Page 33 of Curiosity Killed The Vampire

Only then did I really look at him.

His jacket was ripped from collarbone to bicep, the dark fabric soaked along the shoulder. The skin beneath was already knitting, but an ugly, spreading bruise discolored the flesh, bone sitting at a slightly wrong angle before it shifted back with a muted crack. He didn’t flinch.

“You caught that rock with your body,” I said, my voice low.

“You were under it,” he replied simply, as if that explained everything. For him, it did.

He watched me, gaze intense, jaw set. “You burned too hot,” he added. “If you’d stayed another minute⁠—”

“I didn’t,” I cut in, forcing a crooked smile. “So you can hold the lecture.”

He huffed out a breath, the ghost of a smile tugging at his mouth. “You’re impossible.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because you keep proving it.”

The floor shuddered one last time, dust drifting down in a soft, final fall. Then the mountain went still. Really still. The kind of still that came after something broke for good.

I looked toward the end of the tunnel, where the shimmer of open air glowed through the stone. “It’s over,” I whispered.

“For now,” Con said.

I glanced down at the artifact in my hand. It pulsed once—gentle, deliberate—almost like it was breathing with me. The temple was gone, entombed under tons of rock, but the thing we’d taken from it was very much alive.

I met Con’s eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”

We started up the last stretch of the tunnel, our shadows stretching long behind us, the final echoes of the collapse rolling away like distant thunder.

Behind us, the dead sigils and broken wards lay buried in the dark, their purpose finally spent.

But the weight in my hand, the living power coiled inside the crystal, was a different kind of warning.

What had been buried didn’t always stay that way.

And this time, we’d brought one of those buried secrets with us.

CHAPTER 10

The air outside hit like a slap of cold water—fierce, biting, clean.

For a fleeting moment, the rush of wind and the sight of the stars overhead felt like salvation.

We had made it out.

The cave mouth gaped behind us, a jagged wound in the mountain, now half-collapsed, plumes of dust still curling upward where the stone continued to settle. The sky stretched endless and dark above the treetops, the moon just a thin sliver of pale light.

I drew a deep breath, letting the cold burn through my lungs. The snow underfoot glittered in the moonlight, a perfect stillness after the chaos below. I turned to Con, the weight of the artifact still heavy in my hand.

“We should move⁠—”

The word died on my tongue.

A sound cut through the quiet—soft at first, like the hiss of disturbed snow. Then another. A metallic click.

Con’s head snapped toward the tree line. “Down.”

I dropped just as gunfire erupted. Muzzle flashes flared in the darkness, the echo of the shots rolling across the mountain like thunder. Bullets tore through the air, ricocheting off the rocks where we’d stood a heartbeat earlier.