Vlad huffs. “You poodles have puny arms.” He steps forward, brushing me aside—Is that a tail?—and eases the doors open just a crack. Light paints a line on his face, showing deep-blue skin, a strong nose, and an angular face. His eyes are stunningly red, the color of blood. Then he steps back into the shadows again, depriving me of more.

Not quite human, but not quite mesakkah, either. Huh.

“Did that light hurt you?” I ask as I pull the doors a bit farther apart. Now that he’s broken the seal on them manually, I can shove the doors in their tracks enough to wedge my body into the hall. I step out, dust my dress off, and then turn to the lab doors. I can’t see inside. It’s just darkness.

“It felt uncomfortable, but it did not burn.” The darkness moves a bit, and I imagine the alien vampire pacing on the other side.

I move to the door panel on my end. “It’s a good start, then. Let me see if I can adjust things further.” I try, but the No Personnel Authorization message keeps flashing. “I can’t. It doesn’t recognize me in the system.”

“How do we get in, then?”

“Unless you have a severed hand somewhere, we can’t.”

He pauses. “I think I might have taken off a finger when I attacked them. Do you want it?”

Is he serious? I don’t know if I’m horrified or thrilled. “Your finger?”

He scoffs. “As if I am that weak. It’s one of theirs.”

“Hand it over.”

Five minutes later, I’m holding a bloody, severed, blue-skinned finger and trying not to be grossed out as I push the tip of it onto the screen. A name and profile come up for one of Nasit’s assistants, and I get to work.

“You know what you’re doing?” he asks from inside the other room.

“I do, yeah. Despite my current poodle status, I actually had a decent owner before this. She was an elderly mesakkah lady who had bad eyes and had me handle all her devices and her reading and writing. I’m pretty good with their equipment . . . as long as I have a profile to access things, that is.” I set the finger aside carefully in case I need it later and consider the panel in front of me. There’s a red, flashing Error message, and I dismiss it and look through the option menus for the commands for the lighting. I find the environmental controls, scrolling through the options. There’s a custom setting at the very bottom of the brightness choices, and I select it. Immediately, the lighting changes in the hall, becoming unnatural and vaguely pinkish.

One hand stretches out from within the doors, and he flexes it in the open air, testing the feel of things.

I try not to stare, as the deep-blue hand extended toward me is huge, with three long fingers and a thumb, each one tipped by a nasty-looking claw. A thick vein traces over the back of his hand, and his fist looks strong and brutal, like he could snap my neck without trying very hard. I press my hand to my throat, swallowing.

Then the doors open, and Vlad the Hopefully-Friendly-and-Not-Impaler steps out so I can get a good look at him.

He doesn’t step out as much as he stalks out, as if he’s had enough of the shadows and demands that the light bow to him. He loomed over me in the darkness, so it doesn’t surprise me that he towers over me now, but I am surprised at the sheer breadth of his shoulders. No wonder he was able to get the door open with ease. His biceps are bigger than my thighs. His thighs are bigger than . . . well, they’re huge. He’s got the same strange, three-toed feet that the mesakkah do, and the deep-blue skin, but he’s got no horns. His face seems more angular than theirs, his eyes a bit wider, and the red of them is bright crimson and vivid. Strangely enough, he’s got thick, dark lashes, heavy eyebrows, and short black hair that sticks up from his head in spikes.

If I wasn’t familiar with aliens at this point, I’d say his Halloween costume looks very authentic.

Vlad strides toward me, and yup, there’s a tail there, all right. It’s thin like a lion’s, and with a thick swab of fur at the very tip. He’s wearing what looks like a tattered loincloth of plain white, and it exposes all of his chest, with a thick pelt of dark hair trailing down to where a navel should be . . . and isn’t. One of the medical sensors is still attached to his arm, a snapped wire dangling across one shoulder. He takes two more steps and then he’s looming over me again, and I don’t even come to his shoulder.

I really, really wish it was just a costume.

“I should remind you that you promised not to eat me,” I say, hiding my nervousness.

He smiles, showing bright-white teeth and two rather large, pointy incisors that leave no doubt to his vampiric claims. “I said I wouldn’t. We are friends, remember?”

Friends, right. I gesture at the hallway. “I can go to the main system and adjust the lighting so you don’t have to worry about it harming you.”

He nods, and I get the impression he’s waiting for something.

“What?” I ask.

“What now?” Vlad inquires. “What does one do when you are not enclosed in a tube or being forced to perform medical stress tests?”

I eye him. “Did you . . . not have downtime?”

He shrugs. “They kept me sedated until the sedation drugs were no longer effective.”

I blink. So he doesn’t know what to do with himself? Truly? “Well, the way I see it, we have a couple of different options. Since this is our station now, we can clean up after ourselves . . .”

Vlad makes a face.

I laugh, because I was thinking along the same lines. “Yeah, screw that. How about we go find our escape pod and get the hell out of Dodge?”

“If this is Dodge, I agree.”

Chapter Five

Dana

Our luck runs out as we head to the bay where the escape pods are kept. The one that’s been left behind has a dozen flashing error lights on its panel, and I make a noise of distress at the sight. “Well, now we know why one was left behind.”

“So we’re stranded here?” Vlad growls, his voice rumbling with displeasure. “We’re stuck waiting for them to come back? If they come back?”

“Oh, they’ll come back,” I point out as I step forward to the diagnostic panel. Error after error rolls down the horizontal screen, making me wince. “There’s too much expensive equipment here to abandon this place for long. They’ll just wait until it’s safe.”

“You mean until I starve to death?”

“Or until they find some mercenaries to come with them to act as the muscle.” I shrug, flicking through the menus on the computer screen. Now that I can get into the system, I’m able to do something about all of this. I accept all the error messages and only one remains. The sight of it cheers me up. “Actually, this one isn’t as bad as it seems. The power core—which is like a battery—is drained. I bet if we recharge it, we can use the shuttle.”

“Good. You know how?”

I nod, starting the sequence. Something deep in the station clanks and then the lights on the pod flicker. Transferring Power . . .

“It’s going right now,” I tell Vlad.

A new status appears on the screen, and I have to bite back a groan of dismay.

“What? What is it?” Vlad asks. His big hand curls around my upper arm, his touch surprisingly comforting.

I guess I didn’t hide my displeasure so well. “It’s going to take a while to charge.” I do a little math in my head and wince. “About a week, actually. That must be why no one tried to take this one.”

He blows out a breath and his hand drops from my arm. “We wait it out, then.”

“I’ll clear my busy schedule,” I tease. He doesn’t laugh along with me, just gives me a puzzled glance. “It’s a joke. Well, since we’re stuck here for a while . . . want to go snoop through everyone’s rooms? We can see who’s got the best clothes and the most comfortable bed and make ourselves at home there for the next week.”

A slow, feral grin curves his mouth, and I find myself smiling back.