“What do you expect, you idiot?” Quinn snapped, hands on hips, as the tiger shook its massive head and staggered to its feet.
Serai’s fear vanished and anger took its place. Lovely, warming anger, which stiffened her spine and reminded her she was a princess of Atlantis. She stepped forward until she was standing next to Daniel and gave Quinn her haughtiest glare.
“Stand back, female, or face my wrath,” Serai declared in English, holding her hands out to her side in the ready position.
Quinn’s mouth fell open, and the impudent woman began to laugh. At Serai. Anger heated up, became rage.
“Seriously? ‘Face my wrath’?” Quinn shook her head. “Daniel, where did you get her? Melodrama R Us?”
Serai’s face flushed. It had sounded a little over the top even as she said it, but she wasn’t exactly experienced at facing down humans in combat. The tiger paced forward, snarling at Daniel, until it stood next to Quinn.
“I’m out of practice at issuing warnings, human,” Serai snapped. “But how is this for something you can understand ? Keep your pet kitten away from Daniel, or I will be forced to harm it.”
The tiger paused, mid-snarl, tilted its head to the side, and stared at her, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. It almost looked like he, too, was laughing at her.
Quinn laughed. “Right. Daniel, tell your girlfriend there that we don’t have time for all this posturing and to stay away from Jack or she’ll get hurt. Now we need to talk about what you’re doing here—”
The tiger’s snarl interrupted the human just before it signaled its intent to attack by bunching its powerful muscles and tensing for the leap. Daniel growled deep in his throat, almost as wild as the tiger, but Serai was suddenly fed up with all of them. She called to the pure magic of Atlantis, the magic she had once wielded with little skill but that now rushed to her call. Jack leapt into the air again, but this time Serai knocked Daniel out of the way, and she sprang up to meet the tiger.
On its own terms.
Daniel fell backward, knocked out of the way by more than a quarter ton of tiger. He landed on his ass, and bounced back up immediately, wincing as the tigers crashed into each other. Serai had transformed in an instant’s shimmer of magic into an enormous tiger—bigger even than Jack, nearly as big as a horse. She roared, and Daniel almost fell over.
She wasn’t just a tiger. She was a saber-toothed tiger.
“Daniel!” Quinn screamed, just as he leapt toward the two tigers. “Do something! She’s going to kill him!”
The few other humans in the room that he’d ignored up to that point suddenly had weapons in their hands, and Daniel didn’t know what to do first to protect Serai. As it turned out, he didn’t have to do anything at all. Jack, who was probably even more shocked than Daniel, did it for him. The big cat rolled onto his back and presented his snowy white belly to Serai in a blatant display of surrender and submissiveness. Daniel, who’d seen Jack fight in both his tiger and human forms, was amazed. No way would the Jack he knew have backed down from a fight.
The shimmer of shape-shifter magic curled around Jack’s form even as Serai lightly clamped her massive jaws around his neck, so gently that the enormous curved sabers of her teeth didn’t break the skin of Jack’s human neck when he returned to human form.
His naked, human form.
It was Daniel’s turn to growl. “Get dressed, shifter.”
Quinn made some kind of signaling gesture and the rest of them immediately put their weapons down. Daniel nodded to himself. When the leader of all North American human rebels gave her troops a command, she could expect instant obedience. She’d certainly earned their respect.
She’d always had his.
“Maybe you could ask your girlfriend to let me up?” Jack said, smiling a little but carefully not moving at all. Serai released him and backed away, then stalked over to Quinn and snarled at her.
Quinn held her hands up in front of her, the universal signal for “you win, don’t bite me,” and Daniel could have sworn Serai, still in tiger form, smirked. She padded over to him and curved around his body for a moment, then shifted from extinct tiger to haughty Atlantean princess in seconds. She, unlike Jack, was fully clothed.
Jack laughed and quickly dressed in clothes someone tossed him. His shifter magic was so powerful he generally shifted into human form with his clothing intact, but he either had been shocked out of his routine by the saber-toothed tiger suddenly appearing from nowhere, or the display of nakedness was simply to poke at Daniel.
If the latter, it had worked. Daniel started after Jack again, but Serai caught his arm.
“I think we’ve had enough of this,” she said quietly, and he whipped his head around to look at her, really look at her, and realized she was on the brink of collapse. “I’m very tired, Daniel. It has been a long . . . time.”
Her eyes rolled back in her head and he caught her, swinging her into his arms just before she fell to the stone floor of the cave. Pain and remorse stabbed at him. Yet again, after all these years, even when given a miraculous second chance, he was failing her.
“Quinn, I need your help,” he said, ignoring Jack. “She’s weak and needs to rest.”
Quinn swept her gaze over Serai’s unconscious form, still dressed in the silken gown, and then she nodded. “Of course. We can get you a place to sleep and warmer clothes for her. We’re camping out here, but you probably knew that, or why would you be here?”
He grimly shook his head. “Trust me, I had no idea. I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
Jack walked closer, ignoring Daniel’s scowl, and inhaled deeply, as if scenting Serai. “I wasn’t about to hurt her, and you know it, vampire,” the cat shifter said. “She’s beautiful, Daniel. She’s not a shifter, though, and she smells like . . . Atlantean? How did she do that? And a saber-tooth? They’ve been extinct so long—”
“Probably around ten or eleven thousand years,” Daniel interrupted dryly. “I’ll explain later, if you’re done trying to kill me.”
Jack scowled at him. “If I’d been trying to kill you, you’d be dead.”
“Think again, little kitten,” Daniel advised flatly. “Remember who hit the wall.”
“Children,” Quinn interrupted. “Enough. Let’s get her some rest, and then you have some explaining to do, Daniel.”
Daniel’s temper flared, and for the first time in the years he’d known her, he let it loose at Quinn. “I am vampire. Senior mage of the Nightwalker Guild, and formerly primator of all vampires in this infant of a country. Tread softly before you think to issue orders to me, human.”
He felt her shock through the blood bond he’d once had to force on her to save her life. Jack started to say something, but Quinn cut him off with a raised hand. The uncomfortable truth was, the blood bond ran both ways. She could probably sense Daniel’s emotions, too. She was certainly looking at him with more than a little sympathy in her dark eyes.
“Daniel deserves our trust, Jack.” She issued a few quiet requests, and one of the humans motioned to Daniel to follow him down a dark corridor.
Quinn’s slightly raised voice stopped him. “We’re near Sedona, Arizona, Daniel. And we’re in big trouble.”
He almost smiled. “With you, what else is new?”
Serai woke as Daniel put her down on a pallet in what looked like another room in the same cavern. Same dark stone walls. Same dank stone-and-dirt-cavern smell. A small fire glowed in a corner of the room, giving off a bit of heat and light, but not enough to really help. She was shivering bone deep and felt like she might never be warm again.
Daniel sat on the edge of the narrow bed as he pulled rough blankets around her, but his hands stilled as he realized she was awake and looking at him.
“How are you feeling?”
She lifted one shoulder. “I’ve been better, but I’m alive. I’m free. There’s much to be said for that.”