“I have questions, but most of them can wait,” Owen said when Helena stepped into his space. He smelled like gunpowder and vampire dust. Neither were pleasing smells, but Helena tucked her face into the curve of his neck and wrapped her arms around his shoulders anyway. Many humans would flinch at having a vampire so close to their throat after such a massacre, but Own just wrapped his arm around her and held her close. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she assured him honestly. It was true. She might grieve for the wasted lives of her own kind, but she had taken many lives before theirs, and regretted some of them more. Teucer was by the door, and was no doubt listening to the battle around them. If there was trouble, he would know before anyone else. “But always sad to put down frenzied fledglings. They did not choose this fate, and yet it fell to us to deliver it to them. What are your questions?”

“Is now the time?”

“I would rather be distracted from my own thoughts. Teucer is checking on my Coven. He will tell me if we are needed.”

“Right. Really only one pressing question that’s been eating me since I heard him call you by your old name. Teucer called you his youngest?”

It was not the most distressing question she expected him to offer, and Helena was relieved. After such a brutal fight, she did not want to answer hard questions.

“I turned her,” Teucer said from the door. When Helena looked over at him, it was to the sight of him carefully cleaning blood off his bronze sword with a silken handkerchief. “In… oh, which century was it, Heléne? They get away from me. It was in England, I’m sure.”

“1348, and yes, England,” she supplied with a faint smile for her sire, who winked. The old faker. He never forgot a thing, but the little ruse helped to put Owen at ease, here in the heart of their enemy’s compound where they might need his trust to keep them all from a bad death. “We should start moving. Victore will need us soon.”

“I enjoyed the thirteen-hundreds. Good music. Interesting food,” Teucer mused. Owen stared between them, heart a little fast again, but not panicked. He was taking the revelation better than most. Helena wasn’t surprised. There wasn’t much that truly startled him. “But I was born, and died, several thousand years before.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Is it rude to ask how old you are?”

“Only if you make me do the arithmetic myself. The proper year of my birth is lost to time, but I sailed with my brother, Ajax, when he went to war with Troy.”

Owen made an odd choking noise that was somewhere between a snort and a sputter. Helena smiled faintly despite the seriousness of their situation. That reaction, at least, was not uncommon. Teucer was one of the oldest vampires living, and yet so few of their kind had ever seen his face, and fewer yet knew who he once was. “You were in the Trojan war?”

“For a while,” Teucer said with an ancient light in his eyes. They came to a metal blast door, and he waved them back so he could handle it. Helena left him to his work. He enjoyed destroying doors. “I survived it, unlike many, although my mortal life ended only a single short year after the war did.”

Before Owen could comment, Teucer settled his feet on the cheap laminate floor, and put all his impossible strength onto a powerful punch that left a deep dent in the steel. He frowned at it, and hit it twice more before it screeched off its hinges and crashed to the floor.

“That one was better-made than the last one,” he noted, and frowned, sniffing warily. “Heléne, I smell gas.”

Helena took a deep breath in and hissed furiously as she let it out, the smell of gas heavy on her tongue and harsh in her nose. It was pure luck that she and Teucre were the ones to find it. They could catch the scent before any of her Coven. “They’re getting ready to blow the compound. It’s a trap. Children, evacuate!”

Victore, somewhere across the compound, heard her and blew two short blasts, and a third long one. The reaction was instantaneous as all of Helena’s Coven scattered for the exits. Content that her Coven were on their way out, she turned to Owen.

“You can’t keep up with us,” she told him quietly. He was practical, but no man wanted to be carried about like a doll. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure how else to get him clear. He certainly couldn’t match the speed of two elder vampires as he was now. “How do you wish to be carried?”

To her surprise, Owen smiled and pulled a charm from his belt. It was made of glass, and contained a single drop of mercury inside. The outside was inscribed with Faerie runes.

“You didn’t think I relied on dashing good looks and my pretty face all the time, did you?” he said roguishly, and smashed the charm under his boot. The mercury vanished into smoke that sank through his skin and left the illusion of feathers under his skin. “Lead the way. I have four minutes of speed.”

“Best not to delay,” Teucer said, and slid his sword into the scabbard on his hip. “Stay close, children. We are not yet free of this enemy’s grasp, and he may have more surprises in store.”