Sanctuary. ?ilina, Slovakia.

  Nikolas sent word that he’d set up passage for them to France to leave in three days. From what Alex could tell, it hadn’t sounded like an offer. That was fine with him right now. He knew Misha would help them handle it and if it meant they could relax on a train across Europe instead of hitching freight and sleeping rough, he could be okay with a lot.

  In a carefully choreographed and synchronized dance, Alex and Reeve were rarely in the same room for longer than a few minutes over the next few days. Even when they weren’t in the same room, he could tell Reeve was quieter than normal, especially after he burnt his damn hand off—and for a guy who didn’t say much unless he had to (which generally meant he was correcting someone or giving orders) talking less may as well have meant not talking at all.

  Gareth and Hannah were awkward around Alex too. No one said anything about it, but he saw them exchange knowing looks when they thought he wasn’t paying attention. He knew the whole thing made them both uncomfortable. They could get in line.

  Misha was too busy being Misha (grumbling and speaking various languages into his phone about fifty decibels louder than necessary) to be much company, but Alyosha stuck with Alex without being weird about it. Alex wasn’t sure if it was because Reeve had told him to keep an eye on him or not, but Alex didn’t think so. He didn’t ask because Alyosha was sort of a shit liar and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  They passed the time exercising in their small room or teaching card games to Emil, the other Child in the house. He was about Alyosha’s age, and with an awkward mix of non-fluent languages and hand miming, they made themselves understood.

  For the most part though, everyone was keeping to themselves in the painfully close and quiet house.

  Alex was alone in the kitchen, frying up a grilled cheese, when he heard pounding at the door. He froze, taking the pan off the heat and looking around, realizing he wasn’t even sure where everyone was. His mind ran to Church members who’d be less okay with them skipping the red lights (or hunting), and Nikolas, whom he really didn’t want to have to manage by himself. He craned his head toward the stairs and yelled, “Misha?”

  The pounding sounded again, slower this time with long pauses between knocks. Alex groaned and jogged to the front of the house, grabbing the rifle they kept beside the door. Neptune wouldn’t knock, he reminded himself. He checked the slide on the gun, unlocked the door, and yanked it open.

  Misha nearly fell over onto him, hauling Emil in after. Alex caught at him and it took more strength than he expected to keep him upright.

  “Shut it,” Misha urged, breathing hard. With their black coats, he couldn’t tell how bad off they were, but the fabric felt wet. Alex hadn’t even seen them go out.

  He slammed the door and yelled for Gareth this time, louder than before. Misha laid Emil down on the floor and sat beside him with an ungraceful plop, one arm completely limp. Alex‘s hands hovered in midair. “Where are you hurt?” he asked, more than a little frantic.

  Misha only blinked slowly at first, his eyelids trembling in response, which dragged Alex’s heart down into his stomach. Misha’s eyebrows tensed, concentrating, and after what felt like an hour, he gestured vaguely toward Emil who had closed his eyes. Alex bent and started looking him over and patting him on the cheeks. He found half a dozen wounds on Emil and a blood-soaked cloth tourniquet made out of Emil’s missing shirt high up on one arm, hiding something worse. Emil didn’t open his eyes. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” Alex muttered.

  He straightened, hearing feet pounding down the stairs.

  “You okay?” Gareth called from the bottom of the stairs.

  “No!”

  Alex sat back up and turned to see Misha had slumped over just in time for the others to barrel into the room, guns drawn, and erupt into a din of shouting and cursing. Hannah shouted over all of them, ordering them to shut up and sending Alyosha to get her bag while she triaged. It reduced the panic in the room, but not by much.

  Hannah and Reeve worked to move Misha onto his back while Alex and Gareth pulled the bulky coat off of Emil. With a clearer view, it was obvious the injuries were bites. More than one had deep chunks of flesh missing. Gareth sucked in a breath and shook his head at no one. The blood had drained out of his face. Gareth gathered up the bloody clothes and stepped back, eyes stretched, giving them a wide berth. Returning with the bag, Alyosha pushed in front of Gareth, locking eyes with Alex, and helped him wipe away the worst of the blood.

  “Keep pressure on everything you can,” Hannah snapped to them as she examined Misha. Hannah had cut his shirt off, showing a ragged gouge pouring blood on Misha’s forearm, a hideously swollen wrist on the opposite arm, and a long maroon-black blotch of a bruise spreading across his ribs. “This arm is definitely fractured.”

  Getting up close to Emil, Alex could see the tourniquet was still seeping and Emil’s skin was grey and clammy. He felt cold. “Hannah?” Alex called, looking up.

  She looked over at them and he saw her face fall. “I’ll be right there.” She blew hair out of her face and turned back to Misha. “Can’t he just mimic Gareth?”

  “Not while he’s unconscious,” Reeve answered, somehow sounding calm.

  Hannah was glancing back and forth between Emil and Misha while she rooted through her bag. “Reeve, hold his legs up. Maybe we can get enough blood to his brain to wake him up long enough to heal.”

  Reeve nodded and took up a position by Misha’s boots.

  “Here,” she said to Alex and tossed him a small tube of skin bonder. “Clean and start sealing up those smaller cuts like I showed you.” Alex forced himself to take a couple of long breaths to steady his hands. “Alyosha, hold this,” she told him as she tied something off over Misha’s forearm and passed it off.

  Alex grabbed the antiseptic and splashed it over the least intimidating slashes with a grimace. Emil didn’t react. Alex clenched his jaw and crouched over him, using one hand to force the cuts closed and applying the glue with the other. Hannah suddenly appeared next to him, peering at the tourniquet and biting her lips together.

  “Gareth,” she raised her voice without looking up, “buddy. I didn’t want to do this to you but the cat’s out of the bag that you know how to suture and I need your hands.”

  “What?” Gareth asked from behind him. The flat tone of his voice made Alex want to turn around, but he was struggling with a too-wide laceration that he could barely pull together.

  “Close up Misha’s arm,” she ordered, “Interrupted stitch. I’ve gotta deal with this.”

  Alex finished with a laceration that was puckering in an ugly way but at least it wasn’t bleeding. He moved up to crouch beside Hannah, who was preparing a needle with quick, practiced movements.

  “Jesus, that’s so many of them,” she breathed.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  “Uh, get me a belt?”

  Alex nodded scanning the room, his mind going a little blank in panic. Gareth was bent over Misha, tying tiny knots with an expression he knew meant Alex shouldn’t attempt to talk to him for the rest of the night.

  “Take mine,” Reeve offered, gesturing with his useless, bandaged hand.

  It made him swallow but he went. Alex scooted over to where Reeve was kneeling, holding Misha’s legs near the ankles with them raised up to shoulder height. Reeve sat up a little straighter to give Alex more room to work. Alex unbuckled the clasp as quickly and impersonally as he could while he held his breath.

  Tugging at the buckle, the strip of leather slid loose and Alex hurried it over to Hannah without looking back. Hannah was elevating Emil’s tourniqueted arm.

  “Here,” she said, helping him set it in place. “As high up on the shoulder as you can get. Good. Now really crank on it.” He yanked the belt tight. Alyosha reached in and together they pulled harder, until the leather bit into the skin. “Good.” Hannah said again. “Now move.”

  Alyosha nodded to him that he had this and Alex sat back, feeling lost. He rubbed the blood drying into gritty beads on his hands off onto his jeans. Story was pulling at him in too many directions at once. Distorted flashes from Emil’s sweaty skin, ice-cold fear emanating from Gareth, and the long line of complicated images coming off Reeve and the unintentional brush of his skin in the rushed fumble for his belt. He needed to focus on something and it might as well be useful.

  “Does anyone need me right now?”

  No one answered for a long while until Reeve replied, “Good idea. Find out what the hell happened here.”

  He hated that Reeve was reading him and how well he knew what Alex needed to pull him out of the overwhelming Stories. Careful not to make eye contact, he made his way to Misha and rested one hand lightly on his head where his hair was damp from sweat. He let the Story dissolve into his fingers and closed his eyes.

  Alex reaches back and back until he finds Misha’s boots hitting the damp pavement, walking with Emil. He follows their silent march into town and waits beside them in empty alleyways watching the sparse street traffic. Emil crouches, sinks down on his heels, resting against the wall. Misha smokes and Alex almost thinks he looks bored, if not for the tension ready to spring in Misha’s muscles. Alex leans forward through the Story, letting the night wash past them until he begins to follow them home.

  It happens fast and then feels so slow. Footsteps race up at them from behind and, before they can fully turn around, a hand snatches Misha up and slams him half a meter off the ground into the corner of a building and holds him there. The impact snaps Misha’s head to the side, bouncing it off the brick. Alex recognizes the angle as the bruise that will form on his ribs. The dog is no one he recognizes but he knows Misha does.

  Alex can feel his own breath coming too quick in shock. Instinctively he reaches for his hip but remembers where he is as he’s patting himself down. Emil responds immediately, his long knife drawn, throwing a wild swing aiming for the outstretched arm. The dog drops Misha, who collapses in a heap, to swat at Emil, hitting him hard enough to drop his knife. It bites him on the chest, straight through his coat, with a violent head-shake while Emil claws and pounds on its head to no effect. Emil begins chanting in a language Alex doesn’t know, but the cadence of it sounds like a prayer. The dog opens its jaws long enough to thrash him into a bike rack with a sickening clang that makes Emil go limp and quiet, before latching on again.

  Misha is slowly pushing himself up onto his knees. He’s moving slowly, with painful, choking coughs, trying to get his wind back. Alex stands between him and the dog, as if that could provide some kind of protection, but Misha half-stumbles past him, ripping his machete from its holster. He gets in a glancing hit that sticks fast to the thing’s neck, forcing it to drop Emil. Turning, it charges and the sheer weight of the dog brings him down onto his back.

  Misha braces his arms against the dog’s chest, muscles shaking, trying to hold it up, but his elbows are giving. With a short, ragged yell, Misha throws his head back, baring his throat covered in a tattoo of a cross on a rosary. The dog rears, snarling and turning its head to the side where it locks its jaws around Misha’s forearm. His skin is opening. Alex knows Gareth is closing it now.

  Unlike with Emil, it stays with him for a while holding onto him as Misha struggles, face contorted, but he’s pinned like an insect to a specimen board. Alex feels the echo of fiery pain as though the dog’s mouth were a branding iron. By the time the dog uncurls and takes a few steps back, Misha’s flailing is slowed and his eyelids are fluttering.

  It waits silently, unnaturally still. Misha is slow to get up and wavers off balance when he finally does. Bracing himself with one hand on his knee, Misha carefully pulls out his second machete. The dog takes another slow step back, watching him. The machete bounces in Misha’s hand as they stare at each other.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Neither moves and instead of advancing, Misha hauls the stunned Emil to his feet, draping his arm around his shoulders and turns his back on the dog, walking away. Alex winces, waiting for the attack to come but it doesn’t. The dog simply follows them, matching their pace, ten or so feet behind. Misha trudges slowly, reflexively glancing over his shoulder. Alex moves with them, his body on fire with pins and needles.

  After half a block, Misha looks back again and turns with a pained expression. He shouts something in Slovak and with his knife pointed, moves as if to force the dog backward. It pauses, face blank, before crossing the distance between them and wrenching Misha’s arm hard enough that his forearm audibly snaps. The knife falls from his limp hand with a clang and Misha doubles over, sucking in a breath and clutching his arm to his chest. That leaves Emil stumbling unmoored and the dog leans in to bite Emil again high up on his arm, where Hannah is working with the tourniquet. It lets go as fast as it happened and backs up a couple of steps, jaw working—chewing, Alex realizes with a shudder.

  Emil falls back against the side of a shuttered store, pressing his hand to the bite. Misha fumbles his way to Emil and uses his good hand and his teeth to tie the makeshift bandage with Emil’s shredded shirt to stop the worst of the bleeding all the while the dog watches from six feet away.

  When they start walking again, the dog follows. Misha doesn’t look back again. It doesn’t matter. A pattern begins. They walk, the dog follows. Periodically it charges them, latching onto Emil before quickly withdrawing, like a picador stabbing a bull over and over, slowly draining the life out of it. It isn’t long at all before Emil is slowing and each time it seems harder and harder for Misha to get them up and moving again. Both of them are too pale. Emil’s eyes are shut tight. The whites are showing underneath Misha’s irises.

  When the Sanctuary is in sight at the far end of the block, the dog walks up to them one last time. They’re moving at such a slow pace now that it doesn’t have to rush to close the distance anymore. It doesn’t even bother to bite Emil again, just lands a well-timed kick to Misha’s legs that knocks them both to the ground as easily as you would a house of cards. Misha’s head whips around and he looks surprised and wholly offended. Alex is relieved to see he still has enough fight in him for that kind of reaction.

  As the dog watches them, Misha pushes himself up to his knees with his good arm and grabs Emil who hasn’t moved at all.

  The dog smiles and loudly says, “Nechaj ho.”

  Misha’s expression falls flat and hopeless for a moment before it’s entirely taken over by anger. The dog kicks lazily at him and Misha nearly falls again as he moves to avoid it.

  “Jedz ja,” Misha sneers from the ground. He spits on the cobblestones and lifts his chin in the air.

  It shifts its weight from one foot to the other but doesn’t move.

  “Huh?” Misha presses, louder. When it doesn’t respond at all, he leans down once more and levers Emil up with a grunt and continues the slow trudge to the Sanctuary. The dog follows. He’s more dragging Emil than anything, despite the slow paddling efforts of Emil’s feet. Still they make it and Misha, resting his forehead just beside the hanging crucifix, pounds on the door with his foot while the dog stands silently behind them.

  Alex lets go of the Story.

  He sat back on his heels, reacclimating to the bright lights in the front hall and the smells. He blinked down at Misha who still wasn’t awake.

  “Hey,” Reeve’s voice broke through. Alex looked up. Reeve was where he’d left him, at the other side of Misha, now with his boots settled together on one of Reeve’s shoulders. Reeve raised his eyebrows and tipped his head forward. “Hey, you okay?”

  Alex broke eye contact and looked around. A couple of blankets had been carefully tucked around Misha’s neck covering his torso. That made sense, even Alex was feeling cold from kneeling on the bare floor. Turning, Alex couldn’t find the others or Emil, just a pile of clothes and gauze and he began to panic.

  “They set up Emil on the couch for now,” Reeve said gently.

  Alex cleared his throat. “Is he gonna be okay?”

  “Hannah says she’ll know more in the morning.” He pitched his voice to carry, “Gareth, Hannah.”

  “Is he awake?” she asked, as they came at a jog.

  Reeve shook his head. “Tell us what happened.”

  Alex did. They listened without interrupting, but Reeve looked like he was taking it hard.

  “Okay,” Hannah said when he was done, pulling the blankets off Misha. “Gareth, get up close. I was giving him until you came back to wake up on his own.”

  “What are you going to do?” Alex asked, wary.

  “I’m gonna set his arm.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Reeve breathed. Misha’s forearm was covered in a white bandage and his other was still a lumpy red and purple mess.

  Alex didn’t watch. He’d already seen enough that night. There was a terrible crunch and a groan of pain. When Alex looked back Misha’s head was shifting fitfully. Misha’s good arm was halfway in the air reaching to protect his broken arm, the hand in an awful rictus.

  “Misha,” Hannah nearly shouted into his ear, “mimic Gareth now.”

  Misha’s face flexed, clenching his closed eyes tighter and shuddered the way the muscles in your arm do when you’ve been holding something too heavy for too long.

  “Hey,” Alex barked, giving his face a couple of slaps.

  Hannah took a breath to shout again but turned around instead. “Reeve?”

  “What the fuck do you think I can do?”

  “Wake him up?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” he ground out shortly.

  Hannah groaned. “Then will you lift his damn legs up like you give a shit?”

  Reeve sat up straighter and hoisted his legs up above his head. Misha grunted and his Adam’s apple bobbed trying to swallow.

  “No, no—” Alex yelped, watching the bandage on Misha’s gouged arm flood red with blood. “Legs down, legs down.”

  Reeve dropped his legs back down to his shoulder and Hannah swore. Alex grabbed the bleeding arm and elevated it, even as it made Misha flinch.

  “Misha,” Hannah shouted again. “Gareth, I want you to practically crawl down his throat.” She ground the knuckle of one finger in small, hard circles on Misha’s sternum.

  Misha hissed, wincing, and he rounded his spine, pulling away as Gareth leaned in closer.

  “I swear to god, Misha. Stop dicking around,” Hannah muttered.

  Misha’s forehead knit itself into deep lines and the blackening bruise on his ribs suddenly began to recede, shifting to purple then yellow the smaller it got. Hannah and Gareth fell back together, deflating. Alex let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

  After a long moment, Misha groaned again and opened his eyes a slit. “Emil?”

  “He’s alive,” Alex told him.

  Misha nodded slightly and frowned at all of them. “Let go of my feet.”

  “No?” Reeve replied with zero conviction, looking to Hannah.

  “Are you gonna pass out again?” she demanded.

  He made a scoffing sound. “Of course not.” While his voice sounded cocky, he was careful not to move a muscle.

  “He should be fine in an hour if it’s like me,” Gareth shrugged. “He’ll just be weak and tired for a day or two.”

  Reeve set his legs down carefully and stood, stretching out stiff limbs. “It was the same one?”

  “Yes, you fuck up,” Misha croaked.

  “Why didn’t it kill you?”

  He rolled his eyes and flexed his hands, gingerly. “Killing me isn’t the worst thing it could do to a Child of God.”

  “It wants to bite you again,” Alex finished.

  Misha let out a sigh. “We’ll kill it right this time. Now can we get me off this damn floor?”

  ---

  SolCorp LAHQ. Saturn Department.

  If she’d only had more time, she could have cracked it. Grace knew it. Another few days, a week maybe, she’d have worked it all out, but with her position as Third, she wasn’t afforded the ability to be away that long without raising questions. And she got the impression that people not asking questions was just as important as having gotten the answers. Saturn was like that sometimes.

  None of the ‘I almost had him’ type refrains lessened the shame in her belly for returning home empty-handed. Well, maybe not empty-handed; that would have been an improvement. Swallowing the possibility to devolve into tears, Grace knocked on Mackenzie’s door. “Ma’am?”

  “Grace, come in.” Her voice was hopeful and that made it even harder to put her hand on the knob and pull. She did it anyway, head held high.

  The moment Mackenzie saw her, Grace could see her face fall and her jaw visibly tighten. “My god,” she breathed. As much as Grace knew the reaction was deserved, she hated it. Her face was cut up in three places with a bruise across her collarbone and her right hand bandaged up right.

  Grace smiled sweetly. “You should see the other guy, ma’am.”

  “Grace,” she scolded, standing. “What happened?”

  She dropped the forced smirk. “My cab got t-boned at an intersection.” She must have been exhausted or jet-lagged or both and dozed off one night on her ride back to her hotel. The next thing she knew, she was waking up as some good Samaritans were pulling her out of the battered car. Everything hurt, her neck only second to her hand which had been holding her phone when they were hit. The phone had been destroyed in the crash, splintering her hand with glass.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Mackenzie demanded as she reached her and began to size up the injuries.

  “I still had a couple of days left to figure it out.” Mackenzie’s mouth pursed at that and Grace couldn’t stand waiting at the edge of the cliff any longer. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “I tried.”

  “You should have come home.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. “But I would have done the same thing. Tell me you saw an actual doctor while you were there?”

  “Yes, ma’am, they kept me overnight in the hospital. I’m fine. My typing is going to be slow for a week or two but other than my pride, I’ll recover.”

  Mackenzie looked pained but nodded. “Do you have it in you to brief me?”

  “Of course, ma’am.” They sat. Grace’s heart thudded, threatening to choke the words out of her. She wouldn’t allow it. “I eventually identified the pattern as an onion dome from the Annunciation Cathedral in Kharkiv. It doesn’t look it in photos, but it’s a solid match when you’re there in person, but I couldn’t find anything else. I’m so sorry, ma’am. I worked every angle I could. Barely slept. I nearly missed my flight trying to—”

  “Grace, stop. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

  “I’ll go back and keep trying. I can sort my office out in a few days, get it ready to run without me for longer.”

  “No.”

  “I can do it,” she insisted. “I hate letting you down.”

  “If there was something to find,” Mackenzie pressed, “you would have found it. You’re a brilliant agent. You didn’t let me down. It was a Hail Mary bid.” Her humorless smile returned. “And if this is your luck right now, I don’t want you stepping foot on a plane for a while.”

  She allowed a pout to sneak through her controlled expression. “You trusted me with this.”

  “You worked every angle,” Mackenzie quoted her words back to her, “and I believe that. Coming up empty is still data. Remember that. So thank you for the data. I’ll work a new angle. Now go home and rest. I don’t want you working today.”

  “Respectfully, ma’am, no thank you.”

  She sighed and touched her cheek lightly, eyes holding none of the gentleness of her hand. “Never stop being you,” she told her. “Not for anything. Not for anyone.”

  Grace smiled against the ache in her heart from her failure. “Respectfully, ma’am, that was already the plan.”

  “Good. Now go.”

  ***