Page 41 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

NICO

Three of them hit me at once, and a fourth puts a wooden round through the meat of my shoulder to make the point land. None of it slows me the way they want. I throw the first into a rack of casings, and I am reaching for the second when Gabriel's arm bars across my chest from behind.

"Don't." His voice is wet, blood crusting one side of his face. "Look down. Look where your boot is."

I look. My foot rests half on a seam in the floor, the same kind Cassandra read above us, the kind cut to drop a ceiling. A hand's width forward and everything Lucien hasn't yet carried off burns under a mountain of black stone — and her with it, if she's anywhere past that wall. So I hold.

"He took her east," Cassandra says, low, already crouched at a sealed arch with her gloved palm flat to the rock. "Through the deep galleries. The passage answered to him, then closed. I can hear it grinding."

"Then open it."

"I can't, if I do it wrong, it collapses on top of her." Her amber eyes lift to mine, steady where I have none left. "You want her crushed to spite him? Be useful instead of terrifying."

The men I dropped are scrambling back to Lucien's side of the breach. I leave them be. Gabriel plants himself in the gap, broad, bleeding and refusing to move. Ten of our own arrived just as Lucien hit us because Gabe called them, and they have wild faces of vampires deciding whether to run.

Lucien's voice reaches us then, carrying through the throat of the vault, bouncing off chambers I cannot see.

"—copy the eastern manifests first. The purge records. The names struck through. Leave the treaties. No one weeps over a treaty."

I taste the strategy in it like blood. He is not robbing the place. He is editing it.

"He's choosing," Cassandra breathes. She has gone still over a row of empty cradles where cases sat an hour ago, the dust ghosting their absence. "Nico, look at what's gone. Massacres. Erasures. Everything he's left — context, cause, the why of it — he hasn't touched. He's building a story out of blood and cutting out the reason for every drop."

"Then we burn it." This from a young one at Gabriel's back, voice climbing. "Before he walks out with proof our own elders butchered people. If the world sees those names⁠—"

"The world won't see a thing if you bring the roof down," Gabriel says, almost kind, one hand splayed against the man's sternum. "Sit on that match."

"Gabriel," I say, without taking my eyes off the sealed eastern arch. "How many of ours can still stand?"

"Stand or stand usefully?" he asks, wiping blood from his mouth.

"Usefully."

He looks once across the chamber. "Six. Eight if desperation counts as a limb."

"It counts." I turn to the gray survivor nearest the cases. "You know these shelves?"

He blinks. "Better than most."

"Then you are with Cassandra. Anything Lucien's people missed, you mark. Anything copied out of order, you keep out of their hands. No heroics. No speeches. Just records."

The old vampire swallows, then nods.

I point to the young one at Gabriel's back. "Take two and guard the western cases. If anyone reaches for anything, break the arm."

His fear finds somewhere to stand. "Yes."

Around us the silver-blue light shudders in the veins of the stone, patient, throwing our shadows across cases that hold the worst centuries anyone ever survived.

"Lucien does not need the whole vault. He needs the part that bleeds loudest. He takes the wound, cuts away the cause, and calls it truth. We stop them destroying them. We hold the archive. We get Riley back."

Gabriel's grin cuts through the blood. "That sounds like a plan."

"It is the beginning of one. And Riley is already working the rest from inside no doubt."

Because she is. Riley makes trouble wherever she needs to. The first sign comes from the walls. The eastern arch, sealed a moment ago in dead black, gives one thin pulse of blue. Not a flare. A stutter. Three short veins of light crawl across the stone, break, then curl back into a crooked loop. Cassandra goes still.

"There." Her gloved hand lifts, not touching. "That is not keeper-script."