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Chapter Text

At least they keep this place stocked, Fiona thought bitterly as she pillaged the alcohol cabinet. She still wasn't entirely sure if vampires could get drunk; on the rare occasions when they indulged her curiosity, the Czar and Princess both drank her under the table in lieu of an answer. Logically, she knew that the out-of-the-way placement of the alcohol cabinet, combined with the limited variety, most likely meant that it was maintained for the use of guests, but the interest was there none the less. 

Her favored brand of Scotch was near the front, and when a quick glance around showed no glasses in sight, Fiona took the whole bottle. I think they can spare me one bottle. How in the bloody hell they went and messed this up- she shook her head to clear its thoughts; Dmitri's abodes were not places to lose one's temper. A sip of whiskey would calm her, and so she set off in the direction of the sitting room. Previous experience knew of comfortable couches and, more importantly, a set of crystal glasses atop an oaken side-table. The probability that they had ever held anything that she would think of as a 'refreshing' beverage, much less an alcoholic one, was abysmally low, but she was past caring.

Fiona padded down the hallway, bottle in hand, so set on her new self-imposed mission that she was only yards from the sitting room door when she heard voices from within. She froze in place, straining her hearing. A pained grunt, soft murmuring, a deeper voice replying something inaudible... One hand went to the red pendant of her necklace, the other sliding up the bottle to grip the neck of the Scotch like a club's handle. If its some little Resistance shits, they picked the wrong bloody day. 

The door was cracked and, if she remembered correctly, wouldn't squeak until three-fourths open; if the intruders were human, she stood a reasonable chance of taking them by surprise. Fiona steadied her breathing even as her heart pumped adrenaline and pent-up anger through her veins, easing forward to nudge the door open and peer inside. She sighed dramatically at what she saw, and shouldered her way into the room. 

"I almost white-lighted you two, you know," Fiona said to Dmitri and Anastasia, setting her bottle on the nearest available surface and strolling forward. Dmitri was seated on a couch, his back to her, and when only his sister acknowledged her presence- by planting herself firmly between them- something unpleasant ran up the human's spine. 

"What are you doing here?" Anastasia snarled, her tone one that would have inspired respect if Fiona had been paying more attention. Instead, she was already rounding the couch, freezing in place when she finally had a good look at Dmitri.

"Bloody hell, Czar, what happened to you?" His usually-dark suit was covered in blood, and from the haziness of his eyes and pain on his face, a good amount of it had to be his own. To call Fiona unnerved by the sight would have been an understatement; she could count on one half of one hand the number of times she'd seen the vampire actually wounded, and it rattled her more to see it now, in such uncertain times.

"I told you of the girl, yes?" Was the wry reply, accompanied by a grimace; the labored nature of his breathing told her that it must hurt to talk.

"Fiona." Anastasia snapped, and the human finally looked up at her. "My brother needs rest, not company. I will take care of him."

"Yeah? Is that why he looks ready to pass out?" A dangerous anger flashes across the vampire's face, and before she could move to carry out the murderous intent of her expression, Fiona added, "My apologies, Anastasia. It's been a long day." Dmitri made a sound that might have resembled a chuckle on a better day, and Fiona nodded to him. "How long since he's eaten?"

Not a drop of tension had left the room at the apology, though the rage on the female vampire's face retreated to burn just as brightly behind her eyes. She's going to try to kill me one of these days, Fiona thought, almost unconcerned; the idea was nothing new.

"Recently." Came the eventual, terse reply. Fiona was already rolling up her sleeves, undeterred by the answer. A myriad of Celtic symbols began on her left palm and wove their way in black ink up her forearm, though the right arm was bare until the elbow. 

"Well, more can't hurt. Witch's blood has a bit of a kick to it." And the sooner he recovers, the safer I'll be. As an afterthought, she glanced to Anastasia and added, "I put a few pre-drawn packs in the fridge for you two. I'm guessing every drop of blood in this place is going to your brother, so you should take one while you can. Oh, and one of us should do a sweep of the compound, if you two didn't know I was here." 

"I will not-"

"Anastasia..." Dmitri interrupted, quiet and hoarse,  "Go, replenish your strength. We will need it." 

The woman glared at Fiona over her brother's head, but said in the sweetest of voices, "As you wish, brother."

Fiona shook her head as the vampiress stalked from the room, drawing a small dagger from within her coat. The tip was already pressed to her index finger when an idea struck her. Well, waste not, want not.

"Seeing as you're already bleeding like a stuck pig-" She began unceremoniously, and the Russian's eyes glittered with agitation, "-mind if I just use yours?"

Dmitri looked at her for a long moment- Christ, he looks tired- and flicked a hand as if to say 'Do what you want'. Fiona returned her knife to her jacket and sat on the couch next to him, only to hop immediately back up. The Czar shot her a questioning look. 

"If you get a drink, I do too." She explained as she retrieved her bottle and one of the crystal glasses, filling it halfway. She set her drink on the in-table next to the couch and settled down cross-legged next to Dmitri. "This might hurt a bit," Fiona warned. His next heavy breath might have been a resigned sigh, so she leaned forward and pressed two fingers against his chest; she applied only as much pressure as she needed to, but her compatriot still winced. "Sorry, mate." 

She sat back and chanted in her native Gaelic, pressing a blood-soaked finger to the center of a tattoo on her left wrist, and energy crackled to life under her skin; the black symbol burning with a heat that was caught somewhere between painful and pleasant. Fiona glanced at her watch and noted the time. 

"You've got ten minutes." She told her companion, extending her right arm to him. 

It had been a while since she'd indulged the Biter in feeding directly from the source, but she distinctly remembered him being a bit more considerate in the past. "Ow! Bloody hell, Czar, I need the ligaments next to that vein. I'm serious, Dmitri, ease up. Fucking blood-suckers... Ow! Don't be so touchy, I was joking."

When the vampire had settled and was being as gentle as he was likely to get, Fiona retrieved her glass with her free hand, sipping on it intermittently. 

"I didn't come here to be a blood bag, you know." She grumbled. "You're gonna have to tell me what exactly has been going on, because I've heard some pretty interesting things. You'd think the Resistance overrunning your camp would be the worst of it, but that's just the most well-known. Julius is out looking for you, and mate, he is pissed. Something about you having his mother killed. Then there's the van Helsing girl. I'm guessing she got away? Well, I'm sure she'll be looking for the chance to put you down, too." Fiona took a deep drink from her glass and added light-heartedly, "When did hanging around with you get so bloody dangerous?" 

Dmitri made an agitated sound in the back of his throat. Anyone with half a brain would fear that particular monster's agitation, but Fiona snorted a laugh. "Sorry, mate, but if you're gonna bleed me dry you have to listen to my complaints." She took another sip of her drink and glanced at her watch. "Remember the good old days? 1815 to '16, now that was a fun year. Enough volcanic ash in the air that you guys could get out in the daytime to hunt if you bundled up, and enough desperate souls around for my businesses to pick up. And there were some great parties that year."

Fiona glanced at her watch again and set her glass aside. "Sixty-second countdown, Czar." She said, using her free hand to draw a piece of fabric from her pocket. She always kept a clean rag on her in case a spell required more blood than a pricked finger, though it would likely be a woefully inadequate bandage for the wound on her wrist. "Time," Fiona called, drawing her arm free of Dmitri's grip, watching him like a hawk all the while. His injuries would intensify his hunger, and if he intended to keep feeding, she might have to take measures to remind him of her boundaries. 

 Fiona's arm was relinquished without objection, and the vampire leaned back, sighing deeply and staring half-dazed at the ceiling. Pain still shot through his body and intensified at the slightest of movements, still sapped the strength from his bones and clouded his mind, but the blood now running through his veins made those sensations seem distant. It may not have tasted as sweet as Anastaisa's, but Fiona was right; it always brought a certain vigor with it.  

"We were surprised to find you here, Fiona... but I cannot say I am displeased." His voice was still quiet and thick, but stronger than it had been. 

"You never are after you've had a hit. Give it a minute, and I'm sure I'll annoy you." 

The woman pressed a rag to the injury on her wrist, chanting calmly. Dmitri watched with lazy interest as blood and a separate, clear liquid soaked into the cloth with supernatural speed, and the witch folded the fabric to repeat the process twice more, withdrawing any foreign organic material- including those with vampiric properties- from her bloodstream. "I knew of women who used it as a contraceptive," she'd explained the first time he had fed directly from her, "But this is basically the same principle, so it should keep me human."

"My offer still stands, my friend," Dmitri said on impulse, and Fiona glanced up.

"You're talkative all of a sudden." The Celt said with a small, knowing smile, and he returned it bitterly; both knew that it still sent a stab of pain through his chest. "And I still say that it'll be a yes when I'm about to die. Appreciate the sentiment, though." The woman discarded the blood-soaked rag and tore off a length of her right sleeve, using teeth and one hand to tie it tightly around the wound on her arm.

The sheer speed of the action spoke to the number of times he had seen her do it, and he mused on how the experience of centuries had changed her outward appearance so little. She had said once that old witches are closer to a vampire than human, and he supposed that the statement had some merit to it; no streaks of grey ran through her dark auburn hair, the only wrinkles to show on her face were crow's feet, and her small frame remained athletically muscled and lithe. Her own need for blood to perform spells had increased in the last decade, so much so that she used in a year what would have lasted three when they first met- a need not incomparable to those of his own species.

"You could do so much more as one of us." he persisted.

"Really, Dmitri? 'Cause neither of us knows if I would keep my powers."

"But if you did? If I could... guarantee that?" They had had this conversation many times before, and always he offered this supposed guarantee. It did not matter that he had no way of actually promising that; he was only waiting for the day her answer changed, so he could begin the research knowing that it would not ultimately be wasted.

Fiona sighed and sipped her drink. "Look, Czar. With my magic, I barely need to eat, barely need to sleep, barely do anything a human does. So what would advantage would turning give me? I couldn't go out in the daylight, and you'd have to find a new snack. That's about it."

"There will always be another 'snack', Fiona, but I have only one witch."

"And you might not have any if I come to the dark side." She took a deep gulp of Scotch and ran her uninjured hand through her hair. "Speaking of the dark side, what's your plan now? Kill Julius, reorganize your army, go after the girl?"

"Which would you advise?" He queried- not because he would actually listen, they both knew, but because he was curious as to what she would say. The witch swirled the liquid around her glass thoughtfully. 

"If I were you, mate, I would stay away from van Helsing until you know you can kill her. The last time didn't seem to go to well."

Rage sparked in his chest at the memory. "I was caught by surprise." He snarled, anger burning in his tone, and Fiona raised an eyebrow. "I did not anticipate- it does not matter. I will be ready the next time."

"I could still help you with that, you know. A little boost might be all you need."

"Ah, but your prices are still too high."

"When it comes to you, my prices are a bloody bargain, trust me." She growled, face darkening immediately. "I have to charge my other customers more just to cover the things I do for you."

This was another conversation they had had before. Once, in leaner times, this same argument was the closest he had ever come to killing her, and she him. Neither had actually tried, of course; two hundred years of a mutually beneficial relationship had caused them to place a certain amount of value on each other's lives. That was not to say that either would actually sacrifice anything of worth for the other, or that they would even remain friendly, but as of yet, it had kept them from each other's throats.

In theory, she should be easy to kill, he knew; she is still human, still needs oxygen and an intact spinal column and a certain amount of blood in her veins, but what makes her useful is also what makes her dangerous. He has seen what remains after she "white-lights" a person, has seen the burns and blinded eyes on humans, and the charred husks that had once been others of his species. "A blast of direct sunlight is real useful when you hang around night-walkers," she'd once said, both in teasing and warning.  

Dmitri was fairly certain that she could not kill him. Physically, she might be capable of coming close, but her human heart remained her weakness. How many times had she drank too much, and confessed that her life would be 'ungodly boring' without the work she did for him? How many times had her her loyalty been tested beyond what a simple business partner's would endure? The fact that she offered her blood freely testified to the human habit of growing attached to things, no matter how much she had tried to limit it. If Dmitri killed her, he might feel annoyance or inconvenience, but the blessing of his state of life was how greatly it dulled the human weakness of emotion; if she were to kill him, however, she might actually feel grief. 

This weakness did work to her advantage in some ways, he mused. It made her less of a threat to him, and that in turn increased her chances of survival.

"So which will you deal with next, Julius or your army?" Fiona asked. She glanced at her near-empty glass and rose, presumably to fill it- only to sway on her feet, threatening to topple over. Dmitri braced himself to catch her if she actually did fall; he would be vastly disappointed if he lost such a powerful ally because she cracked her head open on a coffee table. 

"Don't you bloody move." She ordered, steadying herself with a hand on the couch arm. "I didn't let you drain me dry just to reinjure yourself with dramatics. It's been a while since I was a donor, is all." She took a deep breath, glancing down to the wound on her wrist and grimacing.

Dmitri cocked an eyebrow and relaxed back. Perhaps he had been over-zealous in his feeding, but if she had the energy to snap at him, it had obviously caused no lasting damage. 

"Where is your pet? We have not seen him about." 

"Devon? Oh, he's out and about. I have him tracking Julius's movements at the minute."

"Julius." He snarled the name bitterly. "I should have killed him long ago, but I was waiting for him to become more than a disappointment." 

"That worked out well, didn't it?" Fiona replied bitterly as she poured another drink. "If my raven gets hurt spying for you, by the way, I'm going to be pissed." 

Dmitri spread his hands in an 'I'm innocent' manner. "I did not ask you to spy for me."

"Oh, please, don't act like you weren't planning on it. You know, when you could walk straight again." The witch took a deep drink from her glass. "How the hell did this happen? At the beginning of the week I was organizing caravans, putting together recommendations for replacements Elites, enjoying a new lover... Now my most powerful ally is hiding out here with a gaping hole in his chest and an upstart Biter hunting him down."

The remainder of such a spectacular turn of events in his life only rekindled the anger in Dmitri's chest. "You are free to leave if you do not like the situation," he growled, low and dangerous. Fiona looked at him for a long moment, evaluating the extent of his rage. 

"I'm not complaining, mate. Just venting." She took another quick sip of Scotch, refilled her glass, and settled on the couch next to him once again. "Besides, you're pretty well stuck with me now."

"Anastasia warned me about feeding the strays." Came the wry response. 

Fiona laughed. "So he does have a sense of humor! And here I thought you were gonna let a little thing like near-fatal injuries turn you sullen." She took yet another drink, which did not escape him; if she was already more than two glasses in, she was more annoyed than he originally thought. "So, if you're not going to put Julius down yet, you must be going after van Helsing."

"The girl is what is important." He maintained, almost fervently. "She is the key to our survival- or our extinction. If she cannot be captured, she must be killed. Julius... he is no real threat. I will deal with him in time."

The Celt studied him for a long moment. "I can kill him, if you want." She finally said, but Dmitri waved the idea away. 

"I appreciate the offer, my friend, but I will deal with him personally."

"Make an example out of him, you mean." Fiona grinned at the idea. "I can't wait to see what you do to this one. Something fittingly dramatic, I hope."

Dmitri indulged her with a rare, genuine smile of his own. "I will try not to disappoint." 

"Good. So, you deal with the girl first, then have some fun with Julius, and you army rallies behind your success. Sounds like a bloody plan to me." They sat in comfortable silence for several seconds, and at the end of it Fiona drained her glass and rose. "I'll take my leave, then."

"Leave? Fiona, there is enough room here for all of us."

"As much as I hate to say it, the Princess is right. Me being here is a distraction, and you need to be back on your feet as soon as possible. Besides, you've got Anastasia to hold your hand and pat your head. Me, I just can't stand to sit still in dangerous times." The witch unrolled her sleeves, tugging them down to cover the wound on her wrist. "Devon will drop off another pack of blood in a few days. Make sure your sister doesn't snap my familiar's neck, yeah?"

"And what do you intend to do in that time?"

The witch shrugged. "I have people who can maintain my business for a few days, so I think I'll do some field work. See if Devon can't find your van Helsing girl, and see if I can't slow Julius down and buy you some time."

"You have always been a valuable asset, my friend. Your efforts will be rewarded."

"Oh, I'm counting on it, Czar," Fiona replied with a wicked grin. "I'll check in after two weeks or when I hear something, whichever comes first."

"Happy hunting," Dmitri called sweetly, matching her predatory smile.

 Lower, Devon, Fiona commanded, and the raven dipped his body closer to the earth, slowly circling the figure traveling below. 

In the beginning, she had caught a glimpse of a group that may have been van Helsing's; an athletically-built brown-haired woman, a boy nearing adulthood, and a young girl, all near Dmitri's fallen camp but traveling away from it. It could likely have been just a group of normal humans fleeing the chaos, but she had still followed them for as long as she could. If they had a destination in mind, she couldn't discern it in the time she'd had sight of them. The Czar's scattered army was proving to be an obstacle- she'd had to white-light a surprising number of vampires as she traveled- and she eventually got distracted enough by this to have lost track of the group. 

A few days after that trail had run dry, she had come across this particular Biter. He was recently turned, and still inexperienced; as such, it was easy enough to follow him, and something in the back of her mind told her that it was worth the time. Though his feeding was still sloppy, he was learning quickly, and seemed to possess a surprising amount of focus. He's looking for something, Fiona thought, not for the first time, as she observed his relatively linear and undistracted path. She observed him for a while longer before more pressing matters called her attention elsewhere.

Rest and eat, Fiona advised her familiar, and withdrew to her own body. She opened her eyes and leaned forward, the tree branch underneath her swaying with her shifting weight, and caught sight of several figures moving in the valley below. 

There you are, Julius.

She rose and went to work. 

Chapter Text

Of Men and Monsters

As she often did whilst bleeding onto a beautiful forest floor, Fiona contemplated the events leading to her partnership with Dmitri.

The progression of history and time had always fascinated her; the never-ending cycle of action and reaction and consequence, of dominos falling one after another into perpetuity. If she had not attempted to kill the Red Baron; if he had not burnt her home and family to the ground on charges of witchcraft; if her mother had not taught her the ways of the old gods, of the power of blood and the earth; even if Julius Caesar had not conquered the Gauls, then she and Dmitri never would have met. She would have had no reason to be stealing into the room of the Red Baron the same night a visiting Russian diplomat was set to arrive; she would not have been caught by an unaccounted-for personal guard, would not have been thrown into the dungeons and beaten half to death, and would not have ran into a certain intrigued vampire in the resulting escape attempt.

That one night, the culmination of all the moments before it, had set her current path, and the falling of dominos in its wake had led her here, to staggering through a forest and a field before collapsing next to an ill-used dirt road. A few sparse trees lined it, and she dragged herself underneath one to lean against it's trunk, methodically shedding her jacket and shirt, applying blood to the black ink of a Celtic symbol that rested over her heart. Magic burned beneath her skin, the heat not quite painful, and with laborious focus the edges of the gash across her stomach began to close. In less than a minute, the spell was sapping her strength faster than the flow of blood was slowing, and she let it fade, chest heaving for breath.

"Caw." Devon said insistently, flitting from the ground to her knee; he would have preferred his rightful place on her shoulder, she knew, but her current state was making him too anxious to keep still.

"It'll be fine, Devon." Fiona assured him with a weak smile, slipping her ruined shirt and then jacket back on with as little grimacing and gasping as she could. "We've had worse. I'm sure they haven't."

The raven cocked it's head, hopping in place irritably. "Caw." He repeated, louder.

"If you're so bloody worried, go look. But I can't imagine any of them survived, and I need a rest."

Fiona's familiar ruffled his feathers, gave her knee a quick and somewhat rough peck, and lifted to the air in a flurry of noise. Fiona sighed heavily, gingerly pulling a flask and dagger from the various pockets of her jacket. Sometimes I wish he weren't so paranoid, she thought, taking a long drink from the flask and setting about carving a symbol into the bare expanse of skin that was her right forearm; at one glance it appeared to be an archaic Celtic sun, the next a tribalized flower. When she was done, she extended her arm to rest in the sunlight and called upon her dwindling reserves of magic to activate the spell, and the skin around the bleeding symbol turned greyish-green and spongy.

It was an interesting spell, one that allowed the caster to leech some energy from the sun's light; the advancements of science had taught Fiona that this was an imitation of photosynthesis. Still, it came with the ever-present cost of blood and energy to maintain, and if the ashy skies did not produce enough sunlight to surpass both the drain of magic and the normal functions of her wounded body, she could very well pass out, a possibility she weighed heavily as she sat in vampire-infested territory.

For a long while, she simply rested and allowed the spell to oh-so slowly pull together the skin on her stomach, sipping from her flask intermittently and keeping a vague awareness of Devon's location in the back of her mind.

As time dragged on, her mind wandered to her quarry, and her past experiences with him; though she could assume many things about the warlord, she truly knew admittedly little of Julius, even given their interactions, as Dmitri had once called them with a disapproving sneer. The line of thinking quickly brought her back to Dunsinane, the fortress she had constructed in the heights of the Rockies. There, supernatural beings were able to conduct business away from the dangerous eyes of the modern world. She had once managed much of her business and spent most of her time in that compound, yet she did not often miss it. There was a reason she had named it for the place where Macbeth's ambition became his downfall; one never felt quite safe there, surrounded by creatures who would so easily and willing kill someone like her if they so wished. Even with all the wards and magical oaths that prevented violence within its grounds, she'd always had to keep her guard up at Dunsinane, yet Julius's proximity was a reminder of the fun that could nonetheless be had in such a tense place.

Fiona didn't realize that she was nearly dozing until Devon's insistent pecking and approaching voices snapped her awake. One hand went automatically to her dagger, the other- the one with a fiery sun tattood on the palm- encircling the red pendant that hung from her neck. Three figures were coming into view from down the road, and with the ease they walked in the sunlight, they were human. The knowledge calmed her, if only somewhat; humans she could deal with.

One could almost imagine the group to be a family; a tall man, an athletic brunette, and a young girl. But as more details became apparent, reality slipped back in. The man was well over six foot and solidly muscled, dwarfing Fiona even from this distance; something about the shape of his face, the movement of his body, was familiar, but deija vu was not uncommon for a being as old as her, and she was more concerned about the rest of his group. A wicked black hand-ax and two pistols hung from the woman's belt, and the child's hands were loosely bound with thick leather straps connected by a small but solid chain.

The witch shifted at noticing that, bending one leg to better lurch to her feet if need be. The movement drew the group's eyes, and they froze in place, squinting at the humanoid form lounging at the base of a tree; the woman drew her ax. For a second, both parties simply surveyed the other. They were too far for Fiona to make out many details of their faces, but the fact that they didn't immediately try to kill her was perhaps a hopeful sign, and the insistent tugging of memory drew her curiosity to the man.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than the wind picked up, blowing her scent towards them, and the child suddenly darted forward, every inch of her body trained on Fiona with predatory intent. The witch's hand tensed around her dagger, Gaelic words resting on the tip of her tongue, but the girl had not gone ten feet before the woman lunged forward, snagging the girl's jacket and dragging her back, holding the child tight against her body. The girl struggled, hissing and twisting and trying to continue her path forward, and years of experience sent a wave of grief and anger through Fiona's cold heart as she recognized an un-child, a vampire turned well before maturity. Conversation passed quickly between the man and woman, the pair both glancing in Fiona's direction. She could not make out specific words from this distance, but she could recognize tone and body language; the woman was speaking softly, insistently, and the way she looked at Fiona- calculating, determined, yet with the barest hint of guilt- gave her the impression that perhaps now was not the time to appear disposable.

"I can help her." Fiona called; after all, she was a businesswoman at heart, and perhaps a deal could be struck. If not, drawing them closer would also bring them into range of her spells.

The pair paused, exchanged a glance. "How?" The brunette called back, incredulity lacing her voice.

"Let's have a talk, and I'll tell you."

The pair of adults huddled closer together, exchanging hushed conversation, after a moment they slowly began to close the distance between them. Seventy feet became fifty, then thirty, and Fiona's eyes widened in shock as she made out the details of the man's face.

Julius.

Another ten feet, and he stopped short, recognizing her as well; each stared at the other in shock, the woman looking searchingly between them.

"Fiona." He said dumbly, quietly, gaping at her with chocolate-brown eyes and sun-warmed skin. A thousand thoughts flew through her head: meetings at Dunsinane; the current tensions between Julius and Dmitri; the carnage both were capable of. Her mind focused in, oddly enough, on Balthazar. Zar had headed the Elites for nearly half a century, been among their ranks for another two decades before that, and the restoration of his humanity by the Van Helsing girl had changed neither his station nor his loyalties. Yet two hundred years had honed Fiona's insight and intuition to a dangerously fine edge, and something about the cast of Julius's face and set of his body suggested a much more drastic alteration.

"You know each other?" The woman asked, though the real question was obvious in the mistrust of her eyes as they flickered from witch to warlord: How do you know her? What sort of villain is she? It snapped Fiona back to the reality and immediacy of the situation; she forced the shock from her features and plastered a wicked grin onto her face, sweeping a gaze up and down the man.

"Humanity looks good on you, Julius." She said with a wink, and the warlord's face flushed, eyes not quite seeming to meet hers for several seconds. Then an idea seemed to poke through the racing mind that accompanied their current meeting, and Julius suddenly snapped his gaze down to meet hers, deep anger burning in chocolate-brown eyes.

"Did Dmitri send you?"

"Dmitri?" The woman- the Van Helsing, Fiona's addled brain finally realized- snarled, pulling the unchild back as her grip on the ax tightened; disgust and hate washed immediately over her face as she glared down at the witch. Fiona noted the reaction from her peripheral, but found herself unable to tear her gaze from Julius's form. She'd seen him box once when he was human, but to see him like that again, after eighty years of blood and debauchery, was hard to process. The warmth and health in his complexion was a sharp contrast to skin that had once been cool to the touch; the initial absence of tension, of hardness on his face suggested something almost like gentleness, a foreign idea to try to associate with this hulking warlord.

"Come on, Caesar, you know me better than that. The leeches can't send me anywhere I don't want to go."

Julius began to say something decidedly contrary in tone, but Vanessa abruptly cut him off. "Why are you here?" There was no attempt to hide the aggression, no effort put into concealing the bloodlust. If Julius had not been so relatively calm, Fiona got the distinct sense that that ax would be against her neck by now. She regarded Vanessa for a long moment, and found herself searching for more of Gabriel in her; perhaps one day she would stop comparing every Van Helsing she met to that one, but it seemed that that day had not yet come.

"I wanted to see what all the commotion was about." Fiona said with a shrug. "It's not everyday that someone lands a blow on the Czar, but it seems you can do more wondrous things than that." She nodded to Julius at the last statement, once again taking in the all-too-human pallor of his skin and cast of his eyes.

"Oh, I'm full of surprises." Vanessa said, lips pulling back into a predatory smile. There you are, Gabriel, Fiona thought bitterly.

"I'm sure you are." The witch returned levelly, not a hint of centuries-old loathing in her voice before she was once again drawing her gaze back to Julius. "Stick with her, Caesar, and you probably won't make it through this mess."

Julius didn't seem to notice the quip; he was staring at her intensely, rage and, more startlingly, grief painted across his face.

"Did you kill my mother, Fiona?" He asked, low and hoarse; she'd never seen this kind of emotion on him before, and for a moment she didn't even comprehend the statement. When it finally registered, she let the confusion play across her face.

"Why on God's bloody earth would I kill your mother?"

"Dmitri sent someone to kill her- to punish me." He took a threatening step forward, started to say more, and several things happened at once. Fiona instantly shot to her feet- or tried to, anyway. Her feet were under her when dizziness hit her head and red-hot pain shot across her stomach, the half-healed gash tearing slightly at the sudden exertion. She all but collapsed back against the tree, hand shooting to her stomach, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

Van Helsing and Julius had both tensed at the sudden movement, weapons held ready to strike, but neither them nor Fiona had the most volatile reaction to the situation; that came from Devon, who, at his companion's sudden pain and fear, shot forward in a fury of black feathers, screaming and clawing. He was on Julius in a heartbeat, talons tearing through the arm the warlord threw up to protect his eyes. His forearm was a bloody mess by the time Fiona could fully comprehend the commotion.

Bloody fucking- She let out a shrill whistle, and Devon shot back to her shoulder, feathers puffed up to nearly twice his regular size. Julius was cursing, Van Helsing was yelling, and Fiona calmly ignored them both, soothing Devon's feathers down with a blood-soaked hand.

Julius abruptly fell silent, and Vanessa wavered, looking at him questioningly. He stared at Fiona, wide-eyed, his torn and bleeding arm caught halfway lowered from his face.

"You're hurt." The blatant concern caught her off guard; it was not a trait she had ever associated with him.

"So are you. Sorry about that. You know how dramatic Devon can be."

Annoyance blunted the empathy, and for a minute he was almost familiar. He had never been a fan of her deflections- or perhaps it was just their frequency that aggravated him.

"What happened?" He took a tentative step forward, and Devon let out a sharp warning caw, feathers puffing up again.

"Hush, Devon." Fiona chastised, sliding back down the tree trunk, and Julius eased forward- a watchful eye on the raven- to stand in front of her. His looming might have been imposing, if he weren't looking at her with near puppy-like eyes. She searched his face for a long moment, and let out a derisive snort that immediately stretched into a grimace. "Seeing you like that is… odd, but I can't say I'm surprised."

It was more deflecting, and he let out a bemused huff. "Why's that?"

"Good men make the worst monsters." It was meant as a statement of fact, perhaps even as a compliment, but Julius dropped his gaze, face falling into a century's worth of guilt and shame, and Fiona felt a familiar stab of guilt. She often spoke too bluntly, too harshly to her people at Elsinore when returning from a trip; working with blood-suckers led to a certain forgetfulness about the existence of human emotions.

"Apologies, Julius." Fiona said genuinely, and his head snapped up, unsure and evaluating. To further the sentiment, she added, "And if you must know, I made one too many snarky comments to the Princess. She sent some Elites to remind me of my manners- some of Zar's. You just can't train them like he did, especially now that he's dead. Such a waste."

"Anastasia's out here?" Julius asked, equal parts surprised and uneasy, and Fiona grinned.

"No one was more surprised than I when that particular gopher finally left her hole. Don't worry, she's not around here. Devon clocked her yesterday, twenty miles to the south and heading west."

"How many with her?" Van Helsing interjected, glancing around wearily; Fiona noted that she did not seem surprised by knowledge, and came to the sudden revelation that the boy who had been traveling with her- Muhammed, whom Dmitri had thought held such potential- was nowhere to be seen. Fiona swept a honed gaze up and down the Van Helsing and the un-child, looking for anything else she had missed in her wounded and surprised state.

Finally, she answered, "Three. How many did she have when she found you?"

The air seemed to shift, making room for the sudden tension. The brunette's jaw clenched, and she twirled the ax around her hand in a decidedly aggressive fashion. "You tell me. Seems like you know them pretty well. What are you, exactly?"

Fiona flashed her coldest smile and said, low and smooth, "Oh, I'm a lot of things. Deal-maker, patron of wounded creatures, friend to most and enemy to few. I've stood with and against monsters you've never even heard of." She paused, preparing for the reaction to her next words and glancing disdainfully to that ax. "But more importantly, lass, I'm out of your bloody league."

Fiona expected some kind of outburst, most likely physical and most likely dramatic; Gabriel certainly wouldn't have stood for such a direct insult. Instead, Vanessa snorted derisively.

"That's a lot of talk for someone who can barely stand." She said, and the Celt grinned.

"Fiona-" Julius warned, immediately alarmed. The word was only halfway from his mouth when Fiona placed a blood-soaked finger to her eyelid and uttered a single syllable in Gaelic. For a fraction of a second, nothing seemed to happen.

"What the fuck did you do!" Vanessa screeched, cradling Dylan to her, ax held in front of them as though to ward off an attack. Her eyes were cloudy and white, completely blind.

"Fiona!" Julius snapped, taking a step towards Vanessa as though to help, and thinking better of it when the ax was jerked to point towards the sound.

"Give it back!" Vanessa snarled, panic and aggression lacing her voice in equal measures. "I'll rip you to fucking pieces! Give it back"

Fiona winked at Julius, tapped a finger against her lips, and silently mouthed another Gaelic word. When she next spoke, her voice sounded from behind Vanessa.

"I'm quaking in my boots, truly." She intoned, and Vanessa whirled to face the phantom voice, ax flashing dangerously through the air.

"Fiona, that's enough." Julius interjected sternly. "You made your point."

"Why do I get the feeling that you're not as much fun as you used to be?" The witch replied lightly, snapping her fingers. Sight returned, it took a solid second for the disoriented Vanessa to get her bearings and turn to face the pair once again.

"Do that again-" Vanessa began menacingly.

"Really? You think another threat is the way to go?" Fiona challenged, and Vanessa paused. "Now, lets at least act like we're civilized people."

Silence stretched for a long second before Vanessa asked, "What are you, some kind of witch?"

Fiona grinned wickedly. "Aye. A world class draio fala. What you modern kids might call a hemomancer or a warlock. I'm probably the oldest living blood-witch in the States."

The Celt saw Van Helsing's interest catch on the term blood witch, and watched her connect the term to Fiona's initial offer about Dylan. "You said you could help her."

"For a price, and with certain… supplies. Luckily, I'm feeling quite generous." She waved her bloodied hand pointedly.

"And the price?" Julius queried.

"You always had plenty of blood to spare, Caesar. I'll do what I can for the girl, after I've done what I can for me."

"What can you do for her?" Vanessa challenged, with renewed suspicion.

"Well, there is a chance that I could turn her back."

The pair of humans stared at Fiona for a second, gaping, before both spoke at nearly the same time.

"Are you sure?" Van Helsing asked; she was trying so hard to appear deadly serious, but desperate hope was creeping into her eyes.

"Wait, how long have you been able to do that?" Julius followed a half-second later.

"Almost a century." Fiona said to Julius. To Vanessa, she said, "There's a chance. The young and the willing are easiest to turn, but nothing is guaranteed."

"Hold on," Julius interjected, "So when we were-" He glanced almost imperceptibly at Vanessa, and instead said, "When we worked together, you could have turned me back?"

Fiona, unable to tell quite how he felt about that- and doubting if even he knew- simply shrugged. "Sure, I could have. And you would've fought me every second of it, and probably been promptly murdered if it'd worked." She, too, glanced to Vanessa and back, and with a near-lecherous grin added, "Handsome vamps aren't so easy to find that I'd just throw one away. Not before I'm done with 'em, anyway."

Julius blushed deeply as Vanessa looked between them, distinctly uncomfortable. "This ritual of yours," she said, pointedly changing the subject, "What happens if it doesn't work?"

"Not much. A bit of retching and spasming, but nothing fatal, if that's what you're worried about."

Van Helsing paused, evaluating. "Alright. Say we try your ritual, and it doesn't work. What do we get out of helping you then?"

"Fair question. Your kid doesn't look like she's in great shape. The un-children need to feed often, and if all else fails, I just so happen to be a great blood-bag." Fiona began to push herself to her feet, and Julius offered a hand, which she took. He hauled her up, and she swayed slightly, right hand keeping pressure on her stomach as she extended the left towards Vanessa. "Those are my offers. Do we have a deal, Van Helsing?"

Vanessa stared into her for a long second, hate and suspicion and hope in her eyes, before she sheathed her ax and shifted her body sideways, holding a newly-struggling Dylan away from the witch. The pair shook hands.

"Splendid. Now, for our first order of business." She turned back to Julius and drew her dagger from her jacket, flipping it deftly around her hand to offer him the handle. "Prick your finger with that."

"Just a prick?"

"Aye. Humans can be fragile, and a slower flow of blood will keep things from moving too fast." She leaned back against the tree, pale and unbalanced despite her unconcerned facade, and shed her jacket. Julius did as he was asked, and Vanessa pulled Dylan a few yards back, predicting the struggle that came when the young vampire saw fresh blood.

"A tiny bit bigger." Fiona instructed, rolling up her left sleeve to reveal lean, hard muscle underneath an interlocking web of Celtic tattoos, the symbols beginning at the palm and disappearing, seemingly without pause, under her shirt. Julius again dug the point of the dagger into his index finger, barely wincing as blood welled to the surface. "That'll do. Hold that finger on this symbol on my shoulder. Next one down- there ya go. Now, mate, here comes the important part: I need to know if you start feeling light-headed, cold, clammy, or if your hand goes numb. Try to be a tough guy about it and you might lose that finger."

"Okay, I hear ya'." Julius affirmed. Then he added, with a quizzical look, "Were there always this many side effects?"

"Oh, sure. But vamps are tougher, and more expendable- don't give me that look. I wasn't any more reckless with your life than you would've been with mine." As magic knitted the flayed skin on her side back together again, Fiona nodded towards Dylan and asked, "Who sired her?"

Vanessa gave her a black look. "Your friends didn't tell you?"

Fiona had invested enough of her concentration into magic that the term 'friends' did not immediately clarify the answer. Then Julius said softly, knowingly, "They didn't. She doesn't approve of-" he gestured noncommittally towards Dylan.

Rebecca.

That highborn prick said he'd keep her in line. Bloody leeches and their bloody schemes.

"I should have fried her." Fiona said venomously, mostly to herself. "I had her life in my bloody hands, and I let him talk me out of it." She shook her head as though to clear it. "I'll need a reasonably fresh vial of the bitch's blood for the ritual. Five milliliters will do, but the more the better."

Vanessa's face fell, and Julius shot her a sympathetic look. Fiona glanced between them, eye narrowing.

"She wasn't turned the normal way." Vanessa explained. "They did it in a lab. That doctor, Sholomenko, he said she'd die if I turned her back."

The Celt pursed her lips. "That's a complication. He has a mind to rival Mendel, if not an ounce of his balls. I suppose I can find him and pick his brain. You say you've talked to him. Where did you see him last?" Vanessa glanced away, lips pressed into a thin, angry line. Fiona frowned, and pressed, "And they had to use a sample from someone to transmit the virus, so I'll still need the sire's blood."

"They're dead. Both of them."

"Well, fuck." The witch said with her usual elegance, unsurpised. "I should've guessed that a Van Helsing would go on a killing spree."

"You work with vampires, and you're going to lecture me about killing people?" Vanessa snapped.

"Pardon me for holding humans to a higher moral standard than the leeches."

"Fiona," Julius cut in before either could throw more insults, "Is there anything else you could use? Maybe my blood could work. Me and Rebecca were turned by the same person-"

"Look, Caesar, you can't just pull a I Can't Believe It's Not Butter substitution with blood-magic rituals." The warlord appeared wildly confused by the statement, so Fiona clarified, "I need the real thing, and without the blood of the sire, there's not much I can do." The Celt glanced to the un-child again, then to Vanessa, adding, "I'm sorry. All I have to offer her now is a meal."

Uneasy surprise entered Van Helsing's face at the seemingly genuine apology, followed by a flicker of hope at the prospect of feeding her child.

"And you won't turn if she bites you?"

"Not with magic and a little vigilance." She mumbled a few words in Gaelic and added to Julius, "Hand me your other arm." He did as he was told, expecting her to collect more blood from the deep scratches in his forearm, but instead she gently held his wrist in her hand and passed a hand up his arm, repeating that same foreign phrase. His skin became almost uncomfortably warm under the touch, but the wounds began to knit themselves back together as the hand passed over them. "You're good, mate. Thanks for the donation."

Julius dropped his hand from her shoulder and leaned on the tree next to her, distantly amazed by the improvement a few minutes of magic had made in her; the Celt's face was no longer tensed in pain, and her movements were surer, her complexion warmer. For having been used to produce this wondrous effect, he himself felt only one small side-effects, with his heart pounding as though he'd been sprinting. The witch settled smoothly on the ground again, drawing her flask from her jacket and looking back up at Vanessa and Julius.

"The kid has three minutes once I start this next spell- less, if she's sucking me dry too fast. Witch's blood has a certain allure to it, and the kid's starving already, so she's not gonna be easy to pry off me." She stared intently into Vanessa's face as she added, "If you don't get her under control quick enough, I will, and it'll sting."

Vanessa's mouth set itself into a hard line, but she nodded. She drew Dylan closer, the girl primed to fall upon the Celt at the slightest opportunity. Julius shifted closer, ready to intervene if she latched onto anything more vital than an arm. Fiona took a deep breath and long drink from her flask, noted the time, and recited a string of words in Gaelic. She held her bare forearm out with resignation.

It did not take much guidance from Vanessa for the unchild to clamp down on the arm with hands and teeth, fangs sinking into the vein of the wrist. Fiona grimaced and thumped her head back against the tree, cursing lowly in what sounded suspiciously like Russian; the child certainly had no concept of gentalness.

"How's Cormac?" Julius asked conversationally, a thinly veiled attempt to use one of her favorite subjects to distract her from the dagger-like teeth shifting in her arm. Fiona flashed a rare gentle smile for the sentiment.

"My pride and joy, as always. He's grown into the finest druid on this side of the Atlantic."

"Better than you?" Julius teased, folding his hulking form to sit next to her.

"Another decade and he will be. I've got experience on him, but I never had a particular talent for the earth magics. If Gaelic were his native tongue, he'd have been unparalleled in the Druidic arts years ago." There was no small amount of pride in Fiona's voice.

"You have a kid?" Vanessa asked as she took in their conversation, judgmental and almost suspicious.

"Cormac isn't my- well, that's not true. He isn't blood, though." Fiona glanced towards Dylan, and for a long moment those dark green eyes were far, far away. She took a long drink from her flask, and the grim, sympathetic look Julius was given her made her suspect that he knew she was thinking of her own children. He should have known little about them, and likely wasn't even sure exactly how many she'd had, but he knew that they had met early and gruesome deaths.

"Quick looking at me like that, Caesar. It's too weird seeing pity out of you." Fiona glanced at her watch and then to Vanessa, seemingly oblivious to Julius's sheepish expression. "Sixty second countdown, Van Helsing."

Julius stood, bracing to help. Vanessa tightened her grip on Dylan's collar and wrapped an arm around her small waist, and Fiona yelped as the unchild immediately clamped down on her wrist, hard.

"Vanessa-!" Julius exclaimed, worried, at the same time that Fiona snapped, "Van Helsing!"

The pair were able to pry Dylan from the witch's arm, the latter shouting curses in various languages all the while. The minute the unchild was relieved of Fiona's wrist, the Celt cradled it to her chest, drawing a clean rag from her discarded jacket's pocket and pressing it to the wound, speaking smoothly in Gaelic. She noticed that Vanessa was watching the ritual keenly, though Julius, having observed the practice several times before, was much more interested in bear-hugging a thrashing Dylan into submission.

Fiona deftly tied a strip of cloth around her wrist using teeth and one hand, and climbed to her feet to slip her jacket back on. Devon alighted to land on her shoulder, rubbing his head affectionately against her jaw.

"It's been a- well, its been something doing business with you, Van Helsing. Julius, come here a minute. I've got something to show you."

Julius glanced to Vanessa and passed Dylan off to her, and crossed to stand before the Celt. The raven eyed him distrustingly, and Fiona glanced towards Vanessa with a similar expression.

"Transference," She explained simply, and Julius, familiar with this vaguery, leaned down slightly so she could place two fingers to his forehead. Vanessa watched around Julius's shoulder as Fiona's eyes turned cloudy and white, as though no pupil or iris had ever existed. A moment later, the witch blinked, normal eyes returned, and they broke apart. "It's called Elsinore. There's a pocket of human civilization there. If you ever get tired of trailing at Van Helsing coattails, you're welcome there."

Julius grinned. "You tryin' to recruit me?"

"Course I am. Look, mate, I don't know what you think of yourself right now, but I've watched you for over eighty years. You're tough, you're good-hearted, and you're smarter than you let on. And that's without the training I know you have. We'd be grateful to have you. Just keep the location to yourself, yeah? There's not a vamp out here that knows about it, and I want to keep it that way."

"What, not even Dmitri?"

"Fuck no. That highborn prick is a good ally and a horrible houseguest. He thinks every place is his." She glanced towards Vanessa, ignoring the way the women glared at her with renewed murderous intent. "There's a couple with a camp 'bout thirty miles northwest of here. They take in kids, sometimes help out travelers. Stay away from them. An unchild could get close enough to rip them apart."

"And why should I care about friends of yours?"

"I'm a neutral party, Van Helsing. I run supplies and jobs for every major organized faction in this wasteland, and a good few of the minor ones. These friends happen to be good people who know nothing about you. I, on the other hand, have lived long enough to see that death follows Van Helsings like a shadow, and unlike yer cult of a family, I'd like to spare as many civilians as possible."

Vanessa narrowed her eyes at the Celt, no doubt sensing a deeper chasm of emotion running underneath the last statement. There was personal history there.

"What do you know about my family?"

The witch smiled, thin and cold. "That he who hunts monsters should be careful not to become one. Devon, find me a path, north by northwest." The raven lifted to the air with a satisfied cry. Fiona put two fingers to her forehead in a lazy mock salute to Julius. "I hope to see you at Elsinore, Julius."

"Yeah. Maybe one day." His tone suggested that he very much doubted that eventuality. The witch smiled wryly, shot one last disapproving glance to Vanessa, and spun on her heels, meandering off the road and following the raven's silhouette through an open, overgrown field. She half expected to feel an ax being buried into her back, especially when she heard hush voices rise from behind her, but Julius and the Van Helsings slowly faded into the distance as she walked. When they were finally out of sight, Fiona let out a deep sigh, some of the tension leaving her muscles.

Devon swooped down to join her as she walked, and she extended a forearm for him to land. He cocked his head at her, a deep rasping sound rumbling from the back of his throat.

"Yeah, it is bloody weird. A human Julius, and a half-breed Van Helsing. Hey, is that why you were such a dick to Julius?"

The raven replied with a rumbling, almost grating sound.

"Fair, I guess. I'm more surprised about Vanessa. This is the first we've walked away from a Van Helsing better than we walked in. But good God did she remind me of Gabriel at times."

Devon made a comforting clicking sound with his beak, and Fiona stroked the feathers on his chest.

"Thanks, mate. Follow them a bit, see which way they go. They were good sports. We'll give 'em a few days head start before we tell Dmitri."

Devon cocked his head, clucked at her disapprovingly, and shot into the air anyway. Fiona watched him go and then drew her flask, sipping it as she strolled leisurely through fields and forests, enjoying the physicality of the travel.

She really had been spending too much time administrating. Perhaps she would stay in the field for a while longer, and see how things played out.

Chapter Text

Then did the little Maid reply,

"Seven boys and girls are we;

Two of us in the church-yard lie,

Beneath the church-yard tree."

We Are Seven, Williams Wordsworth

Fiona's mother had schooled her in magic using a technique she'd called "slapstick discipline". She would perform simple spells- hovering a pebble in the air, or creating a flame from nothing- and her mother would strike her forearms with a cane pole. When Fiona could maintain concentration on a spell for ten hits in a row, she graduated to maintaining concentration on two spells at once. They had even attempted three, but to split the mind in three ways and maintain concentration on each in those circumstances was beyond even her mother's capabilities, so when Fiona could hold the three for five hits, her mother relented.

Even at the time, Fiona knew that that was a harsh, vindictive method. Her mother did as well; Fiona saw, more in retrospect than the moment, how it weighed on her. But she was raising a daughter in harsh times and training a magician for even worse, and did what she felt she had to do to forge Fiona into something that could survive the lives they led.

Fiona had never used the method when teaching Cormac- could never bring herself to- but she understood the necessity of it. That didn't mean she forgave it, but when she was with the Johnsons, she could sympathize with the grief that a parent must feel to have to tarnish a childhood to save the child.

On this day, as she always did, she sent Devon ahead of her to greet the family; the second time she had come to their camp, she had avoided setting off the rudimentary perimeter alarms, and they had shot at her on instinct when she quietly appeared amongst them. Devon served as a convenient way to warn them that she was near, so that they could at least temporarily be more careful about identifying humanoids before they shot at them.

The squeals and sounds of delight went up from the woods ahead of her, and a ghost of a smile crossed her face. When she stepped into camp, her familiar was playing with the younger children, fluttering after them as they scattered before him.

"Devon, come get your tips on before you scratch someone." She called, swinging her backpack from her shoulders. After the first few times watching him play with the children, she had spent a sleepless night in the Johnson camp carving old corks down to tightly fit the end of his talons. The raven made an aggravated rumbling sound as he landed on the ground next to her, hopping impatiently in place. "Hold still, dummy."

"Stupid." The raven shot back, a deeper mimicry of Aisling's Dublin accent.

"Shut up." She muttered as she slid the corks onto the tips of his talons. "Or next time I'll carve one to go on your beak."

"Shut up." The raven returned, and shot back to the children, who waved briefly at Fiona before fleeing, laughing with delight.

"Fiona!" Chad called happily, strolling over from the cooking fire. "Good to see you again."

He pulled her into a side-hug, and she patted his back companionably.

"You're looking good, mate. Everybody doing okay?"

"As good as we can."

"Fair enough. Where's Mike?"

"He took Troy hunting. Hey, got anything good for us?"

"Com'on, you have to ask? I stopped by one of my safe houses on the way. Even have some chocolate for ya'."

"Ssshh!" Chad immediately interjected, looking around dramatically. "They'll stampede us both if they hear the C-word."

The Celt laughed at that. "Right, right. What about you guys? Find me anything interesting?"

"Well, don't know if it's anything good, but we have some things for you to look over."

"Good enough for me." Chad began to lead her towards the entrance to their bunker, and Fiona swung her pack over one shoulder and followed along. She waved to the kids as she went, fist-bumped Ethan as she passed, and made it all the way to the bunker entrance before a small body collided with her thighs, staggering her as small arms wrapped around her waist.

"Fiona!" Tabitha squealed, breathless but delighted, Devon swooping towards them both, "Save me!"

The Celt laughed out loud and looked up to Devon, who was already pulling out of his dive to flap around her at head-height.

"Back, fowl beast!" She called dramatically, waving her arms at him threateningly and laughing at her own pun. He croaked and dived in, nipping her finger and darting back out of range. "Ow! Dick! That hurt."

"Hold still dummy." The raven mimicked, this time with Fiona's more Ulster accent. Tabby burst out laughing at the retort.

"Stop showing off for the kids." She grumbled as the raven lazily glided away. He was rarely this talkative around adults, but soaked up the wonder and attention of children. Then Fiona looked down to the girl wrapped around her legs and grinned. "Nice to see you again, lass. What've you been up to?"

"We found some mushrooms for you!"

"Wonderful! Were there any you can name?"

"There was porcini, and hawk's wing, and Ryan found some chanterelle."

"Good job! Hawk's wing is criminally underrated in my opinion. If I'll remember, I'll have to bring you all some of the beefy mushroom soup we make with it."

They descended into the underground bunker where the family slept; Fiona paused at the bottom and turned back to the ladder, arms held out, and Tabby leapt to her from the top with a delighted laugh. The Celt caught her, spun around once, and deposited the giggling girl onto the floor.

Chad, meanwhile, had pulled a small box of items from under one of the bunk beds and was methodically laying items out on the floor. In a familiar ritual of theirs, Fiona settled cross-legged on the ground across from him, swung her pack from her shoulders, and began laying things out of it as well. Tabby quickly grew bored and headed back up the ladder. Fiona glanced over her shoulder to assure herself that the girl was gone, and then added a box of condoms and a jar of coconut oil to the pile of goods.

Chad shot her a bemused smile. "Still on about the coconut oil, huh?"

"It's better than any modern lube, and I'll happily die on that hill."

"It's alright." He said with a shrug.

"Well, if you don't want it-"

"I didn't say that."

She huffed a laugh. "'Course not. What mushrooms do you have for me?"

Chad deposited two bunches of mushrooms in front of her, each tied together with a small length of twine. "Left we identified, right we're not sure about."

Fiona spent the next few minutes dividing the mushrooms into several smaller piles. "No one ate any of these, did they?" She asked, holding one of the unknowns up.

"No. Poisonous?"

"Aye. Psychedelic in small amounts, but nothing you all should be messing with." She added it to one of her piles. "But if you find any more, I'd be happy to have them."

"You getting into recreational drugs these days?" Chad jested.

"Please, I've been in the recreational drug business for years. I don't touch uppers, though."

He raised an eyebrow. "That's where you draw the line, huh?"

She shrugged. "I just don't sleep enough to be taking anything that might keep me up. I don't judge the hard stuff, though. Everyone was on laudanum back in the day. And I was in love with a man once who enjoyed a bit of opium from time to time. Helped him calm down after gunfights.

"Gunfights? He a cop or something?"

"Crime lord."

"You know I can't tell if you're joking, right?"

She grinned devilishly. "And you never will."

He snorted a small laugh. "I suppose I'll live. Hey, you think those mushrooms are a fair trade for the chocolate?"

"The chocolate's not in the pot, it's for the kids. But I'll trade you twenty rounds of ammo for the mushrooms and the wild mustard."

In a familiar routine of theirs, they spent the next few minutes bartering items back and forth. Chad certainly came out with the better of the deal, but Fiona was sure to counter his offers enough to make him feel that he'd earned it. When it was done, she began to pack everything back into her backpack; if Chad noticed that more fit into the bag than should have really been possible, he didn't mention it.

"We still have room at Elsinore if you want it." The witch offered conversationally as she packed.

"We appreciate it." The 'no' was left unsaid.

They'd had this conversation before, but this time, Fiona paused and looked up, fixing Chad with a hard, grim look.

"Things are getting dangerous, Chad. And I mean more dangerous. Infinitely more. I can't protect you out here."

"We didn't ask for you protection." Chad replied, quiet but tense.

"And I didn't ask to like you lot, but here I am." She snapped back.

"We're done talking about this, Fiona."

"Then stop talking and listen. You can't keep these kids safe, Chad.

"We're-"

"I don't care how bloody careful you think you are. I was in a castle full of armed guards when I lost a child. You're in the middle of a fucking apocalypse with some cans on a string."

"Then I'm sorry for your loss, but we are done talking about this."

"I think you missed the point of that anecdote." She grumbled, pushing herself to her feet and stalking across the room. There really was no graceful way to stomp up the rungs of a ladder, but the hatch made a satisfying bang when she slammed it.

Within seconds, Devon was diving towards her, and she held her arm out instinctually. He landed and cocked his head, chirping and rumbling at the emotion he could feel rolling off her.

"I tried. He won't listen, as usual." Devon croaked, and the sound stretched into a grated rumble. "Yeah. We'll see." A more inquisitive chirp. "I'll give it to Tabby. She's a reliable kid."

Fiona spent the bulk of the rest of the afternoon teaching the kids card games and helping with small tasks around camp. Troy and Mike returned without a deer, but had collected several rabbits from their traplines. Fiona expertly dressed them down with her dagger, and then summoned the kids around for a lesson on how to remove the skin in one complete piece; Mike and Chad, meanwhile, took the chance to slip into the bunker alone.

They had dinner, and the kids chatted animatedly with Fiona the whole time, asking this and that about history and her travels and her current life. She didn't lie, but she kept some parts purposefully vague. The whole family was delighted when she presented two whole bars of Hershey's chocolate for dessert, and Chad passed out one square to each person and hid the rest away for the days ahead.

Then the guitar came out, and the children were polite enough to let their fathers get through one song before they were asking Fiona to play. The witch had never officially learned how to play the guitar, but she could pick the strings almost like a banjo, and knew enough basic chords to combine into music. Her voice wasn't exactly beautiful, but she had the confidence and the range and precision of tone to make the performance enjoyable nonetheless. She played a few adapted songs in languages they couldn't understand, knowing that they simply enjoyed the new rhythms and sounds, and then played Dark and Stormy Night, a jaunty and humorous ballad about an entire castle conspiring to cover up the murder of a countess. By the end of the song, Tabby was falling asleep against Fiona's side, worn out by an afternoon of playing and socializing.

She smiled down at the girl. "Hey Tabby, you awake?"

"Mmhm." The girl hummed.

"Com'on, time for bed." Fiona prompted, passing the guitar back to Mike.

"Nooo!" She whined immediately, sitting up straighter and rubbing her eyes. "I wanna stay up."

"I'll sing you another song if you go to bed now." The six-year-old only frowned up at her, lower lip beginning to stick out in a pout.

"Will you tell me a story too?"

The witch grinned. "You're a tough negotiator, lass, but you've got a deal."

In what was almost becoming a routine of theirs, Fiona stood and lifted the small girl into her arms, opening the hatch to the bunker and descending the ladder with one hand.

"What story do you want to hear?" Fiona asked as she crossed to the beds and began to tuck Tabby in for the night.

"I dunno. Something I haven't heard before."

"Hmm. Have you heard the story of Medusa?"

"Nuh-uh."

So Fiona told an abbreviated and significantly less graphic version of Medusa's origin story, and ended it well before Perseus arrived. She focused on the idea that most monsters were better left alone- that, in fact, even the monster was usually happier that way. Tabby listened with rapt attention at the beginning, but by the end, she was nodding off again.

"Tabby. Hey."

"I'm awake." The girl muttered.

"I know. I have something for you." That woke her up a little, and she sat up straighter in bed.

"What is it?"

Fiona reached into a pocket inside her jacket and pulled out a round amber stone that had been tied into a loop of black paracord to make a necklace.

"Ooh. It's pretty." Tabby said, reaching for it. Fiona looped it over the girl's head; the cord was so long that the stone hung halfway down her torso. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, lass. This is a very special stone. It's called a Sending Stone. I have one too." She pulled a nearly identical stone from the same pocket to demonstrate, then dropped it back in. "If you're ever in trouble, you can use it to contact me. I'll hear it through my stone. Understand?"

"Like magic?"

Fiona grinned. "Exactly like magic. Now, all you have to do to get it to work is say this phrase into it. Repeat after me, okay?"

She spent several minutes teaching her the phrase, adjusting her pronunciation until Tabby could repeat it flawlessly.

"Very good." She praised when Tabby finally had it. "Now try it into the stone."

"It'll really work?" She raised the stone up and repeated the phrase into it, and it lit up with pale golden light. Tabby's eyes went wide. "Woah."

"I told you. Magic." Fiona pulled the twin stone from her pocket again. "Say something into it."

"Hello?" Tabby immediately said into the stone, and her voice echoed from the stone in Fiona's hand. A wide grin split her face. "That's so cool."

"Right?" Fiona said with a matching grin. "But it's not a toy, Tabitha. This is for emergencies only. Alright?"

Disappointment dampened her smile immediately. "Alright." She said sullenly. Then, "Can I tell Mike and Chad?"

"Of course." Fiona replied, because she knew they wouldn't believe her. Any time the pair had witnessed something out of the ordinary with Fiona or her equipment or her stories, they pointedly ignored it; she had no doubt they'd dismiss this as well. "Now, what song did you want to hear?"

Tabby requested The Willow Maid, and when she was still awake at its end, Fiona immediately went in to How the Tide Rushes In. She was sound asleep halfway through, and Fiona spent one minute watching her sleep, tamping down the familiar wave of warmth and pain that rose in her chest. The Celt slipped back up the ladder as quietly as was possible, and rejoined the rest of the Johnson family around the campfire.

They talked and told stories for perhaps another hour before it was declared time for the rest of the children to go to bed. Fiona bid them all good-night as they shuffled off, and as soon as the hatch closed behind them, Fiona shot Mike and Chad a wicked grin.

"The coconut oil is just okay, is it?" She teased.

"I usually don't want to have to decide between cooking and sex." Mike replied mildly. "But it is pretty good."

Fiona moaned dramatically. "What an understatement."

Chad looped an arm around his partner's shoulders. "Did your crime lord introduce you to it?" He asked.

"Crime lord?" Mike asked, looking between them with raised eyebrows.

"Old love." Fiona explained. "And I introduced it to him."

"Good God. A crime lord and a Russian noble." The latter referred to her second husband, whom she had mentioned during a previous visit. "Where do you find these people?"

"Well, the Russian was the nephew of an associate of mine." She flashed a bemused grin, sinking into memory and drawing her flask from her jacket. "Same associate basically called me a gold-digging whore when he found out we were engaged. That's the second or third closest I've come to going at him."

"That was Ivan, right?" Mike asked. "Which husband was he again?"

"Number two. First one I loved, though."

That surprised Chad. "You married someone you didn't love? I can't see that."

Fiona took a deep swig from her flask. "Honestly, I don't know if I loved my first husband. In my time, a woman's relationship with her husband was about survival. You had to play to what society expected of you, yes, but you also had to love someone. You can't live like we did if you didn't have a reason too, so if you had to force yourself to love someone, you did. That might have been more Stockholm Syndrome than love, now that I think on it. But Ivan… Ivan I loved. It tore my heart out to watch the Van Helsings give him a slow death."

"The Van Helsings?" Mike asked. If they were thrown by phrases like in my time, they didn't mention it. They never did, nor had they ever asked about her implications that she was much older than them.

Fiona waved off the question. "This rich German family. Bunch of sociopaths. Thank God they don't have the resources they used to."

"Who does these days?" Chad put in, a little bitterly.

"Aye, that's the truth. My people are going stir-crazy without TV. If Marge didn't have the entire Golden Girls box set, they'd be at each other's throats by now."

"You've been watching Golden Girls?" Mike asked with a fond smile. "I loved that show as a kid. Watched it all the time in high school."

"Me too." Chad agreed. "One of the first shows that made me think it was okay to be myself." He pressed a kiss to the side of Mike's head.

"You know, I was actually in love with a woman named Sofia once. Not nearly as sarcastic as Sofia Petrillo, thank the Lord. I would've been roasted alive."

Here I go again, Fiona thought distantly. The Johnsons and the whiskey were a combination that always brought her back to lost love, and they were dangerously easy to talk to.

"Wait, you had a girlfriend?" Chad asked, his surprise based in her plethora of male lovers, string of past husbands, and self-proclaimed "overly Catholic" upbringing.

"Girlfriend." Fiona scoffed. "She wasn't my girlfriend. She was the light of my life. My partner, my lover. She was the force of nature that I believed in more than I believed in my father's God-"

"Okay, Romeo." Mike jested when he sensed that she was about to get long-winded and poetic. Fiona grinned.

"I'm a sap, I know, but Sofia deserves every ounce of it. She was this curvy five-foot-nothing Greek with these deep black eyes… And she had the cutest little girl. They had my heart in their hands. The kind of love that makes you want to be a better version of yourself. Kinder, more patient. I hadn't been that happy in… in a long time." The familiar wave of grief swelled in her chest, and the witch took a deep swig from her flask.

"What happened?" Mike asked quietly, gently. Chad shot him a disapproving look for prying, but Mike was unperturbed; he knew that some grief needed to be shared.

"She was in an arranged marriage. He was an abusive psychopath, and the son of a Mafia don who operated out of Portland. I tried to intervene so many times, but she begged me not to hurt him. Knew the rest of the family would retaliate against me if I did. I begged her to come live with me. I tried so many times." She paused, took another swig. "Heh. Guess she had a deeper hook in me than I had on her, 'cause I didn't touch him. Then he found out about us… In those days, relationships like ours could be a death sentence, and he was already unstable… He took them both from me, and wouldn't even face me like a man. Made me carve through his father's men to get him."

The "carving" didn't go as well as the statement implied. She'd gotten herself pinned down in a warehouse in Portland, surrounded by mobsters spraying gunfire at her. Cormac had had to call Dmitri, and he'd sent Julius to pull her bleeding, bullet-ridden hide from the proverbial fire. Then she'd staggered her half-conscious self around that warehouse until she found Sofia's husband- the man was barely alive by that point- and emptied an entire revolver's worth of bullets into his face. Dmitri and Julius had been livid about the whole event, though the latter's anger was slightly assuaged by his love of killing mobsters.

"Christ." Chad muttered.

Fiona smiled blithely. "Apologies. I don't mean to be so depressing."

"No, its okay." Mike responded immediately, all earnesty and sympathy. "It's been hard for us, and we still have each other. I couldn't imagine…" He trailed off, leaned into Chad for comfort.

"Well, I couldn't imagine doing it now. In the middle of all this, and with kids…" Her face hardened. "I wasn't joking earlier. This hellscape is about to get even worse, I guarantee it. Those kids need to be somewhere safe. Elsinore. Dunsinane. Even one of my safehouse would be better than out here."

"Fiona-" Chad snapped, but Mike put a hand over his to pause him. Then he fixed Fiona with a firm but patient look.

"Can you guarantee that no one will disapprove of our relationship?"

"I can guarantee your safety."

"If you can't guarantee that, then you can't guarantee our safety."

Genuine anger spasmed across her face. "You insult me, lads." She said lowly, voice tight and caged. "I don't harbor bigots. I can't police thoughts, but all of my people are hand-selected and trained. You two have absolutely no idea the lifetime of effort that has gone into making Elsinore a safe place, so don't sit here and tell me it's not."

"Don't sit here and tell us it is." Chad snarled.

"It is." She insisted, growing frustrated by both their denials, and the fact that she couldn't explain that violence was magically prohibited in her lands. "And even if some of my people did disapprove of you, it'd still be a better place for those kids."

"The best place for them is with us!" Chad snapped.

"Chad." Mike interjected, and the pair shared a look. Mike looked back to Fiona. "We appreciate your concern. I know you're pushing this because you care about us, but-" She could have hit him when he said but, "-you need to let it go now."

They all knew that wasn't going to happen. Fiona took a sip of whiskey to soothe the frustration and anxiety twisting in her chest. She had seen the pattern of history, and knew, through a kind of instinct that bordered on clairvoyance, that these people would not be unaffected by unfolding events. She knew in her bones that there would come a day when she would have to intervene, and the beginnings of grief began to weigh in her chest. She already knew that her hand would be forced in protecting these children, and that that would destroy this relationship.

Fiona turned those emotions off. What had to be done would be done. She had lived too long to shy away from necessities for the sake of sympathies or morality or personal pain.

The three chatted a bit longer, especially about what Fiona knew of the current state of the continent, but the tension never completely dissipated. Eventually, Fiona bid them both a good night and settled in next to the fire to keep watch. She rarely slept, and so her visits with the Johnsons was an equally rare opportunity for the whole family to get a night of uninterrupted sleep.

As she often did while in the field, she spent the night alternating between funneling spare energy into the red pendant around her neck and watching through Devon's eyes as he lazily circled the perimeter. Around four in the morning, Devon had drifted farther afield, and reached through the familiar-bond to turn Fiona's attention to him. She entered his body reflexively, and immediately saw what had caught his attention. The local group of Flencers had wandered closer than normal- still within their own territory, but close enough for it to be noteworthy. They were sniffing and circling the area, and from the aggression and frustration in their bodies and their clipped, growling communications, it wasn't prey they'd found.

Trespasser, Devon thought- or at least, he thought of a concept that made the word appear in Fiona's mind.

Aye, Fiona agreed somberly. As plain bloody creepy as the Flencers were, they knew and usually respected where their territory ended and the Johnson land began. A lone, wandering vampire, on the other hand, would not know nor care about a human's territory. The witch had her familiar follow the half-feral vampires as they tracked the scent through their land, hoping that the group would find the interloper and deal with it. Instead, they gave up when the scent crossed fully into Johnson land, wary of tracking something past the unofficial border for fear of traps.

From the trajectory of travel, it was possible that the interloper had unknowingly cut through the corner of Johnson land and just kept going; still, Fiona and Devon spent the remaining hours until dawn meticulously combing the area in outward-spiraling circles. They found nothing else, but that didn't comfort her. Was it one of Dmitri's scouts, or Mara's? Was it a hungry vampire, pushed out of his territory by some of the vampires that were scattered when Portland fell to the Resistance? Like any ecosystem, the consequences of the changing dynamics would have far-reaching consequences, and in this food chain, the Johnsons were near the bottom.

The Johnsons began to wake a few hours after dawn. Fiona began to gather her things and prepare to move on, and told Chad and Mike of what she had seen. They were put far too at ease by the news that she hadn't been able to actually find anyone near the camp. At this point, Fiona felt like she might as well be bouncing her head off a wall as trying to warn them, so she let the subject fall.

After breakfast she said her good-byes and hugged everyone in turn, unable to shake the nagging feeling that the next time she saw them, someone would be missing from the family.

"Be careful." She told Mike and Chad. "More careful than ever."

"I promise, we will." Mike assured her.

When she knelt down to hug Tabby, she lowered her voice to say, "Be good for your fathers. And if something happens, call me."

"I will." Tabby replied, as close to dead-serious as a young child could be.

"Good girl."

Fiona had arranged with Chad and Mike to be back in about a month's time. In reality, it would be less than a week.

Three days after arriving back in Elsinore and five days since parting with the Johnsons, Fiona was spending an afternoon reading reports in her study of the morning when Ian began to shout from her bedroom.

"Fiona! Get in here!" He sounded only half-awake, sleep thickening his North Irish accent.

Fiona was in the doorway in an instant. Inside, Ian was frantically pulling his clothes on. He was in his early fifties, leanly muscular, with white hair cropped short in a military haircut and an equally close-cropped beard. "The stone." He explained shortly, and nodded to the Sending Stone glowing on her nightstand. She could hear Tabby's voice from across the room, whispered and frantic and barely intelligible between sobs. In the background, she could hear someone hushing her but holding back sobs himself.

Fiona darted to it and said the phrase. "Tabby? Can you hear me? What's going on?"

"Please come. Please, it was in the camp. There's blood-" The girl trailed off into sobs and rambling, and cold terror shot up Fiona's spine. She moved as she talked, pulling a snub-nosed revolver from her nightstand drawer and loading it.

"Tabbly, lass, where are you? Are you hidden? And what's in the camp?"

"It's Grendel. It's Grendel from the story. I'm in the bunker. Hurry. Please."

Fiona slid the revolver into the waistband of her cargo pants and threw on her jacket. "I'm coming. You stay in that bunker until I get there and don't come out for anything. I'll be there in a minute."

She deactivated the stone, put it in her pocket, and darted back out to the desk in her study. Ian was hot on her heels, but while she grabbed the satellite phone from her desk, he crossed to the opposite wall, where buttons for an intercom system were neatly labeled.

"How many squads?" He asked.

"Get me two, and whatever Vultures are in tonight. Prepare for casualties."

"Got it. Don't forget your vest." He responded brusquely, but when he glanced back, she was already gone.

Chapter Text

"How many are you, then," said I,

"If they two are in heaven?"

Quick was the little Maid's reply,

"O Master! we are seven."

We Are Seven, William Wordsworth

In the Johnson camp, just outside the entrance to the bunker, a sliver of red light cut vertically through the air, and then began to expand. To view it from behind, it stretched into what appeared to be just a six-foot rectangle of softly-glowing light; from the other side, it was a door in space, rimmed with light, opening into a dim bedroom. Fiona stepped through, Devon on her shoulder and a hand around her necklace, and the portal closed behind her.

The iron smell of blood hung in the air, and movement to her left made Fiona spin, hand still around her pendant. Twenty yards away, a man- a vampire- crouched over a small body on the ground. Her mind distantly realized that the boy was Ryan, only seven years old, his chest stuttering and stalling for breath. The vampire was tall and spindly, with high sharp cheekbones and his head shaved bare. He had been watching with rapt attention, but at Fiona's movement, he leapt to his feet and whirled towards her, body primed for motion.

Rage swept through Fiona's chest, and she blinked once, and then her eyes were black from corner to corner. The vampire cocked his head exaggeratedly at that, a slow, manic smile spreading across his face.

"A pretty bird with pretty eyes." He purred, and he wasn't looking at Devon. He took a deep breath in through the nose, and his face lit up. "Like Christmas dinner."

Fiona wanted to rip him apart, to quite literally tear him limb from limb. She'd done it before. But she glanced to Ryan on the ground behind him, and knew there wasn't time for a fight.

She was distantly aware that the vampire was still talking, practically cooing. "Come here, little birdie. Angry little thing. I don't mind some spice in my food-"

Her teeth grinded as she raised the palm with the fiery sun tattooed on it, and the vampire's brow furrowed briefly in confusion. Then she said one word, and a bolt of blindingly white light shot out of her hand. He jerked out of the way, screaming when it passed close enough to burn his arm. Fiona bolted forward, and the vampire's eyes went wide as he scrambled away, barely avoiding another blast of light as he ran. Devon launched from Fiona's shoulders and gave chase, but the witch slid to her knees next to Ryan.

There were deep lacerations across his torso, an alarming amount of blood on soaked through his shirt. She ripped her left arm out of her jacket, yanked her dagger out, and cut across the healer's tattoo on her left shoulder. She said a string of words in Gaelic and planted her palm on his chest, and the cuts began to laboriously knit themselves together. In the back of her mind, she recalled Devon to keep watch over them as she focused on the spell.

It wasn't long before the witch was shivering violently despite the warmth of magic beneath her skin, and she put her free hand back on her pendant and switched to drawing power from it. When the wounds were closed, Ryan didn't wake; he was no longer bleeding out, but the blood he had already lost was significant. She could only hope he would be stable for at least a few hours. Fiona pulled him into her arms and trotted to the hatch to the bunker.

"Tabby?" She shouted down. There was a moment of silence.

"Fiona?" That was Chad's voice, shaking and cracking. The Celt held Ryan in one arm and awkwardly descended the ladder to find the bunker in disarray. Furniture was thrown and broken, blood was smeared everywhere, and against one wall, holding a M16 that Fiona always provided ammo for, was a shaking and hyperventilating Chad.

"Bloody hell." She cursed, setting Ryan on a bed as she crossed to him. "Are you hurt?" She was already patting her hands down his torso, checking for blood. He tried to bat her away, but his attempts were weak and uncoordinated.

"He was too fast. So fast." He repeated, over and over.

"Where's Tabby?" She asked, but he didn't seem to hear her. She grabbed him by the collar and yanked his face towards hers. "I know she's alive. Now where is she?"

"G-get off me!" He protested, trying to push her away. The witch let him go and turned away, laying flat on the floor to look under the bunk beds.

"Tabby?" She called, and heard a small response from under one of the beds. She scrambled to it immediately and saw a small, wide-eyed face starting back at her. "Tabby, I'm here. It's okay."

She coaxed the girl from under the bed, and when she was out she immediately threw herself into Fiona's arms.

"You're safe, lass." She soothed. "You did so good, Tabby. I'm here. I'll keep you safe."

Then they heard footsteps above, and looked up at the ceiling in sync. Fiona pitched her voice low and said, "Get back under the bed. Don't come out unless I tell you to."

The witch planted herself in the middle of the room, between the ladder and the two humans, and drew her dagger. Over her shoulder to Chad, she whispered, "If it comes to a fight, don't worry about shooting me." He nodded shakily, sweaty hands adjusting and re-adjusting on the gun.

Anger and adrenaline and a small tingle of fear surged through the witch's body, and at such strong emotion, Devon sent assurances down the familiar-bond. She relaxed only a fraction, and when the hatch opened and a man descended, she saw the hair and the jacket.

"Mike!"

"Fiona?" He asked immediately in confusion, and then his eyes found his partner. "Chad!" Mike was to his side in an instant, and Chad started up again like he had when Fiona first arrived- So fast, he was so fast. A group of people started down the ladder after him, but the witch barely glanced at them.

"You." A woman snarled from the ladder, and Fiona whirled. For a second, she stared in unbelieving shock at Vanessa Van Helsing, uncaring of the group of teens or of Julius, who had crowded into the bunker behind her.

"What did I fucking tell you?" Fiona snapped, stalking forward, and she only caught a glimpse of absolute animal rage on Vanessa's face before the Van Helsing closed the distance between them and swung at her. Fiona ducked on instinct and backpedaled, and then everyone was shouting, and Julius was in between them, holding Fiona at arm's length by the collar of her jacket and pushing Vanessa back with the other.

"Enough!" Julius shouted. "That's enough!"

Fiona, who hadn't tried to go at Vanessa again after Julius grabbed her, shouted around him, "What did I bloody tell you? Like a goddamn shadow, and you brung it exactly where I told you not to go!"

"They found us!"

"And you-"

Julius yanked on the collar of her jacket, and the Celt glared up at him. "Knock it off, Fiona." He snapped. "This isn't her fault. It was a vampire." Julius looked at Vanessa and added, "And it's not her fault, either."

Fiona ground her teeth together, and then was struck with something. The unchild. Where is she? It was a half-panicked thought, because if she wasn't with Vanessa, she must be loose somewhere in the Johnson camp-

But she hadn't been in the camp, had she? And as Fiona's eyes flickered over them, she couldn't find the little vampire anywhere in the group of kids. Comprehension began to dawn on her. After a second where no one moved, Julius looked between the both of them and let go of Fiona's jacket. She glared at Vanessa, then turned and knelt next to the bed.

"Tabby, you can come out."

As before, the girl was instantly in her arms, and Fiona wrapped one arm around her and motioned for Julius with the other. He lifted Tabby into his arms and sat on the bed, and for a second Fiona marveled at how naturally he comforted her.

"Fiona!" Ian called from above, and everyone whirled toward the ladder.

"Who's that?" Vanessa demanded hotly.

"My people." Fiona snapped back. She pushed through the small crowd at the base of the ladder and called up the open hatch, "Rook, area's clear for now. Get me a perimeter and prepare for a Code 45. And keep the Vultures back from the hatch."

"On it."

The witch could feel everyone staring at her. She pinched the bridge of nose, sighed, and spun back around to face the adults. "What is going on? And who are all these kids?"

Mike gave Fiona the general summary of things from his point of view, and she settled on the bed next to Julius to stay near Tabby as she listened. Slowly, the remaining Johnson kids- now only consisting of Tabby, Ryan, and the teens who had gone with Mike- began to put furniture back in place and talk amongst themselves. The group of older, unfamiliar teens also talked in hushed voices, huddled together at one end of the bunker, and the quiet chatter filling the room created an illusion of privacy as the adults, congregated on the other side of the room, relayed the events of the past few days.

The conversation shifted to what the Johnsons should do next. Fiona sat next to Julius and held Tabby silently as everyone talked, frustration and resolve hardening her heart with every foolish idea they proposed to fortify the bunker and strengthen a perimeter. When the juvenile detainees agreed to that latter point, Fiona passed Tabby back to Julius and stood.

"I'll introduce you to my people. They'll find places for you and give you a crash course."

"Hey, wait a minute," Chad put in suddenly, "You weren't supposed to be back for another three weeks. Why are you guys out here?"

"Oh, that's right." Mike agreed. "And I thought you liked to travel alone. Something big come up in the area?"

In her peripheral vision, Fiona watched Vanessa tense at that idea, and mentally scoffed. Not everything is about you, Van Helsing.

"I called her." Tabby piped up from her place huddled in between Julius and Fiona, and everyone looked at her.

"Called her?" Mike asked, brow furrowing as he looked to Fiona for clarification. Julius glanced between them all.

"You haven't told them?" He asked, frowning over at her in the quintessential I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Fiona scowled back at him.

"I haven't told them?"

"Tell us what?" Chad asked.

Fiona continued to Julius, "Let's go around the room and tell everyone our birth year. You can start." Now he was annoyed with her, a muscle in his jaw flexing just slightly in an oh-so familiar way. "That's what I thought. Pardon me if I didn't want to find out if the Brady Bunch would try to burn me alive."

"Tell us what?!" Chad snapped.

"And why would we try to burn you alive?" Mike added, exasperated.

The witch leaned her head back against the railing of the bunk bed behind her and sighed, staring detachedly up at the ceiling as one resigned to inevitable pain. She drew the Sending Stone from her pocket and held it out in her palm.

"Tabby, lass, say something into your stone."

The young girl peered up at her nervously, hands fiddling on the stone around her neck; she could sense the tensions just as acutely as the adults, if not more so. "Was I not supposed to tell anyone?" She asked, voice beginning to quiver as she added, "You said I could tell 'em. You said."

Fiona tilted her head down to look at her. "I did. You've done everything right. We're going to show them how it works now, yeah?"

"...Okay." She said hesitantly, and held the stone pendant of her oversized necklace up to her face. She said the activation phrase perfectly- Fiona felt a small spark of pride- and the stone began to glow. For a second, the teens around them stared at it with the same dumbfounded look as their adoptive fathers. "Hello?" Tabby said into the stone, and it echoed clearly from the stone in Fiona's hand.

Silence stretched for a long, long moment. Quietly, Mike asked, "What are you?"

"I don't suppose anyone knows what a hemomancer is?" Fiona asked. When she got only blank looks in response, she sighed. "Witch, warlock. Call it what you like. And by the way, Devon is my familiar, not a pet. He hates being called that."

"So you were lying to us?" Chad asked. "This whole time?"

"I have never once lied to you!" Fiona snapped, voice starting to rise. Julius almost imperceptibly nudged her with an elbow, shot her a hard look that she noted in her peripheral vision. Voice tight and carefully level, she went on, "Every question you have ever asked me, I have answered truthfully."

"Or not at all." Chad shot back bitterly.

"I'm entitled to some privacy."

"Were you ever going to tell us?" Mike asked softly.

"Yes. I was." She'd known that whenever they finally ended up at Elsinore, she'd have to tell them about all the things that go bump in the night- including, to some extent, herself.

Chad looked her over searchingly, suspiciously. "Are you human?

As human as the Van Helsing, she wanted to say. Instead, she said, "Biologically, the vampires are human. I'm a bit closer to normal than that." There was uneasy silence for a long, long moment. In the way that Mike and Chad looked at her, the way they looked at each other, she knew that their relationship had changed irrevocably and irreparably. If they had found out at a different time, in a better situation, perhaps things could have gotten close to normal again, but now…

Doesn't matter. She thought distantly. This friendship is going to be ash in a few hours anyway.

Finally, Fiona said, "Take some time for yourselves. We've got the perimeter for the night."

When the group of detainees was gathered above the bunker with her, Fiona called for Rook and Talon. All her humans went by callsigns when on mission, and Ian, codenamed Rook as the head of the squad of the same name, now resembled a member of a SWAT team more than the man who had once been a captain in the IRA. All her guards were in similar attire- automatic rifles, grey and black fatigues, body armor, black helmets with night vision goggles. The only thing to differentiate one shadowy form from another in the dark were the designs painted onto helmets and vests. Rook's was a raven-like bird with a white face and beak; Talon's was a vague outline of a bird, feet and talons extended toward the viewer and rendered in sharper detail.

"Talon, stick these guys in the perimeter and teach 'em what you can."

"On it, boss." She said, and looked over the assembled teens. "Com'on guys, with me."

As soon as they were out of hearing range, Ian said with disapproval, "New additions to the Johnsons, huh? Where do they even find all these kids?"

"That juvenile detention center."

His body tensed. "Christ. The little sociopaths that tortured Troy? I wouldn't let them anywhere near a weapon."

"They're desperate."

He gave her an evaluating look. "Desperate enough to come to Elsinore?"

"I didn't bring it up again." Her voice was tired and ragged, but hardened for a second when she added, "And I'm done asking." She deflated almost instantly, shoulders sagging.

Ian put an arm around her, and she leaned into his side. "We're doing the right thing." He soothed. "The Round Table approved it, and they don't approve of anything we do." The Round Table or The Cabinet were nicknames for the ruling council of Elsinore.

"The Round Table aren't about to destroy their relationship with these people."

"They'll come around, one day." He assured. "Once they're settled in, they'll see that this is for the better."

Fiona looked up at him and flashed a small smile. "Thanks for trying, love. Where are the Vultures?"

Ian called them over, and three humanoids materialized from the darkness. Two were males and one was female, and all were vampires. Fiona swept a quick look over them.

"Silus was out hunting, I suppose?" She asked, a little uneased by that. Silus was the oldest of her vampires, and one of only two turned through magic and sire-bonded directly to her. She would have much preferred him at the head of Vulture Squad for this.

"Probably. He wasn't at home." Ian answered.

"And you say you don't have favorites." Karl jested in his refined Berlin accent, sensing her unease; he was the oldest of the assembled group, and the other vampire bonded to her.

"It would be better if he were here. The vampire that did this… Lets get Jackdaw over here."

They called over Jackdaw, the other squad leader, and once she had joined them, Fiona explained all that she had just learned. Early into her story, a teenage boy- one of the detainees, whom she had noticed had some kind of speech impediment- emerged from the bunker and settled in to keep watch. Fiona smiled and waved, and moved her little group of advisors to huddle farther out of earshot.

"Kinda useless to keep watch now, ain't it?" Jackdaw asked. "Our perimeter is rock-solid."

But it's our perimeter, and the Johnsons don't trust me anymore.

Outwardly, Fiona only shrugged. "Let it be. It makes them feel better."

The witch summarized the vampire's attacks against the detainees and the Johnsons, then his past, and ended with the presence of Julius and the Van Helsing.

"Julius?" Victoria, the female vampire, asked. "Your Julius?"

"Your Julius?" Ian repeated, looking at her questioningly, almost accusingly. Victoria winced and shot the Celt an apologetic look. I'm going to hear about this later, Fiona thought with an internal sigh.

"You're missing the point, mates."

"The Van Helsing." Karl said knowingly.

"Aye, the Van Helsing. She complicates things. If the Johnsons don't go along with the Code 45, she'll put up a fight. Someone will get seriously hurt."

"We should find a way to isolate her." Ian said. "Subdue 'er away from-"

"No." Fiona interjected sharply, and looked at them each in turn as she said, "None of you are engaging the Van Helsing at all, even if she comes at us. If it comes to it, I'll deal with her." The witch did not particularly relish her chances in that scenario, but it would be leaps and bounds better than the regular humans. "And go easy on Julius and the Johnsons. These people have been through too much to start this relationship with violence. Only use force with them if they make the first move. Got it?" The humans and vampires around her nodded slowly. "Good. Now, I propose we wait a few hours before we execute the 45, but I'll hear arguments for earlier."

"Hours?" Jackdaw asked incredulously. "Warlock, if we're not back by morning, Elsinore will be spread thin-" The hatch to the bunker opened, and everyone looked over to see Vanessa climbing up.

"Vultures, out of sight." Fiona hissed at a whisper, and Malachi, Victoria, and Karl backed away from the light of Felix's fire and melted into the darkness. A little louder, as though they had never paused their conversation, she continued to Jackdaw, "We could stay the night if we need to. If we have to be spread thin, daylight is the time to do it."

Vanessa glanced over reflexively at hearing voices from the murky shadows around the fire. Fiona nodded to her, but the Van Helsing only scowled back before settling down with Felix. The Celt resisted the urge to roll her eyes and turned back to her guards.

"That was frosty." Jackdaw observed. "You shit in her cereal or something?"

"She doesn't understand the phrase neutral party." Fiona responded. Bemused, she added, "She actually took a swing at me downstairs."

"Christ." Ian said. "This is why we tell you to bring your security detail."

"She wasn't gonna murder me in front of the Johnsons, and Julius broke it up pretty fast." She glanced over to the Van Helsing, and sighed when she saw that Vanessa was keeping an eye on them, glancing over occasionally. "Let's go see the perimeter. We'll walk and talk."

The trio found Talon, who toured them around their perimeter to point out where the juvenile delinquents had been placed. Fiona made small adjustments as they went, trying to spread the kids out from each other so they could be easily disarmed when the 45 was executed. Perhaps ten minutes into this endeavor, Jackdaw glanced over her shoulder, then did a double take.

"Uh, boss?"

"Hmm?" Fiona asked, then followed her gaze back to the fire Felix and Vanessa had been sitting at. The Van Helsing was gone, and the boy was holding his neck, body tensed and curled into himself in pain. "Sweet Mary and Joseph." The Celt cursed, trotting toward him. He looked up as she approached, and shrunk back. "Easy, lad. It's Felix, right?"

Fiona could see now that there was blood on the hand on his neck. "I'm fine." The boy said defensively, words thick in a way that was insistently familiar, but which she couldn't quite place. She knelt in front of him.

"I can tell." She replied dryly. "Can I see it?" Felix shook his head furiously and edged away, and Fiona sighed and glanced around. "Vanessa took a chunk out of you, yeah?" He stared at her with wide eyes. "Can't say I'm surprised. She take off?" She tried not to sound too hopeful, but when he slowly nodded, exhilaration sung through her veins.

"She's gone?" Ian asked from where he hovered with Jackdaw and Talon.

"It's our lucky day." Fiona glanced over with a wide grin, and then her face fell serious. "Mates, this is the best chance we'll get. Disarm the delinquents- quietly- and gather them 'round. I'll be over in a minute." As they dispersed, Fiona looked back to Felix. "I can close that up, but I've got to touch you. Is that okay?"

His eyes darted over her, and then he nodded hesitantly. Fiona wrapped one hand around her necklace- now a pale pinkish-red instead of vibrant crimson- and placed the other below the wound on Felix's neck, and a phrase had the crystal pendant warming to almost painfully hot in her hand as the boy's wound slowly pulled itself together. When it was closed, Fiona settled onto the ground, pulled out her satellite phone, and dialed for Elsinore.

"Warlock to Elsinore. You in, Druid?" She said into it, and then paused to listen. "We're good. ETA is about forty minutes. I still have to draw the Circle, and then execute the 45." Another pause. "Because I didn't use one to get here, and now I'm almost out of reserves. I might have to open a vein to get back… What are you, my mother? Just have the quarantine wing ready and medical on standby." Yet another pause. "Love you too. Warlock out."

As Fiona slid the antenna down on the sat phone and shoved it back into her pocket, her people were already hard at work around them. Teenagers were being brought in ones and twos to huddle in a group at the edge of the fire's light, waiting under the supervision of Talon and two other Rooks. The witch sighed, stretched, and stood, and then glanced to Felix.

"Right now I count you as a Johnson, same as Troy. All I ask is that you stay here and stay quiet, or I might have to count you as one of them." She paused. "My, that sounded quite ominous, didn't it? We're not going to hurt them, but I just might leave them out here."

"Warlock." Ian called from the darkness, "This is the last of them."

Fiona joined him and surveyed the small group of teens, who were now hemmed in by four guards and huddled together, glancing about like nervous, flighty animals.

"Alright, listen up, because I won't be repeating myself." Fiona began, and the delinquents' nervous gazes honed in on her. "I and my people are about to attempt the evacuation of the Johnson family, possibly by force. They will come under my protection and be relocated to a facility with electricity and running water and medical care. Unfortunately, I do not count you as members of their family." Anxious whispers swept through the small group. She looked across their faces and continued, "All I know of you lot is the tortures you have inflicted upon others of your group. By the laws of this land and this time, I understand that you are children. But these were not the actions of children, and in these times I cannot afford to treat you as such." Now they were deathly quiet, a mixture of nervousness and shame and wariness across their young faces. "The Johnsons see it differently, I'm sure. They would lobby that I extend my invitation to you. So this is my offer. All who want to may come to Elsinore and join my organization. You will be provided with food, shelter, and a better chance at surviving this apocalypse than you will have out here. In return, you will be expected to behave as adults. That means working, following orders, and playing well with others. If you find these terms unacceptable, by all means, try your chances out here. If you're coming, go with Talon over there. If not, stay here and stay quiet."

Without another word, Fiona turned on her heels and walked away. Rook followed after her, standing a few feet back as she found a suitably long stick and began carving a pattern into the dirt.

"Not your most charming speech." Rook observed as he watched. "You'd catch more flies with honey, y'know."

"These aren't flies, they're bloody hornets." She griped back. "I don't know if we should be catching them at all."

"Y'know I'm with you on that." Ian said quietly. "But Cor- Druid would want to help them. A softer touch might coax them along."

"Then by all means, get on with the soft touching."

Ian made an incoherent grumbling sound at her and fell silent. She spent several minutes on what she was drawing on the ground, starting with a ten-foot circle that elicited croaks and rumbles from Devon in the trees above them, and in turn cursing and re-drawing from Fiona. Once it was almost perfectly round, she began meticulously adding symbols along the inside edge of it. She was halfway done when a commotion from the bunker's hatch drew her attention. She glanced over and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"One thing after another," She grumbled, stepping carefully over her drawings in the ground and handing Ian her stick. "Make sure no one steps on my Circle."

The Celt trotted back towards the fire and the hatch, and even in the dark, the stature of the figure arguing with Jackdaw left no doubt as to who it was. Jackdaw glanced over at her approach, easing back a half-step as Julius turned to the witch, looking none too happy.

"Fiona-"

"Julius."

"What do you think you're doing with these kids?!" He swept a hand towards the teens.

"We took their weapons and had a little chat about not mutilating each other."

He fixed her with a hard evaluating look; they had known each other long enough for him to sense the half-lie. "What are you up to?"

Fiona's lips twitched back towards a snarl, anger flickering to life in her chest. She had given up on Mike and Chad, but Julius should have known her better. "You listen to me, Romanski," She growled, stepping up into his personal space, "We are the only people in this entire camp who are doing something that might actually keep these people alive. So do me a favor and ease off with the fucking accusatory tone."

Julius leaned forward just slightly, glaring down at her. He knows I hate his bloody towering, she thought bitterly. "That," He said lowly, "Wasn't an answer."

"My, my, Julius." Karl practically purred. Behind Julius, the trio of vampires had materialized like wraiths in response to their raised voices. The blond German stalked a half-circle around the taller man, sweeping an openly predatory gaze over him. "Don't you look good enough to eat."

"Karl." Fiona scolded, exasperated.

"Karl, Victoria." Julius greeted cooly, head turning slowly to track them as the group circled around him to assemble behind Fiona.

"Malachi." The youngest vampire introduced himself with a grin that flashed too-sharp canines. "I thought you'd be shorter, Julius. How exactly did this height difference work out?" He asked with a glance to Fiona, who stood a solid foot shorter than the former vampire.

Victoria patted Malachi on the shoulder. "I'll draw you a diagram later, honey."

A flush crept up Julius's face, and Fiona sighed again, loudly.

"Knock it off." She commanded her vampires. "You're already on HR's shit list."

"Why should we care about human resources?" Victoria asked.

"Sorry to inform you, love, but you're still human."

"Fiona." Julius cut in, and now it was his turn to be exasperated. "What's going on? And where's Vanessa?"

She didn't tell him? Interesting. "She took off. Bit a chunk out of Felix first. How long has that been going on?"

For a split-second, he looked at her with the expression of a startled deer. "She's gone? Why didn't you come get me?!" His voice grew louder on almost every word, and then he glanced over Fiona's shoulder, telling her that Karl had bared his teeth in warning behind her.

"I'm not your bloody babysitter." Fiona replied levelly. "And for the record, I thought that the Van Helsing would have the sense to tell her people where she's going."

Jackdaw scoffed behind her and muttered, "Like you do with your security detail?"

Fiona scowled over at her, and Devon cackled from the trees above them. Julius was already stalking back towards the hatch to the bunker, yanking it open and sliding down the ladder. Distant male voices filtered up, and the frantic snippets of conversation Fiona caught made her sigh and look skyward.

"Sweet Mary. He's going after her." The witch distantly wondered why all the men in the camp seemed incapable of coming up with good ideas. "Vultures, follow him when he leaves. Stay out of sight if you can, but keep him alive. I'll pick you up at the Mount Hood cabin in two days."

"Why? You in a sentimental mood or something?" Malachi asked.

Fiona rolled her eyes. "I want him at Elsinore one day. I'm willing to invest some resources if it keeps him in one piece till then." And, though she wouldn't admit it, she was in a sentimental mood. It was dangerously humanizing to have found out that Julius was good with kids.

Less than a minute later, Julius was back up the ladder, one of Mike's shotguns in hand. "Watch out for the Johnsons while I'm gone." he said to Fiona as he loaded shells into the gun. She made a face at him.

"Since when do you know how to shoot?"

"We had guns in my day."

Fiona hmmphed and looked him over, not comforted by the statement, chewing on her bottom lip indecisively. "You want a ward?"

His head came up. "Really?" Fiona had put them on Julius a handful of times before; he knew she didn't dole them out lightly.

This is a bad idea, Fiona thought. I'll be lucky if I don't pass out trying to get us home.

The Celt let out a slow, controlled breath. "Aye. Let's do it." Immediately, her head swung around to her vampires as she added, "And you three will be silent, got it?"

They nodded solemnly, but watched with delight as Julius handed the shotgun to Jackdaw, and both he and Fiona both began to peel off jackets and shirts.

"Bloody fucking Christ, it's cold." Fiona complained as she pulled off her black sweater, leaving her in only a sports bra in the freezing winter air. The web of tattoos on her arms extended across her chest and wrapped around her shoulders to cross her upper back; a few others symbols were interspersed sparingly across her lower torso. Next to her, Julius was also shivering and shirtless, and Fiona glared around him at her leering vampires until they looked away. Then she pulled her dagger out of her discarded jacket and handed it to Julius.

"Between the shoulder blades." She reminded him, turning around.

"Yeah, I remember."

He put one hand on her shoulder and placed the tip of the knife to the shield knot between Fiona's shoulder blades. She nodded, and he made a small cut in the center of the tattoo. He handed the knife back and sank to one knee, one forearm across his leg and the other hand braced on the ground. Fiona wrapped one hand around her pendant and placed the other palm square between his broad shoulders.

"This one's for the pain." She said, and Julius glanced back over his shoulder at her in surprise. A phrase in Gaelic had the skin on both of their backs warming to the edge of pain, and in the cold air, steam began to rise off of them almost immediately. Fiona was vaguely aware of Karl's searching look; he knew that that particular spell did not eliminate pain, only transferred a portion of it to another person. "Now the ward."

The witch's lips pressed into a thin, hard line as she braced herself and split her mind in two, reciting the words to the ward even as she held focus on the other spell. She and Julius tensed at the same time as the heat on their backs turned to white-hot pain. Steam billowed off of them, and three seconds in, Fiona bared gritted teeth as her back burned hotter and hotter. The steam and the firelight seemed to play odd tricks with the shadows across their skin. After five seconds, Fiona's knees started to buckle underneath her, and she had to brace her other hand against Julius's shoulder to keep herself standing. Her people stepped closer, concerned, but dared not interfere.

Then it was done, and Fiona staggered back, breathing raggedly; Karl stepped forward, letting her steady herself with a hand on his arm. Between Julius's shoulder blades, the same shield knot from her back had burned itself into his skin. The spell would fade in a few hours, and the burn in a few days, but for now, trying to pierce his skin would be like trying to pierce a rhino's.

"Fiona?" Julius asked, brow furrowing in concern, turning as he rose. "Hey, you alright?"

The witch nodded, though she was still using Karl to hold herself up. "Just stung like a bitch."

The concern didn't leave his face, but he stooped to collect their shirts and jackets and handed Fiona's back to her. They redressed in efficient silence, and Jackdaw handed the shotgun back to Julius. He nodded to her and then looked to Fiona.

"Thank you", he said, at the same time that Fiona said, "Good luck." For the first time in the night, the pair grinned at each other.

"Keep them safe." Julius added.

"Mate, I promise you that they'll be safer tonight than they have been in years."

She could see in his face that he trusted that statement. If he knew how she'd be keeping them safe, it would have been a fight, but the sentiment was honest. He set off into the night, and the minute he was out of hearing range, Karl leaned in.

Quietly and in German, Karl asked, "Why did you do that first spell?"

In the same language, Fiona responded, "I'm cutting it close on energy. It would've taken too much to fight his nervous system."

"Why did you do it at all?" He hissed.

Her expression shuttered. "You have orders. Get to it."

The vampire stared for a second, then spun on his heels and stalked away, and Victoria and Malachi followed him as they disappeared into the took a deep breath and turned back towards Jackdaw and, some yards behind her, Talon and the juveniles, who were all openly gawking.

"Jackdaw, bring the perimeter into thirty meters around the hatch and switch everyone to rubber bullets." Jackdaw nodded and trotted away, and Fiona crossed back to where Ian still stood, holding her stick and looking none too happy about what he had watched. "Rook, pull three of your squad out of the perimeter to exfil the kids in the bunker."

Ian handed her her stick and brushed past her without a word. Devon clicked his beak at her and sent a thought down the familiar-bond, and Fiona glanced up to him as she resumed drawing her circle.

"Jealous? You think?" The raven clicked in response, and the witch let out a frustrated sound. "He said he could do no strings, and now he's jealous? Who in their right mind would think that that looked fun enough to be jealous over?"

Witch and familiar continued to complain as Fiona rapidly finished adding the symbols to her circle in the dirt. Some of her guards appeared just outside it as she worked, hovering a few feet away as they kept their thirty meter perimeter. When she was done, Rook and three members of his squad were waiting.

"I'll call Mike and Chad up. You lot will separate the Johnson kids from any weapons they might have and get them up from the bunker."

Her people nodded, deathly serious, and Fiona trotted towards the bunker. "Talon, Jackdaw." The pair of women joined her as she walked. "When I get Mike and Chad up here, keep close to them. They're not going to be happy about this."

"Got it, boss." Talon said, and Jackdaw nodded. They waited a few yards away as Fiona opened the hatch and slid down the ladder.

Everyone looked up at her when she hit the bottom. They must have been preparing for bed, because the lanterns and candles had been dimmed down, and most of the kids were curled up in the bunk beds. Fiona honed in on Mike and Chad, still sitting together at the other end of the bunker.

"Lads," She said, quiet but serious, "You need to come see this." They glanced to each other warily, and then to her. Without a word, they rose, Chad swinging his M16 over his shoulder and passing Mike a bow and quiver. "It's not like that." Fiona added, meaning that it wasn't dangerous. The pair glanced to each other again, and came to the ladder with weapons still in hand. The witch schooled her face before she could frown.

Fiona went up the hatch first, and mouthed Armed to Jackdaw and Talon. Mike and Chad glanced around warily as they emerged, and Fiona quietly shut the hatch behind them.

"I thought you were putting the kids in your perimeter?" Mike asked, brow furrowed in a mix of confusion and disapproval at the assembled group of teens, and then Talon and Jackdaw stepped forward, rifles at the ready.

"Weapons." Jackdaw ordered.

"Excuse me?" Chad said sharply, and both he and Mike looked to Fiona, expecting her to intervene. She only looked back at them, face cold and impassive. "Fiona, you can't be serious!"

Jackdaw leveled her rifle at Chad, and Talon at Mike. "Weapons." She repeated. The couple didn't move, but with guns at their chests, neither resisted as the women took Mike's bow and Chad's gun.

"So we can't have weapons on our own land?" Chad demanded. The women had lowered their guns, but were crowding Chad and his partner back from the hatch. Mike was silent, staring at Fiona with mounting suspicion and horror.

"I'm sorry about this, lads." She said cooly.

There was fear and betrayal on Mike's face. Chad scoffed, thinking she was referring to disarming them. It was only when Rook and his three squadmates opened the hatch and began to file down that he realized the situation, and his eyes went wide.

"What do you think you're doing?!" He demanded, taking a few steps forward as though to intervene. Jackdaw put a hand on his chest and shoved him back, rifle coming up once again. Behind Talon and Jackdaw, Fiona stood defensively in front of the hatch, armed crossed, face unreadable.

"What are you doing?!" Chad demanded again, looking directly at Fiona now, voice pitching higher with anxiety. He already knew, but he needed to hear it for it to be real.

Her lips twitched back at the corners, half a snarl, half a bitter smile.

"Think of me as the apocalyptic Child Services."

For a deathly silent minute, both of the Johnsons simply stared at her.

"Fiona," Mike began softly, imploringly, "You can't do this. Don't do this."

"Don't do this?" She snarled back, cold façade melting into frustration and a deep, visceral anger. "I should have done this last week! I should have, but I didn't, and now six kids are dead, and that is on my head for the next bloody millennia!" She was shouting, and she took a breath and lowered her voice. "This madness ends now. I don't care what you two do, but those kids are coming with me."

Behind her, someone was coming up the ladder, and Fiona turned and offered a hand up to a blond teenage girl.

"Hey, Chloe. Go stand with Daurian over there. Wave, Daurian!" He waved so that the teen would know which one was him. Chloe, the eldest of the Johnson girls at sixteen, glanced nervously at Mike and Chad, still stood at gunpoint only yards away.

"Chloe-" Chad began.

"Quiet." Jackdaw snapped.

"Easy, everyone." Fiona said with just the slightest edge in her voice, glancing over at them briefly before refocusing on Chloe with a tight smile. "No one's gonna get hurt, you have my word. Things are just a little tense. Go stand with Daurian, yeah?" The girl looked between the adults, and the guns, and slowly began to walk to Daurian. Fiona let out a breath.

"Felix, you too." She added. Felix hadn't moved from the fire since she'd healed his neck, watching everything in wide-eyed silence. He too glanced nervously between Fiona and the Johnsons, and then went to join Chloe.

One by one, the handful of Johnson kids emerged from the bunker, most of them nervous, some only half-awake. With Chloe being their eldest sister, they filed over to her and Felix with little resistance, and Fiona stepped away and pulled out the sat phone again. When Cormac picked up on the other end, all Fiona said was, "ETA is ten minutes."

When she turned back, Rook's squadmates were climbing up from the bunker, the first man turning back to help up the next, who was carrying Ryan. Rook came up last, Tabby in his arms. Ian nodded to her, confirming that they had all of them, and she nodded back. Then Fiona fixed Mike and Chad with a cold, serious look.

"Last chance. Staying or coming?" They stared back at her, completely at a loss, faces the picture of grief and betrayal. She turned away. "You've got 'bout one minute to change your mind." She turned and walked towards the Circle, voice raising to carry out everyone else. "Prepare for exfil. Daurian and West, take the Johnson kids through first. The new kids go next, then go reverse rank order by squad, Jackdaws first. Rook, you're on me."

Daurian herded his handful of charges to the edge of the Circle and was joined by West, the soldier carrying Ryan. Rook passed Tabby, half-awake and rubbing her eyes as she looked around in confusion, off to Daurian.

Fiona stepped up to the edge of the teleportation circle and rolled up her left sleeve as Devon landed on her shoulder. This is going to be unpleasant, she thought as she held her bare left forearm over the Circle and drew her dagger. She began to chant low and smooth in Gaelic, voice unwavering as she made a cut across the inside of her forearm. When the blood fell onto the symbol in the ground, every line lit up with a vibrant red light, and a red glowing line appeared in the air above the center of the Circle, expanding to a portal much like the one she had arrived in. On the other side, a long room was visible, the walls lined with beds. A group of nurses and doctors looked over and jolted into motion, preparing for the incoming people.

"Daurian, get them through." Fiona commanded, voice already strained. The Johnson children were gawking, and that made it easy to push the first kids through. She was distantly aware that Mike and Chad were shouting now, trying to push bodily past Talon and Jackdaw; it was quickly escalating to a fight. Too late, the last few kids realized that they were being separated from their fathers, but Daurian shoved them bodily into the people waiting on the other side, and then stepped through with West and Ryan.

Fiona began to shiver uncontrollably, the bleeding arm she still held over the Circle visibly shaking. Devon rubbed his head against her chin and clicked encouragement. Two more soldiers were already arriving at the Circle with the half-dozen juvenile detainees who were coming with them. They stepped through the portal with some nerves but no resistance. Dizziness was starting to creep into Fiona's head.

Why does punching a hole through space-time have to take so much energy? She thought with sarcastic bemusement.

The Jackdaws were next, backing through one by one. Fiona gritted her teeth against the sensation of being both unbearably hot and numb with cold, swaying in place. Rook put a hand on her shoulder to keep her balanced. Just a few more seconds-

"Gun!" Jackdaw yelled, and Fiona's head jerked around, and Chad had a pistol- where the hell did he get a pistol- and the world became chaos. The first shot seemed deafening, and Talon was knocked to the ground from the impact of the bullet on her vest. Jackdaw and the remaining Rooks opened fire in a panic, the impact of rubber bullets staggering Chad. Mike dove for Talon and fought for control of her gun, and Rook lifted his rifle and pumped pellets into him; he jerked back, Talon's rifle in hand.

"Retreat, now!" Ian shouted, and the portal flickered as Fiona's focus slipped, caught in indecision between helping them or holding the spell. Jackdaw bolted to Talon, rubber pellets glancing off her body armor as she grabbed Talon's vest and dragged her back towards the portal. Ian stepped in front of Fiona, and barked without looking, "Keep it open, Fiona."

Chad had one arm across his face to protect his head as he staggered toward the portal, face twisted in pain and body jerking whenever a pellet bounced off him. The four remaining Rooks had backed to the edge of the Circle, struggling to keep up a volley of covering fire as Mike returned rubber rounds at their unarmored shins and Chad fired live rounds in half-blind shots.

Black spots were swimming in Fiona's vision, but she heard a rifle click on an empty magazine next to her. "No live rounds!" She shouted over the noise, and a man cursed and ducked back through the portal. Jackdaw made it back to Circle and dropped Talon, who scrambled the rest of the way herself. Chad had gained ground. Fiona nearly tipped over, shivering so violently that her whole body was shaking uncontrollably, but her mother had trained her well, and as long as she was conscious, nothing short of a major wound would get her to drop the spell now. Jackdaw caught her, holding her up from behind with an arm around her waist.

"Out, now!" Rook shouted, still keeping in front of Fiona's, shielding her unarmored body with his armored one as Jackdaw drug her back through the portal, holding her up just on the other side so she could still see through. The only thing she could hold in her mind was the spell; she watched everything else as though it was happening in a dream, only distantly aware that it was supposed to be real.

The last two Rooks backed through, leaving only Ian a few steps in front of them. They were still firing for a half-second before their guns clicked on empty at nearly the same time, and Chad looked up at the sudden drop in noise and impacts, eyes wide in animal desperation and fear as he realized the portal would close any second. His arm jerked up, and he fired again. Ian crumpled back, blood gushing from his neck, half in and half out of the portal. Fiona stared, uncomprehending. Jackdaw shouted, dropped her, and dove for Ian, and the witch fell straight to the ground.

Jackdaw yanked Ian through, and the portal snapped shut, and Fiona passed out.

Chapter Text

Certain situations had a way of reminding Fiona just how far she was from a normal human. Sitting at Ian's bedside was one of those situations.

By all rights, the bullet should have been fatal. Even with the marvels of modern medicine, there was only so much that could be done for a hemorrhaging jugular and a half-torn trachea. Cormac and a druid's healing magics had been all that saved him, and even that had it's limits. Ian had slipped into a coma, and in the days since, Cormac had been laboriously coaxing his body into healing itself.

Fiona was aware of how a person should react to seeing a friend and lover lying unconscious and intubated in a hospital bed. A few hundred years ago, she had felt those kinds of things. She still felt something, of course, some level of grief and guilt and anger, but somehow it wasn't the same. She could only liken it to the difference between watching a beloved dog and a beloved friend struggle to live: both horribly painful, and yet nowhere near the same. A person knows they will outlive their dog, but they struggle to picture life without a dear friend.

There were very few people that Fiona struggled to picture life without.

There were people she cared about, yes, and she valued the joy they could bring to each other, but they would all eventually be fond and painful memories. Slowly, gradually, it had become impossible to be attached to people that she could and would outlive, or at least to develop the same level of connection that she had been capable of in her youth.

More like pets than people, she thought, and not with the level of concern it should warrant. When did that happen?

The door creaked slightly as it opened, and she glanced up to see a familiar silhouette.

"Karl said you were in a sentimental mood." Silus said in his posh British accent.

He was broad-shouldered and athletic, just a few inches shy of six foot in height. He had jet-black hair punctuated by a carefully cultivated streak of gray and a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, and though he was a vampire, he had been similarly pale as a human. He was classically handsome, and quite aware of that fact.

"You're late, Lord Dashwood." Fiona replied coldly. It had been over three days since the events of the Johnson camp, and this was the first she was seeing him.

He scoffed and flashed a bemused grin. "Don't Lord Dashwood me, darling, or I'll Lady Romanov you."

"Silus," She snapped, and the smile wiped from his face. "Four days. Why the fuck were you gone for four days?"

Softly, carefully, he began, "Neither of us could have known what would happen. And my presence wouldn't have changed this." When her expression didn't change, he added, "If you had Called, I would have come."

"And if I had, how quickly could you have gotten back?" She challenged. He looked away. The answer was at least hours, and more likely days. Fiona stared at him for a few more seconds before glancing over to Ian. "We should take this outside."

Silus followed silently as Fiona led them out of the room, down the back stairwell, and out the door. The night was cold and calm, and the open land around them was covered in a light dusting of snow that reflected the moonlight, bathing the world in dim light. Fiona stopped and looked out over the land, then up at the bright constellations.

Quieter and more tired, she said, "You don't just take off for four days without telling me first. That's an order."

Silus wrapped his arms around Fiona's waist and pulled her back against his chest, dropping his head to rest it against hers.

"Don't be cross with me, love. I've found some information that you'll want to hear." He kissed her neck. "That's why I was away for so long. I wanted to confirm it all before I brought it to you."

"It'd better be good." She groused, leaning back into him and enjoying the small comforts of familiarity and affection; it was a welcome reprieve from the stress and guilt of the last few days.

"That… is not exactly how I'd describe it." Silus said, and Fiona glanced up and back at him. Pensively, he added, "Perhaps we should go somewhere private…?"

Worry furrowed her brow, and then her face fell into tired resignation. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and sighed.

"Just get it over with."

Silus took a deep breath. "Anastasia is dead."

"...What?" Fiona pulled away and turned to face him. At his expression, she muttered, "Bloody fucking hell, you're serious."

For a second, shock turned her as numb as if she'd been dunked in ice water. Despite their nearly-open disdain for each other, she had known Anastasia for centuries. The Princess couldn't die. The Romanov siblings were her equals as immortals, had spent longer in her life than nearly anyone else.

They are family, Fiona. Ivan had told her once, when she protested the idea of his aunt and uncle coming to their son's christening. The only family I have left. For the longest time, there had been three people in the world who kept Ivan and Nikolai's memories alive. Suddenly, there were only two. And one of us likely to get himself killed over it.

The thought snapped her back to reality, and she shut her emotions off.

"What's the situation? What moves are the Czar making?"

"He's on the move. Warpath, I should say. He's traveling with a half-dozen Elites now, and rumor has it that he intends to bolster his ranks. I believe he thinks he can simply assume leadership of other clans."

"Of course he does," she griped to herself, "He steamrolled across the Baltic and Transylvanian clans. Doesn't seem to recall the socio-economic climate that made that possible." A sense of dread began to creep into the back of her mind. "Who did he leave to hold the city?"

Silus scoffed. "He doesn't hold the city. His loyalists are one of the factions fighting over it. Like vultures over a corpse, and just as pretty as the phrase suggests."

Fiona's eyes widened in panic. "Fuck, Callum's caravan-"

"Really, darling, do you think so little of me? I've contacted them. It will take a few days to circumvent the city, but they will most likely arrive unharmed."

Some of the tension eased out of her. "You're a brilliant man, you know that?"

He flashed a dashing smile of pearl-white teeth with too-sharp canines. "Is my absence forgiven, then?"

"...Aye, but don't make a habit of it." Fiona said, and then she leaned her forehead into his chest and groaned. She would have preferred to scream. "I have to call a council meeting in the morning. Aisling's going to be in her own personal Hell. She'll have to reroute all the northwest caravans."

Silus made a disgruntled sound as he wrapped his arms around her and set his chin on her head. "She'll be in Hell? I'll be in Hell if I have to sit through a council meeting. Really, love, I've been in the field for days-"

"And whose fault is that?" She looked up to challenge with bemusement. "Your responsibilities here don't disappear when you do, Lord Dashwood."

"Responsibilities." Silus scoffed. "Why did we ever agree to responsibilities? We should have stayed at Wycombe and lived out our days in luxury. Perhaps we could have helped Francis expand the Club."

Fiona smiled at the fond memories. She had first met Silus at a meeting for the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe. "You would've had to stop calling it that first."

"Ha. Never. Hellfire Club might be brutish and simplistic, but it isn't as conceited as naming it after himself."

Fiona let out a sound somewhere between a huff and a laugh. His sibling-like rivalry with his older cousin Francis had been a source of amusement for her since they'd met, and the fact that it had endured this long was a testament to the sometimes-strange ways in which vampires were frozen in time. The thought had her mind wandering back, to times with the Dashwoods, and with the Romanovs, and with Ivan and little Nikolai. So few of us still alive.

"What are you thinking about, love?" Silus asked quietly.

She was thinking about dominos falling in perpetuity, of parties in St. Petersburg in 1815 and meetings at Mendum Abbey in 1772, and of all the names that would mean nothing when she died.

"I think I need a drink. Care to join me?"

"This is bullshit." Fiona grumbled to Silus as she stalked around her office the next morning. The vampire was reclining on the couch in the corner, sipping from a tumbler of thick red liquid. "I'm three hundred fucking years old, and they want me to have a babysitter-"

"But it's because they care just so much." Silus put in mockingly, a devilish grin on his face.

"You think this is funny, don't you?"

"Darling, I think this is brilliant. I've been waiting fifty years for this ridiculous Council idea to produce consequences for you."

"This isn't an empire, Si. You can't rule these people, you have to lead them. I know you Brits struggle with that idea, but-"

"And look what democracy has gotten you. Allowing yourself to be given orders by a gaggle of plebs."

"I'm a pleb, if you care to remember."

"No, you were a pleb. And decades from being one when we met, let alone now."

"Keep being a smug git about this, and you can be my security detail."

"Promise?" Silus asked, unperturbed.

She scoffed in return. "What do you think you're on about? You hate doing actual work."

"After all I've just done for you? You wound me, truly."

Fiona shot him an evaluating look. "Are you serious?" She asked incredulously. "You'd actually want to be a bodyguard?"

"I do not particularly want to, but I am better equipped for the task." He flashed a charming smile. "After all, the most difficult part of the job is keeping track of you."

She looked over him for a long moment. "Why the sudden concern?" Fiona asked, expression guarded. "Did Cormac talk you into it?"

Silus stared into his glass, expression falling. Low and serious, he said, "The humans are concerned because you passed out. I am not so patronizing. However…" he paused, considered a moment, and looked up with a hard, serious expression. "I was not there when you last got in the middle of a blood-feud between the Romanovs and the Van Helsings, but I know that you barely survived. And I know that if you do so again, I am a part of the collateral damage. This Van Helsing may spare the humans, but every vampire, Carpiani, and werebeast in this compound would be slaughtered."

Fiona's face hardened, and her eyes darted over him. She crossed to her desk and began pouring a glass of Scotch as she said, "If you're looking to save your skin, you should be staying here, not coming with me."

He regarded her cooly. "When you die, this whole place will come crashing down. I'd have thought you knew that much."

"Sweet Mary, what are you on about now?" She asked as she settled on the couch next to him.

Silus set his drink down on the coffee table and turned more fully towards her, face serious, eyes keen. "How long could Cormac maintain the barrier on his own?"

It took her a long moment to realize the question wasn't rhetorical. "That depends entirely on the situation."

"Does it?" He challenged. "The day would come, sooner rather than later, that he would need a river of blood. You and I both know he isn't capable of that."

"He doesn't have to be. There are people here who are."

Silus made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. "Do you think the rest of us will give a damn about keeping this place sustainable when you're gone? You're their patron saint, darling-" At her face, he huffed and amended, "Fine, you're their heathen godling. That's what happens when you personally raise them out of a hundred different hells. Twelve nationalities, every major religion- the only thing these people have in common is you. If you die, they'll make a war of it."

Fiona considered that for a moment. It was a possibility, certainly, especially from the ones whose recruitment had hinged on gratefulness and loyalty more than opportunism. "You don't think Cormac could rein them in?"

"Even if he wanted to, he'd only have support from Avani and Sonya. Connington and Nazir command more individually than those two together."

Dr. Avani was the head of medical and Connington the head of security. Darius Nazir and Sonya, on the other hand, both held elected Council seats, the former represntating the human population, and the latter the Carpiani and werebeasts.

A small smile crossed Fiona's face. "Only Avani and Sonya? You'd go to war if I died?" Silus was, begrudgingly, the vampire's Council representative.

"Of course I would, darling. I'm your best friend."

"No, you're my oldest friend. There's a difference." She teased.

"Now you're just being cruel." He grumbled. He picked up his glass again and took a long sip. "All this to say, if you'll find us more tolerable than your last detail, I or one of the other Vultures should accompany you outside the compound for now."

Fiona had to admit that it was a reasonable compromise with the Council's decision. In many ways, one vampire was worth three humans, and one person she could tolerate was infinitely more useful than a team she would avoid. The Council should acquiesce to it without much of a fight. Fiona nodded absentmindedly, thoughts already turning away.

"It might be time I took on a new apprentice. Cormac too." Silus raised an eyebrow, and Fiona sighed and added, "These last two years, Death has never felt very far away, but since last night… I've been thinking on it, but I should have put things in place before now. You're right about that."

"I don't recall suggesting that," Silus grumbled in protest, distinctly uncomfortable now. So he can talk about me dying all he wants, Fiona internally complained, But I'm being a downer to take it seriously.

"I should have been doing more to prepare Cormac for it. Apprentices, and stacking the Council in his favor… that's a solid start."

"Stack the council?" Silus asked, face curious and evaluating, "You sound like you have someone in mind."

Fiona flashed a devilish grin. "I always keep an eye out for talent, love. And if you're serious about being my bodyguard, you should know that I'm heading out tomorrow morning. I need to find the Czar and get a sense of his plans."

"... Tomorrow?"

"If you'd rather sleep, I can always go alone. Or I can take Karl."

"...No. I'll go. Karl is far too forward for Old World propriety, and the Ambassador is too much his type."

Fiona grinned at the idea. "It'd be funny to watch, though. I don't think I've ever seen the Czar flustered."

Silus rolled his eyes. "He's not going to blush like a schoolgirl."

"I think you underestimate the combined power of Orthodox guilt and that 'Old World propriety', mate." She took a sip of whisky and propped her feet up on the coffee table. "But I guess we should take it easy on him. The first time you lose a love is… hard to get through."

"Not to mention the first time you lose a sibling." Silus sneered.

Fiona bit down a laugh. "Now those are the kinds of things you aren't going to say tomorrow."

He flashed that charming smile. "If you insist, darling." He downed the rest of his drink and stood. "I'm going to bed. Don't wander off on your own, or I'll have to hunt you down." He gave her a quick kiss on the forehead as he passed.

"Promises, promises."

By the next afternoon, Fiona and Silus were making their way through an abandoned warehouse full of vampires. Some were Dmitri's Elites, but an equal number Fiona recognized as having originally belonged to Julius's clan. The latter simply moved out of their way, but the first Elite they saw silently fell into step in front of Fiona and led them through the building and to a door.

Fiona and Silus were just reaching it when Scab, one of Julius's former lieutenants, came scrambling out of it. He would have ran straight into Fiona, but Silus grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him to the side just short of it.

"Watch it, mate." Silus snapped, shoving the smaller man down the hall.

"Good catch." Fiona said to Silus, peeking around him to watch Scab continue on down the corridor. "He's in a hurry, isn't he?"

The door was still partially opened, so she leaned against the doorway and rapped a knuckle against it. Inside, Dmitri was looking into a dusty but mostly-intact mirror, and looked up at the sound.

"We need to talk, Czar." Fiona said.

"Yes, we do. Come in." When she nudged the door open, and he saw Silus standing behind her, he greeted, "Ah, Lord Dashwood."

"Ambassador Romanov." Silus returned with his usual charming smile.

Dmitri glanced back down to Fiona. "You are not traveling alone?"

"I got into a scrap that spooked my people. I'll have a bodyguard for a little while." She glanced back to Silus. "Give us a minute, yeah?"

Silus's eyes flashed down to Fiona and then to Dmitri, reluctant for half a second. "Of course, darling" He began, but leaned forward to put a hand on her waist and add to her, "But keep the door cracked."

Fiona resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He didn't actually distrust the Czar in particular, she knew, but he sometimes postured like this. She suspected it had something to do with jealousy. Her experience with vampires was that, for most, selfish possessiveness was as close as they could feel to true affection; in rarer cases, the latter was possible, but the two still blurred together. And maybe he's more rattled by what happened with the Johnsons than he acts.

Silus stepped out of the room and left the door just slightly ajar behind him. Fiona crossed to lean on the wall in front of Dmitri, pulled a blood bag from her jacket, and tossed it to him.

"I heard about Anastasia." She began, watching him carefully. "What happened?"

"...She went after the Van Helsing girl." The vampire finally answered, eyes far away for a moment, and Fiona wondered if the unsaid I shouldn't have let her go had been as obviously painted on her face when people asked about Ian.

"I know the feeling, mate. You're out for revenge, then?" When she'd lost Ivan and Nikolai to Gabriel Van Helsing, it had been her only goal.

"I do not doubt that I will have it," He began, and the cold, controlled anger that slide across his face told her just how much he believed that, "But it is not my priority." He paused for a second, debating, before adding, "I have been having dreams."

"Dreams?" Her eyebrows shot up. "Really? That's interesting. Mind if I take a look?" He immediately glared down at her. "Alright, fine. Don't look at me like that, it was just a question. You got any theories about it?"

"I believe the Elder is alive."

The Elder? "Wait, your sire? I thought he was dead… Alright, that explains the 'dreams', then. Using the sire-bond to Call you. What does he want?"

"His freedom. I have seen a door, and a key. If I can acquire it, I can release him from his imprisonment."

Fiona cocked her head. "And you're actually going through with it?"

The Russian's brow furrowed. "Why wouldn't I?"

She looked at him for a long moment, and then a bemused smile crossed her face. Every now and then, he could still manage to impress her.

"Damn. Imagine if any of your vampirelings had that kind of loyalty." She paused. "That came out a little mean, didn't it? Apologies."

For a fleeting second, he matched her bemused smile. "Not all of us are creatures solely of ambition, Fiona."

"'Course not. Some of you are creatures of hedonistic pleasure." She flashed a teasing smile and added, "And then there's you, whose neither. Why do I find you fun again?"

The Czar let out a small huff of a laugh at that, but the amusement quickly fell from his face. "If I were to ask for your assistance in finding this key and freeing the Elder, what would you ask in return?"

She thought for a second. "To start, I'm in the market for a new apprentice. You ever get your hands back on that Mohamad kid you wanted for the Elites?"

"No, and I have not heard anything of him since the human's uprising. If he is still alive, he will not be easy to find."

Fiona chewed on that information. "Hmm. No offense, Czar, but you're running out of things to bargain with."

"Have I ever failed to pay my debts, Fiona? We both know that one day, I will have something you want."

"'One day' is the problem phrase there." She shot back, and he raised an eyebrow. "Look, at the beginning of the week, I wouldn't have doubted that you were going to bounce back from this. It's nothing we haven't seen before. Now, though, with Anastasia gone… I think I should start taking life expectancy into account."

"You expect me to die?" He asked, offended. "Have I not earned more faith than that?"

"We're both going to die, Dmitri. I plan to live for a bit longer first. But you, you're running headfirst into a fight with someone who demonstrably can kill a vampire your age." There was a long, tense moment of silence, and Fiona added, "And, I should warn you, she's started drinking blood."

"I know." He said. Then: "How did you learn that?"

That threw her. "She passed by one of the groups I trade with and bit one of 'em. What do you mean, you know? How did you know?"

He looked away, knowing what her reaction would be. "When she was in my custody-"

"Christ," Fiona cursed, eyes widening in horror and realization, "You took a half-breed Van Helsing that already can't be killed, and you purposefully introduced her to bloodlust? Are you out of your fucking mind?!"

No wonder she overpowered him. Sweet Mary, I'm lucky she didn't try to drain me.

Dmitri's head swung around at that; she very rarely cursed at him. "Careful, Fiona. Remember who you speak to."

I'm speaking to a fucking idiot, she almost said. It was impressive, really, how quickly he could take her from impressed at his loyalty to enraged at his stupidity.

"Dmitri, she put a goddamn hole through your goddamn chest after sitting in a prison cell for days. Now she has access to all the weapons and blood she can get her hands on. You have no idea what you've unleashed on the world. I've got no idea what you've unleashed on us."

"She is none of your concern."

"Neither was Gabriel." Fiona snarled. That was a low blow, she knew immediately, but couldn't bring herself to regret it.

His face hardened, centuries-old pain and rage resting just below the surface. "What happened with Gabriel was as much your fault as mine." He snarled back, low and venomous.

There was a long, tense moment of silence where Fiona fought with herself to just shut up. They'd had this fight before, but never while she'd been sober and never while he'd been recently bereaved; if emotions ran high, she had no idea how far it could escalate. Fiona pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. Nothing's changed, just what you know about it. Keep it together.

"If there's anything else I should know about her, Czar- and I mean anything- now is the time."

"As I said, she is no concern of yours."

She could have hit him, but instead she said, "If it's gonna be like that, I'm not getting in the middle of this. Sorry, mate, but I'm not fighting a Van Helsing for you, especially not with only half the information."

"And when did I ask you to?" The vampire snapped back. "I ask for the key, nothing more. I can deal with the Van Helsings."

Not with your track record you can't, Fiona thought but didn't say. She thought for a long second, weighing sentimentality and the value of this allyship against the very real dangers.

"Alright, fine. Here's the deal I'll make you. You can call me three times, and within reason, I'll help. You pay for the first one in advance. After that, you start owing favors, and I start collecting on them."

"Very well. What is your first request?"

"I want Julius left alive- and unmaimed. Rough 'em up if you have to, but no permanent damage."

"Julius? What use could you possibly have for him now?" There was that vampire possessiveness. It was a common mentality between vampires and those they'd sired: even if the vampireling was no longer theirs to command, they were considered theirs to kill.

"I already had a use for him the last time he was human, if you'll remember. If you hadn't went and stole him out from under me-"

"Would you have rather I'd let him die?"

"I'd rather you not let him get stabbed in the first place!" She snapped. For a second they only glared at each other, and then she sighed. More levelly, she continued, "All I'm asking for is your word. That's a damn cheap price, Czar."

Slowly, he nodded. "If you want my word, you have it. I swear that I will not break him beyond repair."

"Not a fan of how you worded that," Fiona grumbled to herself. "Alright, roll up your right sleeve. Actually, scratch that, take a drink first. This one's gonna sting."

He raised an eyebrow at that. "May I first ask what you plan to do?"

"Oh, about five different things. At the end you'll be able to get my attention, give me an idea of the urgency of it, and I'll be able to find you to teleport to. And if you don't give me ten minutes to draw a Circle, you're taking the hit for the difference in energy efficiency, so don't do it if you're hurt." She flashed a tight but not unfriendly smile. "Alot of work in exchange for nothing but a promise, yeah?"

"You have my gratitude, my friend. How long will it take?"

"Depends. Start drinking." She pointedly drew her own flask from her jacket and took a sip before continuing. For once following her advice, Dmitri punctured the blood bag and took a sip.

"How long?" He prompted again.

"I can carve it on, or I can draw it out and then burn it on. It's fine line work, a bitch to do with burning when the skin wants to bubble. That'll take longer to prep, maybe forty-five minutes, but the pain will be over quicker."

"I am not a man averse to pain." He said, waving that concern away.

She raised an eyebrow, but drew her dagger from her inside jacket pocket. "Hold on to that thought."

Twenty minutes later, he was leaning against the wall next to the sink, forearm across the corner of it so the blood would drain without too much of a mess. Fiona had expected him to be at least interested in what she was doing, but he had somehow managed to completely zone out while she carved into him. He hadn't moved a muscle, and the symbol had turned out magnificently for it. One large circle encompassed the muscle of his forearm, symbols lining the inside edge of it. to make up the teleportation components. In the middle of the large circle were three smaller, identical ones arranged in a triangle, each with one symbol in the middle of it and four smaller ones along it's outside edge.

"Wish I could take a picture of this to show Cormac." She mumbled to herself as she finished the last lines. "It's got to be one of my best. I should test out new spells on you more often."

Fiona had thought that her vampire companion seemed half-asleep, but the moment she said that, his eyes snapped wide open and then down at her.

"Test?" He asked sharply.

"Now who's lacking faith? It's perfectly safe." As far as I can tell. She rolled up her own right sleeve, lined her forearm up next to his, and used her still-bloody dagger to make three small horizontal cuts to match the placement of the three smaller circles on his arm. She held out her arm. "Now for the easy part."

They clasped forearms, and Fiona wrapped her free hand around her pendant and began to speak. She began in Gaelic, and heat mounted beneath the skin of her forearm; the outside circle on Dmitri's arm lit up with a soft red glow. She transitioned smoothly into Latin, and the smaller three circles lit up. When she was done, she picked her dagger back up from the sink in one hand and held his arm with the other.

"See how each of the small circles has these four little letters outside them? If it's not an emergency, cut from the top one to the bottom one." She tapped each with the point of the dagger as she explained. "If it is, first, try not to need me. Failing that, cut from left to right."

The cuts on his arm were already beginning to knit themselves together as she spoke, but instead of vanishing completely as they normally would have, they began to scar. The vampire looked down at that with curiosity and flexed his hand.

"How long will this last?" He asked, referring to the scars.

"The little circles will fade out as you use them. I'll have to deactivate the bigger one. Oh, and do us both a favor," She pulled a Sending Stone out of her pocket and handed it to him. "If you're going to be running amuck, keep me updated so I can pull my caravans out of your way."

"As you say, 'no promises'." He replied as he tucked the stone into his pocket, a whisper of a mischievous smile crossing his face. "I imagine that I will be quite busy."

Fiona rubbed an eye with the heel of her hand. "Don't remind me. My logistician is already losing her mind. Says you're going to destabilize the whole region."

"I don't doubt that we will." He said, unperturbed. "But that will make it easier to conquer when we return."

"Sure it will. Just try and stay alive that long, mate. I need a return on my investment."

There was that bemused smile again. "Your concern is touching, and a little insulting. I have lived three hundred years and see no reason I will not live for three hundred more."

A little over a fortnight later, Fiona would look back on their conversation and marvel at the sheer irony of that statement.

Chapter Text

Phil's instinctual first impression of Fiona had been of weakness. It was a knee-jerk, animal reaction, a response to her friendly and easy-going demeanor. She talked and joked with Julius and Flesh and his other lietenants like they were old friends, like they were all civilized humans. If one of them made a threat or an insult, as vampires were want to do, she most often looked at them as though they were being downright rude, with not an ounce of fear or respect for the perpetrator. Usually, she left the discipline of Julius's men to Julius, and had little more than a sharp retort as her own part in her defense. The smarter amongst them soon realized that Julius would not carry respect for her, nor would she be so at ease with them, if she was not formidable. Flesh and many others quickly learned to treat her with some respect, even if a few could not conceive of her as a serious threat.

There were moments, though, when conversation drifted a certain way, or when the dramatic debauchery of the clan's lair sparked disapproval, or when a vampire took an insult one step too far, that Flesh sensed something lurking underneath the charming facade. It was something that reminded him of documentaries of wolves, or of lions: a pack animal that could hold such warmth for it's companions, yet would tear apart any and all other living creatures if it thought it should. He had heard that some zoo keepers described this change as the "predator switch".

In many ways, the vampires were the lions, the wolves, but their predator switch flipped on and off so frequently that Fiona seemed unconcerned by it, as though she had learned to navigate such tumultuous behaviour decades ago. Once or twice, however, the witch had made Flesh feel as those keepers must have felt to witness their dear pets morph into cold-blooded killing machines.

He did not remember exactly what started it. They had been as jovial and companionable as they had ever been, drinking and joking, and some lower lieutenant had gotten their feathers ruffled. They issued an insult. Then a threat. Then, as they proceeded on a long-winded mocking of Fiona's humanity, they mentioned Cormac, and Aisling, and what it would be like to rip their entrails from their stomach and sodomize their still-breathing bodies.

Flesh remembered watching the switch flip, watching the way those green eyes sunk behind the cold reflective gaze of a shark. "How very dramatic," She had said simply, and then the vampire was hovering over the main table as though held there by an invisible hand, and Fiona's eyes were black from corner to corner. When she stood, there was a power and aggression in her body that he had never seen from her, and perhaps that made the offending vampire think it a false bravado. She told him, in the coldest voice Flesh had ever heard, to back down. The vampire ran his mouth instead.

She did not look to Julius for consent. She did not give a second warning. There was some kind of dangerous focus within her that he could only liken to the single-minded drive for blood of a predator amidst the chase.

The same invisible force that held the vampire in place took him apart in slow and methodical order. Starting up the left side of his body and then down the right, it crushed fingers, cut the hand from the wrist, snapped the elbows, and finally dislocated the shoulder. When both arms had been mangled, the knees and legs got similar treatment. It was gruesome. It was loud, both from the screaming of the vampire, and the eventual glee of the clan, who watched it all unfold like an event meant to entertain them. It did not entertain Flesh, and it did not entertain Julius, though it seemed to fascinate him. For them, the spectacular violence brought the realization that their wolf had teeth after all, and oh, how sharp they really were.

When she was done with him, Fiona's magic lowered the vampire to his crushed knees atop the table, and she vaulted atop it to take his head between her hands. "Look away, ladies and gents, or you'll go blind." She'd said in that same cold, detached voice. Of course, no one listened at first, and the flash of light that followed did indeed blind many momentarily; those who were quick enough to cover their faces would regain their vision in a few seconds, while the slower ones would take hours. The brightest, whitest daylight filled the room, so intense that even underneath both his hands, balls of phantom colors danced across Flesh's closed eyes. When the world went dark and they could see again, the vampire on the table was a blackened, shriveled husk, his eyes liquified within his skull.

And then Fiona blinked, and the switch flipped off. Her eyes returned to green, and she bowed towards Julius as would an actor at the end of their play. Then she took her seat and picked up her flask as though nothing had happened, and the night continued on.

As Phil and Lucky watched Scab stalk the line of human prisoners that had been presented to Dmitri and his Elites, he thought he could sense that same thing rising towards the surface, and he waited for that moment where she would no longer recognize the bloodsucker as part of her kind, as pack instead of prey. Fiona had just stepped back to Dmitri's side from sending that vampire of hers away, but when Scab tried to grab Callie from the line, she stepped forward again; he saw the switch flip, and for a bone-chilling second he knew that horror would come.

Then, without looking, as though he sensed it or simply predicted it, Dmitri held down a hand towards her, ordering a halt. And she paused for a half-second, and as Dmitri ordered another to be chosen, she seemed to sink back in to her usual demeanor, if more than a little pissed. Phil could only stare in shock, for a moment unable to comprehend what could call back a wolf as it closed on the kill.

He should have known that Fiona was not so easily deterred. When Phil and Lucky's attempt to free the prisoners had dissolved into the chaos of fleeing humans and pursuing vampires, a shape materialized from the darkness barely four yards from them. Lucky fired on instinct and hit the witch's shoulder, rocking her back onto her heels, and then the small Celt batted the rifle's barrel aside and shoved Callie into Phil's side.

"Try and keep track of her, yeah?" Fiona growled. And then she was gone again, strolling through the forest as though the screams and blood were of no consequence.

They did not see her again until sunrise, but he glimpsed her raven once through the night, and warned Lucky of a possible meeting. They had just settled into an abandoned cabin for the night when a knock came at the door. Lucky and Phil both reached for their guns, but Phil sighed as he did so, and at Lucky's inquiring glance, he motioned her back from the door.

As expected, when he opened it, Fiona was leaning against the doorframe, her raven on her shoulder.

Within a few days of Fiona's last conversation with Dmitri, just as the sun was beginning to set, he contacted her with the Sending Stone. His group had captured a Spanish-speaking woman from whom the only words they could understand had been the name Fiona Corvus. Less than fifteen minutes after the call, Fiona and Devon and Silus were stepping from a portal. They had appeared right next to the Czar as planned, but seeing Scab and Ivory hovering a few yards away gave Fiona pause.

The witch flashed a charming smile. "Ivory, love. Good to see you." Her eyes slid over to Scab, and the smile tightened. "One moment, please."

She spun on her heels to face Dmitri and said in Russian, "Please tell me the Sisterhood is here because you patched things up with Mara."

He replied in the same language. "Of course not. Scab killed her." Ivory and Scab were watching them keenly now at hearing the names; Silus, meanwhile, crossed his arms to wait, looking around at the group of vampires and captured humans with barely-disguised boredom.

"You've got to be joking." Fiona replied. "That one? He's less than a hundred years old. Mara should've snapped him like a twig."

The vampire shrugged. "He has proven hard to kill."

"Aye, the cockroaches always survive, don't they?" That got a chuckle from him. Fiona switched back to English and continued, "You said you might have one of my people?"

"We cannot tell, but she knows your name."

"I can't believe that not one of you lot knows a lick of Spanish." The witch grumbled. "Thanks for calling me. I'll have a look."

Fiona started towards the group of prisoners, Devon lifting into the trees above and Silus falling into step close behind her. A quick glance turned up no one she immediately recognized, so she called in Spanish as she approached, "Someone has been asking for me?"

Most of them stared back blankly at her. The American education system hard at work, she thought sarcastically.

"Senora Corvus," One Latina woman responded, and Fiona headed for her. The prisoners tied to either side of the woman shrunk back, but despite the way her eyes nervously darted over Fiona and Silus, the woman stood her ground. The witch evaluated her for half a second.

"Not to be rude, love," She began in Spanish- Silus shot her an amused look at hearing mi amor- "But I don't remember you, and I have a great memory for people. So have we actually met, or are you just bullshitting the leeches?"

"I'm Maria. We have not met, but I have heard of you. I know you are-" There she hesitated, and amended whatever she was going to say to, "That you work with the Portland vampires."

"Yeah? What were you about to say just there?" Fiona asked with a half-grin. When the woman hesitated, the witch pressed, "Com'on, I'm not going to shoot the messenger. What do people say about me?"

"The vampires call you the Russian's pet witch."

Fiona laughed jovially at that. "Ha! Really? Now that's ironic. My Council calls him my pet vampire. Like one of those feral tomcats you keep around to kill the mice." Over her shoulder, she tapped her knuckles against Silus's chest pointedly. He didn't understand Spanish much better than the other vampires, but he flashed a smile that might have been reassuring if not for the gleam of fangs. "Don't worry, this one's a bit more tame. So, how exactly did you hope this would play out when you started throwing my name around?"

Automatically, more than likely rehearsed, Maria replied, "I've hidden a year's worth of medicine. Get me out of this, and I'll take you to it."

Fiona cocked her head. "How did you manage that?"

"I was a home nurse before the Rising. After… everything, I knew which houses had medications on hand."

The witch flashed a small, appreciative smile. "Smart woman. Got anything good?"

"Pain meds-" She started, but Fiona waved that away.

"I can produce my own opioids, and narcotics were the first thing everyone grabbed when the world ended. What else?"

"Insulin, blood pressure medication, steroids… A lot of stuff."

Fiona considered that, and nodded slowly. Insulin is a bitch to get your hands on. Might be worth it just for that. "I'll talk to the vampires and see what I can do." She smiled charmingly and added, "Lie to the leeches all you want, love, but you better not be bullshitting me."

From behind her, Silas suddenly put a hand on Fiona's waist and leaned down to speak into her ear. "Fiona, there's a kid here."

Fiona's entire body tensed, but she forced it to relax and leaned back into him. He dropped his head almost onto her shoulder so she could respond in a whisper, "Where?"

"To the right, behind the brunette in the grey jacket."

The Celt turned her head slowly to look down the line of humans. Sure enough, at almost the other end of the line of prisoners, a girl huddled against a brown-haired woman. Fiona put the kid somewhere around ten, certainly not older than twelve. Her eyes were keen and observant as she stared at the two newcomers, and though the rate of her breath frosting in the air told Fiona that she was certainly scared, she was far from panicking.

The woman with her caught Fiona's gaze, and worriedly glanced from the witch to the kid. She leaned down to say something to the girl; the child averted her eyes, trying to furtively glance back up without being caught. The woman, meanwhile, watched Fiona with open wariness.

"I think that's my cue." Fiona muttered to Silus. "Keep the Czar off my back, yeah?"

He gave her a quick kiss on the temple. "Of course, darling."

Fiona made her way down the line and stopped in front of the woman and the girl, both of whom shrunk away. The witch held her hands out to the side placatingly.

"I come in peace." She greeted with a small, joking smile. "Fiona Corvus." The woman only stared at her for a long moment, suspicious and resentful in equal measure, so Fiona prompted, "And you are?"

"What do you want?" The woman asked brusquely, though there was the barest shake in her voice.

"Names, for a start." Fiona returned gently, looking at her with patient expectancy. When she still hesitated, the Celt glanced down to the girl with the same expression.

"Callie." The girl offered quietly. The woman shot her a reproachful look.

Fiona nodded. "Pleasure to meet you, Callie." She said, and again looked at the woman expectantly.

"...Jolene." She finally said. Her eyes flickered over the witch. "You don't look like a vampire."

"I'm as human as you are, love. I'm a hemomancer- a warlock. I've got a truce with the leeches."

"Warlock?" Callie asked. "Like- magic?"

Fiona nodded, flashing a warm smile. "Aye. Spells and familiar and all."

Jolene somehow looked even more unnerved by that idea. "What do you want with us?"

"Look, I'm not here to hurt anyone. I'll help the kid out if I can. You her mum?"

Before Jolene could respond, Callie put in, "My parents are dead."

"We've been looking after her-" Jolene began.

"I can take care of myself." Callie interjected, and there was such conviction- and just a hint of bitterness- in her voice. Fiona grinned.

"I guess you're who I should be talking to, then." The witch replied, turning more towards her. "We're short on time, so I'll get to the point. The vampires aren't going to just let any of you go, but I can try to trade something for you."

"...Why?" The girl asked, incredulous and nervous and almost guilty. "What does it get you?"

Fiona noted the layers of emotion. Outwardly, she only shrugged. "Dunno yet. Got any useful skills?"

It was a lie and a deflection, but it was easier than explaining the intricacies of trying to hang onto the tattered shreds of one's immortal soul. It wasn't about morality, exactly- Fiona had never been a pillar of morality by any standard. It was more about apathy. The ability to leave a child to certain death represented a line she wouldn't cross yet, a line between being at least somewhat of a normal human, or something entirely removed from it.

Callie seemed pleasantly surprised by the question, though not entirely convinced by it. As she listed off a few skills- trapping rabbits, fixing electronics, so on- and Fiona probed her on her past, she began to develop a theory as to why. Some kind of survivor's guilt complex, the witch thought as she learned of her now-dead traveling companions, and it was only supported by the girl's quiet, nervous admission that she'd looked after a friend that had turned into a vampire. She knows that people are only this committed to helping her because she's so young.

All too soon, Fiona saw in her periphery that Silus was walking towards them, and she stood and stepped back to meet him. He again looped an arm around her waist and spoke into her ear.

"The Ambassador is losing patience," He said quietly. "He'll make a scene of it shortly."

Fiona sighed. "I'll be over." Silus nodded and slipped away, and the Celt looked back to Callie. "Sit tight. I'll work something out."

"And the rest of us?" Jolene challenged. "You're just going to leave us to die?"

Fiona fought not to scowl. "What do you expect me to do here, love? I can't take them all in a fight, and even if I could, I wouldn't. I'd have to gut every single one of them to avoid a war between their clan and my people. I'd be killing more people than I saved." Jolene only stared, blindsided by that idea. People never think their heroic fantasies through, do they? "Lovely chat. Best of luck."

The Czar was waiting expectantly and impatiently. "I'd like to take the woman." She said as she reached him.

He settled her with a hard evaluating look, not for a second missing the way she had worded that. "If she is not one of yours, then you have no claim on her. We will need to eat."

"She's more of a private contractor than an employee." Which, as of the moment, was not technically a lie. "If you'll part with the kid, too, I'll consider that second symbol paid for."

He shot her an annoyed look. "You cannot stake a claim on every stray you find, Fiona."

"It's not just about sentimentality, mate. Remember that I said I'm looking for an apprentice? She's a little young for hemomancy, but about the right age for druidcraft. Have a good look at her. She's pretty damn composed for a kid in this situation. It's bloody impressive." The vampire glanced over her shoulder at the kid, face unconvinced. "Com'on, mate, she's not really even big enough to eat. All she's gonna do is slow you down and give the rest of them delusions of heroism."

The truth of that last statement gave him a moment's pause, and Fiona watched him consider it.

"You may have the woman if you are able to replace the volume of blood lost."

The witch chewed that over for a second. "Live, or will blood bags do? I'll throw in some of my own if you'll take bags."

"How generous." He replied with sardonic amusement. "That will suffice."

"And the kid?"

Something sharp and predatory sparked behind his eyes. Fiona had learned to recognize the look: he knew he had something she wanted, and that he could get away with overcharging for it. She distantly wondered if she'd been as obvious about it the handful of times the situation had been reversed.

"Lead me to the key I seek, and you may have the child."

The Celt gave him a distrustful look. "Yeah? And what's the catch?"

"The Van Helsings and their followers have it."

"No." Fiona said instantly. "I told you, I'm not getting in the middle of- hold on. Their, plural? Abigail's come out of hiding?" Fear began to claw up her spine. "Jesus fucking Christ, Dmitri-"

"Not Abigail. The second daughter, the Harker girl."

"That's barely better." Fiona grumbled. "You said followers? How many?"

"Julius, another man, a woman. They were all bitten by Vanessa. They reeked of it."

"All three? That can't be a coincidence." An idea made horror flash openly across her face. "Sweet Mary, are they sire-bonded to her?"

The Russian glanced over with a thoughtful look. "It would explain their devotion. Even in the face of certain annihilation, they follow her. Fascinating. Do you think she has realized? She could build an army…" His tone was all amusement, like someone who had just witnessed a toddler say their first curse word. Fiona gave him a black look.

"I know you vampires are emotionally stunted, but horror and revulsion are the appropriate reactions here."

"The key." Dmitri insisted, trying to wrest the conversation back to the original point. "Will you guide us?"

"Do I want to traipse around the woods with you until we get into a fight with those cultish vampire hunters?" She asked sarcastically. Her gaze drifted back to Callie, and her eyes softened at the same time that her teeth began to grind. Asking me to risk my life for a random kid that gets him nothing. This is daylight fucking robbery. "I'll think about it." She finally ground out, stalking away and resenting that the statement didn't carry the same sarcasm as the previous one. Silus fell into step beside her as she crossed back towards the humans. "We can have Maria, at least."

"And the child?"

"I'll figure something out."

Devon cawwed from somewhere in the forest, his consciousness pressing in on hers. Fiona stopped in her tracks and grabbed Silus's arm, her eyes rolling back as she entered Devon's body and her own became blind and deaf. Her raven was perched on a high branch, looking down at two figures huddled behind some trees. At a thought he looked the other way, and Fiona could distantly see her own body some distance away. What do we have here? That guy looks familiar- oh, it's Flesh! Huh. Glasses really do kill any intimidation factor, don't they?

Devon's idea, the reason he had alerted her, bled into her mind. Brilliant, mate. Keep an eye on them, She told him, and returned to her own body.

"Something wrong?" Silus asked immediately, keeping his tone conversational even as his eyes lifted to dart around the surrounding trees.

"Devon figured something out." Fiona replied cheerily, pulling him forward as though nothing had happened. "Take Maria and collect her stash. We'll need the insulin. I'll 'port you to the nearest safehouse to make it quick, and you can leave them there. What she does after is up to her, but if she wants to join us, link her up with Nina's caravan."

"And do you plan to do anything dangerous while I'm away?"

"Nothing more than usual."

He sighed dramatically. "If something happens to you under my supervision, Aisling will stake me. Keep that in mind, darling."

Fiona rolled her eyes at him and stopped in front of Maria. She began to explain in Spanish the same thing she had told Silus, and reached inside her coat to draw her dagger and cut the woman's hands free. She nodded along to the instructions, and then shot a trepidatious look over Fiona's shoulder. The witch followed her gaze to the horde of vampires waiting expectantly behind her.

"Ah. Breakfast time." She remarked to Maria. Then she stepped back to hold her hand out over the ground, and a long phrase had dirt and woodchips scattering, leaving a small teleportation symbol etched into the ground. Mum would kill me for being so showy, She thought distantly, and glanced up at the vampires. But I don't think they'd wait for me to draw one. To Silus, she said, "Be quick and quiet. Don't draw attention to yourself."

She made a cut on the back of her arm to activate the circle, and he automatically stepped closer to her, glaring openly at the other vampires. He stooped to place a quick kiss to her forehead and mumbled, "Be careful, darling. Remember that your well-being affects us all."

"Your self-centered concern is always so charming, Si." She muttered back with a little annoyance and a small smile. She said the words to activate the circle, and it glowed bright red in the dim post-sunset light as the portal formed in the air above it. Silus motioned Maria through, flashed Fiona one last dashing smile of white teeth and sharp canines, and disappeared.

Fiona glanced back, taking in the crowd of hungry vampires and the way every set of eyes had honed in on the cut on her arm. She internally sighed, but put on a wicked smile for the crowd, said, "Sorry, ladies and gents, but I'm only on the menu for people who say pretty please," and gave Ivory a brazen, playful wink.

"Hello, Flesh." The Celt said with a companionable smile the next morning. "Long time no see."

"It's Phil." He returned cooly, gun held tightly but lowered. For a second, the world was silent, and Fiona cocked an eyebrow.

"May I come in?"

"'Do we have a choice?"

"Come on, mate, when have I ever been a bad houseguest? We need to have a chat, but if you want to do it on a doorstep, we can."

For a long minute, he looked as though he was considering it. Then he glanced to Lucky and away, and stepped aside. Fiona strolled in as Phil shut the door behind her, the witch taking in her surroundings with a quick glance. They stood in the middle of a respectably sized living room, the space dominated by a large hearth and a worn sectional. Lucky stood near the far wall, silhouetted by moonlight from the windows behind her. Devon glided from Fiona's shoulder to the back of the sectional, and the witch nodded to the other woman.

"Nice to meet you again, lass. I'm Fiona Corvus."

"I know who you are." She returned scathingly, and Fiona flashed a cold smile.

"Oh, I'm flattered." Fiona pointed to the hearth, mouthed a word, and a fire roared to life. "And how, exactly, have you heard of me?"

"You sided with the vampires over your own kind. Supported those monsters when they were in Portland, and now you're letting them feed on children-"

"Lucky-"

"I see you're Resistance, then." Fiona interrupted, and added dryly, "You lot never did understand the meaning of neutral party."

"A neutral party would have supplied us as well as they did the vampires."

"If you think I never supplied for resistance groups, then you must be from Taka's branch."

That caught her off guard. "What?"

"I'd work with a Resistance, but I wouldn't work with Taka. I dislike hypocrites and Rebecca. Hypocrisy is forgivable, but reporting to Rebecca was not."

Shock and hurt flashed across Lucky's face. Fiona noted that, despite the sympathetic look he gave her, Phil did not look in the least bit surprised to learn that the infamous Resistance leader had been a traitor. The witch strolled to hearth and leaned against it, feigning obliviousness to the emotions of the two humans.

"Why are you here, Fiona?" Phil asked after a long moment.

"Oh, several reasons. The biggest is to talk to Callie, but I'm guessing that she's not here."

"No." He said shortly. When he did not elaborate, she sighed dramatically.

"You former leeches are so hard to predict. Julius gets nicer, you get pricklier, and Zar didn't change a bit."

Though Fiona noted that Lucky did not seem surprised by the phrase "former leeches", Phil flinched like he'd been slapped. "Julius? He's…"

"He was traveling with Vanessa Van Helsing the last I saw him. Seems like a good guy," she added, because though she had long suspected that, she very much doubted that Phil did.

"You have to be joking. Julius? With everything he's done? He-"

"Stones and glasses house, mate." Fiona interjected, a slight edge in her voice, and Phil studied her for a second.

"You still like him."

"I barely know this version of him. I've never disliked him, and he's regained a moral compass, so he's at least likable. He's certainly still useful. So maybe you could avoid shooting him on sight, yeah?"

He scowled at her, though she couldn't be sure if it was for the implication that he would shoot someone on sight, or because she had asked him not too. Silence stretched for several seconds, and it was Lucky that broke it.

"What do you want with Callie?" The question was harsh, the tone suspicious. Fiona narrowed her eyes.

"I don't harm kids, lass, and I'd appreciate if you'd stop implying that." She looked to Phil and continued, "I want to offer her a chance to join my organization. My best case scenario is that Cormac takes her on as an apprentice."

"Cormac? Not you?" Phil asked, both suspicious and a little relieved. If it weren't for how well-liked Cormac was, Fiona might have been offended by that.

"Sure. Kids tend to take better to druidcraft than to hemomancy, and it's about time he had an apprentice."

"Why would she want to go with you?" Lucky challenged. "She's seen you associating with vampires."

"She's associated with vampires. Did you even talk to the kid? She was feeding one of her friends-turned-vamps back when she was at your Resistance field hospital. Besides, we've got electricity, running water, fortifications-"

Horror crawled across Phil's face. "You're going to raise a child in Dunsinane?"

"No, I'm not. But for the record, I resent that implication. Dunsinane is one of the safest places in the world, especially in the current food chain. No one comes to any harm there that they don't consent to."

Lucky raised an eyebrow at the specific wording of that last sentence, and looked to Phil. "What's she mean by that? What's Dunsinane?"

"Her castle in the mountains. It was like one of those… those hotel and conference centers, but for vampires. I've only heard about it. As far as I know, no one uses it anymore. "

"The vampires don't use it anymore." Fiona corrected. "They don't really need to. But we still get magicians, therianthropes, Carpiani- even a few humans. Then and now, Dunsinane is hidden, neutral ground."

"The hell is a therianthrope?"

"A nice Latin name for a werebeast. I try to use the term because, shockingly, people don't like being called beasts. I shortened it to therians for a while, but Cormac told me that that's a kink name now, so here we are."

Phil rubbed his face with his hand, as though he couldn't fathom that he had heard that sentence come out of a three-hundred-year-old witch. "Look, the kid's not here. We sent her off with some of the survivors from her group."

Fiona sighed again. "Mate, I gave her to you because you used to be breathtakingly efficient at executing orders. Hold on to her, I said. A very simple request."

"I don't take orders from people like you anymore."

The Celt cocked her head. "And you think Vanessa isn't like me? Well, in some ways, I guess you're right. I'm not that vicious. Not that bloodthirsty."

"Bullshit." The response was immediate, quiet but fierce. "I've heard the stories- you've told me some of them yourself. What you did to that Gabriel guy. What you did to Mercer in front of us."

"What I did to Mercer was business. He made an open and dramatic threat against my people. If I hadn't reacted equally dramatically, someone might have thought that they could follow through on those threats."

"And what empty threats did Gabriel make to earn a decade of torture?"

The switch flipped, and her face shut down; for one irrational moment, a shot of fear went up Phil's spine. Coldly, matter-of-factly, she replied, "He ripped my newborn son from my arms and dashed his head open against the wall."

The silence that followed that statement was deafening, made all the worse by it's length. Phil's mouth fell open slightly, then snapped shut, and he looked away, appropriately ashamed. Fiona drew her flask from her jacket and took a sip, noting that, for the first time since she'd stepped in the room, Lucky did not look at her like she thought Fiona a rabid dog. After a long, long minute, Lucky asked, "What did you do to him?"

A shadow seemed to slide across her eyes. Lucky likely thought it a trick of the light, but Phil knew better; for a split-second, her eyes had turned as black as they had been when fury had gripped her two years ago.

Finally, the Celt said, "More than I should have, but less than he deserved." She took another long swig of whisky and added, "Circling back to my original point, Gabriel was a Van Helsing. I've seen that kind of rage pop up every few generations in their family. Their obsessions with hunting vampires doesn't really lend itself to mental stability."

"Vanessa isn't like that." Phil insisted quietly, though a seed of doubt sat deep in his chest, planted by the wave of incomprehensible agony he had felt some weeks ago, when some still-unknown event had caused Vanessa such pain that it exploded into him through the link between them. The road back from that kind of pain would not be easy, and in the current world, it would likely not be bloodless.

Fiona took another swig from her flask, rescrewed the lid, and tucked the flask back into her jacket. "This group you sent Callie off with," She began, pointedly changing the subject, "Do you have a description of them, or a last known direction of travel?"

Phil glanced towards Lucky, already preparing to protest when she snarled, "And why the hell would we tell you that?"

"For Christ's sake, will you lay off it already?" Fiona snapped. "You threw the kid into an apocalyptic wasteland, and I'm trying to get her back to civilization. Let's stop acting like I'm the one in the wrong here."

"You-"

"Lucky!" Phil interjected sharply, earning him an annoyed look from the taller woman and a tired one from the shorter. He hastily added, in a gentler tone, "Lucky, please." Anger thundered across the woman's face, but before she could retort, Phil looked to Fiona and said, "Look, we're going to need a bit more here. We can't just send you after her without some assurances."

A muscle clenched in Fiona's jaw. You can't send me after her because you don't know where she fucking is, she mentally corrected. And you don't know where she fucking is because you couldn't be bothered to look after her for twelve hours. But Fiona figured Lucky to be only a few sharp words away from either all-out screaming or gunfire, and she had not made so many allies by escalating tense situations.

"And just what would make you feel assured?" The witch ground out. Phil glanced towards Lucky, suddenly unsure. Yeah, that's what I bloody thought.

"Well…" Phil began, "To start, if you don't want to take her to Dunsinane, where are you taking her?"

Fiona grimaced, knowing exactly how they would react to her answer. "I can't tell you that, mate."

Lucky snorted derisively. Phil shot Fiona an exasperated look and said, "You know we can't take that answer."

"Look, the fact that nobody knows about it is what's kept us alive this long. Everyone knows about Dunsinane, and one of these days, its going to get hit hard. Hell, if it weren't for this goddam apocalypse, the DOJ would have sacked it already." At their astonished looks, Fiona elaborated, "This fucking magician prick had a day-job as a Blacktech executive, and with the government sponsored shadiness they're involved in, the FBI was breathing down my neck for a bloody month before the Rising." Sweet Mary, what a headache that was.

"That isn't exactly reassuring."

"My point is," Fiona replied testily, "If I want to keep this place safe, I can't go around advertising it like I did Dunsinane.

"Does Julius know about it?"

"Flesh-"

"Phil!" He snapped, halfway to shouting, and Fiona paused.

"...Phil." She amended.

"Does he know?"

The witch briefly considered lying. "Yes, but only because I'm holding out hoping on recruiting him. I had my eye on him for an apprentice a few decades back. Second chances are rare. I've learned to jump on them."

"And you think that makes him more trustworthy than us?" Phil kept the volume level, but there was venom in his voice. Fiona cocked an eyebrow and looked pointedly to Lucky.

"He's not openly aggressive towards me, so he's already ahead of you two."

"And what's it say that the blood-sucking monster is the only one who likes you?" Lucky shot back.

Fiona's lips twitched back towards a snarl, but she schooled her face towards dower neutrality. "You got questions, and I'll answer what I can. But I'm not telling you where it is because, like it or not, I can't trust you."

A mix of emotions spasmed across Phil's face- frustration, bitterness, distrust, anger. His next questions came short and almost harsh.

"What'd you call this one?"

"Elsinore."

"How many people?"

"Around a hundred adults, about twenty kids, and a handful of teens."

"How many vampires?" When Phil asked that with such surety, Lucky glanced from him to Fiona with renewed distaste. The witch was quickly growing tired of that expression.

"Four vampires, three therianthropes, three Carpiani."

"What do you mean by Carpiani?"

"A people from the Carpathian Mountains. They're true shapeshifters, among other things."

"Are they blood suckers?"

"The Carpiani and therianthropes both can get a boost off it, but they don't need it to survive."

Before Phil could ask anything else, Lucky interjected, "How do you feed the vampires?"

From her tone, the woman might have imagined dungeons of captured humans, or that those who stepped out of line in Elsinore were dragged off, never to be seen again. She supposed that she couldn't fault her for the assumption, given how most of the organized vampires ran their territories. No vision for the future, Fiona mentally scoffed, not for the first time. Living bodies replenish their blood. It's unsustainable in the long run to kill people.

"All the adults are on a rotating schedule of mandatory blood donations." They had also, on a few rare occasions, drained perpetrators of capital offenses, but Fiona guessed that that fact would not be well received. "We divide the blood between the leeches, the hospital, trade, and magic."

Phil's eyes widened at that. "Hospital? You have a hospital?"

"We've had it going since the 60s. The Rising got a few of our nurses, but we have a complete medical team, physical therapist and all. Even got a handful of psychiatrists. Damn, do those poor bastards have a shit job nowadays."

"Christ." Phil muttered, both humans momentarily stalled at the idea of a functioning hospital.

Fiona took the opportunity to cheekily add, "We also have a rec building with a cinema on the first floor." She let silence sit in the room for a few minutes before asking, "Still think the kid's better off out here?"

"...We don't know where they were headed." Phil admitted quietly.

"I've gathered." Fiona replied testily. "Direction of travel?"

"Phil." Lucky interjected.

"They have a hospital, Lucky."

"They also have vampires, Phil. Vampires and fucking shape-shifters."

"Don't forget the gypsies, tramps and thieves." Fiona put in with venomous sarcasm. Lucky shot her a black look, and the witch only crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Phil expectantly.

He stared at Lucky. Lucky stared at him. "Northwest." He finally said, and she relaxed.

Fiona straightened from the hearth, green eyes alight with anger as they flickered between the two humans. "I see." She made a motion and said a word, and a sudden gust of wind had the front door slamming open. "Devon, scout to the southeast. Probably couldn't have gone further than fifteen miles." He made an unhappy grating sound; they both knew it was a long shot. "I know. Just do your best."

Thick, awkward silence filled the room as the raven glided out into the night. Phil eventually broke it.

"You have to understand why we can't trust you."

"I understand why lemmings follow each other off cliffs. It doesn't make them any less stupid for it."

Lucky's face hardened at the open insult, and though she didn't raise the barrel of her gun, she shifted the stock to a more ready position against her shoulder. "It's time for you to leave."

Fiona's eyes focused on the gun, expression turning cold and flat as her gaze slowly traveled up the weapon to the woman who held it. "Do you think," She mused, voice bone-chillingly void of emotion, "That I could've traded you two for her? They wouldn't have eaten Phil, granted, but you, you're fairly young, healthy, strong… and I bet I could've used him to find Vanessa, if they really are sire-bonded." She cocked her head. "Have you been having dreams, Phil? Following impulses you don't know how to explain?"

His face shut down, betraying nothing, but the way Lucky's eyes widened and darted to him was all the answer Fiona needed. So it's true. The Celt barked a small, bitter laugh and looked toward the ceiling with detachment to quote, "Hail, horrors, hail…" And receive thy new possessor, those goddamn Van Helsings.

The Czar was right: they could build an army of devoted vampire hunters, of fanatic human purests. Gabriel had managed to infiltrate a fortified castle with nothing but a handful of mercenaries. If he had had a true cult around him… Fiona's eyes drifted back to Phil, cold calculations flashing behind her eyes. If she used his blood to track down Vanessa, could she end this nightmare? How many of her people would die if she chose not to? If she did?

She took a breath and let her emotions filter back in. Heh. Now who's having delusions of heroism?

"Fiona." Phil prompted uncertainly. When she looked back at him, and her expression was no longer brutally cold and callous, some of the tension eased from his body. He nodded towards the doors and said a firm, "Please."

She looked between Lucky and Phil one last time. "I've been telling everyone to stay clear of this Van Helsing mess, but you know what? You two do what you want." She paused in the doorway to add, "And remember that the next time you put a bullet in me or mine, I'll do something about it."

When Silus stepped out of one of their safehouses at sunset, found Fiona drinking on the porch.

"I see it didn't go well."

She drummed her fingers against her flask. "Ever have one of those days that makes you miss when they put cocaine and opium in everything? I'd've killed for some laudanum a few hours ago."

"Fiona, darling, the only drug I was consuming in those days was you, and I've never gone off it." She let out a small laugh and rolled her eyes. "And my adventure went swimmingly, thank you for asking. Dr. Avani will be singing your praises when she gets her hands on all of it."

"Maria?"

He shrugged. "She went her own way."

Fiona sighed and drug a hand down her face. "Everyone we try to help would rather slap our hand away and die out here than take a chance on trusting us."

Silus hummed contemplatively as he scooped her out of her rocking chair like she weighed nothing- she gave a surprised squeal of a laugh that, for a moment, made her seem young again- and settled onto it himself, holding her on his lap. She laughed again and rested her head against his chest, enjoying the way his voice vibrated through it when he spoke.

"This feud between the Romanovs- pardon me, Romanov- and the Van Helsings is not helping your public image, my dear. It worked to our advantage to have a certain reputation in Portland, but now that reputation is on the move."

"Aye. I'm starting to fear that my tomcat is eating my chickens along with the rats."

Silus chuckled. "My, what a metaphor. You know, if the cat is causing you trouble, you have four loyal, vicious hounds waiting for your every command."

"Against the Czar, you're four Chihuahuas."

"Hmm. Jack Russels?" He bargained. "Small, yes, but tenacious, brutal little dogs. Four of us could kill a cat."

"I appreciate it, but that's one pet I'd have to put down myself."

"Hmm. How would you do it?" His voice was low and rich with heated curiosity. Fiona smiled and tilted her head up to kiss his neck.

"Like that idea, love? Been jealous lately?"

"Always, darling. Of every other bastard that's ever had their fangs in you." He dropped his head to mutter against the curve of her neck, "And all of us, every single one, would kill the others and keep you all for themselves if they could."

She smiled at the flattery, and teased, "You don't have to try so hard, y'know. I'll have to give you a drink sometime today. Can't have you foaming at the mouth."

"But where's the romance in that?" He cried over-dramatically, lifting his head to flash her a wide, jesting smile that made his eyes sparkle and fangs flash. "Where's the allure, the sex appeal? If being a vampire doesn't make me supernaturally irresistible for all eternity, then I don't want it."

"Right, right. My bad." She cleared her throat and began, as though reading from a bad play, "Oh, Silus, you've enchanted me so-"

He mimed as though he would shove her off his lap, and she laughed again. "You're a cruel, vindictive little creature."

They stayed cuddled on the porch for several long minutes, until the last rays of light had faded from the sky and the crickets had begun to chirp around them. Then the witch stood and stretched.

"Let's get moving. Cormac called on the Sat phone while you were asleep, and Tabby's still asking for that stuffed bear from the bunker. Thought we'd swing by and grab it while we're out."