Rare Vigilance (Whitethorn Agency)

The man tilted his head and the light from the lamp fell differently over his face. His brown eyes flickered amber, and memories of yellow eyes and sharp white fangs flashing in moonlight rose like a shadowed leviathan in the back of Atlas’s mind. He squeezed Cristian’s arm to ground himself and swallowed, forcing down his fear.

“You’re not Decebal,” the man repeated, slower this time, “and you brought a pet.” He sniffed the air and his eyes narrowed. “Why would you need a pet, I wonder?”

“Who the fuck are you?” Cristian demanded. He tried to get around Atlas, but a quick step and shift of body weight prevented it.

“I could ask you the same thing,” the man said. “But I think I already know.”

He hadn’t moved any closer to them. Their efforts to escape didn’t concern him. He seemed...bored, and that scared Atlas more than anything else.

“We thought Decebal would come himself,” the man mused. “We wished to discuss his surreptitious attempts to expand his borders. We never thought he’d send his son instead.”

Fuck. Whoever “they” were didn’t matter. They knew who Cristian was, which meant they’d been keeping an eye out for him. The danger was too great.

The mystery man rolled his shoulders, flexed his hands, and stretched his neck from side to side, like an athlete limbering up before a competition. A low rumbling growl built in the room all around Atlas—from the man, from Cristian, from his own imagination?—and Cristian tugged against his iron grip. Even that reminder of where and when he was didn’t help. The man turned farther into the light and Atlas’s heart lost its beat in a stumbling moment of panic. The scars on his neck and ribs stung like they’d been reopened. The creature standing across the room had given up all pretense.

Yellow eyes with dilated pupils. Tips of long fangs pressing coyly into a lower lip as it smiled at them.

Vampire.

“No one is leaving,” the monster said with no little glee.

It lunged forward, moving fast, too fast, like they had that night in Romania. Atlas tried to push Cristian toward the door, but Cristian had already stepped around him. In front of him, with his back to their enemy, shielding Atlas.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only marvel at Cristian’s fearlessness.

“Go!” Cristian shouted, face to face with Atlas, and then the word cut off, replaced with a grunt of surprise. He clutched at his armpit and spun away, roaring something at the snarling vampire behind him, who was already shifting his hold on the delicate knife he’d meant to use against Atlas. A knife he’d sunk into Cristian instead.

Adrenaline surged. The world narrowed to the task at hand. Protect.

He pushed past Cristian and met the vampire mid-charge. The elbow he landed to its throat stunned it for a moment, sent it off balance, and Atlas capitalized on that. He hooked his heel around the back of the vamp’s leg and toppled it. It snapped and hissed and clawed at his back as it fell. Snatches of the Romanian attack blurred and ran together with the present. His head echoed with screams and growls as he straddled a thigh, trying to control the vampire’s ability to twist free. The violent sting of fresh scratches opening across his back melded with the aching pull of the scarred skin crisscrossing his chest and abdomen stretching past its endurance as he fought to pin it with a forearm to the chest. The vampire twisted its head and fangs clicked as they snapped inches away from his neck. The healed gouges ripped into his flesh burned from the memory of fangs lodged in his throat.

One forearm to chest. The other hand holding the wrist, trying to control the movement of the knife. Atlas gritted his teeth and tried to slam the vampire’s arm down, dislodging its hold on the weapon, but it was too strong. He couldn’t win this fight.

Cristian appeared at his side. His knee slammed into the vampire’s stomach and as it curled up from the ground with a rushed exhalation of pain, Cristian’s hands settled firmly on either side of its head. He twisted, a brutal, confident movement, and the air resounded with the wet pop of vertebrae cracking. The vampire’s body went limp beneath Atlas, and he slammed its hand to the ground until the knife skittered out of its limp fingers.

“Bought a second,” Cristian panted, clutching at his injury. “Need to finish. His heart—”

Atlas staggered to his feet. A row of dusty pipe clamps hung on the wall nearby. He grabbed one, dragged it over, and clutched tightly at the black pipe as he raised it over the vampire’s chest. With a ragged bellow, he drove it down with his remaining strength. The end of the pipe ground into the concrete floor and he tore it free, repeating the staking again and again and again and—

“Stop,” Cristian urged, tugging at his arm with a hand. “It’s done.”

He blinked and let the clamp fall from his trembling hands. The vampire lay there, an ugly, uneven hole torn through its chest. Thick, dark blood dribbled sluggishly from the edges of the wound, and Atlas choked on rising bile.

Cristian pushed him back from the body. He went willingly, desperate to move his attention to something, anything, else. Like Cristian’s hand clutching at the wet fabric under his arm and the fine sheen of sweat coating his forehead.

“You’re hurt.” Atlas dug for his phone.

He hit the number he’d programmed in case of such an emergency and turned the phone on speaker so he could use both hands to paw at Cristian. Cristian swore and tried to avoid his inspection, but Atlas remained focused. He needed something to cling to as the adrenaline high faded. He needed to keep Cristian alive. If he did, he could prove everything that had happened to him was real.

The line clicked. “Doctor Dosou,” a woman said.

“This is Atlas Kinkaid. Cristian is injured,” he explained, still trying to get Cristian to move his hand away enough so he could see the wound.

“Slow down, Mr. Kinkaid. Where are you both?”

“Hahn Lake,” Cristian said aloud, hissing when Atlas tugged on his jacket lapel. He must have realized he’d lose the battle, because he dropped his hand and continued glibly, “How are you, Héléne?”

“What kind of injury?”