Flame turned to Radu. "I need to go back, I need to rescue him."

He nodded. "Soon enough. But you shouldn't go alone, and you shouldn't just run off right now. She's still fairly formidable, even alone."

"I suppose..." Flame didn't want to wait.

"Hey!" Aidan interrupted. "Your spells are still on me, mister high-and-mighty, I-don't-like-hurting-people, Blessed Saint Radu. Are you done?"

Radu gave him a level look. "Yes." He shut and barred the door and then gestured, and Aidan staggered, suddenly released. He straightened and took the chance to glare at them again through the little window.

"He's not going to be able to get out of there?" said Flame.

Radu shook his head. "No. The whole chamber is protected with clerical magic. Neither he nor his magic can touch the door, the walls, the ceiling or even the floor. Though I did put that one on the outside of the stones, so he'll be able to lie down if he so desires." He turned to go. "Come. I'll tell my followers about you, so you shouldn't scare any of them too badly. You can stay here tonight and set out, rested and with what help I can spare, in the morning."

Flame followed Radu, her steps suddenly heavy with weariness. She was tired, so very tired. When Radu showed her into a simple room much like his own she went directly to the bed and collapsed into it. She didn’t even bother to undress or to shift back into her natural firecat form as she often did to sleep. She fell into a deep sleep like falling into a slow-moving river the moment her head touched the pillow.

She awoke gradually with the feeling she’d just heard somebody calling her name. Everything was very still, and she felt oddly detached from herself, as if she was still dreaming, but she knew she was awake. The call came again, but it wasn’t a call with words, it was more like a feeling. Someone she knew was calling her, summoning her, and she must go. She made her way through empty corridors. Most of the illuminating torches had gone out, but the call guided her unerringly through the dark. She came to the stairs that descended to the basement and went down them. Somewhere in the back of her mind a little bit of her that was more awake was telling her there was something she ought to remember about the basement, but in her dreamy state she couldn’t think what it might be. Then she reached the bottom of the stairs and snapped abruptly and horribly awake. The space in front of her was lit only by the dim light that spilled down the stairs, but it was more than enough for Flame to see the gruesome scene before her. The door to Aidan’s cell stood open. A man in cleric’s robes was sprawled in front of it, and a puddle of blood covered the floor around him. A bloodied dagger lay on the floor a few feet away from the body. She took one step forward with the thought that the man might not be dead. As she did a dark shape dropped from the shadows of the ceiling behind her. He touched her with one hand and at his touch she was frozen, completely unable to move.

As she had known it would be, when he came around in front of her it was Aidan. He snapped his fingers and a ball of fire appeared just over his shoulder. By its light he looked at her closely.

"It's strange... You look so very much like her, and yet you're not like her at all. The way you treated me... You knew I was your enemy, and yet you were kinder to me as we traveled than she has ever been. I don't understand it." He reached up and stroked her cheek. She shivered at his touch. "You're beautiful. Perhaps even more beautiful than she is. There is always hardness and... and pain with her beauty. But you..." He slid his fingers down from her cheek, along the side of her neck, and traced them lingeringly over her throat. "I find that I want you. As I have never wanted anything, not even my Flame when she first seduced me. And I don't even understand why that should be. Why should your softness be more beautiful? But it is..."

Flame closed her eyes tightly. That flicker of sympathy was still there for him, and what he had said made it burn even stronger, but overriding that was fear. She didn't want to see what she knew must be coming. So she felt rather than saw his arms encircle her. She felt the soft touch of his lips on her neck and then the sharp prick of his fangs as he broke through her skin to reach the rushing blood beneath. She had known such kisses before, of course. Her Aidan was a vampire as much as this man was, and she had taken great pleasure in sharing that special bond with him. But this was a different, darker experience. Where her Aidan's mind was usually clear, and calm, a warm, loving embrace, this touch was like being dropped into a raging ocean storm. A dozen different emotions churned together, tossing her, and him as well, like a ship at sea. There was physical passion, of course, and that was foremost in those first few moments, but beneath that she felt rage, hatred, fear, depression, self-loathing, confusion, and other, less easily named things, all tangled together, all fighting against each other, but also all battering on her. It felt as if the darkest of these feelings were directed at her, that she was the one raged against, feared, hated.

She shrank back from the assault, and a kind of twisted joy surged in him at her shock and fear. He reveled in her terror, in the distress of this, the object of his hatred. Or was it only that she was the mirror of the true object of this storm of darkness?

While all this was surging between them, unchecked emotions pouring back and forth across their bond, they remained locked in their embrace, Flame standing frozen, Aidan with his head bent to her neck. He drank deeply of her blood, relishing the flavor of her fear. Gradually Flame began to weaken. Her pulse became weaker, her breathing more shallow. I’m going to die, she thought, and somehow the thought was liberating. If death was near then there was nothing else she needed to fear. And with the fear any hatred she had for this dark mirror of her husband fell away as well. Instead she found herself regarding him with pity and compassion. He was so like her Aidan. What had his life been like, to make him what he had become? She remembered what he's said about hardness and pain, and what he had said also about how his wife would play with her husband until she broke him. Had she then played with and broken this man?

Aidan, joined to her mind by the blood-bond, couldn’t read her thoughts, but he could sense her emotions, and the sudden shift confused him. His exultant delight in his revenge faded. He realized with a kind of shock that he was killing her, that she lay on death’s door at that moment. Somewhere in his heart a tiny spark of caring flared to life. He was killing her and she must know it, yet he felt no hatred from her, only this strange compassion. Suddenly two impulses were at war in him. He had always taken as his hunger and his passion demanded. He was unaccustomed to exercising self-restraint, and yet he didn’t want her to die. He struggled for the self-control to draw back. Flame felt the shift, felt the struggle change. Now his emotions were not tossing her or him, they were all at war with his hunger, the fear now not fear of her, but fear for her, and the hatred vanished in the face of what might almost be the very smallest possible grain of love. She reached out to him then with warmth and encouragement, wanting to live but wanting nearly as much to see Aidan win over his inner darkness.

How his struggle might have ended they would never know for at that instant Radu leaped down the stairs and hurled Aidan bodily away from her.

She collapsed on the floor; whatever spell had held her in place broken. Aidan got to his feet and faced Radu with a snarl on his face. His lips were stained with blood that he didn’t bother to wipe off. He advanced and swung a fisted hand at Radu’s midsection. Radu just managed to step back and avoid the blow. He saw as Aidan’s fist whipped past that the vampire in fact held a knife, the blade turned to lie almost invisible along his forearm, the sharp edge facing outward. Had he not avoided the blow it would have gutted him. But even as he realized the danger he was in Aidan reversed his momentum and slammed the knife point first into Radu’s abdomen. He doubled up, clutching at the hilt of the knife that stood out of his stomach. Aidan stepped back, a hard look in his eyes. Flame Song, barely holding on to consciousness, could distantly feel his rage echoing down the fading link between them.

He turned and his eyes fell on her still form sprawled on the cold floor. Another shock of realization swept though him. He bent over her and his fingers felt for a pulse. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. It was weak and unsteady but there. Surely in this monastery there were healers enough to save her. He rose and quickly began to ascend the stairs. Halfway up he stopped and looked back, surveying the three bodies scattered on the floor, blood pooling around two of them. Flame Song, slipping into unconsciousness, was still faintly linked to him, and the last thing she knew was his sudden feeling of regret and his surprise that any such emotion could find its way into his hardened heart.