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.”
But the priest was shaking his head, a universe of sadness in his somber expression. “He’s gone, Quinn. I can heal grievous wounds, it is true, and you know I would do anything for you, but I cannot heal death. Only the gods can do that.”
Quinn screamed again, a sound of such utter, hopeless rage that it sent chills snaking down Daniel’s spine. Serai shuddered and turned her head to look up at Daniel, and the deep blue of her eyes had spread from her irises to completely cover the white, so that her eyes were entirely blue.
“He’s not gone,” she said, her voice gone deep with ancient power. “He’s almost gone, but a small part of him remains.”
Alaric stared at her and raised his hands almost as if to block any attack Serai might try. She made a dismissing motion and ignored him, focused entirely on Quinn and Jack.
“Put me down. There next to Jack,” Serai ordered Daniel, and he found himself obeying her without question. The magic resonating in her voice called to him on such a visceral level that it echoed in his bones. He wouldn’t have been able to refuse her—looking around, he saw that everyone but Alaric had stepped forward in response to her command, as well.
He helped her to sit on the ground next to Jack, and she gently nudged Quinn to one side and then lay down across the badly damaged tiger, so that her body draped across Jack’s.
Quinn grabbed at her. “No! What are you doing? Get off him!”
But Alaric gently pulled Quinn back and held her back by wrapping his arms around her. “Give her a chance, Quinn. The ancients had magic we have long forgotten.”
Quinn shook her head back and forth, over and over, but subsided, watching Serai with huge eyes filled with tears that she wouldn’t let fall.
She had reason to cry. Gashes so deep that Daniel could see bone in some of them covered every quarter of Jack’s body. Serai grasped his fur with both hands and started to hum softly, then turned those blind and darkling eyes to Quinn.
“Part of him lives, but only his animal side is still—barely—on this side of the river of death,” she said, so softly it was almost a whisper. “I can call to the tiger that is Jack and help him come back, but his human side is almost certainly lost forever.”
Quinn stared at Serai, pain and terror and awe mixed in her expression. “What are you?”
“I am Serai of Atlantis, and the Emperor gifted me with ancient magic not seen on this world since before my continent dove beneath the oceans,” Serai said in that terrible, beautiful voice of power. “I gift you his choice, as another once gifted me the choice of life or death for one I loved. Shall I let him seek out his ancestors in the afterlife or do you wish him to live, though it be perhaps only a half life?”
Her gaze met Daniel’s, and he understood, in a way he never had before, what it had cost her to make that choice for him—both that day and every day of her life since. Now she offered the same painful choice to Quinn, and he could do nothing but stand helplessly by and watch them.
The knife he’d pulled out of his side a little while ago during the battle had hurt far less.
“I choose life,” Quinn said, her voice ringing out. “You make him live, do you hear me? No matter what it takes. Make at least part of him live, and I can find the rest of him somehow. Someday. You make him live.”
Serai nodded and began singing, first softly and sweetly, and then stronger and more powerfully, as magic threaded through the lyrics and melody of her song. A gentle, glowing, golden light rose from Jack’s body and surrounded them, until they shone as if lit from within by miniature suns. Everyone watching them held his or her breath in unison until, seconds or centuries later, a rough coughing noise sounded and Jack’s body shuddered fiercely, almost rising completely up off the ground before it fell back down.
Quinn cried out and put her arms around Jack’s neck, but the tiger snarled at her and Alaric yanked her back and away, putting his own body between the two of them. Daniel pulled Serai away, too, but she shook her head and he settled for crouching down next to her, between her delicate skin and Jack’s powerful jaws.