Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection: 1/6 (187 page)

“They’re coming,” said Dimitri in a low voice, that lovely accent making my heart ache. “I know they are.”

“Then let me get out there and be useful!” she snapped. “You don’t need us to babysit these two.” Her tone was dismissive. Scornful, even. It was understandable. Everyone in the vampire world knew Moroi didn’t fight back, and Lissa and Christian were firmly bound.

“You don’t know them,” said Dimitri. “They’re dangerous. I’m not even sure this is enough protection.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

In one smooth motion, Dimitri turned and backhanded her. The hit knocked her back a few feet, her eyes widening in fury and shock. He resumed his pacing as though nothing had happened.

“You will stay here, and you will guard them as long as I tell you to, do you understand?” She glared back and gingerly touched her face but said nothing. Dimitri glanced at the others. “And you’ll stay too. If the guardians actually make it this far inside, you’ll be needed for more than just guard duty.”

“How do you know?” demanded another Strigoi, a black-haired one who might have been human once. A rarity among Strigoi. “How do you know they’ll come?”

Strigoi had amazing hearing, but with their bickering, Lissa had a brief opportunity to speak undetected to Christian. “Can you burn my ropes?” she murmured in a nearly inaudible voice. “Like with Rose?”

Christian frowned. When he and I had been captured, it was what he’d done to free me. It had hurt like hell and left blisters on my hands and wrists. “They’ll notice,” he breathed back. The conversation went no further because Dimitri came to an abrupt halt and turned toward Lissa.

She gasped at the sudden and unexpected movement. Swiftly approaching her, he knelt down before her and peered into her eyes. She trembled in spite of her best efforts. She had never been this close to a Strigoi, and the fact that it was Dimitri was that much worse. The red rings around his pupils seemed to burn into her. His fangs looked poised to attack.

His hand snaked out and gripped her neck, tilting her face up so he could get an even better look into her eyes. His fingers dug into her skin, not enough to cut off her air but enough that she would have bruises later. If there was a later.

“I know the guardians will come because Rose is watching,” said Dimitri. “Aren’t you, Rose?” Loosening his hold a little, he ran his fingertips over the skin of Lissa’s throat, so gently . . . yet there was no question he had the power to snap her neck.

It was like he was looking into
my
eyes at the moment. My soul. I even felt like he was stroking
my
neck. I knew it was impossible. The bond existed between Lissa and me. No one else could see it. Yet, just then, it was like no one else existed but
him
and me. It was like there was no Lissa between us.

“You’re in there, Rose.” A pitiless half smile played over his mouth. “And you won’t abandon either of them. You also aren’t foolish enough to come alone, are you? Maybe once you would have—but not anymore.”

I jerked out of her head, unable to stare into those eyes—and see them staring back at me. Whether it was my own fear or a mirroring of Lissa’s, I discovered my body was also trembling. I forced it to stop and tried to slow my racing heart. Swallowing, I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, but they were all preoccupied with discussing strategy—except for Tasha.

Her cool blue gaze studied me, her face drawn with concern. “What did you see?”

I shook my head, unable to look at her either. “A nightmare,” I murmured. “My worst nightmare coming true.”

I
DIDN’T HAVE A PRECISE count of how many Strigoi were with Dimitri’s group. So much of what I’d seen through Lissa had been blurred with confusion and terror. The guardians, knowing we were expected, had simply had to make a best guess about how many to send. Hans had hoped overwhelming force would make up for us losing the element of surprise. He’d dispatched as many guardians as he could reasonably clear from the Court. Admittedly, the Court was protected by wards, but it still couldn’t be left entirely undefended.

Having the new grads there had helped. Most of them had been left behind, allowing the seasoned guardians to go on our hunting party. That left us with forty or so. It was as unusual as large groups of Strigoi banding together. Guardians were usually sent out in pairs, maybe groups of three at most, with Moroi families. This large of a force had the potential to bring about a battle rivaling that of the Academy attack.

Knowing that sneaking through the dark wouldn’t work, Hans stopped our convoy a little ways from the warehouse the Strigoi were holed up at. The building was situated on a service road cutting off from the highway. It was an industrial area, hardly a deserted path in the woods, but all the businesses and factories were shut down this late at night. I stepped out of the SUV, letting the warm evening wrap around me. It was humid, and the moisture in the air felt especially oppressive when I was already smothered with fear.

Standing beside the road, I felt no nausea. Dimitri hadn’t posted Strigoi this far, which meant our arrival was still—kind of—a surprise. Hans walked over to me, and I gave him the best estimate I could on the situation, based on my limited information.

“But you can find Vasilisa?” he asked.

I nodded. “As soon as I’m in the building, the bond will lead me straight to her.”

He turned, staring off into the night as cars sped by on the nearby highway. “If they’re already waiting outside, they’ll smell and hear us long before we see them.” Passing headlights briefly illuminated his face, which was lined in thought. “You said there are three layers of Strigoi?”

“As far as I could tell. There are some on Lissa and Christian, then some outside.” I paused, trying to think what Dimitri would do in this situation. Surely I knew him well enough, even as a Strigoi, to calculate his strategy. “Then another layer inside the building—before you get to the storage room.” I didn’t know this for certain, but I didn’t tell Hans. The assumption was made on my own instincts, drawn from what I would do and what I thought Dimitri would do. I figured it would be best if Hans planned for three waves of Strigoi.

And that’s exactly what he did. “Then we go in with three groups. You’ll lead the group going in for the extraction. Another team will accompany yours and eventually split off. They’ll fight whoever’s right inside, letting your group head for the captives.”

It sounded so . . . militaristic.
Extraction. Captives.
And me . . . a team leader. It made sense with the bond, but always in the past, they’d simply used my knowledge and left me on the sidelines.
Welcome to being a guardian, Rose.
At school, we’d conducted all sorts of exercises, running as many different Strigoi scenarios as our instructors could dream up. Yet, as I stared up at the warehouse, all of those drills seemed like playacting, a game that could in no way measure up to what I was about to face. For half a second, the responsibility of it all seemed daunting, but I quickly shoved aside such concerns. This was what I had been trained to do, what I had been born to do. My own fears didn’t matter.
They come first
. Time to prove it.

“What are we going to do since we can’t sneak up on them?” I asked. Hans had a point about the Strigoi detecting us in advance.

An almost mischievous smile flickered on his face, and he explained his plan to the group while also dividing us into our teams. His approach tactic was bold and reckless. My kind of plan.

And like that, we were off. An outsider analyzing us might have said we were on a suicide mission. Maybe we were. It honestly didn’t matter. The guardians wouldn’t abandon the last Dragomir. And I wouldn’t have abandoned Lissa even if there were a million Dragomirs.

So, with sneaking having been ruled out, Hans opted for a full-on attack. Our group loaded back into the eight SUVs and tore off down the street at illegal speeds. We took up the entire width of the road, gambling on no oncoming traffic. Two SUVs led the charge side by side, then two rows of three. We shot to the end of the road, came to a halt with screeching tires at the front of the warehouse, and spilled out of our cars. If slow stealth wasn’t an option, we’d gain surprise by going fast and furious.

Some of the Strigoi were indeed surprised. Clearly, they’d seen our approach, but it had happened so fast that they’d had only a little time to react. Of course, when you were as fast and deadly as Strigoi, a little time was all you needed. A group of them surged at us, and Hans’s “outside team” charged back, those guardians putting themselves between my group and the other going inside. The Moroi fire users had been assigned to the outside group, for fear of setting the building on fire if they went inside.

My team moved around the battle, inevitably running into a few Strigoi who hadn’t fallen to the first team’s distraction. With well-practiced determination, I ignored the nausea sweeping through me from being this close to Strigoi. Hans had strictly ordered me not to stop unless any Strigoi were directly in my path, and he and another guardian were beside me to cover any threats that might come at me. He wanted nothing to delay me from leading them to Lissa and Christian.

We fought our way into the warehouse, entering a dingy hall blocked by Strigoi. I’d been right in my guess that Dimitri would have layers of security. A bottleneck formed in the small space, and for a few moments things were chaotic. Lissa was so close. It was like she was calling to me, and I burned with impatience as I waited for the hall to clear. My team was in the back, letting the other group do the fighting. I saw Strigoi and guardians alike fall and tried not to let it distract me. Fight now, grieve later. Lissa and Christian. I had to focus on them.

“There,” said Hans, tugging my arm. A gap had formed ahead of us. There were still plenty of Strigoi, but they were distracted enough that my companions and I slipped through. We took off down the hall, which opened into a large empty space that made up the warehouse’s heart. A few pieces of trash and debris were all that was left of the goods once stored here.

Doors led off of the room, but now I didn’t need the bond to tell me where Lissa was. Three Strigoi stood guard outside a doorway. So. Four layers of security. Dimitri had one-upped me. It didn’t matter. My group had ten people. The Strigoi snarled, bracing in anticipation as we charged them. Through an unspoken signal, half of my group engaged them. The rest of us busted down the door.

Despite my intense focus on reaching Lissa and Christian, one tiny thought had always been dancing in the back of my brain. Dimitri. I hadn’t seen Dimitri in any of the Strigoi we’d encountered. With my full attention on our attackers, I hadn’t slipped into Lissa’s head to verify the situation, but I felt totally confident that he was still inside the room. He would have stayed with her, knowing I would come. He would be waiting to face me.

Having reached our goal, I no longer needed extra protection. Hans pulled out his stake on the first Strigoi he encountered, pushing past me and jumping into the fray. The rest of my group did likewise. We poured into the room, and if I thought there’d been chaos earlier, it was nothing compared to what we faced. All of us—guardians and Strigoi—just barely fit inside the room, which meant we were fighting in very, very close quarters. A female Strigoi—the one Dimitri had slapped earlier—came at me. I fought on autopilot, barely aware of my stake piercing her heart. In this room, full of shouting and death and colliding, there were only three people in the world that mattered to me now: Lissa, Christian, and Dimitri.

I’d found him at last. Dimitri was with my two friends against the far wall. No one was fighting him. He stood with arms crossed, a king surveying his kingdom as his soldiers battled the enemy. His eyes fell on me, his expression amused and expectant. This was where it would end. We both knew it. I shoved my way through the crowd, dodging Strigoi. My colleagues pushed into the fray beside me, dispatching whom-ever stood in my way. I left them to their fight, moving toward my objective. All of this, everything happening, had led to this moment: the final showdown between Dimitri and me.

“You’re beautiful in battle,” said Dimitri. His cold voice carried to me clearly, even above the roar of combat. “Like an avenging angel come to deliver the justice of heaven.”

“Funny,” I said, shifting my hold on the stake. “That
is
kind of why I’m here.”

“Angels fall, Rose.”

I’d almost reached him. Through the bond, I felt a brief surge of pain from Lissa. A burning. No one was harming her yet, but when I saw her arms move out of the corner of my eye, I realized what had happened. Christian had done what she’d asked: He’d burned her ropes. I saw her move to untie him in return, and then my attention shifted back to Dimitri. If Lissa and Christian were free, then so much the better. It would make their escape easier, once we cleared out the Strigoi.
If
we cleared out the Strigoi.

“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get me here,” I told Dimitri. “A lot of people are going to die—yours and mine.”

He shrugged, unconcerned. I was almost there. In front of me, a guardian battled a bald Strigoi. That lack of hair was
not
attractive with his chalk white skin. I moved around them.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Dimitri. He tensed as I approached. “None of them matter. If they die, then they obviously aren’t worthy.”

“Prey and predator,” I murmured, recalling what he’d said to me while holding me prisoner.

I’d reached him. No one stood between us now. This was different from our past fights, where we’d had lots of room to size each other up and plan our attacks. We were still crammed into the room, and in keeping our distance from the others, we’d closed the gap between us. That was a disadvantage for me. Strigoi outmatched guardians physically; extra room helped us compensate with more maneuverability.