Vampire in Atlantis

strong arms wrapped around her. She rested her head against the hard muscles of his chest and sent a mental thank-you to the portal, just as it opened again and deposited them in the torch-lit darkness of what looked like a smallish cavern. Stumbling a little as her bare feet touched the cold stone of the floor, though she was still safely ensconced in Daniel’s embrace, she had a mere second or two to register the small cluster of humans surrounding them before the tiger attacked.

Chapter 4
     

     
    Serai screamed and Daniel pushed her behind him, putting his body between her and the tiger and yelling at it.
    “Jack, no!”
    Jack? He knew the tiger’s name?
    The tiger ignored Daniel and charged, leaping through the air in full feline fury, its mouth opened in an earth-shattering roar. If she hadn’t been so terrified, Serai might have admired its feral beauty. Daniel leapt up to counter the tiger’s attack, and the two of them met in midair with a crash that resounded like thunder.
    The tiger caught Daniel in its deadly embrace and swiped at him with paws the size of dinner plates, each tipped with long, sharp claws. Daniel’s nightwalker strength was a match for the tiger, though, and he shoved the beast’s forearm away from his face and then hurled it across the cavern, where it smashed into the wall.
    A woman yelled at Daniel, by name, and Serai’s eyes narrowed as she examined the human female. Scruffy, small, and tough, with a waiflike exterior that covered a steel core, if the look in the woman’s dark eyes told true.
    “Daniel, leave Jack alone. How dare you blast in here and hurt him?” the woman shouted in one of the landwalker languages. English. Serai knew it, of course. The Emperor had taught her all languages.
    “Quinn, he attacked me, in case you didn’t notice,” Daniel replied, with what Serai believed to be admirable calm, under the circumstances.
    “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