“Stay back!” I said. It sounded like my voice anyway. Distantly.
I didn’t want to hurt him. Not really.
But Ididwant to hurt Rothwild. A dozen reasons why filled my muddled head as he stopped in front of the stone dragon statue that sat in the back of the cavern on the opposite side of the fiery lake. Then he turned around and faced me, holding his hands up.
“Theodora,” he shouted as I stepped onto the rocky bridge and walked toward him. Flames jumped and flickered on either side of me, burning brightly on the lake’s surface. “We are not enemies.”
“Oh, but weare,” I shouted back.
“I’m not surprised you succeeded in finding the other bands of the ring when your father failed. It is why I followed you instead of him. He is a monkey who’s outlived his use, but you are... family.”
I laughed. “Family?”
“We are connected. You are blood of my blood.”
My father shouted something indecipherably foul at Rothwild from the other side of the bridge. He sounded so far away now. The dragon’s heartbeat inside my head was far louder than his voice.
“I’m not your blood,” I told Rothwild as I crossed the bridge, closer and closer. “You aren’t Vlad’s descendant. There’s no link.”
“One will be found,” he said confidently as he closed in on me. “My mother told me it was there. Everyone in my family knows it.”
“That’s why you originally hired my father, wasn’t it? Through Dr. Mitu?”
Rothwild set his back against the base of the dragon statue. “He is a useful idiot. You are not, and I’ll admit, I respect that. It only proves to me that we share a bloodline. I am descended from Matthias Corvinus. You are descended from John Hunyadi. We both have old Transylvanian blood, back when these lands belonged to their rightful owners, the Hungarians.”
“Believe what you’d like,” I told him.
“It will be proven, I assure you. We are family, Theodora. We can share the ring. Share the power. I know so much more about the ring than you do—things no one else knows. I can teach you.”
I laughed. “Can you?”
“Theodora!” my father called from a distance behind me, limping. “Don’t do this!”
“Teach me what?” I asked Rothwild, ignoring my father’s pleas.
“I can teach you that spell I used on the banknote. I can teach you how to control animals.”
“Like you lost control over Lupu?”
“I can teach you to control people! They will obey your command.”
Something inside me darkened. The memory of Huck’s body on the floor of the Zissu brothers’ shop floated through my head. It felt like weakness. I pushed it away.
“You killed the widow and her maid,” I told Rothwild, stepping off the bridge. And onto the narrow terrace of cavern floor that held the dragon statue. “You tried to kill the baroness. You’ve threatened to kill Lovena and Huck. Give me one good reason to let you live.”
“Come closer,” he said, crooking a bleeding finger, one hand behind his back. “And I’ll show you.”
“Theodora!” my father bellowed.
When I turned my head to look at him, Rothwild swiveled around. He grabbed a fat lever at the base of the dragon statue and used all his weight to pull it downward. Gas hissed. The flame in the dragon’s mouth flared and shot out toward me.
On instinct, I dropped to the cavern floor as flames spewed where my body once stood. Heat engulfed me. Pushing forward, I scrabbled beneath the gas flame on hands and knees. My vision blurred and swirled.
Red flame. Red rock.
Red Rothwild, racing toward me.
His face was gnarled and monstrous. Deep-set eyes wide with determination. He lunged for the sickle sword. But he was still big, and I was still small and nimble. I rolled away as his body flew toward me. The statue’s flame torched his back. He howled in pain and stumbled, tripping over uneven ground around the fiery lake.
