Vampire in Atlantis

chirping or something, not talking. They were vampires, and they were clumsy amateurs. Loud and arrogant, without a clue somebody might have been here to hear them.”

“Lucky for us, surely?”

He touched her cheek and smiled at her, trying to shove the knot of fear and rage for her—for what might happen to her if they didn’t succeed—deeper in his gut. She didn’t need to know he had the slightest doubt.

“Everything is lucky for us. When we’re done with this little errand, we’ll go to Vegas.”

She laughed. “Isn’t that in the desert? With the places humans go to shove money in machines and listen to the little bell sounds?”

He shook his head. “I think that was one strange filter the Emperor put your knowledge of the world through.”

“Yes, I would agree,” she said seriously. “Who is Justin Bieber, and why is his hair poisonous to small girls?”

It was a long time before he could stop laughing hard enough to answer her.

They made good time, considering, and had hiked nearly three miles when she admitted to needing a break. She drank water and ate some bread and nuts from her pack, while he stared at her and tried not to think about how sweet her blood might taste.

It was a very unsatisfying rest break, which only got worse when she pinned him with that sapphire gaze and asked the one question he’d been praying she’d never get around to asking.

“What happened to you after you became a nightwalker? What have you been up to for the past eleven millennia?”

He stood up so fast he knocked over the rock he’d been using for a seat. “We need to get going. Definitely no time to discuss boring details of the past several thousand years.”

She put her things away in her backpack and didn’t answer him, but he could feel the weight of her disappointment—or disapproval—in her silence.

“It’s not a pretty story,” he finally said, not looking at her. Not wanting to see her face.

“I don’t want pretty. I want the truth. All I’ve ever wanted. Your history is a part of you, and I love . . . I love to hear about the past,” she said, biting her lip.

Daniel felt like the rock he’d been sitting on had just slammed into the side of his head. She loved him? Had she been about to admit to that?

No. Of course not. He was a damned fool to think it.

“Not my past,” he said flatly. “Nobody would love to hear about my past.”

“Then don’t tell me all of it. Just tell me the part that happened right after you became a nightwalker. What happened? Did it hurt? Was the mage training hard?” She slipped her hand in his so naturally that he almost didn’t notice it until they’d taken a few steps, and then a wave of warmth and peace swept through him and he tightened his fingers, never wanting to let her go.

They walked in silence for nearly ten minutes, Serai apparently content to wait for his response, while he considered what to say. Finally he shrugged. Let her hear it, then. Let her know firsthand what a monster he was. It would be easier for her to let him go when the time came.

Easier for him to leave her to a better fate, as well.

“I became a monster. There was nothing left of the Daniel you knew; he lost himself to the bloodlust and the pain of losing you.”

She flinched a little, but tightened her grip on his hand. “I’d heard it was bad at the beginning, for the newly made.”

“It’s bad enough, as far as I saw from others, but never as bad as I became, or at least that’s what they told me. I had lost you forever. I thought you were dead. I had nothing else to live for, so I didn’t bother to live. I wanted to die, but the monster’s sense of self-preservation was too strong.”

He heard her indrawn breath, but ruthlessly continued. She’d wanted to hear it. She could hear it all.

“By the time I was sane enough to think that maybe the story I’d heard was wrong, that maybe you lived, Atlantis was gone. Vanished beneath the sea. After that, I became a monster the like of which the world had never seen. For several years, I raged and rampaged, killing humans and treating them as nothing more than prey for slaughter. I went after the criminals and the rogue soldiers, those who looted and pillaged and raped. I killed them all and drank their blood and I gloried in it.”

She stopped walking, but he refused to look at her.

“You were trying to achieve some sort of justice,” she said, but he ruthlessly cut her off, before she could get carried away with some false idea of his nobility.

“I was a murderer, after vengeance. Nothing more. Don’t try to make me out to be anything heroic. It would be the worst kind of lie,” he said roughly.

“So what changed?”

He started walking again, all but dragging her along. “What do you mean?”

“What changed? That’s not who you are now, so what changed?’

He flashed back to that moment, that one crystal-clear moment in time. The moment he’d never forget.

“I met a girl who reminded me of you,” he confessed, the words almost dragged out of him.

The memory that he could never, ever forget. As if on command, it played again in his head in brilliant, heartbreaking color:

He’d attacked a small village where a gang of marauders lived, killing and maiming every man in it without regard for anything but the ever-present, voracious bloodlust, when a girl threw herself on his back and started punching him in the head. He threw her off without a thought, but when he turned, he realized that she was only a child. He never, ever killed children. Even in his madness, he’d retained that much of himself.

But in a flash of light from the fire, he realized something else: she looked like his Serai. Not exactly, not like a sister or daughter or even a cousin. But there was something in the curve of her cheek and the fall of her hair that arrested him and froze him in place.

“How can you do this? Are you a monster?” the girl cried out, but he didn’t hear her. He heard her words in Serai’s voice, and he was destroyed.

He threw all the gold in his pockets at the girl and ran. Ran, and then flew, and never stopped until he found himself deep in the middle of a forest so old and dark and deep that the humans believed it to be cursed. He opened a hole in the ground underneath an ancient tree and threw himself into it, covering himself up and losing himself to the pain.

The mage who’d turned him found him and coaxed him back to the surface. Cleaned him up and taught him a few hard truths. Told him he had a choice: study and learn and work to make the world a better place, or become one of the evil, lost ones. The first choice was the harder one.

Redemption would not be cheaply bought.

Daniel chose redemption. But a thousand years is a very long time, and although the world changed, evil remained the same. Finally his mentor gave in to despair and walked into the sunlight. On that day, Daniel chose a lesser death. He chose to put himself in a state of hibernation for a very, very long time, in hopes that perhaps the world would be different when he awoke. Better.

Worth fighting for.

He had no idea that he would sleep nine thousand years.

When he woke, the world had changed. He traveled all over it, helping where he could, studying and learning the new ways and customs and amazing technology. Unfortunately, people were still dying. But he met an unexpected group of allies: the Atlantean warriors. He didn’t bother to ask about Serai, though. Who would know anything about a girl dead for more than eleven thousand years?

Her quiet voice broke into his reverie. “But before that? You met the girl who looked like me, and then what? You . . . you fell in love?”

“What? No, I didn’t fall in love. I managed not to kill her, too, though.” He lifted her up and over a fallen tree. “Are we still on the right path?”

She closed her eyes again, for nearly a minute this time, and then nodded. “I’m so tired, though. I can still feel the Emperor, and it’s not moving. The witch hasn’t done anything with it in a while, as far as I can tell. Maybe