Will had taken over as many of Helen Magnus's duties as he could, but he was falling behind and he knew it. The former heads of Sanctuary houses had started complaining and talking about a permanent replacement for their missing leader. They still constituted a council of sorts, and many had established and were running other underground Sanctuary locations. Nearly all considered themselves more capable than Will of running the entire network.

He couldn't dispute that, he had the least experience of any of them, but he could delay them taking any action for a while yet. Magnus would be back; he insisted she would at every conference when the subject arose.

But he was beginning to think privately she might not. The delay in her reappearance made him extremely uneasy. If she had shot Tesla and they both went through the gate, what would have happened on the other side? Had he lashed out at her? If he was confused, not remembering their relationship, and hurt by the bullets, he might have attacked her. Helen was tough and capable of defending herself, but maybe not against a crazed vampire. If Helen was all right, she surely would have been in contact by now.

Every day Will scanned all the Sanctuary operative reports looking for anything that might indicate she was trying to get in touch, and every day he was disappointed. As he finished today's scan, Henry came into his office.

The HAP was looking tired. He and Erica had put in long hours reconstructing things the confused Serbian had taken apart, plus they were looking after two very young children.

Henry just said, "Hey, how's it going?"

Will understood he was really asking if there was any sign of Helen; Henry found an excuse to stop by every day, just in case there was anything in the reports he could help follow up on. Will replied, "You know, same-o, same-o." No sign of her.

"We've got everything back together except some of Drac's experiments. I don't even know what they were supposed to be, I'm not going to mess with them. How's your phone?"

Will picked up his new cellphone. Henry had done everything he could to retrieve the data from what was left of the old one, but he'd only been able to find and transfer a quarter of the information from the damaged one.

"Good," Will said; no point in making Henry feel bad, it wasn't his fault Nikola got hold of Will's old phone and disassembled it. Besides, Will had been able to rebuild most of the data. "It works great, has more features than my old one."

Henry nodded, and they endured an awkward silence. Then Henry said, "Do you think the Doc is ever coming back?"

"I don't know. I hope so, and soon, before I get killed by a pile of paper falling on me."

Henry sat down. "We need a plan. What if it's months before the Doc comes back, or years? Am I supposed to just keep taking care of Danny? It's not that I mind, but legally isn't he supposed to have a guardian or something? And what do we do if Nikola comes back without her? Is he still one of the good guys? I mean, he didn't know who he was or what he was, what if he . . ." Henry couldn't finish the sentence.

Will sat back in his chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. He was overworked and tired, and he didn't know what to say. The same questions kept circling through his head too, and he didn't have any answers. There just wasn't enough information.

Henry said, "I don't think they gated to any other gate, there was no sign of them at any of them. If the gate wasn't tuned, then they could have gone anywhere, like into solid rock or the bottom of the ocean and we might never see them again."

"Yeah, I know, I've thought of that too. But it's only been a few weeks. If there's any chance at all, Helen Magnus will be back, you know that."

"I know, I'm just tired. But how long do we wait?"

Will sighed. "As long as it takes. With Helen that could be another hundred and thirteen years, you know?"

"So another month?"

"Sounds about right."

"And if that wine-drinking addled vampire shows up without her, we squeeze him until he tells us everything he knows."

"Yeah, but unfortunately that might be nothing at all."

/

Silently, on bare feet, Jade's three servants exploded from the darkness. One threw himself at Helen, two leapt at Nikola. None of them paid the least attention to the yetis, who backed up waving their torches to keep the fanged monks away.

Helen didn't have time to use her sling, so she used her fist on the point of the monk's chin. He fell to the floor, but didn't stay down. He rose and advanced more cautiously. She grabbed her ammo pouch and swung it like a blackjack.

Nikola's two attackers kept trying to bite him. He kept them at arm's length with his claws, but one circled behind him so he couldn't watch both at once. Koden tried to help by swinging his torch at the monk behind the vampire, but had it swatted out of his hands.

Jade slithered out of the darkness and paused a moment to watch the battle. She headed toward the gate, followed by her two consorts.

Nikola charged forward, knocking the monk in front of him aside. The one behind him jumped on his back, holding one with one arm around his neck and the other pinioning his left arm, and sunk his fangs into the top of Nikola's shoulder. Tesla ignored him and grabbed the smallest snake and decapitated it with his other hand. Jade speeded up, but the middle-sized snake turned back and attacked Nikola too.

The monk that had been knocked aside leapt on the vampire as well, overbalancing him and making him stumble into the snake, and fall on top of it. The snake, two monks, and Nikola writhed on the floor in a mad ball of fangs and claws.

Helen had hit the monk trying to bite her two glancing blows with her ammo bag when she landed a hit squarely on his temple and knocked him out. She saw Nikola struggling on the floor and Jade disappearing through the gate.

Helen wanted badly to help Nikola, but she did what she had to first. She ran to the controller and flipped the switch to turn the gate off. Jade was mostly through; just the tip of her tail was amputated to wiggle by itself for a few seconds, and then lie still.

Koden had retrieved his torch, and hovered near the fight, not sure what to do. The mid-sized snake's tail came near Tanka, and she grabbed it and held on, distracting the creature and limiting its movement.

The monk with its fangs in Nikola's shoulder was dead, Nikola had penetrated his skull with his claws. But the fangs were still embedded, and the corpse remained attached. The second monk had bitten the inside of Nikola's thigh, his fangs penetrating the muscle to the artery; Helen could see his throat moving as he drank the vampire's blood. Nikola's free hand was holding the snake's neck just behind the head, keeping it away so he wouldn't be bitten and envenomed.

"Nikola!" she called as she knelt next to the snake and whirled her ammo bag once. Nikola understood, and pushed the snake's head down firmly on the stone floor. Helen struck it as hard as she could, once, twice, three times, and the creature's head was crushed.

With his hand now free, Tesla grabbed the living monk's nose and used it to pry him off of his leg.

"Koden, Tanka!" Helen called. "Make sure this one doesn't escape." The Yetis moved in and stood over the monk. Seeing himself now outnumbered four to one, he stayed still on the ground, just licking the last of Nikola's blood off his lips.

Helen turned to Nikola and helped him detach the dead monk. Nikola made no attempt to get up; he just lay back on the floor.

"Nikola? Are you all right?"

He raised his hand a few inches and waved once at her. Helen went to check on the monk she had hit. She was somewhat dismayed to find him dead, his skull shattered where she had struck him. But he certainly would have killed her if he'd had the chance, so she didn't feel too bad about it. She went back to her vampire.

Nikola slowly sat up. "Wow. Those guys really suck."

"I suppose."

"No, I mean they drank a lot of blood in a short time. I'm pretty weak and getting hungry. Can we go home now?"

"What do we do with the surviving monk?"

"We can't exactly call up the monastery and tell them to come and get him."

"No, we can't, and he shouldn't be wandering around loose attacking people for blood, either. I guess we'll have to take him home with us and retrain him, Nikola."

"Seriously?"

"What else can we do with him? Once we have him on animal blood, we can send him home the long way."

"Fine, whatever. Do you want to operate the controller or do you want me to?"

Since he hadn't made any attempt to stand up, she said, "I'll do it." Helen went to the large device and switched the gate on. Then she did what she hadn't done the first time, and threw the second switch to tune it to the Sanctuary gate. She went back to Nikola and held out her good hand, helping him up.

Nikola looked at the gate critically and said, "Hey, I got it right by ear. We're connected, first try."

Helen gave him a smile and said, "Excellent, Nikola. I'm sure no one else could have done it." After all they had been through he deserved a little ego stroking. He grinned widely at her praise.

They went through the gate, Helen first, then the monk with Nikola right behind holding on to him firmly, with the yetis following.

Emerging into the Sanctuary gate room was a relief. Nikola didn't even have to send an electromagnetic pulse to sound the alarm and bring everyone running; the torches set off the fire alarm.

Henry and Will arrived together, gaping at the collection of people in front of them. They were both happy to see Helen Magnus back, even with one arm in a sling. Tesla was bloody and bedraggled, and was holding on to a small Asian man with snake fangs, but at least he recognized them. They eyed the two mounds of white fur warily, but the creatures didn't seem hostile and neither Helen nor Nikola showed any concern about them.

Helen first went to the infirmary and x-rayed her arm. She found it was knitting nicely, so she changed the dressing and went to reclaim her son. Nikola deposited the monk in one of the containment cells, cleaned up and dressed properly, then went to find a couple of bottles of mediocre wine; he would be mixing it with blood and chugging it for a while, he didn't want to waste the good stuff. Then he took Danny from Helen so she could clean up and have a decent meal. Biggie took charge of the yetis, who dragged him around the compound while they explored their new home.

The Sanctuary gradually returned to normal, at least as normal as it ever was.

/

Jade found herself in darkness, her tail stinging from the amputation. She was hurt, angry and confused; this wasn't what she had seen in the vampire's mind, what had gone wrong? She slithered around cautiously in the rocks and soon found a wall, then another. She circled, checking high and low for a way out, but found only tiny cracks here and there. She tried forcing them wider with no success. It became harder and harder to breathe. Eventually the bubble of space in the rock became still and silent again, as it had been since the earth was born.

A/N: Whew, finally got them home again. I won't be writing any more long Sanctuary stories for a while, but I may do the occasional short stand-alone. My book, The Lady and the Prince is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and due for release on 7 June. So it's time for me to go write the sequel, which is a six to eight month project.