Vampire in Atlantis

night since he’d hired a full-time blacksmith for the smithy, and he left Daniel to craft jewelry and run the shop during the day, claiming that he knew an honest man when he saw one and Daniel was just that.
    The final—and most deadly—attack came before anyone in Atlantis expected it. Daniel was alone with Serai in the shop, her bodyguards across the lane having a mug of ale on a hot summer’s day. The armies rode through the capital city so fast that Serai’s bodyguards died in the street trying to get to her. Daniel hid Serai in a hiding place underneath the floor of the shop and then tried to fight off the looters who targeted the shop for its treasures. The thieving soldiers of the marauding army stabbed him, struck him in the head, and left him for dead where he fell, lying over the trapdoor to the hiding place, covering it with his body.
    During the long hours that followed, until day turned to night, Serai was trapped in the dark, unable to move the trapdoor with Daniel’s weight on top of it. The worst part? She wasn’t alone. When night fell, her suspicions turned to fact: the master jeweler rose from his day sleep. He was a senior mage of the Nightwalker Guild; those who fed on the blood of willing humans. He pushed the trapdoor up, and Serai rushed to Daniel’s side.
    But it was too late. Daniel was so near death that he couldn’t hear her; his body icy cold. Only the faint rise and fall of his chest told them that Daniel had any life left in him at all. The Nightwalker mage offered Serai Daniel’s final choice: would she allow him to turn Daniel into a vampire, or should they let him die?
    She chose life for Daniel, and he spent the next several thousand years trying not to hate her for it, since she had escaped into death without him. But by the time she made that fateful choice, the Atlantean armies had beaten back the invaders, and Serai’s father’s guards burst into the shop and found her. They took her, fighting them all the way, away from the shop, away from Daniel, and away from any future that he and Serai might have hoped for. By the time Daniel was transformed from a nearly dead human into a nightwalker, Atlantis had vanished—destroyed—and all trace of it had sunken beneath the sea, or so everyone had believed.

     
    He finished his pathetic tale and looked up, expecting Quinn to mock him for his weakness. What he saw instead shocked him. Quinn, the tough rebel leader who’d challenged monsters and battled horrors that would have made other humans curl up and beg to die, had tears in her eyes.
    “Don’t,” he said harshly. “Don’t cry for me. I don’t deserve it.”
    “Maybe I’m crying for both of us,” she said quietly. “You know I can never be with Alaric. The best I can hope for is at least I take a bunch of the bad guys with me when I meet my early and violent end.”
    “A little melodramatic, Quinn.”
    “A lot true.” She shrugged. “You have a chance, though. Go find her. Help her. Be who she needs and save her from all of this. Most of us don’t get a second chance, Daniel. Don’t waste yours.”
    An icy wind swept into the cavern, interrupting whatever he’d been about to say, and Daniel threw himself in front of Quinn to protect her from this new danger, but it was only Alaric. Daniel almost laughed, even as the thought entered his mind. Only Alaric.
    The priest was Quinn’s biggest danger of all.
    Daniel felt the click inside his being that signaled the setting sun, but he waited to be sure Quinn—his friend—would be okay. “Are you all right with him?”
    Alaric made a low sound, deep in his throat, and his eyes glowed a hot green.
    “Save it, Priest,” Daniel advised. “You don’t want to go up against me. Nightwalker Guild. Senior mage. Look it up sometime.”
    Quinn smiled a little. “Seriously. He’s hell on picnic tables. Go ahead, Daniel. I’m fine.”
    Daniel didn’t wait any longer, especially since he knew the priest would give his own life to protect Quinn, and the two of them probably wanted some privacy anyway, to work out their own problems. If there was any possibility they could work them out, Quinn deserved that chance.
    Not his business. He launched himself into the air and flew out of the cavern, soaring through the cool dusk sky to where he knew Serai waited. He could feel her, and he needed to find her. Now. And make her understand that she could never, ever leave him again until she was safe.
    Then she could