TWENTY-ONE

I'D NEVER BEEN COMPLETELY NAKED around a guy before. It scared the hell out of me - even though it excited me, too. Lying on the covers, we clung to each other and kept kissing - and kissing and kissing and kissing. His hands and lips took possession of my body, and every touch was like fire on my skin.

After yearning for him for so long, I could barely believe this was happening. And while the physical stuff felt great, I also just liked being close to him. I liked the way he looked at me, like I was the sexiest, most wonderful thing in the world. I liked the way he would say my name in Russian, murmured like a prayer: Roza, Roza...

And somewhere, somewhere in all of this, was that same urging voice that had driven me up to his room, a voice that didn't sound like my own but that I was powerless to ignore. Stay with him, stay with him. Don't think about anything else except him. Keep touching him. Forget about everything else.

I listened - not that I really needed any extra convincing.

The burning in his eyes told me he wanted to do a lot more than we were, but he took things slow, maybe because he knew I was nervous. His pajama pants stayed on. At one point, I shifted so that I hovered over him, my hair hanging around him. He tilted his head slightly, and I just barely caught sight of the back of his neck. I brushed my fingertips over the six tiny marks tattooed there.

"Did you really kill six Strigoi?" He nodded. "Wow."

He brought my own neck down to his mouth and kissed me. His teeth gently grazed my skin, different from a vampire but every bit as thrilling. "Don't worry. You'll have a lot more than me someday."

"Do you feel guilty about it?"

"Hmm?"

"Killing them. You said in the van that it was the right thing to do, but it still bothers you. It's why you go to church, isn't it? I see you there, but you aren't really into the services."

He smiled, surprised and amused I'd guessed another secret about him. "How do you know these things? I'm not guilty exactly...just sad sometimes. All of them used to be human or dhampir or Moroi. It's a waste, that's all, but as I said before, it's something I have to do. Something we all have to do. Sometimes it bothers me, and the chapel is a good place to think about those kinds of things. Sometimes I find peace there, but not often. I find more peace with you."

He rolled me off of him and moved on top of me again. The kissing picked up once more, harder this time. More urgent. Oh God, I thought. I'm finally going to do it. This is it. I can feel it.

He must have seen the decision in my eyes. Smiling, he slid his hands behind my neck and unfastened Victor's necklace.

He set it on the bedside table. As soon as the chain left his fingers, I felt like I'd been slapped in the face. I blinked in surprise.

Dimitri must have felt the same way. "What happened?" he asked.

"I-I don't know." I felt like I was trying to wake up, like I'd been asleep for two days. I needed to remember something.

Lissa. Something with Lissa.

My head felt funny. Not pain or dizziness, but...the voice, I realized. The voice urging me toward Dimitri was gone. That wasn't to say I didn't want him anymore because hey, seeing him there in those sexy pajama bottoms, with that brown hair spilling over the side of face was pretty fine. But I no longer had that outside influence pushing me to him. Weird.

He frowned, no longer turned on. After several moments of thought, he reached over and picked up the necklace. The instant his fingers touched it, I saw desire sweep over him again. He slid his other hand onto my hip, and suddenly, that burning lust slammed back into me. My stomach went queasy while my skin started to prickle and grow warm again. My breathing became heavy. His lips moved toward mine again.

Some inner part of me fought through.

"Lissa," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut. "I have to tell you something about Lissa. But I can't...remember...I feel so strange..."

"I know." Still holding onto me, he rested his cheek against my forehead. "There's something...something here..." He pulled his face away, and I opened my eyes. "This necklace. That's the one Prince Victor gave you?"

I nodded and could see the sluggish thought process trying to wake up behind his eyes. Taking a deep breath, he removed his hand from my hip and pushed himself away.

"What are you doing?" I exclaimed. "Come back..."

He looked like he wanted to - very badly - but instead he climbed out of the bed. He and the necklace moved away from me. I felt like he'd ripped part of me away, but at the same time, I had that startling sensation of waking up, like I could think clearly once more without my body making all the decisions.

On the other hand, Dimitri still wore a look of animal passion on him, and it seemed to take a great deal of effort for him to walk across the room. He reached the window and managed to open it one-handed. Cold air blasted in, and I rubbed my hands over my arms for warmth.

"What are you going to - ?" The answer hit me, and I sprang out of bed, just as the necklace flew out the window. "No! Do you know how much that must have - ?"

The necklace disappeared, and I no longer felt like I was waking up. I was awake. Painfully, startlingly so.

I took in my surroundings. Dimitri's room. Me naked. The rumpled bed.

But all that was nothing compared to what hit me next.

"Lissa!" I gasped out. It all came back, the memories and the emotions. And, in fact, her held-back emotions suddenly poured into me - at staggering levels. More terror. Intense terror. Those feelings wanted to suck me back into her body, but I couldn't let them. Not quite yet. I fought against her, needing to stay here. With the words coming out in a rush, I told Dimitri everything that had happened.

He was in motion before I finished, putting on clothes and looking every bit like a badass god. Ordering me to get dressed, he tossed me a sweatshirt with Cyrillic writing on it to wear over the skimpy dress.

I had a hard time following him downstairs; he made no effort to slow for me this time. Calls were made when we got there. Orders shouted. Before long, I ended up in the guardians' main office with him. Kirova and other teachers were there. Most of the campus's guardians. Everyone seemed to speak at once. All the while, I felt Lissa's fear, felt her moving farther and farther away.

I yelled at them to hurry up and do something, but no one except Dimitri would believe my story about her abduction until someone retrieved Christian from the chapel and then verified Lissa really wasn't on campus.

Christian staggered in, supported by two guardians. Dr. Olendzki appeared shortly thereafter, checking him out and wiping blood away from the back of his head.

Finally, I thought, something would happen.

"How many Strigoi were there?" one of the guardians asked me.

"How in the world did they get in?" muttered someone else.

I stared. "Wh - ? There weren't any Strigoi."

Several sets of eyes stared at me. "Who else would have taken her?" asked Ms. Kirova primly. "You must have seen it wrong through the...vision."

"No. I'm positive. It was...they were...guardians."

"She's right," mumbled Christian, still under the doctor's ministrations. He winced as she did something to the back of his head. "Guardians."

"That's impossible," someone said.

"They weren't school guardians." I rubbed my forehead, fighting hard to keep from leaving the conversation and going back to Lissa. My irritation grew. "Will you guys get moving? She's getting farther away!"

"You're saying a group of privately retained guardians came in and kidnapped her?" The tone in Kirova's voice implied I was playing some kind of joke.

"Yes," I replied through gritted teeth. "They..."

Slowly, carefully, I slipped my mental restraint and flew into Lissa's body. I sat in a car, an expensive car with tinted windows to keep out most of the light. It might be "night" here, but it was full day for the rest of the world. One of the guardians from the chapel drove; another sat beside him in the front - one I recognized. Spiridon. In the back, Lissa sat with tied hands, another guardian beside her, and on the other side -

"They work for Victor Dashkov," I gasped out, focusing back on Kirova and the others. "They're his."

"Prince Victor Dashkov?" asked one of the guardians with a snort. Like there was any other freaking Victor Dashkov.

"Please," I moaned, hands clutching my head. "Do something. They're getting so far away. They're on..." A brief image, seen outside the car window, flared in my vision. "Eighty-three. Headed south."

"Eighty-three already? How long ago did they leave? Why didn't you come sooner?"

My eyes turned anxiously to Dimitri.

"A compulsion spell," he said slowly. "A compulsion spell put into a necklace he gave her. It made her attack me."

"No one can use that kind of compulsion," exclaimed Kirova. "No one's done that in ages."

"Well, someone did. By the time I'd restrained her and taken the necklace, a lot of time had passed," Dimitri continued, face perfectly controlled. No one questioned the story.

Finally, finally, the group moved into action. No one wanted to bring me, but Dimitri insisted when he realized I could lead them to her. Three details of guardians set out in sinister black SUVs. I rode in the first one, sitting in the passenger seat while Dimitri drove. Minutes passed. The only times we spoke was when I gave a report.

"They're still on Eighty-three...but their turn is coming. They aren't speeding. They don't want to get pulled over."

He nodded, not looking at me. He most definitely was speeding.

Giving him a sidelong glance, I replayed tonight's earlier events. In my mind's eye, I could see it all again, the way he'd looked at me and kissed me.

But what had it been? An illusion? A trick? On the way to the car, he'd told me there really had been a compulsion spell in the necklace, a lust one. I had never heard of such a thing, but when I'd asked for more information, he just said it was a type of magic earth users once practiced but never did anymore.

"They're turning," I said suddenly. "I can't see the road name, but I'll know when we're close."

Dimitri grunted in acknowledgment, and I sank further into my seat.

What had it all meant? Had it meant anything to him? It had definitely meant a lot to me.

"There," I said about twenty minutes later, indicating the rough road Victor's car had turned off on. It was unpaved gravel, and the SUV gave us an edge over his luxury car.

We drove on in silence, the only sound coming from the crunching of the gravel under the tires. Dust kicked up outside the windows, swirling around us.

"They're turning again."

Farther and farther off the main routes they went, and we followed the whole time, led by my instructions. Finally, I felt Victor's car come to a stop.

"They're outside a small cabin," I said. "They're taking her - "

"Why are you doing this? What's going on?"

Lissa. Cringing and scared. Her feelings had pulled me into her.

"Come, child," said Victor, moving into the cabin, unsteady on his cane. One of his guardians held the door open. Another pushed Lissa along and settled her into a chair near a small table inside. It was cold in here, especially in the pink dress. Victor sat across from her. When she started to get up, a guardian gave her a warning look. "Do you think I'd seriously hurt you?"

"What did you do to Christian?" she cried, ignoring the question. "Is he dead?

"The Ozera boy? I didn't mean for that to happen. We didn't expect him to be there. We'd hoped to catch you alone, to convince others you'd run away again. We'd made sure rumors already circulated about that."

We? I recalled how the stories had resurfaced this week...from Natalie.

"Now?" He sighed, spreading his hands wide in a helpless gesture. "I don't know. I doubt anyone will connect it to us, even if they don't believe you ran away. Rose is the biggest liability. We'd intended to...dispatch her, letting others think she'd run away as well. The spectacle she created at your dance made that impossible, but I had another plan in place to make sure she stays occupied for some time...probably until tomorrow. We will have to contend with her later."

He hadn't counted on Dimitri figuring out the spell. He'd figured we'd be too busy getting it on all night.

"Why?" asked Lissa. "Why are you doing all this?"

His green eyes widened, reminding her of her father's.

They might be distant relatives, but that jade-green color ran in both the Dragomirs and the Dashkovs. "I'm surprised you even have to ask, my dear. I need you. I need you to heal me."