The lead driver pulled his car over to the side of the road, dragging great gulps of air into his lungs. He was sweating profusely.
You are going to die tonight. All of you. The fog covers a monster. Death. It is calling.
Just to make his point, Aidan leapt into the sky, his body stretching, contorting, until he was a giant winged lizard with sharp, conspicuous teeth. His tail was long and thick with scales, and his eyes were ruby red. He came out of the fog, right at the line of showy cars, and breathed fire across their hoods.
Doors sprang open, and gang members burst out onto the street, shouts of terror echoing through the fog. Aidan laughed softly as he landed just to the right of the lead car, shape-shifting as he did so. His long muzzle shortened, fangs exploded, and his body compacted itself into lupine muscle and sinew. Fur rippled down his back and arms, emerging in a wave over his skin. He loped after the men, red eyes glowing.
“Wolf! Werewolf!” The scream caromed along the street, and a gun went off. It was impossible for anyone to see more than a scant foot in front of him, but to Aidan the air was perfectly clear, and he knew the exact location of his prey. He chased them for some distance, reveling in his ability to run so swiftly. There was joy in his heart. The joy he had felt some seven hundred years earlier. He was having fun.
“It was a dragon!” a harsh voice yelled as they all ran, their footsteps loud in the darkness.
He followed another voice. “This isn’t real, man. Maybe we’re having some kind of mass hallucination.”
“Well, you stay and check it out then,” someone called back. “I’m getting the hell out of here.”
The wolf loped closer, scenting the human. The man was slowing down, certain none of this could be reality. The wolf leapt, covering a considerable distance in a single spring and catching the human by the seat of his pants. He got a mouthful of denim, and the man gave a high-pitched scream. Without looking back, he bolted to join his friends, his boots loud on the street as he escaped.
Aidan laughed out loud this time, the sound echoing eerily, carried on the thick bed of fog. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had so much fun. The gang members were yelling back and forth, cries of fear. To even the odds a bit more, he concentrated on the cars, rolling them over, one by one, so that each car was sitting on its roof, the wheels spinning uselessly in the air. Then he did the same for the rival gang. They needed to rest in the park for a time anyway.
After assuring himself that neither gang had any fight left in them, he took to the air once more, this time racing back to Alexandria. He landed on the stone pathway in the garden outside the kitchen. A fish leapt in the pond, and the sound of splashing was loud in the night air. The wind was beginning to gently shift, slowly pushing its way through the fog. Tails of the white mist swirled lightly and drifted here and there like veils of lace. The effect was beautiful. It was all beautiful.
Aidan inhaled deeply and looked up at the sky. This wasn’t his homeland, but it was his home. The vampire had been wrong about that. Aidan had grown to love San Francisco over the years. It was an interesting city with interesting people. True, he missed his own kind and the wildness of the Carpathian mountains and forests. He would give almost anything to touch the soil of his homeland. The ancient land of his people was forever in his heart, but this city had its own call, its diverse cultures melding and making for an incredible world to explore and enjoy.
Aidan used his keys to open the kitchen door. The house was quiet. Stefan and Marie were asleep in their room. Joshua slept fitfully, obviously uncomfortable at being so long separated from his sister, though Marie had allowed him to sleep in the little sitting room off their bedroom on the first floor. Stefan had kept his promise; the house was locked up tight, its iron grills shut over the windows to protect against invasion.
Aidan’s safeguards were holding strong. Spells that were ancient and strong, known only to a few of the oldest of his people, were woven into the doors’ intricate stained-glass windows. Gregori, the dark one, the most feared of the Carpathian hunters and their greatest healer, had taught him much—the safeguards, healing, even the ways to hunt the undead. Mikhail, their leader and Gregori’s only friend, had agreed to send Aidan to the United States as a hunter once it was known the betrayers had begun to branch out and seek other worlds for use as their killing fields. Gregori trained few hunters; he was a loner and avoided others as a rule.
Julian, Aidan’s twin brother, had tried to work with Gregori for a time, but he was too much like the dark one. A loner. He needed the highest peaks, the deepest forests. He needed to run with the wolf and soar with the eagles, just as Gregori had chosen to do. Theirs had not been the way of people, of cities, or even of their own kind.
Aidan moved through the spotless kitchen to the basement door. It suddenly occurred to him how good the kitchen always smelled, with its aromas of fresh-baked bread and spices. Marie, and her family before her, had always made his house a home. He had never really appreciated it before. Their loyalty had remained the wonder of his life, but he had never noticed the way they had made his heretofore bleak life bearable.
He breathed in the scent of his family. Warmth spread through his body, his heart. After centuries of a cold, barren existence, he wanted to fall to his knees in gratitude at the unexpected joy of family. He had never noticed the rustic efficiency of the basement before, either. It wasn’t simply a musty, underground space but a bright, expansive room boasting Stefan’s rich wood carvings and a well-organized array of tools. Work benches and tables were clean and orderly, garden tools gleamed with care, and to their left were countless bags of rich soil stacked carefully. Stefan. He owed the man so much.
Aidan himself had meticulously cut out the tunnel leading down to his hidden chamber after studying the rock forming the cliff and knowing that the secret chamber would be impossible to penetrate or detect so close to the large body of water. The undead might know he was sleeping close by, but they would never pinpoint his exact location.
Aidan had chosen the site of his home with care. As money was seldom an object when one lived for centuries, he had more than enough for several lifetimes. It was simply a matter of finding the right location and building to his specific needs. He wanted a few neighbors so that he blended in with his new society, but he needed space and privacy, grounds he could roam in and the freedom of the countryside in his own backyard. He needed the sea with its crashing waves and scents and mist that he could manipulate when necessary.
His property, overlooking the ocean on a bluff, was as close to perfect as he could find. He owned plenty of land around the house to use as a buffer between himself and the neighbors, yet there were other houses along the road. He had the privacy he needed if one of the betrayers found him and he had to fight without danger of someone coming upon them.
Setting up a new home in a new land had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done. But now, as he approached his sleeping chamber, that difficulty paled in comparison to what his brave Alexandria faced in her new life. She expected to die, even welcomed death, especially if it meant saving another—him. He had felt in her mind that she was not willing to prey on the human race for nourishment. She did not have a predatory nature or predatory instincts. And she feared she was vampire. No amount of explanation would overcome her distrust. Only time could do that, and he somehow had to buy himself enough of it with her to convince her that neither of them was vampire, neither of them a heartless killer. He needed the time to make her realize she belonged to him, with him, that they could never be apart.
He brought her out of the earth cradled in his arms. Stretching out on the bed, he motioned with one hand and closed the earth and trap door. She did not need to face the evidence of their unusual life all at once. She would awaken in a bed in a chamber. She would have enough to deal with without finding herself virtually buried in the earth itself.