Rare Vigilance (Whitethorn Agency)

“Funny and smart,” Cristian said quietly. “She’s been living on the streets of Scarsdale for far longer than you’ve been alive. She tends to wander the farthest afield for hunting, but she keeps close watch for daybreak.”

Atlas closed the trunk. “Will she be dangerous?”

“No.” Cristian shook his head firmly when Atlas gave him a look, and his mouth set in a stubborn line. “She’s not dangerous.”

“You said she hunts.”

“Four-legged prey, Mr. Kinkaid. Not many humans wander down here, and most of this group are afraid of being discovered anyway. Mary shouldn’t have come up against anything that would pose a real challenge, which is why I’m worried that she hasn’t come back.”

“Okay. Stick close. Don’t get ahead of me, and if I tell you to do something, you’d better damn well do it.” He checked his phone as he turned on its flashlight. “We don’t have a lot of time, so no wandering off.”

“Fine,” Cristian agreed.

The warehouse in question wasn’t far, maybe three hundred feet away from where they’d parked.

Several flickering streetlights illuminated the area better than Atlas expected. Unlike the building Nell and the other vampires inhabited, this place was a wreck. The wide hangar doors were long gone, though the hinges of one of the doors were still attached the building, rusted and bent. Jagged shards of glass sat like misshapen teeth in the broken windows and stacks of rotting wood and crumpled metal sheets were stacked around the front edge. As he neared, he could see scattered tracks in the bare dirt out front—a variety of shoe prints, paw prints from dogs and cats, and something else he couldn’t place. He crouched beside that track, skimming his fingers over the odd indentations in the dust, the nearly humanoid print marred by narrow indentations near the toes that ended in pinprick points dug into the dirt.

“That’s a new one,” Cristian whispered as he crouched to examine the print.

Atlas grunted. Something about it seemed familiar, like a name on the tip of his tongue or a song whose melody he couldn’t quite place. But there wasn’t time to ponder it. He snapped a quick picture of the print and glanced toward the warehouse.

The darkness beyond loomed like the mouth of a crypt. He rose and made his way into the shell of a building, Cristian close at his back. The additional light from his phone made the transition between outside and inside easier on his eyes, though he warily kept to the edges of the cavernous space out of an abundance of caution.

“Do you hear anything?” he asked Cristian quietly.

“No. Don’t smell anything either. That’s odd...”

The fact stuck out once Cristian said it aloud. Mary had been out hunting, which meant there should have been corpses. There was no metallic scent in the air, no foul odor left over from when innards became outards, none of the signs he associated with decaying flesh waiting to be found. He sniffed the air again. Nothing. Which should have been impossible.

He still woke from every nightmare panting, desperate to clear the fetid memory of rent organs and spilled blood from his nose and mouth. For it to be missing here, where he knew dead things should be...that unnatural detail bothered him most.

“Stay by the wall,” he told Cristian. “And yell if you hear something odd.”

He left the wall and the man behind and slowly crossed into the open floor of the warehouse. He didn’t look directly at the ground where his flashlight was pointed, instead checking for details in the outer edges of that circle of light, trying to keep his vision balanced so he could react if anything came for him from the shadows.

Halfway back, he found a partially collapsed wall. The metal siding had broken free from the aged steel frame of the building, leaving a gaping hole that offered easy access to the outside. There was no blood, but he found shoe prints there, and marks from the thin-fingered hands of whoever had crawled their way inside.

“Cristian,” he called. “I found something.”

He tracked the rustling at his back, grateful when he heard Cristian’s footsteps over the dusty ground. He pointed at the tracks. “Mary’s?”

“Probably.” Cristian stooped closer to the prints and pointed. “We saw those out front though.”

He was right. The odd animal prints from outside were layered atop the human sign. Atlas followed their progress with his light, skin prickling as the story unfolded. The tracks changed farther in, churning up the dust and dirt, transforming to drag marks. The chilling path led him and Cristian farther and farther into the darkness.

“Atlas,” Cristian whispered, “I don’t hear anything back there.”

“You can wait here—”

An elbow bumped lightly against his ribs. “No,” Cristian said. “I won’t make you look alone.”

It was a kindness he didn’t deserve, but he took it nonetheless, grateful to bear the weight with someone else.

They found her in the back corner.

There wasn’t much left, but Atlas crouched beside what remained and forced himself to look for clues of who Mary had been before her death. There were no pieces of jewelry, no shreds of clothing, and his heart ached for her. There was nothing for those left behind to cling to. At least the families of his platoon mates had bodies to bury, ashes to spread, and flags to frame. “I’m sorry,” Atlas murmured as Cristian knelt beside him, paying no heed to the dirt marring his expensive jeans. He looked fragile, his hair messy from running a hand through it, his usual charm carved away by the reality of Mary’s loss. Human. He looked so human in his grief and all Atlas’s further platitudes caught in his throat in the face of that realization. He, more than anyone, had no right to say such words.

Cristian reached out and followed the imprint of the body left in ashes on the dirt. He never touched them, but even the disturbance of the air as his fingers passed over sent the ashes dancing, twisting like delicate flakes of burnt paper. “Sunlight,” Cristian said, the word tight and pained.