Page 12 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

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?"