Rare Vigilance by M.A. Grant

Chapter Eleven

“We’re going to Nell’s,” Cristian said as Atlas pulled away from the house.

“Why did Helias say you only have two hours?” Atlas asked.

Cristian leaned against the window and tapped his knuckles against the glass. “That’s how long Father will be at the clinic.”

Atlas tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “And why do we have to be home before your father?”

“I might have told him I would stay at the house tonight.”

Atlas started to brake, already looking for a place to turn the car around. His actions earned him a vicious look from his passenger. “Don’t turn coward on me now,” Cristian said. “None of the others want to risk Father’s displeasure and Andrei had to go with him. I figured you were the only other person who might not be afraid to come with me.”

It was a childish taunt, but it worked. If he wasn’t positive they’d be able to get to Nell’s and back before Decebal returned, he would have been more conflicted about giving in to Cristian’s obvious manipulation. As it was, he put his foot back to the gas and returned to the original route that would lead them to the warehouse. “Why all the subterfuge?”

“Father’s going to be tightening his grip on things for a while. I don’t know the next time I’ll be able to see Nell and the others.” Cristian frowned, then admitted, “I need to know they’ll be okay.”

Atlas didn’t press further. All he could do was turn up the radio, keep an eye on the clock, and drive on.

Cristian finally spoke again as they pulled up in front of the warehouse. “Father thinks someone’s going to come after me soon,” he admitted, staring out the windshield at the building. “I was the last person from the family to visit the clinic they hit.”

Atlas swallowed. “That’s concerning.”

“I know.” Cristian took a steadying breath. “Come in with me?”

“If that’s what you want,” Atlas replied.

Rather than admit it, Cristian unbuckled and climbed out of the car. He retrieved the duffel bag and waited for Atlas to follow. He did, lost in quiet contemplation. Pieces of the puzzle were coming together slowly and he feared he was responsible for the picture forming. He’d given Jasper Cristian’s schedule, including the clinics he’d visited. Last night, when Atlas texted him and demanded action, Jasper had replied, Taking care of it.

He’d never thought to ask what it was.

It wasn’t Nell who answered Cristian’s knock. The vampire who peered out through the cracked door was far younger, with wary eyes that widened at the sight of the visitors. “Cristian,” he said with outright relief, swinging the door open. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“Not for long, Samuel,” he said, handing over the bag. “We’re on a tight schedule tonight and—”

“Please! M-Mary went missing two nights ago,” Samuel said. He stumbled over the name, voice thick with emotion, and a guttural tug of warning drew Atlas closer to Cristian, who was entirely focused on the conversation. “We haven’t found her.”

“What?” Cristian breathed.

He swayed like the man had delivered a blow and Atlas reached out on instinct, pressing his hand to Cristian’s back to steady him. The smooth fabric couldn’t hide the slight chill of Cristian’s skin, or the way his ribs expanded and contracted faster with his shortened breaths. Atlas must not have overstepped his place, since Cristian didn’t draw away from his touch.

“She said she was hungry, but we didn’t know she’d slipped out until dawn. She didn’t come back.”

Cristian tensed beneath his hand and Atlas knew what he’d ask. He wouldn’t be able to deny the request either, not when he was partially responsible for whatever had happened. He shifted his hand higher, pressing his fingertips into the strong curve of muscle at Cristian’s shoulder blade. “We’ve got a little time,” he murmured. He focused on Samuel again. “Any idea where she may have gone?”

“She likes hunting two warehouses over,” Samuel said, pointing down the road they’d taken in.

“We’ll start there then,” Atlas decided. The decision snapped Cristian from his stupor. He offered Samuel a weak smile and said, “I don’t know when I’ll be back, so take care of Nell for me.”

“Of course,” Samuel promised. “Thank you for looking for Mary.”

Cristian followed Atlas back to the car, where he opened his trunk and pulled out his tire iron. He didn’t know if they’d need it, but he had no desire to walk into an unknown situation without some kind of weapon.

“What’s Mary like?” he asked Cristian. His flashlight wouldn’t illuminate, no matter how many times he shook it. The batteries were well and truly dead.

“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.

Atlas rose and looked out the windows. There, running in a sluggish line was the river, which meant the windows were pointed south. He doubted Mary had been dragged to this spot for the purpose of destroying her body; likely, the animal that did it was hoping to find a sheltered back corner, far from prying eyes, where it could enjoy its kill at its leisure. That observation wouldn’t change anything though, so he didn’t say it.

“That thing hunted her,” Cristian murmured. “There’s not much that could kill one of us. Whatever left those prints would have to be strong.”

“And fast,” Atlas said. He looked over the picture again, working through the details. “Have you ever seen anything that could take down a vampire this easily?”

He looked at Cristian and found the other man watching him already, expression wary. “I haven’t,” Cristian hedged, “but you have.”

It took a moment for the words to sink in and, when they did, he understood Cristian’s hesitance to broach the subject. Cristian had been in his head, had accidentally invaded his privacy, but he’d also suffered through the memory of the attack. He was the only one alive who had witnessed it through Atlas’s eyes. It was no longer just Atlas who could remember the creatures’ clawed hands and preternatural strength. Only Cristian was brave enough to revisit those memories and put the pieces together.

Atlas tried to scrape air past the bands of panic tightening around his ribs. “No,” he declared. “They can’t be here.”

“I’ve never seen anything like them before. It took a predator to kill Mary. Can you think of something else that could do that?”

“Of course not,” Atlas snapped. “But no one would believe my story.”

“I believe it,” Cristian said, painfully earnest. “Blood bonds don’t lie, Atlas. You can shift attention, you can guide someone to certain memories, but you can’t change the truth. You saw those monsters and survived them. Your blood is honest.”

“You don’t know me,” Atlas whispered, rubbing at his chest to ease the sharp pang of guilt clawing against his sternum. If Cristian only knew what he’d just tried to do the other night...

Cristian’s eyes flashed with a hint of gold, and his frustration was written on every tight line of his face. “I do, whether we want me to or not. I don’t know how they got here, but if those monsters are in Scarsdale, they’ll be hunting others the same way they hunted you. Mary put up a struggle. Other vampires will do the same. What do you think will happen if your monsters learn there’s even easier prey around? If they run across a human one night?”

They’d ripped through his platoon with thoughtless ease. Nothing had saved him or anyone else, not their training, not their weapons, not their strategy. They had fallen before they knew their lives were over. Civilians wouldn’t stand a chance.

“What do you propose we do?”

“I need to tell my father what’s hunting in his territory.”

“Will he listen to you?”

Cristian bit his lower lip. “I don’t know. He’s distracted now and—”

“You can tell him what I saw,” Atlas offered. Every word hurt on its way out, but he pushed on anyway. “If it’ll help convince him to stop these things, tell him whatever you need to about my past.”

He looked down at Mary’s ashes. “I can’t let this happen again.”

“Okay,” Cristian said quietly. He lingered over the ashes for a moment before declaring, “We don’t have much time.”

Atlas hated walking away from the ashes without doing anything, without relying on some tradition or ritual to acknowledge Mary’s death. Maybe finding her ashes was enough. It still felt like too little. He quickly scratched Mary’s name into the dirt beside the ashes with the end of the tire iron. It wasn’t enough to commemorate a life, he knew, but it would have to do until Cristian and Decebal could figure out how to keep others—vampire and human—from meeting a similar fate.

Cristian would have to face his father alone. Atlas had his own battle to fight. He needed to convince Jasper and his employer to delay their plans, at least until Decebal eliminated this new threat. As much as he wanted Decebal’s influence gone from his hometown, there were more dangerous monsters to fear now.

Cristian’s trust in Atlas’s memories was the only thing that held him together the rest of the night. He survived the end of his shift, with Decebal’s ill-tempered return and the suspicious glances shared by Cristian’s friends over Cristian and his dark moods. When he finally left and returned to his apartment, sleep escaped him. He lay in bed, replaying the night’s events and drafting what he’d say to Jasper’s employer. Bea came over for lunch and he went back to bed the moment she left. When he couldn’t put off getting ready for his next shift any longer, he forced himself up to shower and dress. He bribed himself to get into the car with the promise of picking up a coffee on the way. Getting a second one for Cristian, one of the disgustingly sweet, flavored things he favored for some godforsaken reason, seemed only fair exchange for his handling Decebal.

For the second night in a row, Cristian surprised him by anticipating his arrival, this time meeting him a step past the threshold. “Thank God you’re never late,” Cristian mumbled as he snagged hold of Atlas’s arm and dragged him back outside. Decebal’s usual security avoided them as they made their way through the gardens. Well, as Cristian led Atlas forcibly through the gardens. He didn’t let go until they were at the edge of the lawn where it bordered a small copse of pristinely maintained woodland.

“What’s going on?” Atlas asked, confused by Cristian’s erratic behavior and still juggling the coffees.

“I needed to talk to you,” Cristian said. He paused, took in Atlas again, and tilted his head. “Why do you have two coffees?”

“One’s for you,” Atlas said, and handed it over.

Cristian lit up and took a careful sip. He closed his eyes and hummed in pleasure. Even from a foot away, Atlas could smell the peppermint on his breath when he said, “Thanks.”

“Sure. Now, why can’t we talk inside?”

“Father’s on edge and talking about this around him wouldn’t be wise.”

“But you did talk to him?”

“Oh, yes. I told him something was hunting vampires in his territory, but when he found out who was being hunted, he told me he had bigger problems to focus on first.” Cristian didn’t bother to hide his resentment of Decebal’s dismissive attitude. “Compassion costs capital, it seems.”

“Maybe he’ll come around,” Atlas said.

Cristian traced the top of the cardboard sleeve. “When I told him what I thought was hunting our people, he told me it was impossible. That I was imagining things that didn’t exist.”

The sharp smile twisting Atlas’s mouth was involuntary, and he tried to hide it with a sip of his drink. “Sounds about right.”

“He has to be lying,” Cristian said incredulously.

“Maybe, but if he doesn’t want to give you answers, you’re shit out of luck.”

Cristian took a slow sip of his drink before glancing away and muttering, “Not quite.”

“What did you do?”

“I might have reached out to a few other people. One of them wants to meet to talk about it. She said it was something she couldn’t discuss over the phone. There’s just one problem.”

Atlas closed his eyes and prayed for patience. “Which is?”

“Father can’t know. He doesn’t like her, so we can’t meet anywhere nearby.”

“Where would we be meeting her?” Atlas asked.

Cristian winced. “The Mollycoddle. A pub outside Desolation House.”

It was a confirmation of his suspicions, but he balked at the answer anyway. “Wait, Desolation House...that town by the wilderness area?” It was a long drive, far longer than anything they’d done before, including their ill-fated trip to Hahn Lake. “When?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Impossible.”

Cristian’s mouth set in a stubborn line. God, he was digging in for a fight, which was never a good sign. “Father’s got a donor’s dinner and then has to finish up work at the clinic. He’ll be gone all night. I got his schedule from Helias. If we leave right when you get here, we’ll have plenty of time to get back before anyone knows we were gone.”

That wasn’t his concern. He was more concerned about their attending a strange meeting in a quiet rural town far away from Decebal and any backup they might need. “Why there?”

“Neutral territory.” Cristian nudged at the grass with the toe of his shoe. “It’s in the no-man’s-land between Father’s boundaries and some others’ territories. We’re less likely to run into anyone who could cause problems.”

“This is a terrible plan,” Atlas warned. Cristian nodded, but it wasn’t enough. Atlas needed to see him, to read his face and expressions, to make sure he knew the truth, not the pretty stories Cristian told everyone else. “Well, Mr. Slava?”

Cristian huffed, but finally looked up, flushed with embarrassment or irritation. “Yes,” he admitted. “But it’s the best I could come up with.”

“If I refused to drive you there, what would you do?” Atlas asked him. His eyes flicked to the side and Atlas hummed low in his throat. “Eyes front, Cristian.”

He obeyed beautifully. His relieved exhalation at the command, the tightness that fell away from the corners of his eyes and mouth, even his relaxed stance as he faced Atlas now, all involuntary reactions. A moment later, Cristian realized what he’d done, but it was too late to deny it. There was no way Atlas would make him try to deny it. No, such trust deserved to be protected, not mocked. The more he learned what Cristian did for those in his care, the more he understood its value.

“Good,” Atlas murmured and he swore Cristian’s pupils dilated even more, until his irises were thin rings of color barely visible from the distant lights of the house. “Now, answer my question. If I didn’t drive you to this meeting, what would you do?”

“Find someone else to help me get there,” he said.

“Who?”

His free hand—the one not clutched around his coffee—clenched into a fist and released. He smelled of peppermint and coffee and cream and desperation. “Probably Andrei. He’s offered to drive me anywhere you won’t.”

Of course Andrei would make such an offer. He didn’t like or trust Atlas, and this was an easy way to earn Cristian’s favor. “Will you go with me?” Cristian asked when the silence had stretched too long.

“Yes,” Atlas said, “but I’m going to take precautions. If we’re traveling that far, I want backup. Would Ioana come too?”

“Probably.”

“Does Helias know what you’re planning? Is he going to cover for you if your father asks questions?”

Cristian shook his head. “He’s taken enough risks on me lately. I don’t want him involved in this.” He took one last, long draw on his drink. Atlas grimaced at the thought of all the syrups sitting at the bottom of the cup. When he broke for air, Cristian asked, “So we’re doing this?”

Atlas sighed. “It had better be worth it.”