Vampire in Atlantis

Before anybody could respond, June came running in, out of breath and holding her arm, which was bent at an impossible angle. Tears ran freely down the woman’s face, but her voice was perfectly steady. “We’re under attack, Quinn. Vampires. A lot of them. Three of us are already dead.”

Daniel yanked Serai out of range of the entrance and placed her, back to the wall, in the farthest corner from danger, as the others rushed out of the cave.

“Stay here,” he commanded.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do, either, Nightwalker,” she snapped.

“I can’t protect you if—”

“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” she said, cutting him off. Then with a rush of power that smashed through the space between them, in a few short seconds she again shimmered into the shape of a saber-toothed tiger. When he started to speak, she snarled at him and shouldered him out of her way before springing across the floor to follow the others.

Daniel swore steadily in a long-dead language as he raced after her. He was going to slaughter anyone— vampire or otherwise—who dared to get anywhere near her. And when this was over, he was going to throw her over his shoulder, take her somewhere safe, lock her up, and maybe invest in some catnip.

* * *

Serai stumbled a little as she bounded across the floor, and hoped Daniel hadn’t seen it. If he realized that the loss of connection with the Emperor was making her as weak as she felt, he’d probably spirit her away and bundle her up in a bubble of safety somewhere. Rather exactly like how she’d spent the past eleven thousand years.

She thought not.

The tiger’s night vision gave her a clear picture of the area and the dark forms attacking Quinn’s group. Jack was already in tiger form himself and launching his body through the night air toward a vampire rushing toward him. They collided with a thud, and seconds later the vampire’s head rolled off its body. Serai felt nauseous, exhilarated, and terrified all at once—a far cry from any of the feelings or emotions she’d known in the pod. Daniel snarled something at her about staying down, and then he shot up into the air, daggers extended, and decapitated two more vampires in midair. They immediately began decomposing into an acidic slime that her sensitive tiger nose despised. She backed away from the mess, so it didn’t get on her paws, and looked around, stunned at the noise and fury of the battle.

Daniel was a whirlwind of berserker rage, slicing through the attackers like an avenging god. She’d never seen him in battle mode, and she caught her breath at the stark deadliness of his every move. His entire body was an extension of his weapons, and he smashed through a wave of the enemy in a brutal dance of death and destruction.

She shook her massive tiger head and looked around, realizing she’d been spellbound by Daniel for almost long enough that someone could have attacked her from behind. She was lucky; the battle raged on all around her, but none of it approached her yet. Her companions were not so fortunate. Alaric was right in the middle of it, flinging energy spheres from both hands, standing back-to-back with Quinn, who wielded a deadly looking gun in each hand. The rebels were outnumbered, but they apparently didn’t think so, or didn’t care, because they were steadily evening the odds. Daniel made a joke out of odds anyway. None could stand up to him.

A shout rang out somewhat ahead and to the left of where Serai stood, and she jerked her gaze away from Daniel again.

“A Mycenae!” Reisen shouted, pledging his part in the battle to his royal house in Atlantis, as he plunged a sword into one vampire’s heart and then withdrew it to remove the fallen foe’s head.

Serai snapped out of her mental paralysis at the sight. Daniel was destroying the attackers, Jack was doing the same, even the humans were fighting hard, and Reisen was dispatching enemies with only one hand. While, she, a princess of Poseidon turned into a fearsome beast of old, had four good paws and a mouthful of sharp saberlike teeth, and yet she stood there helplessly, like the foolish girl she’d promised herself she’d no longer be.

She took a moment to find the nearest threat and identified one of the vampires trying to sneak up on Reisen from behind. She roared a challenge and a warning and sprang across the dozen or so paces to where the vampire had frozen, staring stupidly at the oncoming tiger.

Seeing an extinct animal charging him might have thrown him off his game.

She would have laughed if she’d had human vocal cords, but instead she roared again and then swiped one massive claw across the vampire’s throat and jumped aside as the fiend’s head dropped from its body.

Guess her claws were pretty sharp.

Reisen stared at her in openmouthed disbelief. She tried to smile at him, but when he stepped back a pace, she realized a smile full of teeth like sabers wasn’t all that reassuring. She bounded off to find more enemies, instead of worrying about it, and then fell heavily to the ground, mid-bound, when every ounce of her energy and magic suddenly drained completely out of her body and left her nearly unconscious. There was nothing gradual about it; one moment she’d been ferociously killing that vampire and then she was on the ground as if smashed by a giant hand.

She lay on her side, panting, a stupendously large tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, and then the magic sustaining her shape-change vanished and she lay, limp, one helpless Atlantean maiden in the center of a massive battle.

Out of the stasis pod, into the grave. Perhaps that would become a new popular expression after she died. At least she’d retained her clothing during the shift and wouldn’t die naked. There was something for her memorial service. Didn’t die naked.

Daniel flew through the air toward her—actually flew; her muddled mind told her that if she survived this she had to ask him how he did that—and landed on the ground with one foot on each side of her waist, standing over her prone body.

“If you die, I’m going to haunt you,” he growled at her, his fangs fully bared, and then another of the attackers came at him, screaming something about points for killing the Primator. Daniel met the attack with crossed daggers and then he sliced downward, and another head rolled across the ground.

Serai’s thoughts tumbled crazily; she realized she was near hysteria when she started to hum “vampire heads are falling down” to the tune of some song buried in her memory about a London bridge, and then when everything went suddenly, eerily quiet, she wondered if she’d lost her hearing or her mind.

Or both.

But then a woman—it sounded like June, maybe, but Serai wasn’t sure—screamed, “The tiger is down.” Serai had just enough time to be touched that the landwalkers cared about her even though they’d just met her, before Quinn raced past. A moment later, Quinn started screaming, too, and even Serai’s exhausted mind began to realize that it wasn’t her they were talking about.

She wasn’t the tiger who was down.

“Jack!” Quinn screamed, over and over. Just his name, again and again and again.

Then Serai heard Alaric’s unmistakable voice. “I’m sorry, Quinn. He’s dead.”

Chapter 11

Daniel stared down at the limp, blood-soaked form of the tiger who’d been Quinn’s best friend in the world, and a bleak sense of futility washed over him. Why? Why was it always the good guys—the best of them—who paid the highest price? He tightened his hold on Serai, who had insisted on standing on her own two feet when he’d picked her up from the ground. When he’d seen her fall, he’d almost faced death for the second time that day. If he lost her now . . . but no. Better to focus on the immediate reality.

Jack was down, and Quinn was losing her mind over it. He could feel her maddened anguish searing through him because of the blood bond and realized, yet again, that he couldn’t help her.

Alaric tried to pull Quinn away from Jack, but she screamed and fought him off.

“No, leave me alone! Wait. You can heal him,” she said imploringly, tugging on Alaric’s hand. “You healed me before. I’ve seen you heal lots of people. You can do it. Fix him.”