Vampire in Atlantis

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