded across my mind.

I stuffed my clothes in the suitcase and then slammed it shut. Time to take Leila home. No one expected
her
to leave Vlad, yet she had, and soon she’d be an ocean away from him. I smiled at the thought. She might have refused me once, but that was before she realized Vlad couldn’t give her what she needed. I could, and now I finally had a real chance to show her that.

“Maximus,” I whispered once the hotel room with its putrid yellow walls surrounded me once again. “It’s
back
!”

Chapter 8

M
aximus pulled out a lighter, turning the flame up. I held my hand over it—and immediately snatched it back with a yelp.

“That hurts!”

He flipped the lighter closed. “You’re saying for several weeks it didn’t, because Vlad’s aura rendered you fireproof?”

“That’s right. Fire skipped over me like it does with him. How else do you explain me surviving an explosion that was so intense, it destroyed the trailer I was in?”

And killed another vampire
, I didn’t say aloud. If I dwelled on Marty’s death, I’d start sobbing and wouldn’t stop.

“Being in such intense flames must have used up the remains of his aura in you,” Maximus said in a thoughtful tone. Then he frowned. “Vlad told me about your psychic abilities malfunctioning. Why didn’t he tell me this?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to think about Vlad now. “Maybe because he’d never done it before and he wanted to keep his ability to render someone temporarily fireproof a secret?”

“Perhaps,” he mused.

I didn’t care why Vlad hadn’t told anyone. My fireproofing was gone, my abilities were back, and someone who’d tried to kill me had murdered my closest friend, an innocent girl, and many others, too. Finding that person and making him pay was my new goal in life.

“Okay, picking up impressions from an object works. Let’s see if I can still find someone in the present.”

So saying, I stroked the nightstand with my right hand. Tables, doorknobs, and other fixtures were high-traffic areas for emotional imprints. At once, multiple images flashed across my mind. I weeded through them until I found the strongest thread. Then I concentrated on it, seeking the person at the other end of that invisible essence trail.

The hotel room morphed into an office decorated in shades of beige. A fortysomething man sat behind a desk, balancing the phone with his shoulder as he grabbed a notepad.

“No, that’s not what we agreed on,” he said as he scribbled away. “I don’t care what her lawyer wants . . . for fuck’s sake, she’s already getting half my check in alimony and child support!”

Even though everything was slightly hazy as images in the present were, the word
BITCH
on the notepad was clear.
You shouldn’t have kept cheating on your wife in no-tell motels
, I thought, dropping the link and willing myself back to reality.

Maximus stared at me without blinking. “Did it work?”

“Yes.”

A ruthless anticipation began to swell in me. Now I could start hunting for the person who killed Marty. I still didn’t believe it was Vlad, but if I was wrong . . .

“Maximus, thank you for pulling me out from under the wreckage, healing me, and bringing me here. I owe you my life.” I paused to take in a deep breath. “But now you need to go.”

Both golden brows rose. “What?”

“If Vlad
is
behind this, I can’t trust you,” I said bluntly. “You might like me, but we both know you’re not going to betray centuries of allegiance over a passing fancy.”

I expected a lot of responses. Laughter that sounded like stones grinding together wasn’t one of them.

“You don’t know me as much as you think you do,” he said, and then grabbed my right hand. My power responded, yanking me out of the present into his past.

Multiple
wounds covered me, but I was jubilant. The Holy City was once again ours.

“Allah Akbar!” a voice wailed above our shouts of victory.

Fools. If their god truly was great, we wouldn’t have retaken Jerusalem. The survivors of the battle, mostly women and children, stared at us with frightened loathing.

Then my cousin Godfrey’s voice rang out. “Men of God! Destroy the filth that befouled Jerusalem. Let none survive!”

I froze. Sunlight glinted off hundreds of swords as the other soldiers raised their weapons. Then the swords fell to the accompaniment of high-pitched screams.

“Obey!” the knight closest to me urged. He showed no hesitation as he hacked at those in front of him.

“God wills it!” Godfrey continued to roar while he joined in the destruction. “We must cleanse this city!”

A form hurtled toward me. By reflex, I caught it, looking down on the tearstained face of a boy, his brown eyes wide as he sobbed out a plea for mercy in his native tongue.

Abruptly, he sagged, blood spurting from his mouth. The knight next to me yanked his dripping sword from the boy’s back.

“We have orders,” he barked. “Do not refuse. God wills it!”

I dropped the lifeless boy. Then, jaw clenched, I raised my sword and started toward the survivors.

I snapped back from that gruesome memory with slivers of electricity shooting from my hand. At some point, Maximus had let go, wise since I now wanted to aim those currents at him.

“I know what you saw,” he said flatly. “It’s forever burned into my nightmares. For the sake of allegiance, I once followed a terrible order. Afterward, the guilt nearly destroyed me. I will
not
be that man again. Vlad is ruthless when protecting his line and casualties of war happen, but he’s never murdered innocent women or children. If that has changed, then so has my loyalty to him, but not for your sake. For mine.”

I stared at Maximus. I’d expected he had a dark sin—most people did, especially centuries-old vampires—but I hadn’t anticipated what he’d shown me.

“How could you have fought in that battle
and
been changed into a vampire by Vlad?” I finally asked. “Didn’t the Crusades take place hundreds of years before Vlad was born?”

He smiled tightly. “They did, but the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon had secret rituals. One of them involved drinking blood instead of wine in a mimicry of the Last Supper. For members of the original eight Templars, as I was, the blood wasn’t human, though we didn’t know it. We thought our increased strength and accelerated healing came from God.”

“You were tricked into drinking vampire blood?” Wry snort. “I’ve been there. When did you find out what it was?”

“Centuries later when I met Vlad. In truth, it was a relief. I thought I couldn’t age because God wanted to keep punishing me for spilling innocent blood in His name.”

Some of the anger I’d felt melted away. What Maximus had done was awful, but he’d lived with the guilt for longer than I could imagine. He didn’t need more recriminations from me.

“Um . . . all right.”

Such a trivial response, but too much had happened the past several hours. I rubbed my head, feeling Vlad’s essence flare underneath my fingers. He’d left imprints all over me. I dropped my hand, not wanting to accidentally link to him. With his mind reading, he was one of the few people who could tell when he was being psychically spied upon. It was how we met, and in the unlikely event that he
had
tried to kill me, I wasn’t about to let him know he’d failed.

My eyes burned at the thought, but I forced the pain back.
Survival first, then heartbreak
, I reminded myself bleakly.

“I need to go back to the carnival,” I said to Maximus, “and you can’t come with me.”

Chapter 9

“I
look
ridiculous
.”

I didn’t turn, but continued to stride through the remains of the employee parking lot as though I belonged. We passed a few reporters mixed in with the throng of onlookers. The explosion brought out the gawkers as well as the bereaved.

“You’re the one who insisted on coming.” Spoken low so only he would hear me. “At least you no longer look like a reincarnation of Eric the Red, which is noticeable, by the way.”

A scoff. “And this isn’t?”

Now I did glance at him, taking in the thick black hair covering every inch of his exposed skin and the pronounced brows I’d applied with glue and some modeling clay. Considering the time crunch, I’d done a good job making him look like he had hypertrichosis, more commonly known as wolfman’s disease.

“Not at a carnival it isn’t.”

My disguise was less dramatic. I wore a short blond wig that matched the color of my new shaggy beard, plus about two pounds of gel inserts to give me the double-D’s that nature never intended. My waist and butt were similarly padded, rounding out my figure into unrecognizable proportions. Stage makeup covered my scar where the beard didn’t, and dark glasses completed my incognito look. Well, incognito for a carnival. Most of them had at least one bearded lady.