The red strobe light fractured the Arcanum into a stuttering hellscape of sharp shadows and gleaming glass. The calm, automated voice repeated its warning, now underscored by the sound of shattering containment fields and the guttural shouts of the intruders.
Elara didn't hesitate. With the grimoire case clutched to her chest, she slapped a hand against a seemingly blank section of her lab's glass wall. A biometric panel lit up, and a door-sized section hissed open, revealing a service corridor lined with pulsating copper pipes.
"Move!" she commanded, already darting through.
Kael went next, a shield of muscle and instinct. Alaric followed last, his senses stretching back into the main archive. He counted four, maybe five distinct presences, vampires moving with the liquid predatory grace of Lucian's elite. They weren't tearing the place apart randomly. They were cutting a specific path. Toward the lab.
The door hissed shut behind them, and the cacophony muted to a dull throb. The corridor was narrow, hot, and humming with the building's magical infrastructure.
"Where does this lead?" Kael growled, having to stoop slightly.
"Storage sub-level, then to a waste-conduit that exits near the University of London gardens," Elara said, her words clipped as she hurried. "It's an emergency purge route for volatile artifacts. We'll be swimming in six kinds of residual curse, but it's better than being exsanguinated by Lucian's choirboys."
"The grimoire," Alaric said, keeping pace behind her. "They will not stop. Its signature is a beacon to any Progenitor's senses now that it's been activated."
"Then we'll have to outrun their senses," Elara shot back, turning a corner. "I know a place. A null-room. A void."
"A what?" Kael asked.
"A hole in the world. The Council uses them to interrogate magic-sensitive prisoners. No ley lines, no background magical radiation. It's sensory deprivation for the supernatural. If we can get inside, the book will disappear from their radar."
Alaric's mind recoiled at the idea. For a being whose existence was so tied to the subtle flows of power, a null-room was not a refuge it was a coffin. A slow suffocation. "How far?"
"Too far if they've already breached the inner sanctum." Elara skidded to a halt before a heavy, circular door like a bank vault, covered in swirling, anti-magical sigils. "This is it. Sub-level storage. The null-room is on the far side."
She worked a complex dial. As the massive lock began to grind open, a new sound echoed down the copper-lined corridor behind them not the alarm, but the soft, deliberate click of dress shoes on concrete. Slow. Confident.
"Company," Kael said, turning to face the direction they'd come, his body subtly broadening, a low rumble building in his chest.
The door finally swung open, revealing a cavernous, dark space stacked high with crates and shrouded objects. Elara plunged inside. "Come on!"
Alaric lingered for a moment in the corridor entrance, looking back. At the far end, a figure stepped into the flickering red light. He was tall, impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit that cost more than the annual budget of a small museum department. His hair was dark, swept back, his face pale and arrestingly handsome in a severe, cruel way. He held a silver-tipped cane, not for support, but as a pointer.
"Alaric Valerius," the vampire said, his voice a smooth baritone with a Hungarian cadence. He did not shout. The sound carried perfectly. "The Master sends his regards. And a simple offer. The book. For your continued, quiet irrelevance in London."
"Viktor," Alaric acknowledged, the name tasting of old treachery. Lucian's chief diplomat and head of his external security. A poison-tongue with a killer's efficiency. "You are a long way from the Danube. And you are breaking several Council accords."
Viktor smiled, a thin, bloodless line. "Accords are for those who fear consequences. The Master fears nothing. The book, Alaric. Do not make us unearth your pretty little shop to find it."
Behind Alaric, in the storage room, Elara cursed. "The null-room door is sealed under a time-lock! It needs ninety seconds to cycle!"
They didn't have ninety seconds.
"Go," Alaric said to Kael, without turning around. "Protect the Keeper. Get to the door."
"What are you"
"Go."
Kael met his eyes for a split second, then gave a sharp nod, backing into the darkness of the storage room after Elara.
Alaric stepped fully into the corridor, letting the heavy vault door begin to swing shut behind him, cutting off his retreat. He faced Viktor alone.
"A duel in a hallway?" Viktor chuckled, taking a step forward. "How medieval. But then, you always were a sentimentalist, clinging to older ways."
"I find they have a certain durability," Alaric said, shrugging off his overcoat, letting it fall to the floor. He felt the chill of the corridor, the dampness in the air. He also felt the subtle, latent magic in the very stones of the Museum, the echoes of ten thousand enchanted objects sleeping around them. He was not on a ley line here, in this artificial space. But he was in a well of stored power.
Viktor's smile vanished. He moved.
It was not a blur, but a terrifying, efficient displacement of air. The silver tip of his cane lanced toward Alaric's heart, faster than a bullet. Alaric didn't try to match the speed. He predicted it. He shifted a fraction, the tip grazing his side, tearing fabric and skin. In the same motion, he grabbed the cane below the tip and wrenched, using Viktor's own momentum.
Viktor spun with the motion, letting go of the cane and lashing out with a hand that now ended in claws like surgical steel. Alaric ducked, feeling the wind of the blow pass over his head. He drove a fist upward into Viktor's diaphragm. The impact was like hitting a marble statue, but the vampire grunted, stumbling back a step.
"You've grown slow in your exile, old man," Viktor hissed, regaining his footing.
"No," Alaric said, circling. "I've grown precise."
He didn't need to win. He needed to buy ninety seconds.
Viktor attacked again, a flurry of strikes meant to overwhelm. Alaric parried, blocked, gave ground. He took a shallow cut across his forearm, a deeper slash on his thigh. His blood, dark and ancient, soaked into his clothes. Each injury was a calculation, a trade for a moment of time. He could feel the slow, grinding cycle of the null-room door through the stone at his back. Fifty seconds.
"Enough of this," Viktor snarled, finally losing his polished veneer. His eyes bled to solid black. He stopped feinting and charged, a force of pure vampiric might aimed at crushing Alaric against the vault door.
This was the moment. Alaric didn't dodge. He met the charge.
He caught Viktor's wrists, their strength meeting in a shuddering clash that made the copper pipes on the walls vibrate. They were locked, straining against each other, a contest of millennia-old power. Viktor was stronger, fed on fear and fresh power from the East. But Alaric had something else: the weight of his exile, the burden of his guilt, the sheer, stubborn will to protect the one spark of relevance he'd found in centuries.
He focused not on pushing back, but on pulling. He yanked Viktor forward, unbalancing him, and spun, using the vampire's own monstrous strength to slam him headfirst into the thick, sigil-covered metal of the vault door.
The impact rang through the corridor like a gong. Viktor slumped, dazed.
From inside the storage room, Alaric heard a final, heavy clunk, and Elara's voice, faint but clear. "It's open!"
Eighty-nine seconds.
Alaric released Viktor, who slid to the floor, a trickle of dark blood from his temple. He looked up, his black eyes clearing into furious, human hatred. "The Master will salt the earth of London for this."
"Tell Lucian," Alaric said, breathing heavily, his wounds already knitting with agonizing slowness, "that I am no longer taking messages."
He stepped back through the vault door into the darkness of the storage room. As the immense door began to swing shut, he saw Viktor struggling to rise, reaching inside his suit jacket not for a weapon, but for a small, ornate communication stone.
The door sealed with a definitive, echoing BOOM, cutting off the red light and the sight of his enemy.
In the pitch black, Alaric felt a hand grab his arm Kael. "This way," his friend's voice growled. "The witch has your coffin ready."
They stumbled through the labyrinth of crates toward a faint, unnatural grey outline of a door that didn't seem to be there, a tear in reality itself. The null-room. A place of absolute nothing.
As he crossed the threshold, the last sensation to leave him was the fading, metallic taste of his own blood, and the cold, silent void rushing in to claim him.