Carpathian 17 - Dark Curse

steps until she was in the middle of the huge chamber. Huge columns rose to the cathedral ceilings, marking every few feet. Ancient weapons lined one wall and straight ahead, encased in ice were two perfect dragons, one red and one blue.
    Lara glanced up, her breath catching in her throat as it always did at the sight of her aunts, imprisoned not only by the ice, but caught in a powerful shape that was not their true form. She couldn\'t shift yet, but she felt she was getting close. The aunts had embedded the knowledge deep in her mind so that she wouldn\'t ever forget the process, but she hadn\'t worked up the courage to actually shift. And the aunts had forbidden her to try where Razvan or Xavier would feel the surge of power.
    The red dragon had her great eye pressed against the ice. As Lara watched, the lid slowly closed and then opened again over the round orb. The small acknowledgment gave her the strength to look directly at the man who stood in the center of the room, a frown on his face. Razvan-her father-glared at her, beckoning with a long finger.
    The lines in his face had deepened since the last time she\'d seen him and that had only been a couple of days earlier. His hair had darkened from the coppery red to deeper brown, now streaked with gray. His eyes were sunken and beneath them were darker circles. The moment his gaze fell on her, he began to breathe harder, the air coming out in great puffs of excitement. In one hand he held a ritual ceremony knife and Lara\'s heart began to pound.
    He has the knife.
    Teeth tearing at her flesh was bad enough, but the sharp blade slicing, metal against skin and tissue, invading her body and bringing with it the screams of past victims, screams she couldn\'t drown out for weeks Page 3

    Christine Feehan: Dark Curse
    afterward. The pleas for mercy haunted her dreams and clung like ice to her veins so that she felt she was going insane until time finally melted them away.
    Lara couldn\'t help that spurt of adrenaline and the surge of power that came with it, the instinctive retreat, breaking out of the stumbling steps to withdraw. Razvan snarled, his lips drawing back to reveal his stained teeth.
    \"Get over here!\" His face was a mask of hatred. \"You are nothing, cheap fodder to feed the genius of my existence. Nothing! A worm crawling on the ground to service greatness.\"
    He pointed to the ice and for a moment she thought to fight his power.
    No! You must do as he says. He cannot know the power within you. He will imprison you as Xavier has done to us. This is your chance, Lara.
    Aunt Bronnie\'s voice whispered, cajoled, pleaded and even ordered. All of that would never have been enough to overcome Lara\'s instincts for survival and her revulsion of the knife and Razvan, but there was stark fear underlying each word her aunt spoke to her. Lara allowed her body to bend, to go to all fours, to crawl across the ice floor, the cold piercing her knees. She allowed the sensation, not regulating her body temperature so the distraction of the cold helped to calm her.
    Razvan stood for a moment, hunched over, whispering to himself, his eyes going from blue to green. Lara winced. Her eyes often changed color depending upon her mood, and it was the one thing that tied her to Razvan, the one trait she had to acknowledge they shared-and that meant the blood of a monster ran in her veins.
    He stooped, a strange expression on his face as he glanced around the chamber. One hand dropped to the top of her head, his palm stroking what could have been a caress over her coppery curls. He spoke in a whisper, his voice rusty and hoarse. \"Get out. Get out before you are consumed.\"
    Lara blinked up at him, puzzled by the strange ritual he always invoked before he caught her by her thin shoulders and yanked her to her feet. His eyes glowed a ruby red, shining with madness as he turned her wrist up and slashed the blade across it.
    She cried out, tried to suppress the shock of panic and pain as the knife cut through flesh to bone, freeing the screams of multiple victims, the shadows of life still clinging to the weapon that had tortured and killed them.
    Razvan pressed her wrist to his mouth and began to suck greedily, his teeth biting and scraping as if at a bone.
    He made hideous slurping noises, the sound mingling with the cries of the dead.
    Tears burned behind her lids, blurred her vision and choked in her throat. The aunts were right, she had to escape. It mattered little what was