Building the Tension | ✔ | 18+

Chapter 16 - Feeling Attacked for My Choices

I woke to the sound of knocking on the door. I was wearing nothing but my panties, my healing necklace, and the hotel sheet, but Adrian still had all of his clothes on. He walked to the door and opened it a small crack.

"Lord Ivashkov," said Phillips, "It's time to go if we want to be back to St. Vladimir's by two o'clock."

Adrian looked over at me. "We'll need about five minutes to get ready," he said. As soon as he closed the door, I got up and started to put my clothes back on. "Little dhampir, it's such a shame to see you putting clothes on. I feel like they're all going in the wrong direction," Adrian said.

"This probably won't be the last time you see them off," I told him.

Adrian replied, "I hope not, but you never know what will happen."

-=o0/&\0o=-

After we finished checking out of the hotel, we walked out towards the guardian-issued SUV in the parking lot. Oddly, I was starting to feel sick. "Adrian," I said, "I don't think that French food set very well with me."

When we got to the vehicle, the overhead lights above this section of the lot were all unlit. I wondered off-hand if they had all burnt out. It seemed odd, because I thought they'd been on when we had arrived. I wondered if I'd been mistaken.

I noticed as we walked up that the front driver's tire of the SUV looked really low. Too low. We had a flat tire.

Suddenly, it hit me. I wasn't sick from the food, and the lights weren't out because of neglect or accident. The tire had been slashed. "Strigoi!" I called out, grabbing one of the stakes from my purse, dropping the purse on the ground, and kicking off my heels. I could fight better barefoot than in those things.

Henderson and Phillips both pulled out their stakes and turned so that we made a circle with our backs to Adrian. Phillips had a single molnija, but Henderson had no marks other than his promise mark, so I had no doubt that this was probably his first experience of this kind. Being no more than a few years out of the academy himself, I didn't give him good odds of surviving the night, but now wasn't the time to think about that.

"Are you sure?" asked Phillips.

"What does your gut say?" I asked him, talking quickly, "We're in the biggest city within a couple of hours of St. Vladimir's and we have a guardian-issue vehicle, transporting a royal. The front tire appears to have been slashed. The street lights around the car are all out, but the rest of the lot is well-lit and those lights weren't out when we got here this evening."

"Strigoi," he nodded, as I glanced at him from the corner of my eye.

A moment later, a group of three Strigoi pushed out of the bushes in front of the car. Three. That's one-on-one, with more powerful opponents, and two of us were basically amateurs. My pulse was racing.

Each of the Strigoi, all male, approached one of us. One of them looked like he had been human and the other two appeared to have been former Moroi. Thankfully, none of them appeared to have been a former guardian, so hopefully we had skill on our side.

The incredible thing is that I hadn't even made it through field experience yet and this would make as many encounters with Strigoi than Dimitri had seen by the age of twenty-four - Dimitri, one of the best guardians I've ever met. He was a freakin' Blood Master Level Seven! If I lived through this, what ranking would I get?

I wasn't even going to worry about the other two guardians for now, just taking on the Strigoi coming at me. I would cross that bridge when the one coming at me was gone - or when another one was coming at me. The former human was the one who approached me. This, I could work to my advantage. He would undoubtedly be the weakest of the three. Dimitri had taught me a lot about fighting against opponents who underestimated my strength or skill.