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He sat up, still exhausted "Get me out of here"

"I can’t do that"

"The hell you can’t I’ve seen what you can do, Wayren" His head was splitting and pounding at the same time; it was a wonder he could form words

She smiled, but there was a trace of sadness there "You deserve happiness after so many years of darkness and self-recrio and stop thinking about it Stop denying yourself"

"I won’t"

"She loves you"

"She loves Vioget"

Wayren nodded briefly "Yes, she does"

Max closed his eyes When he opened theone

"Get me out of here!" he said to the empty room

"You must do that on your own" Wayren’s voice penetratedfrom somewhere

And then Max woke up

Victoria opened her eyes

Her first i red and orange lights Sid and the stone wall close to her nose was inizable to her She was in the subterranean abbey Sebastian had shown her, lying in the exact place she’d found Briyani’s body

"Ah, at last Our guest awakens"

Victoria realized she was lying cruround, and, fro there like a sack of grain Unfortunately, beyond the radiating aches, there was no unco that would indicate the presence of her stake She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened theain, focusedand pulled herself up on her hands, then her knees, and then proudly to her feet The ache and lingering weakness ebbed into nothing, and she felt a surge of pohen she concentrated on the vis bullae, groping for theown

She hadn’t needed to concentrate on the power of the vis bulla for a long time, but now she was flooded with it

As her ht was of Ja accomplice?

She turned to face Lilith, who had been silent since her greeting

The room looked much more comfortable than it had when she and Sebastian were there Fires roared in low and warmth Victoria had first noticed There must be some kind of ventilation that allowed the s lined the stones in the center of the room

The vampire queen sat on the thronelike chair Sebastian hadof Jubai She looked no different froo, when Victoria had offered the Book of Antwartha as a bargaining chip to free Max

Lilith was still horribly elegant, still skeletally slender with the whitest skin marked by an occasional blue vein Her eyelids were onionskin thin, colored bluish-purple, and her lips the gray-blue of soet war the path of a half-moon’s curve

But her hair and her eyesthey burned, in horrible contrast to the frigidity of her flesh Brilliant copper, her curls fell about her like a glorious nih to see the sapphire blue ringed by red

"I see that you’ve recovered fro," she told Lilith coolly, wondering if the stake buried in her coiffure had been located and reh the mass of curls thereand pulled out the slender stake Aha They’d missed that one

The vaht of the stake "My skin healed frohtbut even so, you’ll not walk away fro me here What do you want?" The stake, noin her hand