by M. A. Grant
They were still fragmented—Atlas needed to learn control and finesse—but guileless and heart-wrenchingly open. He saw the nest, his heart leapt with fear as the strigoi moved about the space, and he marveled at their treatment of Atlas. Later, they would have to discuss that. He witnessed Atlas’s impossible escape, saw Emil drive off in pursuit of his herd of assassins, and his legs burned as he and Atlas climbed the hill to reach the chapel. The entire time he traveled through those moments, Atlas’s presence pressed against his consciousness, a force strong enough to heal the aching wounds of doubt and isolation. A true feeding, at last.
When Cristian surfaced, he found Atlas knelt across from him with a faint smile on his face. “I love you,” he said simply.
Cristian pressed a kiss to the punctures on his wrist. “Glad you finally caught up, but maybe this is a conversation for later.”
“True,” Atlas agreed. He took his arm back through the bars and stood, glancing around the abandoned chapel. “Keys?”
“On the table,” Radu said. He sounded better, still gaining some strength from the feeding.
Cristian was a new man. The short feeding, the true melding of their minds, knit together the gaping hole in his heart. Atlas trusted him, body and soul, and they could do anything together. Even get out of this mess.
Atlas grabbed the keys then spotted something on the floor. He picked up his silver blade with a sharp smile, and tucked it into its sheath before hurrying back to the cage door. It unlocked with a loud clank, and Cristian and Radu rushed out of the cell. Atlas frowned at Radu’s limp. “Do you need help?” he asked.
Cristian slid underneath one of Radu’s arms and wrapped his own arm around his waist. “I’ve got him. We need you to run interference. The strigoi may have ignored you, but I doubt we’ll be so lucky.”
“The car and truck are down the hill,” Atlas warned them. “I don’t know how long Emil will be gone for, so we’ve got to hurry.”
“What did you do with him?” Radu asked.
“Released the strigoi,” Cristian explained. “Emil chased off after them.”
Radu’s eyes widened and he glanced back to Atlas, who was too busy peering outside to notice. “Are you sure he’s human?” Radu whispered.
Cristian shrugged, unwilling to give voice to his true thoughts on the matter. That could wait until they were far away from Emil’s treachery.
“Hurry,” Atlas ordered, drawing his blade and pushing the door open wider.
He led them down the hill. When they hit the open, flat ground leading to the truck, Cristian thought they might have pulled it off. They’d get to the truck and flee the logging camp. After Emil’s treachery was shared with the Council’s tribunal team, the threat against Mihai’s family would end.
The cries rising up from the forest around them lifted the hairs on his arms and sent a shiver of terror down his spine.
“They’re coming,” Atlas warned. “Get him to the truck. I’ll hold them off.”
If he hadn’t seen Atlas’s memory, Cristian wouldn’t have let him stand alone against the oncoming tide of horrors. But something had happened in that nest and Atlas faced the woods with absolute conviction and no trace of fear.
So Cristian ran.
Radu grunted and tried to help, especially when the forest undergrowth rustled and the sound of a car came from far off down the tracks.
“He’s back,” Atlas called.
Strigoi were one thing. Emil was another. They were mere feet from the truck now, so Cristian released Radu and pushed him toward it. “Go,” he ordered.
He rushed back to Atlas’s side and faced the incoming van. Atlas kept his intense focus on the strigoi emerging from the forest.
The van skidded to a stop. Howls and screams came from the back where some recaptured strigoi must have been locked in. Emil jumped out, his fangs exposed, face twisted in an expression of pure rage. He didn’t say a word. On his whistle, the loose strigoi sprang into action.
The pack swirled around them, attempting to herd and separate them. They worked together to fend off the attack. Cristian wove around Atlas, drawing the strigoi closer so he could dispatch them with his blade. He tried to emulate Atlas’s cool control, even when fangs snapped in his face and forced him to contort to avoid the lethal bite. The silver kukri flashed and cut. This was nothing like the fight earlier. Atlas moved with purpose and confidence, and strigoi fell around him.
Finally, there were three strigoi left. Cristian darted to his left, hoping to draw the nearest one into a leap that would send it toward Atlas. He planted his feet, preparing to dash away at the right moment, when he caught a blurred figure moving in line to Atlas.
Instinct won. He drew on his renewed strength to move into Emil’s way. They crashed together in a tangle of limbs, and he wound up on the bottom of the pile. Atlas yelled something. Strigoi howled. He tried to buck Emil off. The elder vampire’s eyes flashed, and he reached down too fast for Cristian to react. Fingers dug into his hair, a vise-like pressure tightened around his head, and the world jolted as his head twisted and—
* * *
It sounded like a crack of gunfire when the trigger was pulled a half-second too late. It rattled through Atlas, and he spun, no longer concerned with keeping Cristian safe from the strigoi. Something else had happened and he needed to assess the danger.
The moment devolved into breathless images. Emil straddling Cristian’s body. His hands buried in Cristian’s dark hair. Cristian’s head twisted at an impossible angle, his dark blue eyes gone vacant and empty.
Atlas roared. The strigoi froze, their attentions fixed on him, and him alone, for the first time all night, before turning slowly to Emil.
The vampire’s eyes widened and he rose, dropping Cristian like a broken doll.
Atlas launched himself at Emil, outpacing the strigoi at his sides. He raised his blade, trusted the strength of his arm, and swung. This blow was fueled by fury and misery, nothing like his attempt against Sanda. Emil didn’t even have time to raise an arm to block it.
Atlas swung through and skidded to a stop a few feet beyond Emil’s body. He twisted, glancing over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t missed his strike. Emil’s corpse collapsed on the ground beside Cristian. His head bounced when it hit the ground.
Before it even rolled to a stop in the dust, the strigoi threw their heads back and howled. It cut to the very marrow of his bones, so raw and broken it couldn’t be anything but a mourning cry. The moment it ended, they broke.
One strigoi launched itself at another, its jaws ripping at the other’s throat and its claws digging in to tear it to shreds. Atlas barely had time to consider what it meant before the third strigoi came for him. He got his blade up, narrowly blocking the first swipe of its claws. He twisted to avoid its teeth, but the movement was unnecessary. The silver was already working on the monster, who writhed and snapped its death throes on the ground.
The other strigoi was still distracted, ripping apart its enemy, so Atlas rushed it. He landed a few quick hits with his blade against its back and leapt away as it screamed and twisted to swipe at him. This one fought the silver poisoning for longer. It chased after him. He led it away from Cristian’s body and prayed its adrenaline would run out soon. Fifty or so yards away, it finally worked. The strigoi gurgled and collapsed into a twitching pile of limbs.
Atlas ran back. The strigoi that had fallen to its packmates lay nearby. He stabbed it in the heart with his knife, unsure whether it had been truly killed or simply wounded. Immediate dangers cleared, he rushed to Cristian’s body.
He heard the truck door open, knew Radu was crawling out to help, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the limp, cool body in his arms. Cristian’s head rolled freely on his neck. Atlas bit his lip to silence the sobs fighting to break free. Tenderly, he tucked Cristian’s head against his shoulder to keep the bon
es from grinding together. He had to ignore his mind’s screamed warning that Cristian was dead. He knew better. Cristian had snapped the neck of the vampire at Hahn Lake to buy time; it hadn’t died until its heart was staked. Unless Cristian met a similar fate or was exposed to sunlight, he’d be okay.
“How long until dawn?” he rasped out when Radu drew up at his shoulder.
“Not long,” Radu warned. “Why?”
“Help me open the back door of the car so I can get Cristian inside it,” Atlas ordered. “The glass will protect you both from the sunrise.”
“Why would we be here at sunrise?” Radu asked, surprised.
Atlas tilted his head to the van, which shook as the strigoi inside flung themselves against its walls. “Their sire is dead. They’ve got no tether anymore and I won’t leave here until I’m sure there are no feral strigoi to escape. It’s too dangerous to open the door to finish them with the silver blade though.”
“You’re going to expose them to sunlight,” Radu said slowly.
Atlas nodded and drew Cristian’s limp body close as he lifted him from the ground. “Go open our car door.”
Radu did. He crawled in on the other side and helped hold Cristian’s head when Atlas laid him on the backseat. He even closed Cristian’s eyelids. Atlas gave him a confused look, and he explained, “He’ll heal regardless, but keeping all the bones aligned means he’ll spend less energy doing it. And his eyes will adjust faster if they’re closed and don’t dry out.”
“Thank you,” Atlas said.
Once he was sure Cristian would be safe lying there, he staggered back to Emil’s body and patted down his pockets, pulling out two cell phones—theirs and one he didn’t recognize—and a wallet. He returned to the car and tossed them into the console, then crawled into the driver’s seat and let his body crash from its adrenaline rush. Radu joined him after an awkward minute, though he settled into the passenger seat with a few more winces than Atlas expected.
“How long did Emil have you?” Atlas asked him as he watched the van through the windshield.
“I’m not sure. At least a week,” Radu said grimly. “Cristian fed me so I could start healing. His memories were...concerning. Do you know if my family is safe?”
“No,” Atlas said honestly, “but I hope they are. Your father needs to know about Emil. And Grigore still needs to be stopped.”
They waited there, watching the van to ensure the strigoi didn’t escape, and waiting for dawn. It came with painful slowness, one Atlas measured in every breath he had to sit and wait before getting Cristian to safety. Knowing he was healing, even lying there in the backseat, did nothing to assuage Atlas’s guilt. He chewed on it as the night lightened, as the details of the forest and ground came into view and the colors began shifting above the trees.
He moved the car under one of the building’s wide awnings, doing his best to shelter it from the rising sun so he could get in and out without risking Radu or Cristian. When the sun finally crested the trees and cast its beams over the open ground of the logging camp, Atlas got out of the car and made his way to the van.
The strigoi inside hadn’t ceased their efforts for freedom. They snarled and growled. He knew the moment he swung the back doors open, they would try to kill him. But the fear he’d expected after surviving their attack paled in comparison to his need to get Cristian to safety. He could focus on helping his partner and lover, not on giving in to the paralyzing terror he’d fought for so many years.
It made it far easier to reach out and clutch the door latches. Easier to pull them open.
He didn’t flinch when the strigoi rushed into the walls of the cages built into the space, making the van shove backward at him. The weak morning sunlight flooded over them. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
It was not a peaceful death. They didn’t fade artfully into figures of ash. They died in pain and shook apart into smoky piles and Atlas accepted that easily. Now, when the cries of his dying platoon mates echoed in his head after he woke from a nightmare, he would be able to drown them out with the memory of this moment and the sounds of their killers leaving the world.
He stood and watched until all the strigoi were dead before walking back to the car. He left the van doors open.
Radu eyed him when he settled into the driver’s seat. It was an appraising look, and one tinged with wary admiration. “Better?” he asked.
Atlas looked back at Cristian and gave himself one second to worry before shutting it off and refocusing his attention toward the front of the car. He’d get them to Daria’s and explain what had happened. She might not believe him about the strigoi, but it was their best option.
“No,” Atlas said shortly. The engine turned over. “But I’m getting there.”
Chapter Seventeen
It was a hellish drive, with his attention split between the road, Cristian in the backseat, and Radu up front, who kept drifting off as his body tried to heal. At least Daria was waiting outside her house when Atlas pulled up in the car. Her crossed arms and intimidating scowl prompted a barely conscious Radu to mumble, “Does she always look like that?” in his finely accented English.
“Only when she’s actually angry,” Atlas said. He pulled up to her slowly and pointed at one of the nearer barns.
When she gave him a curious look, he gestured to Radu and pointed at the barn again. It would have been so much easier to roll down the window and call to her, but the risk of exposing either vampire to the unfiltered sunlight was too great. She must have understood his poor efforts at communication anyway because she threw her hands up in the air and stomped to the barn.
“She doesn’t seem surprised. Does she know what Cristian is?” Radu asked.
“Yes. She tolerates him. I’m hoping she tolerates you too. But if you piss her off, I won’t protect you.”
“How does she know about us?”
“She also survived a strigoi attack,” he said, refusing to delve deeper. It was Daria’s story to tell, not his. “It wasn’t much of a leap to accept Cristian’s vampirism.”
Radu muttered something possibly flattering in Romanian, and Atlas wished he knew more about Mihai’s eldest son. Cristian had been unusually cagey about his friendship with Radu. If it had been in an effort to keep Atlas from being jealous, it was a misguided decision. Cristian had been alive for centuries. Atlas prayed he’d found happiness with others during that time, or else the near-immortality was more curse than blessing. And if Radu had been one of those lucky few, so be it. If he wasn’t, and he and Cristian were nothing more than friends, it boded equally well. Radu struck him as someone worth knowing, one of those people Cristian said was worth the risk of trusting.
From their brief time together, he couldn’t see similarities between the frail vampire and someone like Grigore. Still, he wanted to check with Cristian before giving up any of their, or Daria’s, secrets. He’d misjudged people before; he didn’t want to hurt anyone else because of it. Maybe someday he’d be able to make up for the mistake of trusting the Wharrams. He would start now, by ensuring Cristian and his friend recovered.
Daria had reached the barn and swung open the wide doors. She glared at Atlas as he drove slowly inside. She closed the barn up faster than he expected, and met him at his car door as he got out.
“Where is my truck?” she demanded, poking his chest with a finger.
“There were complications.”
“I see that. You brought a half-dead stranger to my house and your Cristian is asleep in the backseat—”
He didn’t mean to tense, but she caught him at it anyway. Her eyes widened and she moved to peer around him at the backseat. “Atlas? He is sleeping, isn’t he?”
“Healing,” Atlas said, not trusting his voice to stay steady if he continued. “I’m sorry I had to bring us back here, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else that would be safe enough.”
>
Her earlier irritation was gone, replaced with genuine concern. She placed a comforting hand on his arm. “What happened?”
He told her in fits and starts. She listened quietly, though her thoughts paraded openly across her face when he talked about his experience in the strigoi nest. Disbelief, hurt, anger. A potent cocktail for anyone, and he didn’t have a good way of proving his experience to her, other than his word and the fact that he was still breathing. No matter her misgivings, she let him speak. He told her about the fight, about Emil and Cristian, about destroying all of Emil’s creatures.
“They’re dead?” she asked when he’d fallen into silence.
“Yes,” he promised.
“Prove it.” She skirted by him and reopened the driver’s door. She leaned down and lit off at Radu. Her words flowed unceasingly and Radu tried, but failed, to get anything in edgewise. Their rapid-fire conversation wasn’t the same without Cristian’s dryly amused voice translating in his ear. Atlas pressed a hand to his chest, wishing he could ease the pang of wanting Cristian awake and whole and beside him again.
Eventually, Daria stopped to take a breath. Radu would surely start in on her, Atlas worried, but the vampire didn’t. Instead, he stared at her, starry eyed, and murmured something in a low, honey-sweet voice Atlas couldn’t help but flush at. Daria had no such reaction. She snapped something back, made a rude gesture, and turned back to Atlas. If not for the spots of high color on her cheeks, he would think she’d been unaffected by Radu’s response.
“There’s an old tack room in this barn that’s secure,” she told Atlas. Her accent was heavier than before, but it faded as she spoke. “We’ll move them in there. After, we’ll take the car back and get my truck.”
“You’re okay with us staying here?” Atlas asked her, genuinely worried he’d overstepped.
“You should have asked first.” Her glare softened when she looked to Cristian again. “But I understand why you didn’t. Now, hurry up. The sooner we get my truck, the sooner you can be back here with him.”