Dimitri and I simultaneously held our breaths, not making a move in case we'd break something. Christian blinked, and, before he was even fully awake, seemed to realize he wasn't where he should be. He winced and tried to sit up, momentarily confused at finding Lissa sleeping at his side, her head on his shoulder restricting his movements.

Then Dimitri and I were by his side, both having shot up from our chair and dropped down beside the bed in one swift motion.

"Christian," I called him softly. "Hey, calm down. No need to get all worked up." I pushed him back down on the bed, where Lissa was disentangling herself from the blankets. His sudden start had woken her; she was almost as disoriented as he was, but seeing her blink at him sleepily stopped his agitation a little.

Judging from Christian's frantic look, I could tell that waking up from the dead was no pleasant experience. All the same, he eyed me with something of his habitual glower. "I'm not," he mumbled. Automatic defensive mode kicking in, I guess. Glad he still had that.

"You're okay," Lissa breathed in a still sleep-heavy voice. She was visibly breaking down with relief right now; so was Dimitri, I could clearly see, but he was making a valiant effort to stay composed. "You're awake. You're okay." She put her head back down on his shoulder, closing her eyes briefly with her hand placed on his chest.

Over her quivering head, Christian had a good view of Dimitri and me holding our breaths while watching them. "Stop staring at me like that," he murmured, pathetically failing to sound annoyed.

Then Lissa resurfaced and engaged him in a very deep kiss, so Dimitri and I had time to indulge in our own little break-down and let ourselves dissolve into each other's arms.

"Thank god," Dimitri whispered into my shoulder, so that only I could hear.

"You're all okay," Christian half-asked, half-stated when Lissa let go of him. He wriggled up so he could sit properly and rubbed his face wearily. "What happened to Tim?"

"He left," I said quietly. We hadn't talked about how we would break the news to Christian. You don't just tell someone that the reason they're feeling so crappy is that they died and were brought back by a spirit user. I, for one, would be quite content to just let him recover without knowing from what exactly for now.

"But why am I…" Christian gestured to the bed helplessly.

I wanted to catch Lissa's eyes to get a read on what she thought, but she was looking at nothing but him. "Tim had you shot," I finally said.

Christian's face instantly told me that he gathered more from this answer than I had intended. He studied Lissa's face, which was clearly showing how exhausted she still was. Then he shot Dimitri and me glances. We both didn't have the clarity of mind to wipe our faces clean of the impact of the last 24 hours, I guess, so our faces told him what he needed to figure this out.

"Did I survive that?" Christian's voice was quiet and more serious than I ever liked to hear him.

It was Lissa who answered him. "No," she said simply.

When I had learned that I had died, it had been years after I actually had. I had had time to get used to the fact that weird things happened around me. That I had some sort of connection to Lissa that was more than people usually had. By the time I was told that the reason for all of this was that I had been dead and Lissa had resurrected me with her spirit powers, it kind of fell into place. It explained more than it raised questions.

When Jill had died and been brought back by Adrian, I'd been the one to tell her. With Adrian out of the count with exhaustion and spirit backwash, that duty had fallen to me. I had found nothing but blunt words then. I didn't find anything more now.

Instead of stumbling for words and making the situation more awkward than it already was, I decided to bail. Yup, cowardly. To my defense, I think Lissa was all Christian needed now anyway. Well, almost all.

"I'm going to get the feeder," I said, getting up. "You both need some blood."

Dimitri followed me when I quietly slipped through the door into the bland motel corridor. We left Lissa and Christian sitting on the bed locking eyes with each other, Christian's only reaction a slow and pensive nod.

We both breathed a little more freely when we were alone with each other.

"I still have trouble wrapping my head around how this can be possible," Dimitri murmured. We stood in front of the feeder's door, but neither of us seemed eager to knock. "You're saying it might have been up to thirty minutes until Lissa and I arrived. It should have been too late."

"It should have been," I agreed. Part of my mind told me to say something like, We should be glad it wasn't, but I knew very clearly: it should have been too late for Lissa to save Christian. He had been dead and after such a long time, he should have had no other choice but to remain dead.

"If there's no boundary to this…" Dimitri stopped himself.

"I think there still is," I said pensively. We were both talking in voices so low that even though we were still standing right in front of the feeder girl's door, they could not be heard from within. "He… he didn't change. When you came… he was still the same as he'd been when he… when he was shot."

"But that can't be," Dimitri countered, shaking his head in confusion. "This sounds like time stopped for him. How can that be?"

"I think…" I stopped myself, but I could see no other logical way for what had happened to have happened. "I think it was the fire," I continued. "It was… I think it was kind of drawing back to him. As if it was feeding him energy – enough to keep him… almost alive."

"The fire extinguished when Lissa finished healing," Dimitri whispered.

"Seems like spirit is not the only element we have gaps in our knowledge about. And spirit is still a mystery, after all. The more we know of it, the more questions we have." And it was getting kind of annoying, to be honest.

We finally pulled ourselves together and knocked on the feeder's door. The feeder Dimitri had brought was a pink-haired woman in her thirties, or maybe younger and just looking spent. Back in our own room, Lissa and Christian were huddled together on the bed, and it needed some cajoling to get the two into letting go of each other for long enough to drink their fill. They both looked much better afterwards. Christian still seemed dazed, but that surprised none of us.

"What happens now?" Lissa asked when Dimitri had brought the feeder back into the next room. I had made myself comfortable and was sitting cross-legged on the foot of the bed, while Dimitri had taken a little more distance, sitting in the chair I had spent the night in. "Do we go back to Court? By the way, aren't they frantically looking for me right now? I'm not meaning to be egotistical, but…"

"Hans must be close to having a heart attack," I replied. "We called him yesterday to ask whether he'd seen Tim, but we didn't tell him you'd left. How did you manage to shake your guardians?" I felt for the poor guys. Having your charge suddenly disappear without a trace? Every guardian's worst nightmare. With the queen as your charge, that sentiment grew about a thousendfold.

"I just made them not notice me when we left the room," she said absent-mindedly.

"Spirit coming in handy, doesn't it," I remarked. Lissa looked up at me with a weird glint in her eyes.

"I would certainly say so," she said with a hard stare. "Tim didn't know I was off the meds. Last he knew I was out of the count for spirit business. He must have thought I wouldn't be able to detect the magic in you two." She paused. "You got rid of it."

"We practiced a little do-it-yourself surgery. Silver's gone."

"What was that about the other silver items you said you had to disable?" Dimitri piped in. "The rings?"

Lissa produced the two silver rings from her pocket again, frowning down on the offensive objects. "It's how he kept the connection to you," she recounted to Dimitri what she'd told me last night. "There's a spell in them that links them to the silver in a person. It seems like every person has to have their own connecting object. I can't see it well at the moment, I'm still pretty out of spirit… But I think that this is what makes his spells so long lasting and controllable over a distance. This is a master spellcaster's work." She blinked. "I couldn't have been more wrong about Tim."

Somehow, she managed to convey all her apologies and her regret for not believing Christian's claims into that sentence. Maybe Christian wouldn't have been killed if we'd acted on his assertions. But then, he hadn't stayed dead because Lissa had wiped herself out to bring him back. She'd made up for it, in my view.

He seemed to think the same; he just pulled her closer. The two were still glued together, leaning against the headboard.

"We have to consider our next move," Dimitri reminded us. "Court is dangerous with Tim still on the loose. We have no idea who might be manipulated. Not going back is dangerous, too, because Lissa's unexplained absence will not only raise questions, but probably cause riots."

"And what do we do about Tim, in the long run?" Christian asked, leaning his head back on the wall. "We have to find him, and we have to stop him, and I don't know what you take on this is, but I for my part think that that isn't going to be fun."

"Dealing with Tim has to be our priority," Lissa reasoned. "He's a threat. If he's at Court now… But what if he…" She involuntarily shot Christian a worried look that both he and I immediately caught and understood. What if he tries to kill his alleged rival again?

"It's got to be us," Christian told her gently. "We have you. A spirit user. You can at least tell us if we're under compulsion. If the guardians apprehended him, he might just compel them all into letting him go. We don't even know the full extent of his powers yet."

Lissa sighed resignedly and leaned her head against his shoulder. "So we're going to hunt him."

"Wow, wow," I interjected. I had listened to their plotting mutely, but that was going a little too far. "We can't just take the Moroi Queen and take her on a quest around the country to find a rogue spirit user. Our duty is to keep you safe, remember?"

"And how will you do that, Rose?" Christian asked me, his usual snark making a reappearance. "When he can bring everyone around us to do his bidding? He could compel any guardian into attacking us. Do you want Lissa to stay isolated until you arrest him all by yourself? Look, I know what he can do. He was already successful in killing me once, I'm not keen on a second time. We'll have to be on our guards, but we have to go after him. We're the only ones who can do it."

"He's right, Rose," Dimitri seconded him unexpectedly. I turned around to him, feeling slightly betrayed. His downcast expression softened me immediately, though. "Going back to Court is out of the question. What other option do we have left but to hunt Tim down?"

"What do we say at Court, though?" Christian continued to spin the thread. "Lissa can't just disappear. In that, Dimitri's right. There would be a riot."

"We have to find an excuse for why we need to leave for a while," Lissa mused. "Maybe that I have to go on a diplomatic mission in Europe… or that we're taking a spontaneous vacation…"

"Guys, we're not asking a very important question here," I again interrupted them. They all looked at me as if I wasn't saying the obvious. "Why did Tim do this? What's his motive? The motive is always important in solving a case."

"Yeah, in a Sherlock Holmes movie," Christian scoffed.

"You said he had a thing for Lissa," Dimitri said pensively.

"He definitely had that," Christian growled. Lissa looked at him as if to say, Sorry that someone's having a crush for me ended in him killing you. Seriously, that's what her look said. Those two were uncannily quick in coming to terms with this dying and resurrection thing.

"But shouldn't he have been a little more covert in his actions? I mean, come on! He had you crash your car and then pursued Christian to have a magical showdown. It's not like all that increased his chances with you, Lissa."

She frowned. "I think all he wanted was to make you all have something to do so that he could go out with me without interference. He must have planned something to distract you, too, Christian. I don't think he planned it this way. Even Avery had sense enough left to cover up her intentions. It must have gotten out of hand. The first thing he didn't reckon with was for us to suspect him of anything going on. If his plan had worked out, we wouldn't have had any idea of you two missing. You were supposed to be free, but then this confidential meeting was set, and I had to call you. It was only then that we realized something was wrong. An hour later and I would have been free, too…"

"And I would have been in training," Christian took over. "He would have asked you to out for something or other, presumably out of Court. Maybe the presence of guardians you're less close to wouldn't have bothered him, maybe he would have found some way to get rid of them, too. Maybe there's silver the bodies of all of them. There would have been no need for anyone to have been any the wiser."

"But we realized something was up with Rose and Dimitri, and I was able to see spirit, in contrast to what he thought," Lissa continued. "Which also means that he doesn't know I could heal. He must think you're still…"

"…dead," Christian finished grimly. "That might be an advantage. Don't know how it's possible to get the drop on that guy, but it's bound to be a little easier when he's convinced you're six feet under."

"I agree," Dimitri said. I kind of suspected he only wanted to say something to stop our heads from swiveling between Lissa and Christian as they passed the ball between them.

"The question still remains," Christian said. "What do we do now?"

"The silver," Lissa said. "If we find the silver connecting Tim to his compulsion victims, we break his power over them."

"Find?" I asked. "Do you think he's hidden it somewhere?"

"If he has more victims than the two of you, then yes," Lissa replied. "There were no more charmed objects on him, I could see that much. He wouldn't keep them in his room at Court, not with Sonya visiting him from time to time. If there are guardians under his spell, the charms connecting them are hidden somewhere else."

"Where would he hide them?"

"That's what we have to find out. But first, we definitely have to buy us some time at Court," Lissa said. "I think I can make everyone believe that I have to go to a very important and very secret meeting somewhere very far away. But I'll have to tell people in person. If I just call with the news that I won't show up for days, they'll suspect that someone's holding me ransom or something."

I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I was currently witnessing Lissa plotting a guerrilla move here. Lissa wasn't usually the one to suggest taking up arms against someone. Anyone.

Well, unless they had just heinously killed her boyfriend. I guess that brought out the warrior in her.

"So, we go back to Court," I summed up. "Make everyone believe we're on some super-secret Court business trip. Then we go for Tim." I sighed dramatically. "Great. Just another day in the life of Lissa Dragomir and Rose Hathaway."

"And don't forget their awesome sidekicks," Christian deadpanned. "Dimitri the Warrior God and Christian the Resurrected."

"Good show of black humor," I supported him teasingly. "Keep up the good spirits."

"Or just the spirit," he added.

"If you guys are done joking in the face of death and danger," Lissa interrupted us irritatedly, "can we get going?"

"Are you sure you're both ready to be on the road?" Dimitri cautioned. "I think you could still do with some rest."

"Every minute we wait just gives Tim time to prepare," Christian warded him off. He was already getting out of bed. "Let's just go now."

Dimitri sighed in resignation. "Wise words from Christian the Resurrected."

I needed forever to be satisfied with the first bit of that chapter. Did I get it right? Tell me, please! Still waiting for those reviews from you guys!

Seriously! - REVIEW!

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