SYDNEY's POV
It might be a little odd to be so very excited to see your husband's ex-girlfriend, but that didn't even come close to topping the list of the weirdness that was my life. Rose had such a powerful personality, you tended to either love her or hate her. I certainly didn't hate her, and even if I did, she had just come to our rescue.
"What are you doing here?" Jill asked, before blushing in that adorable way she had. "I mean, obviously you're here to rescue us and thank you for that, but why did Lissa send you?"
"Lissa didn't send me," Rose said in a sharp voice, looking at all of us very meaningfully. "I was never here. Lissa and Christian are on a romantic getaway and Dimitri and I are with them."
I stared at her in confusion for a minute before comprehension dawned. The Moroi relied on the Alchemists to help them stay hidden from the human world. Recent events, most notably my marriage to Adrian, had strained that relationship severely. Lissa couldn't risk angering the Alchemists any more by sending a rescue party to one of their locations. Of course, she'd be perfectly within her rights to recover her sister and a royal like Adrian, but I had always been a sore spot between the two factions. Much better to handle it diplomatically, which could take weeks, if not months. Obviously, they hadn't been willing to leave us in the Alchemists' hands that long, for which I was grateful.
"So it's just you?" Adrian asked, looking around as though he were expecting more dhampirs to materialize in front of him.
"Just me," she replied with a grin.
I found it a little hard to believe that rescuing us had been a solo mission, but then, if I had to pick one person to sneak into a secure Alchemist facility and smuggle a group out, it would be Rose Hathaway. "What about the Stelle?" I wondered. I could still sense the magic that was clinging to her and though I couldn't be certain where that trace of human magic had come from, the coven I had joined was a pretty safe bet.
"They gave me the charm, but they're not here. And we shouldn't be either." With that, she made short work of our bindings and cautioned us all to be silent as we started up the steps to the exit.
We heeded her warning, though it didn't appear to be necessary. Along the way we passed at least a dozen Alchemists, all knocked out. "How did you get so many without breaking the invisibility spell?" I asked her.
"I um...wasn't invisible," she answered. Rose had learned to be content in Lissa's shadow and now appeared uncomfortable as we all stopped and stared at her.
"You could have snuck past them all with the charm," Adrian pointed out.
"Yeah, but I didn't know what shape you guys would be in. I didn't want to risk having to fight my way back out if you were hurt. Plus, I was saving the charm for when I needed it. I thought that guy down there with you might have a weapon and I didn't want to give him the chance to use it."
It was sound reasoning, particularly coming from Rose, but before I could compliment her on it she was whirling around. "Stay back," she warned, crouching into a defensive stance. Eddie immediately leaped in front of Jill.
I was expecting to see more Alchemists burst into the room, which would have been bad enough. Instead, something a hundred time worse entered. A pair of Strigoi.