I yanked the stake from beneath my skirts. The silver caught lamplight as Maeve lifted a sickle from the side table, testing its weight with practiced movements.
"A maid pressed this into my hands when she was here," Maeve said, voice steady despite the screams erupting outside. "She said 'just in case, my lady.' Prophetic woman."
We locked eyes—a quick, bright exchange where fear met courage and chose the latter. No words needed. We moved for the doors together.
The courtyard hit us with organized chaos. We halted at the edge, close enough to see the pattern of combat but far enough to choose our moments.
The household staff moved in their drilled trios, meeting the vampire assault with surprising discipline.
Cook swung her cleaver in a wide arc while two footmen flanked her with iron pikes.
The stable master's group had formed a defensive triangle, backs together, weapons bristling outward.
"Your hunter moves like death itself," Maeve murmured beside me.
Nathaniel pivoted through the melee—a hinge around which the entire skirmish turned. His stakes found hearts with surgical precision. Duck, strike, spin, strike again. Each movement flowed into the next with a lethal economy.
"Your past with him makes a certain reckless sense now." Maeve's tone carried no judgment, only observation. "All that heat and skill focused on you? I'd have made the same mistake."
But my gaze had already found Alistair. He tore through the newly turned vampires in a straight line, bodies falling in his wake like wheat before a scythe.
His target was clear—the elder vampire standing at the courtyard's center, watching the carnage with ancient amusement.
They met in a circle of cleared ground. Alistair stopped three feet away, coiled to strike. But he didn't move.
The elder's mouth moved—words I couldn't hear over the clash of metal and screams. Alistair held perfectly still, listening. His shoulders locked with tension but his hands stayed at his sides.
"Finish him!" Nathaniel's voice cracked across the yard like a whip. "Strike now!"
Alistair didn't move. The elder kept speaking, gesturing with one pale hand toward the house, toward where Maeve and I stood watching.
"Why is he hesitating?" Maeve gripped her sickle tighter. "What could that monster possibly say—"
The question dissolved as movement flickered in my peripheral vision. A vampire slipped from the shadows to our left, young face twisted with fresh hunger, hands reaching for my throat.
Maeve stepped in front of me before thought formed. The sickle sang through air, catching the vampire across the chest. Black blood splattered stone as the creature staggered back, snarling.
"Stake!" Maeve commanded.
I tossed her the silver without hesitation. She caught it cleanly, spun with dancer's grace, and drove it home between the vampire's ribs. The body dropped, limbs already stiffening into true death.
"Behind you!" Cook's voice boomed.
We wheeled together, but the warning was for others. The skirmish was ending. Bodies littered the courtyard—some vampire-still, others groaning but breathing. Our people stood in defensive clusters, weapons raised, chests heaving.
The elder was gone. Simply absent, as if he'd never existed.
Alistair crossed to us with inhuman speed, gray eyes sweeping over Maeve and me, cataloging injuries that weren't there. "You were supposed to stay hidden."
"We were supposed to do many things," I shot back. "Hiding while others died wasn't one of them."
Nathaniel arrived, fury radiating from every line of his body. "You let him go. You had him dead to rights and you let him walk away."
"Inside," Alistair commanded. "My study. Now."
He turned to the gathered household, voice carrying with lordly authority. "You fought with courage that would shame trained soldiers. The grounds are secure for the moment. Nicholas, organize the wounded. Have the bodies burned before they can regenerate."
Nicholas nodded sharply, already issuing orders as we climbed the steps.
* * *
The study door closed with finality. Alistair moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back in that pose I'd seen a thousand times when he wrestled with impossible decisions.
"Speak," Nathaniel demanded. "What did that thing say that stayed your hand?"
"The truth." Alistair turned, and I saw something I'd never seen in his expression—genuine fear. "He promised to kill everyone in this house. Every servant, every guest, every soul who draws breath under this roof. And he wasn't bluffing."
"He's one vampire against—"
"Against nothing," Alistair cut Nathaniel off. "He spared me once before—the night I fled with Maeve. He could have killed us both in that root cellar. He chose to let us go."
"Why?" Maeve's question came out sharp.
"To make a point. That mercy was calculated, bought us time I doubt we can buy again." Alistair's gaze found mine. "He said he'd return for Helena and me after the birth. His exact words."
My arms folded around my belly before conscious thought could stop them, protecting what grew there from threats that hadn't even arrived yet.
"This was our best chance," Nathaniel's voice dropped to something dangerous. "You know that. We had numbers, momentum—"
"You barely survived your first encounter with him," Alistair countered. "You were bleeding out in the garden from one clash. That assessment is correct and you know it."
Nathaniel's jaw worked, but he fell silent. The truth of it hung between us all.
"You should flee," Nathaniel said finally. "Staying here courts disaster. London, maybe. Or north to Scotland."
Alistair and I exchanged glances but did not respond.
The four of us stood in that study, understanding settling like lead in our bones—as long as we remained, the entire town stood under the same sword.
Every soul in the vicinity had become a potential casualty in a war between monsters and the humans.