I ordered, horrified to feel tears start to well. How had she reduced me to this so quickly? Or had I done it to myself? Was I still as out of control as she’d insinuated?
“But you must have trusted that person, to believe them this long,” she went on, her tone turning flintlike despite the new sympathy in her eyes. “Must have loved them, too. Only someone you love could mess you up this bad, this long. My mom sure did a number on me, but she was wrong, just like whoever worked you over emotionally was wrong, too—”
“You know nothing!”
Now I was shouting, and my vision turned ominously dark. I would tolerate her filleting me, but I would rip her blood out and bathe in it before I allowed her to disrespect my sire.
“Tenoch was not wrong. He never would have changed over the world’s most ruthless warlord right before he died unless he knew that part of me was so dangerous, there had to be someone equally dangerous to stop me if I ever truly let that half of myself free!”
Wetness hit my cheeks. I thought it was my tears until I saw the drops flying from Cat’s eyes before feeling more tiny splashes on my skin. I hadn’t meant to yank her tears from her, but I had, and from the flush filling her skin, her blood was also rising to the surface faster than she could’ve directed it.
I spun around, squeezing my eyes shut while trying to force my other nature down before I did bathe in her blood. Go away, go away, go away! I chanted at it.
It wasn’t enough.
Desperately, I sent my senses out to the fountain in front of Ian’s house. Then I blasted my rage into the water it contained instead of the woman who’d cut through centuries of scabs to effortlessly stab me in my deepest wound. I felt the water boil before it iced over so fast, the extreme temperature change shattered the stones. The sound of the fountain exploding was so loud, it masked the crash the library door made when Bones flung it open.
“What’s wrong?” Bones demanded. “Felt a burst of power coming from this room.”
I turned to see Ian right behind Bones. Cat was still staring at me, but at least she wasn’t covered in blood. Neither was anything else in the room. The only damage was what Bones had done to the wall with the door.
Good. I’d caught myself in time.
“Oh, that was just me, being totally not dangerous,” I said in a scathingly bright tone. “Now, I think I’ll go check on our prisoner by myself, thanks.”
I would’ve left, if one of Ian’s guards hadn’t run into the room in the next moment. He was covered in blood, making me think I hadn’t directed all my rage at the fountain outside. Then his panted words made me think again.
“She escaped!”
“How?” Ian demanded, already shoving past him.
The guard ran to catch up with Ian. I did, too, which meant I caught the guard’s reply.
“We don’t know! One minute, she was chained to the chair. The next, the three of us were bloody and she was gone!”
“Sound the alarm,” Ian ordered. “She needs to be found!”
“Don’t you feel where she is?” I asked him, surprised.
Ian’s mouth tightened. “No, I don’t.”
Yonah’s spell had given Ian a significant range. Even if Ereshki had somehow gotten free the moment after she’d left our sight, she couldn’t have run that far in such a short time.
Ian led us downstairs to a solid concrete room that looked like a new vampire holding cell. Its door was the length of my forearm in thickness, and it had no windows. It should have been more than enough to hold Ereshki, but the chair that was bolted into the floor was empty of everything except heavy chains.
Ian bent near the chair, then straightened so abruptly, he nearly ripped it free from its welds. “What is this?”
The room’s two bloody guards gave a guilty glance at each other before the black-haired one replied, “Pen and paper.”
The look Ian gave them should have sent them to their knees begging for mercy. “Why did you give her that?”
“She was crying about how she wanted to write a good-bye note,” the other guard said, hunching as if feeling the blows that were certain to come. “We only loosened one wrist. Her arms and legs were still chained. What could a human do with only one wrist, some paper and