8. Nico
NICO
The safehouse is a ruin behind us, smoke folding into the gray Vienna dawn, and I drive faster than any human should be comfortable with, because I can hear what she cannot.
Two kilometers back, an engine I don't recognize. A second team. Whoever sent the first wave didn't expect them to fail, which means they planned for the failure. Professionals do that. Amateurs hope.
"Slow down," Riley says from the passenger seat. "You're going to wrap us around a lamppost and do their job for them."
"No, I'm not." I take the curve without lifting my foot. The tires hold. They always hold.
She braces a bloodied hand against the dash.
The blood is hers — a shallow split across the palm she keeps flexing, like she's testing whether it still works.
I don't want to notice it. I count three more injuries she's hiding: the way she favors her left side, the stiffness pulling at one shoulder, the bruise blooming dark and ugly along her jawline where someone's elbow found her in the chaos.
She hasn't said a word about any of it. She just keeps sitting upright, eyes flicking to the door handle, the side mirror, the slot of dark between two buildings where a person might run.
Inside, I'm fighting the old predatory reflex her blood wakes, and hating that it answers at all.
She's already planning to bolt. I almost admire it.
"Back there," she says. "When you stepped in front of me. You should have gone down."
"I didn't."
"Yes, thank you, I noticed." Her voice scrapes thin, all nerve and no patience. "That weapon fired. Something hit you. I heard it. I saw your coat tear. And then you just kept moving like getting shot was a scheduling inconvenience."
I keep my eyes forward. This is the part I'd planned to skip, the conversation I'd rehearsed a dozen ways around if I was ever faced with the truth and a human. But she saw. There's no unseeing it.
"Riley." I set her name down flat and deliberate. "The men hunting you are not police. They aren't competition. They are not human."
"Don't." Her voice thins to a wire. "Do not do a cryptic-stranger thing right now. I have had a bad few nights."
"Vampires." I say it the way I'd report a road closure. "They're vampires. So am I."
For a moment she only breathes. Then she laughs — sharp, ragged, with nothing warm under it.
"Sure. Vampires." She jabs a finger at me. "You realize that's the exact sentence a man says right before he keeps me in a basement."
"Nico Serrano," I say.
"What?"
"You said you didn't know who I am." I focus on the road. "Now you do."
"Great. The vampire has manners. Huge comfort."
"You watched someone take a round through the chest and stand up." I cut across her, even and cold. "You felt how the relic went cold when the fighting started. You've felt it pulse since Prague and told yourself it was nerves. Stop lying to yourself. You're definitely sharper than that."
That one lands. In the corner of my eyes, I see it behind hers, that quick cataloguing. She isn't stupid. That's the trouble. She was never once going to be stupid.
"Prove it," she says.
So I summon it to rise. I turn my head and let her watch the gray of my eyes go bright, luminous, the thing under the suit surfacing for a single heartbeat before I press it back down where it lives.
She flattens herself against the door. In her lap, the relic — bundled in a torn jacket — drops cold enough that frost ghosts up the window beside her. The radio collapses into static. A thin seam of light crawls across the obsidian, a new line in the map that wasn't there an hour ago.
"It's answering you," I murmur, more to myself than to her. It shouldn't. It should wake for its makers, for old blood, for me. Not for a thief from nowhere with a cut on her hand. The wrongness of it settles low in my gut and stays there.
My phone jolts against the console. I answer without slowing.
"Is she contained," Cassandra says.
"Define contained."
A pause. "The relic activated again. We caught the signature during your engagement, Nico. It lit up half the network. Three factions are moving on Vienna right now, and those are only the ones we can see. Is the thief alive?"
I should say no. The clean answer — the mission answer — is no, asset recovered, loose end closed. The word forms behind my teeth. It will not come out.
"She's alive."
The quiet on Cassandra's end runs a beat too long. Cass misses nothing, and I've just handed her something.
"Interesting," she says, careful now. "And you've reached that decision because — "
"Because she's the only thing it reacts to. Send me a corridor out of Austria. Backroads, no cameras." I end the call before she can finish the thought I can already hear forming.
Riley is watching me. "Who was that?"
"Someone who wants you dead slightly less than the people behind us do."
The phone goes again. Gabriel this time, and he doesn't wait either.
"Please tell me you didn't kill the asset and plan to sort out the consequences later," he says.
"She's in the car."
"Oh, thank every god. You grew a strategic bone.
" A breath. "Listen, brother, this is past us now.
Four factions, maybe five, all converging on one piece of obsidian.
You can't recover this clean — not anymore.
And if you put that woman in the ground, you lose the only living person who can wake the map.
You know that. I know you know it, because you've gone quiet, and you only go quiet when I'm right. "
I despise that he's right. I despise the easy warmth in his voice while my whole disciplined world tips a few degrees under me.
"I'm handling it," I hang up.
Riley has coiled in her seat, the stillness of something that's decided to wait for one opening. "Stop the car."
"No."
"I'm not your prisoner."
"No," I agree. "You're a liability with a heartbeat, and every monster in Europe is currently driving toward the sound of it.
Run, and you're dead by tomorrow. Hand me the relic, and you're dead within the hour — because the moment I have it, I have no reason to keep you breathing, and they have every reason to make sure you never talk.
I'm not offering you trust. I'm offering you the only version of tonight where you wake up tomorrow. "
Her fingers tighten on the bundle. Frost spiders across her knuckles. She's furious, and beneath the fury she's running the same brutal arithmetic I'd run in her chair. Drop worthless. Every door she counted on, on fire.
"Temporary," she says at last, biting down on the word. "We figure out what this stone actually is. Then I walk."
"Temporary," I answer.
It isn't agreement. It's two armed enemies laying their weapons on the same table, neither one looking away from the other's hands.
On the relic, the seam of light brightens and narrows to a point. Not a full map. Not yet. Just a broken line, a southern pull, and one symbol I recognize from old archive sketches: a monastery mark, carved by hands that should have been dust centuries ago.
Riley sees me looking. "What?"
I turn the wheel before the pursuing headlights find us again.
"It gave us a direction," I say. "And I know where the first door is likely to be."