by M. A. Grant
“I’ve had better nights.”
“That’s an understatement,” Doctor Dosou interrupted. She wore a deep frown as she lifted sections of the jacket, keeping as much pressure on it as she could. “You’re lucky it didn’t hit the artery. It isn’t healing like it should.”
“I’ll be fine, Héléne,” Cristian promised around a pained smile. She ignored it, so he directed it to Atlas, who was equally unimpressed.
“You’re still recovering from the juniper, and I don’t think the bags will be able to do much more,” she warned, poking a spot that made Cristian swear and go even paler than he already was. “You need a donor.”
Of course, that was the statement Decebal walked in on. Atlas tried to straighten in his seat and immediately regretted it. Decebal paused at his side long enough to take in the injuries on his back and the way Ned was bandaging them before striding over to his son. He hissed when Héléne lifted the jacket to expose Cristian’s wound and crossed his arms over his chest. “Who?” he asked.
Cristian grimaced. “I’ll use the bags—”
“This is not up for debate. Pick. Someone,” Decebal bit out.
“I’ll grab Lucy,” Héléne said.
Cristian protested when she rushed out, or started to, since Decebal roared out his name with a thunderous tone that made Atlas flinch. Cristian shut up. “What attacked you?” Decebal asked.
“Strigoi,” Cristian said.
“This is not the time for lies, Cristian—”
Cristian jumped down from the operating table, waved off Ned’s yelled orders to stay put, and stalked to one of the cabinets. Ned swore and worked faster to finish adding the last butterfly bandages to Atlas’s wounds. Cristian opened doors until he found some of the small paper cups.
“What are you doing?” Atlas asked as Cristian selected one.
Cristian winced and peeled away the jacket just enough to scrape the edge of the cup over his skin, collecting a trickle of blood. He held the cup out to Decebal. “Look.”
Atlas wasn’t sure of the significance of the gesture until Decebal snatched the cup from his son’s grip and drank the offering. Atlas started up from the bed, but a piercing look from Cristian held him in place despite his worries of what memories Decebal might be seeing.
Blood gone, the man closed his eyes. His body tensed. His fingers twitched, his eyes flickered and rolled under the lids, and Atlas was about to shove Ned toward him when he took a deep, shuddering inhalation and broke out of the momentary stupor.
“I told you,” Cristian said steadily. “Now do you believe me?”
He stared at Cristian for a long moment before saying, hoarsely, “Yes.” He shook his head like he was trying to shake something loose inside his skull. “Yes, I believe you.”
“What do we do?”
Decebal crumpled the cup. “Find their sire. End this madness.”
“It’s the Wharrams,” Atlas said. When the pair looked at him, he explained, “We caught their mole a week ago. This timing is too convenient.” Hopefully it was enough. God, let it be enough so he didn’t have to explain all of what he knew to support the accusation.
“I will speak to the Council about our suspicions,” Decebal began, only to trail off. He and Cristian turned toward the door, heads cocked expectantly.
Peter, one of Decebal’s employees, burst into the room. His hair was disheveled, his chest heaving as he sucked in air, and his eyes were wide with shock.
“Creatures,” he gasped out to Decebal.
“Where?”
“We’re holding them to the gardens,” Peter said, “but there are too many. They’ll be inside soon.”
“Have they found our nest?” Decebal demanded.
Peter shook his head.
Decebal pointed at Atlas. “Get my son out.”
“We’ll leave through the garage,” Atlas told Cristian. He stood, world wavering a little, and dug the key to the damaged car from his pocket.
“I can help here,” Cristian argued, as if his injuries were nothing more than minor inconveniences.
Decebal turned back to him, eyes blazing, hands shaking as he clasped them around the back of Cristian’s head. “You cannot, fiul meu.”
Yells from outside the medical office. Héléne must have run out to help and left the door to the hall open. Decebal looked back over his shoulder, hearing something Atlas couldn’t make out from the rising din. Whatever it was, Cristian heard it too, because he watched the doorway as if he expected Death itself to come waltzing through. Decebal turned back to his son, pressing their foreheads together. “You must live. I’ll send someone to help you, but you must go now.”
He pulled back and looked to Atlas, desperate. “Run far, understand? If their sire knows where you are, they will not stop hunting.”
“And you?” Atlas asked.
Decebal’s leonine gaze swung back to the door. “I will destroy their nest. Once it is safe, I will call you both home.”
Atlas held Cristian back until Decebal was gone. He knew Cristian’s pain at not following his father. He’d felt the same urge to protect when his platoon was attacked. It had nearly cost him his life, and he’d promised Decebal Cristian would not suffer the same fate.
“We have to go,” he said. “Stay close to me.”
The hall was empty. Atlas knew it was a false peace. Somewhere overhead, the Vladislavic family was fighting for all their worth. They were dying. Even vampires would be hard pressed to survive such an onslaught. He and his platoon had fallen against the creatures’ speed, knocked down and torn apart before they could fire a shot or draw their knives. And here he was, without any kind of defense, about to run straight into a garage that could be filled with the creatures.
A cold sweat broke out over his skin. The lights, normally so gentle on his eyes, grew harsher the farther they ran down the hall. Every sound echoed around and through him—the squelching thud of their footfalls, their breathing, Cristian’s soft grunts of pain as he moved—and he fought the impossible fear that the strigoi would hear them through the floors and walls and converge on them. Feed on them.
Cristian stopped him when they reached the door. “Will you be able to drive?” he asked. “You’re shaking.”
“Better to have something to focus on,” Atlas admitted.
Cristian’s thumb rubbed against his hand, a brief, reassuring pressure, before he let go and took hold of the door handle. “Ready?”
There was no other choice. Not when they heard the splintering of wood and the muted sounds of growls and screams suddenly sharpened. The fighting had broken through into the nest. Decebal must not have been able to hold the line.
Cristian glanced back, his hand lifting from the handle in a moment of indecision. Atlas couldn’t let him go down that road, not when it could distract him from the dangers ahead. He ignored the rising clamor at their backs and opened the door. The damaged car sat where they’d left it haphazardly parked. There were no shadows moving along the walls, no screeches, no claws dragging over concrete. If they hurried, they might make it into the car before the creatures found them.
They flung themselves into the front seats and Atlas started the car with a breathless prayer. It caught just as their time ran out. The first strigoi raced through the open door and keyed on the engine’s noise, the way it caught and changed pitch when thrown into drive. Atlas raced forward, clipping the creature with the ruined bumper, following the wide lane as it turned into the second line of cars and up, up, up, out of the garage. The lights around the property illuminated the strigoi crawling and sprinting and hunting through the grounds. Atlas counted five rushing toward a figure near the garage entrance. He started to slow when he recognized Helias, but Cristian’s hand pressed down on his thigh, urging him forward. Helias lunged toward the first strigoi with a bared snarl, narrowly avoiding its snapping jaw
s. And then they were past the rear corner of the house and the rest of the chaos lay before them.
Decebal’s grounds security had fallen first, judging from the bodies scattered on the edges of the gardens. Even with their losses, the scene didn’t look like a battlefield, which was the most disturbing part. The house, ablaze with light, had a few broken windows. The truest sign of the violence were the groups gathered in small clusters, vampires working together to keep a strigoi or two at bay as they tried to kill them without dying in the process.
Atlas kept to the far edge of the paved drive and accelerated. He flinched, but avoided swerving, when a strigoi launched out of the shadows and hit the rear panel as they passed. Cristian swore for him and turned around in his seat, attention caught by the most intense fighting near the door of the house. Atlas kept his eyes on the road. He could only spare a quick glance out the window, catching a flash of Decebal in mid-fight, his fangs buried in a strigoi’s throat. And then they were at the gate and careening down the private road. Atlas gave the car more and more gas, letting the roar of its engine drown out the lingering sounds of the fight in his head.
It wasn’t until they were on the main road, speeding toward Scarsdale proper, that Cristian dared to ask, “What now?”
“We leave town.”
“Father’s sending someone to help us get out. Where do we wait for them in the meantime?” Cristian peered out the window at the picture-perfect houses flashing by. They stood untouched by death or destruction, and he curled his lip and gave up on them soon enough. “Rapture?”
Atlas glanced back in the rearview mirror. No cars behind them. A lucky break at last. “No. Too obvious a choice. The Wharrams know your father’s world. They’ll expect you to go there.”
“Shit,” Cristian whispered. “You’re right.”
A familiar intersection lay ahead. Atlas tapped his finger on the steering wheel, mind spinning. Between the intelligence he’d handed over and her own research, Bryony would know all of the Vladislavic haunts. She and her underlings would know Whitethorn; they’d found Atlas there, after all. But there was one place she hadn’t seemed to pin down yet.
He signaled and got in the turn lane, following it onto the quiet, residential street.
“Umm, Atlas, where are we going?”
“My place.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Atlas had no doubt the strigoi and their sire would find him and Cristian eventually. All it would take was a raid of Bea’s office to get his address. He’d wanted to call and warn her, but his phone was dead from his plunge into the water, and he’d had to ask Cristian to complete the task for him. Even with that delay, a break-in at Whitethorn would take time. If Decebal had managed to reach his contact before joining the fight, Atlas and Cristian would hopefully be gone before anyone came to look for them at the apartment. There was no point suffocating on the what ifs of the situation. All he could do was secure his apartment as best as he could, keep Cristian safe, and wait for extraction. Ensuring a safe exit from a dangerous situation was what he’d done in the Marines and there was a comfort in returning to those same habits now, even if they were heavily adapted because he was on his own.
“How can I help?” Cristian asked.
Okay, not on his own. In a partnership. It felt unexpectedly good to acknowledge that, and even better when considering the benefits of Cristian’s vampirism, not that he’d ever tell the man.
“We don’t have much time,” Atlas said. “I want us packed and ready to leave whenever you hear from your father’s contact.”
He left Cristian standing in the living room and went to his tiny hall closet. He grabbed a backpack he’d used for overnight jobs and tossed it behind him into the hall. It took a minute to wrestle out the storage tote he’d stuffed in the back corner of the closet.
Bea had taken it on herself to pack up his service items after his discharge. He trusted her, so there was never a reason to look in this particular tote. Now, he stared down at it, loath to open the lid and face his past, but there wasn’t time to agonize. He needed to act, not mourn.
He pulled off the lid. The plastic scent of the tote mingled with faded shoe polish and musty nylon. His assault pack was there on the top. He dragged it out and closed the tote up again, shoving it unceremoniously back into the closet and closing the door on it.
When he returned to the living room, bags in hand, he found Cristian inspecting Snafu. The plant sat in its usual drooping glory, despite the fancy pot he’d transplanted it into. Hopefully Bea would take care of it while he was gone.
Cristian glanced back over his shoulder at Atlas. “This plant is dead.”
“Half dead,” Atlas protested. “That’s more alive than you.”
Cristian made a face of long suffering. “Vampires aren’t dead, you ass. We’re a different, living species. If anything in here is half dead, it’s you. That river water makes you reek.”
“I know,” he agreed. He tossed the bags on the couch. “We can put everything we need out here and then divvy it up between bags.” He made an expansive wave toward his apartment. “Dig around and grab anything you think will be useful. I’m going to shower.”
“Fine,” Cristian agreed. “I’ll tell you when Father calls.”
Atlas went to his bedroom. He grabbed briefs and socks, a loose pair of jeans, and a zip-up hoodie he hoped wouldn’t bind against the butterfly bandages across his back. He rummaged through his other drawers, tossing anything he thought he might want, or that might fit Cristian, on the bed. They’d need at least one temporary change of clothes. Hopefully they could buy anything else they’d need wherever they ended up.
In the bathroom, he peeled off his wet and bloody clothes and stepped under the spray before it finished warming. The soap stung his new injuries, but he felt human again when he stepped out a few minutes later and dried off. Ned hadn’t had time to dress the scratches over his ribs. Stretching confirmed that most of the scratches were long, but shallow. They were easy enough for him to handle on his own, so he dug around in his kit and patched himself up.
Cristian had been busy while Atlas was gone. The couch was littered in several small piles of potential supplies, and the man didn’t even look up from his work when Atlas reentered the room.
“I’m not done yet,” Cristian warned, can opener in hand. He closed the kitchen drawer he’d pulled it from and crossed to toss the tool into a miscellaneous pile. Atlas spotted matches, paracord, and other odds and ends he’d kept out of habit. At least it would pay off now.
Once his hands were free, Cristian glanced at Atlas. He wanted to zip his open shirt closed, to hide the bandages and patchwork of pale scars marring his skin, but it seemed wrong in response to the banked heat of Cristian’s appreciative gaze. It had been so long since he’d let another man look at him like that, since he’d trusted someone to not humiliate him for wearing the badges of his survival on his skin, so he pushed down the urge to hide and instead stood as he normally would. “Grab a quick shower and then we’ll pack,” he said. “You can have some of my extra clothes until we can pick up others. We’re almost the same height.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Cristian rasped. He held himself in place, body taut, until Atlas retreated back to his bedroom before closing himself into the bathroom. Atlas picked out a few things to offer Cristian, grabbed a spare towel on his way to the bathroom, and knocked on the door before entering.
The room was thick with steam and he could hear Cristian splashing under the shower spray on the other side of the curtain. “Where do you want your towel?” he asked as he set the clothes on the counter.
“Over the rod.”
He obeyed and started to back toward the door, but Cristian continued talking. “Got a text. Father’s alive. He’s reached his contact and wanted to know where we were.”
“Did he say how long it would take them to get here?”<
br />
“No.” The shower shut off and the towel disappeared from Atlas’s view. “Hopefully soon.”
“We’ll be ready,” Atlas said, trying to focus on what was left to do, rather than what Cristian would look like as he dried off.
It didn’t help. He was so lost in the images, he jerked when the shower curtain pulled open. He couldn’t help swearing when he saw the reality standing in front of him.
“That bad, huh?” Cristian teased, sliding his thumbs down into the band of the towel wrapped tightly around his waist.
Concern for his gruesome injuries distracted Atlas from what should have been an alluring sight. The claw marks over Cristian’s pecs and stomach were closing before Atlas’s eyes, a slow knitting of flesh over the deep gouges. Dark blood welled up in those depressions, but didn’t overspill. No, that was reserved for the horrific wound in the join of his shoulder and neck. Blood trickled down the defined muscles of his chest and stomach before staining the towel.
The gouges left by the claws were ripped wider from Cristian’s battle for freedom. The flesh above his collarbone was rent open, individual punctures torn into open channels. These wounds were deep, sluggishly pulsing blood despite the body’s efforts to heal. Atlas fumbled for gauze and doused it in rubbing alcohol. Only when he lifted it did he realize his hands were trembling worse than they had at the mansion.
The scarred bites on his neck already burned in sympathy, and he knew that every movement of Cristian’s arm, the neck, the head, hell, even his breathing, made the pain sharpen until it would overwhelm everything.
“You’re still bleeding,” Atlas whispered.
“Haven’t fed yet,” Cristian said, not moving away from Atlas’s attempted first aid. “I’m sure Father’s contact will bring blood bags. I’ll heal eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t good enough. You need to feed now,” Atlas said.
“Without a donor around, that’s not really possible,” Cristian mumbled, close, too close to Atlas. He’d leaned in at some point, his breath warm on Atlas’s neck.
