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and the one holding her groaned.
    She remembered what it had looked like. Jagged shards of once gleaming wood had jutted up into the air. The door had been hanging off. Bits of one wheel were strewn about.
    She could also smell the vampires’ burning skin.
    The vampire who held her snapped his fingers. At once, she heard the horses neigh, then the sloppy sound of hooves fighting through the mud. Within moments, the horses had returned, tossing their heads.
    “Gentle,” the vampire murmured, holding up his hand. Manes waved in the snow-laden air, but the animals stopped prancing and fussing, then lowered their heads.
    Docile fools, she thought.
    Zayan waved his hand in a graceful circle. He conjured a vivid purple light that twined around his arm like a snake.
    The light spun through the air and hit the carriage, where it seemed to rain down like soft rose petals. All she could see was a lovely violet glow.
    As in the fairy tale Cinderella, a carriage materialized before her eyes—but not from a pumpkin and mice, from the wreckage of Simon’s best traveling coach. She blinked hard. As her lids lifted, she discovered the horses in their traces.
    She twisted in the grasp of the vampire in the wolf’s cloak.
    “What did you do?”
    “It would be much better for you to travel in comfort,”
    Zayan answered.
    “That’s not what I mean. You can’t just wave your hand and have a broken carriage leap back onto its wheels, fixed and perfect! It’s not possible.”
    “That is the power of magic.”
    The vampire holding her began to stride to the magically re

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    paired carriage. “Enough talk. We need refuge from the light.”
    The hand massaged her derriere in the most scandalous way.
    Unwanted heat rushed through her.
    She should be terrified, not growing hot. Not breathing in this . . . aroused way.
    Vampires, Aunt Eugenia had warned, could control a woman’s mind. With ease, apparently. And they possessed an allure no woman had to resist, a “glamour” that drew women to them and made them willing victims, a power that was supposed to be the work of the devil.
    Miranda had to find every ounce of strength to fight.
    The vampire patted her derriere. “I hunger, sweeting. I have appetites that have been denied too long.”
    “Yes, angel.” Zayan laughed. He gave the same naughty chuckle as the unseen man in her dreams. “We both hunger.”

    2
    Labyrinth
    The Chamber of the Scholomance
    875 A.D.
    Impossible to believe he was here, that he now stood inside the labyrinth that led to the Chamber of the Scholomance. As his father had wished, he had been selected to be an apprentice to Lucifer. He would learn the timeless magic. He would learn to control the winds, the rain, to summon powerful bolts of lightning or baking heat. He would know all the mysteries of nature, alchemy, and death.
    Candles burned in a ring on the dirt floor. He dropped to his knees and let his head fall forward in the pose of a penitent man. Feminine laughter rippled over him in response.
    The woman who waited in the shadows stepped out. She carried a beautifully wrought axe with a sharpened blade, and she was nude. Stars were painted over her nipples. She was entirely shaved of her nether hair. Where the thick bush of her pubic hair should be, a circle had been painted in red blood.
    Her hair was a rich red—almost the color of flame—and it spilled over her shoulders and down her back in soft, fragrant34 / Sharon Page smelling curls. When he breathed deeply, all he smelled was the sweet promise of new grass, fresh wildflowers, sun, and birth.
    He could not believe, when he smelled her, that she was a demoness.
    “Very good,” she murmured. “But I wonder if you will remain obedient for long.”
    “I will,” he promised. But rebellion sparked deep in his soul.
    He was twenty-one—the age when a man is fool enough to grab up a sword and launch a single-handed attack on an army.
    The demoness laughed again, as though