I hadn’t known that, but it didn’t change anything. “You can’t kill someone for how he looks at me. That’s crazy.”
I thought I heard, “I can if he keeps it up,” but I wasn’t sure, and his next words startled me into forgetting that.
“I’ll see you in a few hours. I don’t want to be far behind Maximus and the others.”
“You’re still going?” I blurted, astounded.
His smile was coldly anticipatory. “Not inside, but someone is watching that abbey in order to detonate those charges. With luck, it will be Szilagyi himself.”
I wouldn’t link to the puppet master to find out; if he was there, Szilagyi would sense that I was spying on him and leave. Instead, I grasped Vlad’s arm with my right hand. If I saw another image of his death, I wasn’t letting him leave this room no matter what he said.
Nothing. I let out a huge sigh of relief.
“Go ahead.”
He stroked my cheek, that deadly little smile never leaving his face.
“Don’t fear. Szilagyi needed to bring a mountain on me to kill me because I’m too powerful to fall in a normal ambush.”
Then he was gone, my hair rustling with the speed of his exit. Vlad had the devil’s own ego, but according to myth, pride was how Lucifer fell. His arrogance could turn out to be his Achilles’ heel if Szilagyi exploited it the right way.
My teeth ground together. That wouldn’t happen. Vlad would search for him in his way, and I’d do the same in mine. So far the memories locked inside those bones from the club hadn’t yielded more information, but I’d keep sifting through them. With luck, one of them would lead to Szilagyi’s location, or to whoever might be helping him. Vlad said he thought that some of his “allies” really wanted him dead. He’d been seeking out items for me to touch the night of the club fire, but since we’d discovered the identity of the puppet master, combing through people he knew to determine friend from foe had been back-burnered.
Still, someone had snatched Marty off the streets, and Szilagyi had been tucked in his concrete box at the time. It could’ve been the young-looking vampire with the prematurely silver hair, but as Vlad had said, Szilagyi had waited centuries to make his move because he needed enough people supporting him first. If Szilagyi was close to us as Vlad surmised, maybe his secret cadre of allies were, too . . .
As sudden as the bolt of electricity that had changed my life, I realized how we could find Szilagyi without spending weeks on painstaking searches of abandoned structures or poring through memories contained in his people’s bones. All we’d have to do was to give the puppet master what he wanted.
Me.