10. Nico
NICO
The switchbacks fall away behind us and I take them faster than the rental can comfortably hold, gravel spitting from the tires, my eyes going to the mirror more than the road.
It's the print I can't release. Pressed into the dust at the tunnel mouth, the tread crisp where ours had already gone soft. Someone stood there. Watched us descend. Left before we climbed out—no scent on the wind, nothing but cypress and old rain.
"You've gone quiet again," Riley says. She has her boots braced against the dash, one arm folded across her ribs where she struck stone.
"Quiet is useful."
"Quiet is creepy when you do it." She tilts her head toward me. "So talk. You said the message points to a saint by the sea. A drowned one. I want to know what that means before I climb into another hole in the ground on your say-so."
I downshift into the descent toward the coast. "Saints by the sea are common.
Drowned saints are not. There were chapels along this shore built over relics lost to the water—storms, raids, a deliberate sinking when something needed to be hidden faster than it could be moved.
My kind used those chapels. A route ran the length of this coast before there were roads.
Way stations. Places to wait out daylight.
Places to leave a thing where no one would think to dig. "
"Your kind." She says it flat, still testing the shape of it. "You realize how insane that sounds out loud."
"You saw the proof three nights ago. Insanity is no longer your problem."
She laughs, short and without humor. "No. My problem is that I stole an overpriced rock and now there's an old man lecturing me about secret tunnels, and I can't tell which of us is the bigger liability. How old are you exactly?"
"Four-hundred-and-twelve. I have never been the liability."
"Old then. That's exactly what a liability says."
I almost smile. I do not let myself. "We survived by control.
Secrecy. Archives no human hand has touched.
Relics buried so deep most don't know they exist. There were factions—old ones—who built systems to keep dangerous knowledge away from humans and from vampires who couldn't be trusted with it.
The vault is the largest of those. If what's inside it ever reached the surface, your species would not survive the knowing. Neither would mine."
She turns in the seat to face me fully. "You decide. You've all just decided, for centuries, what humanity can handle. What we get to know. Whether we even get to know we're being hunted in our own world." Her voice goes sharp. "That's not protection. That's a leash with better manners."
The counterargument is in my mouth. The certainty does not arrive the way it always has. "You think honesty would have saved more of you than silence did?"
"I think you never asked us." She faces the front again. "You just decided we'd break."
I have buried that exact statement for longer than she's been on this earth, and I dislike that a thief has dug it up in under a minute.
The coast opens below us, the water beaten under a low sky.
The chapel sits where the message promised—half-collapsed, its seaward wall gone, the floor running straight into the tideline so that at high water the nave drinks the Adriatic.
A drowned saint. Exactly so. Riley is out before the engine dies.
"The obsidian," she says, her hand going to the satchel at her hip. "It's freezing, again."
When I take it, it lies inert, an ordinary stone gone slightly cool. When she holds it, it pulses, and the pulse drags faintly toward the water, a compass needle hunting a pole I cannot see.
I keep my look normal. This is wrong. Relics of our making do not prefer a human hand. They do not prefer anyone. The thing in her grip behaves as though she is the lock and I am the stranger, and I have nowhere in my understanding to set that.
"It wants the water," she says.
"Or the marker. Come."
We pick along the broken floor to the seaward wall. I see only ruined stone. Riley crouches, runs her fingers along the lowest course, and stops.
"This was moved." She taps a block set slightly proud of the rest. "The mason cut the saint's mark on the wrong edge. Nobody does that. It's upside down because somebody pulled this stone out and shoved it back in a hurry." She glances up. "Your immortal masons were sloppy."
"They were not sloppy. Just fast." Which means someone hid something here under pressure.
She sets the relic to the block. The obsidian flares, a single line of light crawling the stone and resolving into a shape I know too well: a lion, winged, one paw on an open book. The mark of the city in the lagoon.
"Venice," I say.
Movement, up on the headland. A figure where there should be only gorse and wind—still, patient, the stillness of someone who does not want to be seen.
"We have company." I move Riley behind me with one arm. "Don't run. Running tells him you're worth chasing."
"He's already watching us, genius."
"Not certainty. Give him doubt." I sweep the ridge for a second shape, a third. One observer is a scout. Several is a net.
Riley does what I do not expect. She laughs, loud, leans into me like a tourist delighted by a view, and steers us both back toward the car at the lazy pace of two people who found nothing. "Lovers' ruin," she murmurs, still smiling at the sea. "Nobody chases bored lovers."
It is good craft. Better than good. The figure on the headland does not move, and I move away, slightly grateful for no drop of blood spilled.
My phone wakes against my chest before we reach the car. Cassandra. I answer driving.
"You still have the relic," she says, her voice level the way still water is level over depth.
"I have it. And potentially a watcher."
"You'll have more by morning." A pause, weighed. "Lucien Moreau broke cover an hour ago. A statement, through every channel that matters. He's stopped using The First Voice as a sealed signature and declared it openly."
"Openly."
"Publicly. Inside our channels, yes. Not to humans.
Not yet. He's offering a reward for the relic large enough to turn enemies into partners.
He's accusing the leadership of burying the vault to keep their thrones.
He's telling every faction in Europe that secrecy is a chain we forged for ourselves and the vault is how we break it. Nico. He sounds reasonable."
I look across at Riley—bruised, bright-eyed, the satchel held tight to her side, the only living thing the stone will answer.
"Then they'll be hunting her, not it," I say.
"They'll hunt both. I don't trust her. But I understand her worth now, and so will they. Keep her breathing."
The call ends. Riley is watching me, and she has heard enough.
"That voice," she says slowly. "It was talking about me."
"It was talking about the relic."
"It said her." She doesn't look away. "What did I just become?"
I have always believed humans are something to move out of harm's way and forget.
But my grip has gone hard on the wheel, and I am already plotting the fastest road to Venice that keeps her out of the open, it'll take hours to get there but it's better that way.
Beneath the duty I have never once questioned, an older instinct is counting every way I could lose her—and refusing, absolutely, to allow a single one.