Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors
2020 Heat 2/5
Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors by Dima Zales is a 2020 romance. Tropes: Psychic, Urban Fantasy, Vampires. Heat 2/5. Book 7 of Sasha Urban.
What happened in Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors?
The epic conclusion of Sasha Urban’s story! I found my family, I found my heart, I found myself. But it’s not over. No matter how many allies I have, there’s no escaping destiny. The end of the world is coming, and I’m the only one who can stop it.
What tropes are in Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors?
Where does Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors fall in Sasha Urban?
Book 7 of Sasha Urban. Reading order
What should I read next?
The Thought Readers by Dima Zales.
Chapters
Chapter 2
Waking from a nightmare, Sasha rouses Nero to share twin waking visions of Tartarus, a world-devouring Cognizant, descending on Earth to reduce everyone—including her parents—to dried husks. Panic gives way to urgency as she recounts how Lilith sicced chorts on her and Felix, leading to her torture and transformation into a vampire. While Nero coolly insists on measuring seven times before cutting, Sasha demands immediate action. He pushes her to consult her seer powers directly, sending her into Headspace where apocalyptic vision shapes pulse with unsettling music. Gathering her courage, she reaches toward the nearest shape, desperate to uncover the one course of action that might prevent the apocalypse before it consumes the world.
Chapter 3
Sasha wakes in a sterile room to find her friends Ariel and Felix, only to be ambushed by Lilith—her biological mother and an evil goddess of the Otherlands. Using glamour, Lilith immobilizes the pair, then issues a supernatural command that hijacks Sasha's body against her will. Trapped inside her own mind, Sasha watches helplessly as her body murders Felix and then drains Ariel's life force to satisfy Lilith's cruel test. The chapter plunges from disorientation into visceral horror as maternal manipulation twists into forced atrocity, leaving Sasha a prisoner in her own flesh with two dead friends at her feet and an unresolved threat looming.
Chapter 4
Sasha awakens in the dragon world reeling from a horrific prophetic vision: her friends Felix and Ariel will die in an Earth hospital, and only by becoming Lilith's slave can the apocalypse of Tartarus be stopped. She discovers a sire bond with Lilith—created when the vampire drank Lilith's blood—which gives the demon power over her. Nero transforms into a dragon and carries her to the castle, where she learns he is powering up on his hoard. Sasha races to warn the Earth Cognizant about Tartarus's impending invasion, cleverly invoking Nero's debt to pressure him into helping save Earth. The chapter closes as she and Claudia descend toward the trove outside the castle wards, bracing for an encounter with an angry dragon in his true form.
Chapter 5
Sasha and Claudia descend into a subterranean vault beneath the castle, discovering Nero in draconic slumber atop a hoard of incomparable wealth. His healing sleep proves too deep to interrupt safely after his recent battle, forcing the pair to retreat and let the Council delegation return to Earth to negotiate aid. While waiting, Sasha confesses the unconventional origins of her bond with Nero and the oppressive restrictions the Earth Council places on her magic. Claudia, freshly freed from years of captivity, announces her intention to join the mission to save Earth, dragging a reluctant Pozoj along. When Nero finally awakens, Sasha firmly rejects any attempt to confine her for protection, declaring her own resolve to fight for Earth despite the danger ahead.
Chapter 6
Sasha confronts Nero about his decision to keep her close, but his concern masks a deeper devotion. When she delivers the Council's message that his favor is to help stop Tartarus on Earth, Nero's reaction reveals his stakes are personal—Lucretia, her parents, and allies are at risk. Their tension ignites into a passionate, mindful encounter where Nero deliberately withholds his blood, wanting her to remember every moment if they die. Afterward, he arranges for her to see dream walker Bailey Spade on Earth to address her nightmares. They transform into dragons with Claudia and Pozoj seeing them off, flying through Otherlands to a destroyed JFK clone, then onward to Gomorrah, where Sasha nearly collides with Ariel, Felix, and Rasputin—threatening the uneasy truce she's trying to maintain.
Chapter 7
Upon arriving on Gomorrah, Sasha finds her biological father Rasputin, Felix, and Ariel waiting at the gate. She asks her friends to remain on this world and avoid her, revealing a terrifying vision in which she kills Felix due to the sire bond imposed by her vampire mother Lilith. After an awkward exchange with Ariel about sobriety and vampire blood, Rasputin reveals the devastating truth: Nostradamus prophesied that Sasha, born of a powerful seer and Lilith, was destined to kill Tartarus to save her mother, but Rasputin abandoned her at an airport to prevent this fate. Now that Lilith has turned Sasha into a vampire, the sire bond threatens to force her to kill her friends. As Rasputin stockpiles seer power to investigate the danger, Sasha enters Headspace and confronts a cloud of deadly visions, leaving her trapped between prophecy and loyalty.
Chapter 8
A vampire narrator neglects hygiene in a hotel bathroom, musing that immortality makes dental care unnecessary. Suddenly, a giant intruder enters—a man with 80s permed hair and a bomber jacket. He examines a photograph, then shines with energy and transforms into a massive werewolf. Despite the narrator's glamour command, fangs, and super-speed, the beast overpowers them, biting their thigh and smashing furniture. Dragged across the room, the vampire is hurled through a twentieth-story window, glass slicing their palms as they plummet. Though vampiric healing is rapid, the narrator knows such a fall is fatal, ending on a precipice of death.
Chapter 9
Back at Rasputin’s apartment, the narrator recounts a terrifying vision of a hulking assailant in vintage eighties garb wielding a paper photograph, intent on murder. The mood curdles when Rasputin reveals Nostradamus ambushed him in Headspace, leaving him magically depleted. As Nero interrogates the details—demanding to know why he wasn’t in the vision and which hotel it occurred at—the stakes sharpen: the attacker may be tied to a werewolf pack and a looming threat of Lilith’s sire bond. Nero’s protective fury crescendos into a command that they remain inseparable and avoid all hotels. Ordered back into Headspace to gather intelligence, the narrator enters the psychic plane only to find Nostradamus waiting, radiating power and regret. Before she can reach the vision’s shapes, he seizes her with ethereal tendrils, dragging her into the joining to steal her abilities.
Chapter 10
Beatrice enters Nostradamus's traumatic memory, witnessing his torture at the hands of Tartarus—a shapeshifting entity who appears as Cassandra to him—and his sadistic child Lug, a probability manipulator. Tartarus reveals his horrific plan to breed seers, and Nostradamus recalls visions of futures where his family suffered unspeakable fates. Choosing survival over submission, he sacrifices his eyes to escape, vowing revenge while denying Tartarus a seer for his army. In a second memory, the blind Nostradamus demonstrates his mastery of Headspace, targeting a room's essence to glimpse the future and temporarily restore his sight. He discovers a war room covered in prediction cards tracking Beatrice's own past encounters with dangerous figures like Baba Yaga and Harper, including a chilling note that Darian has no future with her. The chapter ends on the unsettling weight of foreknowledge.
Chapter 11
Trapped in the weightless void of the joining environment, the narrator confronts a floating synapse-hologram of Nostradamus, who intends to drain their powers to protect his Plan Ultime. Their furious argument escalates to a physical lunge, but the seer’s shape-entity remains frustratingly intangible, rendering every attack futile. As anger gives way to exhaustion, the narrator reluctantly embraces Nostradamus’s challenge to meditate, discovering an unexpected serenity in the distraction-free emptiness. After what feels like an entire weekend of silent standoff, the Headspace battle finally terminates—but the narrator’s resolve to thwart the seer’s scheme lingers, unresolved, in the quiet aftermath.
Chapter 13
Sasha, a vampire illusionist, performs a death-defying bullet-catch on stage with her boyfriend Nero, catching a fired bullet in her teeth despite paralyzing stage fright. Mid-performance, her worst nightmare unfolds: enemies materialize behind her loved ones in the audience and slaughter them while she is magically frozen, culminating in Nero's gruesome death at the hands of the dragon Yudo. Sasha unleashes a berserker rage, dispatching the attackers in visceral combat. The horror dissolves when dream walker Bailey Spade reveals it was a nightmare, transitioning them to a cloud for a therapy session. Bailey introduces lucid dreaming and Pom, her symbiont, offering to help Sasha process her fears of failure, loss, and monstrosity—though Sasha defers further sessions to focus on saving the world from Tartarus. She wakes in her living room, the nightmare's emotional weight still lingering.
Chapter 14
Sasha wakes from therapy sessions with her domovoi Fluffster and therapist Bailey, then joins Nero and his dragon sister Claudia for a tense New York Council meeting in the castle. When a dream walker questions her seer vision, Nero violently defends her credibility, and the Council agrees to summon all Councils—including the Paris seer Nostradamus—to address the coming threat. Afterward, Sasha learns the Mandate Rite grants a protective aura identifying Earth Cognizant from invaders, and Claudia volunteers to endure the painful ritual to avoid being targeted. The chapter ends with a cliffhanger as Sasha reunites with her half-sister Lucretia, who has just completed her own Rite and promises a shocking sibling revelation.
Chapter 15
Sasha reconciles with her estranged brother Chester and werewolf niece Roxy, revealing she has become a vampire and seer while warning them of an apocalyptic vision where Tartarus destroys Earth. As the family discusses her lineage, suspicions arise that Sasha has inherited a third, rarer power—probability manipulation—from their mother Lilith, explaining her uncanny stock market luck and precise visions. Chester tests this theory using a deck of cards, and Sasha successfully manipulates the odds, separating the deck by color using visible 'strands of fate,' confirming she wields reality-bending abilities. Just as training would begin, the Council of Councils calls them away to address the looming threat.
Chapter 16
Sasha attends a high-stakes Council of Councils meeting projected through Dr. Hekima's immersive illusion, where global Cognizant leaders gather to address the approaching threat of Tartarus. When the Paris seer Nostradamus proposes sacrificing Sasha to fight the entity on a hidden medieval world, her vampire dragon protector Nero erupts in defense, nearly sparking war until Sasha seizes control of the negotiation. Asserting her autonomy, she bargains for devastating concessions: inheriting all of Nero's political IOUs, amnesty for her fugitive father Rasputin, protection for her human parents, citizenship for Claudia, and binding favors from every Council member. With the deal struck, the trio retreats to prepare for the brutal Mandate Rite—a searing ordeal that leaves Sasha convulsing on the sacrificial slab, while a secret plan to flee to the time-accelerated sanctuary of Atlantis hangs in the balance.
Chapter 17
Sasha wakes in a sterile recovery room after undergoing the Rite, immediately recognizing it as the site of her terrifying vision where Lilith's sire bond forced her to harm friends. When Lilith materializes—matching the prophecy beat for beat—Sasha abandons resistance and plays the compliant daughter, handing over the gate sword to avoid triggering the coercive bond. Lilith spirits her away through a series of colored gates to an Earth-like world lacking Cognizant, revealing a plan to defeat Tartarus there before conquering the populace. Along the way, Sasha memorizes the route, spots Nero's teleporter ally Eric trapped under glamour, and learns Lilith distrusts the seer Nostradamus—whom she calls Michel—and intends to sacrifice him along with Tartarus. They arrive at a JFK-like hub with one hour until Sasha's televised appearance, leaving her trapped in a high-stakes journey with her manipulative sire.
Chapter 18
Trapped in New Langdon's eighties-themed broadcast hub, the narrator is coerced by Lilith into competing on the live talent show Pacifica's Got Talent to amplify her supernatural abilities through mass belief. Racing against time, she secures a rigged lottery ticket and a nail gun for a stunt performance while Lilith glamours staff and feeds on a rival contestant, insisting the narrator drink blood to gain temporary power. The chapter builds from paralyzing stage fright to a darker thrill as feeding unlocks heightened abilities, culminating in the narrator stepping toward a blinding theater packed with thousands of live viewers and seven lethal judges, the broadcast just minutes away.
Chapter 19
On a televised talent competition, a young supernatural contestant stages elaborate demonstrations to convince skeptical judges of her powers. She first predicts lottery numbers using a pre-purchased winning ticket, then employs mind control to humiliate a rude judge, forcing him to crawl across the stage and kiss her shoes. Next, she survives a nail-gun stunt as supernatural luck ensures every shot misses her. Finally, she swaps clothes with her doppelgänger Lilith, who performs a levitation act while the protagonist erases the audience's memory of the switch. The viewers' belief generates an overwhelming faith-based energy surge that crashes over her in waves of ecstasy turning to agony, and she collapses backstage as the judges demand an encore.
Chapter 20
Sasha awakens in a moving cab with Lilith after collapsing at the TV studio, discovering her probability manipulation has grown stronger—she can now perceive and snap medium-thick strands of fate, though the thickest remain elusive and she quickly hits her daily power limit. While Lilith demonstrates effortless vampiric flight, Sasha remains earthbound. Faced with a moral crossroads, she chooses to remain on Lilith's world to defend its innocent inhabitants from the approaching threat of Tartarus, invoking the Spider-Man principle of responsibility. Trapped by the sire bond's vigilance, she concocts a ruse: feigning exhaustion to secure a hotel room where she can secretly access alternate inter-Otherland communication. As Lilith drifts off practicing a card trick, Sasha pretends to sleep, hiding her true purpose beneath a calm exterior.
Chapter 21
The narrator performs a death-defying bullet catch with vampire Nero as assistant, only to spot family in mortal danger—until dream walker Bailey appears and freezes time. Inside the shared dreamscape, they move to a cloud over an endless ocean where Bailey, accompanied by her companion Pom, listens to an urgent plea: the narrator has been abducted by Lilith and imprisoned in Tartarus on her world. They devise a plan to reroute the rescue, with Bailey agreeing to wake on Gomorrah, travel to Earth, and summon Nero using a precise route from the JFK hub. As Bailey promises future therapy sessions for the narrator's nightmares, the narrator wills themselves awake, ready to face Lilith alone until help arrives.
Chapter 22
Sasha wakes in a hotel room to find Lilith gone, leaving only a cryptic note signed "Mommy." While brushing her teeth, she experiences a jarring flash of recognition: this exact moment was foretold in a recent vision. Her dread is confirmed when a massive intruder crashes through the bathroom door—a werewolf with retro-eighties hair and a polaroid photo, lacking any Mandate aura and therefore not from Earth. Despite her super-speed, fangs, and a desperate flash-paper distraction, she cannot break the vision's pattern. The alpha transforms into a giant wolf, mauls her thigh, and hurls her through the shattering window. As she plummets, glass slices her palms, leaving her dangling over the void with no escape in sight.
Chapter 23
The chapter opens with the narrator plummeting down the side of a high-rise, her supernatural healing already knitting her wounds but unable to stop the fall. Desperate, she wills herself to fly, recalling that as Lilith's daughter, flight is her birthright. She cycles through pop-culture mantras and reminds herself that while birds can fly, only a seer can see the future—until at floor five, something shifts. Air resistance vanishes and her descent halts. Terrified that this might be death's lightness rather than levitation, she opens her eyes to find herself hovering fifty feet above the ground, alive and suspended in midair.
Chapter 24
The protagonist awakens flight powers and confronts a giant werewolf in a hotel room, defeating him through aerial combat and capturing him mid-sky. While holding the captive upside down at terrifying heights, she extracts intel about the local Mandate—which punishes Cognizant for revealing powers to humans—and learns of Tartarus, an entity threatening to devour their world. The werewolf, Obo, reveals he is an Enforcer sent to capture her for her televised lottery win. Rather than killing him, she forces him to fly her to Pac-Man Island, the Council's forested stronghold, where armed enforcers and a tribunal await with video evidence of her crimes. The chapter closes on a cliffhanger as she faces the Council ready to defend her actions and plead for alliance against the coming apocalypse.
Chapter 25
Cornered by armed Councilors on an unfamiliar world, a seer-vampire must talk her way out of execution. Wearing a dragon-charged truth necklace that glows green when she speaks honestly, she reveals she was prophesied to kill Tartarus, the world-destroying entity now threatening this realm. Though she admits she never foresaw this world's doom herself, the Council votes to believe her after summoning Jaylen, an illusionist who survived Tartarus's attack on his own home. Jaylen projects a harrowing vision of the apocalypse: Tartarus broadcasting as a false god, his shapeshifting children opening gates to drain humans into mummified husks while capturing Cognizant for breeding pits. The chapter ends on a knife-edge as the local teleporter turns on a live broadcast—suggesting Tartarus has already arrived.
Chapter 26
When Lilith hijacks the live broadcast to declare herself a goddess of blood and luck, she demonstrates devastating power by draining glamoured audience members remotely while the Cognizant watch in horrified awe. The narrator realizes their mother is amassing strength exactly as they did, stoking competitive fury. Before the shock fades, Sparkles accuses the narrator of intentionally stalling to free Lilith for the massacre, and the room erupts into armed confrontation. Guns and weaponized hands turn on the narrator, who understands this roundabout revelation means death. The chapter closes on that lethal impasse, the screen still glowing with violence as the narrator faces execution.
Chapter 27
Nero crashes the Councilors' ambush in spectacular dragon form, thundering "Touch her and die!" before landing as a naked man to intimidate the opposition into standing down. He trims Sparkles's beard with his claws to prove his point, then the Council votes to trust Sasha's alliance. With the immediate threat neutralized, Sasha pivots to the larger war: she reveals that the woman on television is her mother—a powerful anti-Tartarus force—and proposes a radical plan to have Cognizant pose as superheroes on TV, creating a controlled narrative that lets them coexist with humans while blocking Tartarus's media power grab. The chapter closes as Nero urges haste, pressing Sasha to stop Lilith while the deception scheme hangs in the balance.
Chapter 28
Sasha proposes a high-stakes rebranding to the vampire Council: rather than hiding, they will pose as superheroes in human media, casting Tartarus as a supervillain to win public support. Councilor Sparkles dismisses the idea as hubris and suggests mass glamour, but another vampire notes that enchanting billions is impossible. When Jaylen argues they should call themselves gods like their ancestors, Sasha rejects the PR nightmare, comparing it to Thor—whom Sparkles' kind may have inspired. Nero backs the plan with a cold bluff, threatening to leave if the Council refuses. The vote passes with reluctant hands. Sasha and Nero teleport with teleporter Lizzy and powerful allies to a studio, but as they materialize, Sasha stares in horror at their surroundings.
Chapter 29
In a live TV studio, Sasha confronts Lilith, who has fed on the audience while cameras rolled, and proposes a desperate alliance: pose as superheroes to unite against the incoming Tartarus. Lilith plays along for the cameras, then reveals her true ambition to claim the world. As allies teleport in—including Felix in a new robotic suit and Sasha's seer father Rasputin—the team races to create costumes and hero personas before Tartarus's 6:45 p.m. arrival. Rasputin reveals enemy gate locations but admits he was attacked in Headspace by Nostradamus, leaving Sasha temporarily powerless. Behind the stage, Nero pulls Sasha aside for a heated private exchange, confessing his love and urging her to retreat, but she refuses to abandon the fight. The chapter ends on unresolved romantic tension and the ticking clock toward battle.
Chapter 30
Sasha is stunned when Nero interrupts their standoff with a raw confession of love, leaving her reeling as they pivot to a televised superhero demonstration. Dressed in skimpy costumes—Vespa for herself and Drakon for Nero—the team showcases their powers to the Cognizant public, with Nero transforming into a massive dragon on camera. When Sasha later finds Nero throttling the traitorous seer Nostradamus, the captive reveals that Tartarus is arriving twenty minutes early and outlines a desperate ambush plan at a Brooklyn arcade called Fun Palace. Nostradamus insists Sasha must face the dark lord personally or he'll hunt her across worlds forever, assembling a suicide squad of probability manipulators, vampires, and earth-shakers while excluding those whose safety would distract Sasha. As they hide behind arcade machines awaiting the gate's opening, the chapter ends on a cliffhanger with the first enemy stepping through the shimmering portal.
Chapter 31
The battle erupts in an arcade when Tartarus’s gate vomits forth a nightmare parade of celebrity magicians—Houdini, Copperfield, Criss Angel—each a hollow duplicate draining life force. As the floor trembles and Roslin’s earth-mover attack collapses, our hero gains a seer’s hyper-awareness, turning the tide against the energy-sucking illusions. But victory curdles when Kit reveals herself, having impersonated Vlad, and transforms into a drekavac to kill the teleporter Dirk. With Tartarus shielded by a Cognizant stone and Nostradamus blinded by Lug, the team splinters under the weight of impossible odds. Blood, broken bones, and shattered machines litter the floor as mother Lilith carves through the duplicates, yet the true horror remains: an invulnerable villain and a fallen ally.
Chapter 32
The chapter opens in the chaos of a multi-front battle against Tartarus and his spawn, where the narrator struggles under Lilith's sire bond compulsion. While Lilith dispatches enemies with the gate sword, the narrator heals her wounded friend Kit with her own blood—only to learn vampire blood cannot mend vampire injuries. As the fight escalates, Kit transforms into a giant orc to strike at Tartarus, but is drained and knocked unconscious. The narrator, compelled by Lilith's mental command, uses the gate sword to kill Heph, Tartarus's shielded son. When ordered to drink Nero's blood to gain strength, the narrator is forced against her will to drain her lover, feeling a violating surge of power with each gulp. The chapter closes on the horrifying realization that Lilith's command will drive her to kill the man she loves.
Chapter 33
Alexandra awakens to the horror of her sire bond with Nero, realizing too late that she loves him—but Lilith has seized control of her body, forcing her to drain his lifeblood while Tartarus feeds on their energy. Desperate to break the bond, she dives into Headspace, where her TV-boosted probability powers reveal a labyrinth of fate-strands. She snaps one after another, willing allies to wake and tear her away, willing the ceiling to collapse, willing anything—but every possible future ends the same way: Nero dies. In a final, devastating twist, she manipulates probability to shift Tartarus's hunger onto Nero directly, technically making the entity the killer, yet the result is unchanged. As Nero's blood flow ceases and his body withers, Alexandra is left with the unbearable knowledge that her love arrived only in time to witness his death.
Chapter 34
Trapped in a looping vision of an arcade where probability manipulation fails to save Nero, the narrator retreats into Headspace to rethink the problem. Desperate to avoid killing Nero while feeding on his blood, they discover a new layer of Headspace mechanics: snapping ethereal strands reveals a cloud of unique visions—each representing a different person or world. With Nero’s time running out and seer juice dwindling, the narrator commits to entering every vision simultaneously, straining toward the final shape as the only path to a potential rescue. The chapter closes on the exhausting threshold of a multi-world search, where survival depends on finding one ally among countless possibilities.
Chapter 35
Bodiless in her apartment kitchen, Alexandra launches a seer vision seeking allies to break Nero's sire bond, but the unfocused query floods her with mundane snapshots of pets, family, and acquaintances before revealing the true scope of the impending invasion. The visions pivot to a coordinated interdimensional defense: across Moscow, Paris, and a coastal beach, Cognizant forces—led by Felix in his Neo Golem suit, illusionists Dr. Hekima and Jaylen, and packs of werewolves—ambush Tartarus's spawn at freshly opened gates, slaughtering the energy-sucking invaders before stepping through to pursue them. At a train station, roommate Ariel is ambushed and savagely beaten by a Tartarus soldier until healer Isis revives her with golden energy, enabling a brutal comeback amplified by a recent TV power-boost. As each victorious squad enters their respective gate, Alexandra follows Ariel's vision through the portal, determined to discover where the defenders are heading and whether she can survive Nero's imminent draining.
Chapter 36
Ariel materializes in a desolate two-sun tundra at the head of a massive Cognizant army—centaurs, cockatrices, giants, and Spartan-like strongmen—poised to liberate Tartarus from its brutal overlords. When the enemy forces retreat, they attempt to drain the life force of Ariel’s allies, dropping them to their knees in agony, but the gambit backfires as Claudia arrives with a skyful of dragons that incinerate the survivors with a coordinated breath attack. Before the clash, Ariel advocates for total extermination of Tartarus’s people to prevent future threats, while Felix argues for mercy toward those who surrender, citing Nero’s directive to free the breeding-pit prisoners without committing genocide. The chapter closes on the scorched battlefield, leaving the fate of the surviving human population and the sealed gates uncertain.
Chapter 37
Sasha awakens from prophetic visions to find herself bound by a sire bond, forced to drain Nero's life in a ruined arcade while the entity Tartarus harvests the last of their allies. Desperate, she expends her final reserves of seer juice and uses probability manipulation to summon the teleporter Eric, her father Rasputin, and the warrior Vlad. Though Lilith—Sasha's mother—slays the teleporter to prevent Tartarus's escape, Rasputin severs her head with a katana, breaking the sire bond and freeing Sasha. She revives the dying Nero with her own blood, confessing her love, only to watch Vlad fall to Tartarus's gate sword. With Nero's blood granting her terrible strength, Sasha turns on the draining demon, ready to fulfill the prophecy and end the battle.
Chapter 38
In a crumbling arcade, the narrator confronts Tartarus in a brutal duel that escalates from fistfights to plasma blades. Though Tartarus attempts to drain the narrator's life force, they turn the tables by feeding on his blood mid-combat, their struggle tearing through the ceiling and crashing back down to create a massive crater. With Tartarus broken but alive, the narrator seizes the gate sword and executes the killer, each slice a vengeance for Vlad, Chester, and the billions lost. The chapter closes on the grim satisfaction of justice delivered, leaving the arcade in ruins and the threat finally ended.
Chapter 39
In the bloody aftermath of Tartarus's defeat, the narrator rushes to heal her fallen comrades with drops of her own blood, reviving Chester, Rasputin, Kit, Eric, and a scarred Nostradamus. The victory turns bittersweet when she discovers Vlad has died permanently, severing the last link to Rose. Racing to aid the pale and failing Nero, she teleports him through a series of gates to the dragon world's imperial hoard, where laying him upon gold restores his vitality. After a tender moment, they mount a dragon and return to the eighties world to join the ongoing battle. Together they slaughter Tartarus's remaining spawn; some enemies surrender while others retreat only to be incinerated by dragonfire, leaving the battlefield cleared but the cost of war heavy on her mind.
Chapter 40
Following the battle's end, Sasha and Nero escape via teleportation to an untouched hub, then fly to Atlantis in the Otherland. On a secluded romantic cliff, Nero shifts from dragon to human form and proposes a shared life split between Earth and his dragon world, allowing Sasha to quit her job and offering her a future as his queen and court magician. After an intimate romantic consummation on the beach, Sasha's seer powers return, revealing vivid visions of two future weddings—one at New York's Palace hotel with family and Cognizant allies, another on the dragon world. The visions expose that her mother's new boyfriend is the blind seer Nostradamus, who manipulated events leading to Sasha's transformation. Despite the revelation, Sasha accepts this destiny as inevitable, embracing her role as Nero's fated mate and queen.
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Smoke, Vampires, and Mirrors by Dima Zales. https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/smoke-vampires-and-mirrors Plot summaries, not full text.