The whiskey burned going down, though Marcus knew it wouldn't matter. Nothing ever did. He'd drunk enough alcohol over the centuries to float a Viking longship, and still his mind remained crystalline, annoyingly clear. The bartender poured another without asking.
"Keep them coming," Marcus said, sliding a black credit card across the scarred wood. "And another round for everyone. On me."
A cheer went up from the Friday night crowd. The bar—some trendy place in downtown Seattle called Ember & Oak—was packed shoulder to shoulder. Exactly how Marcus needed it. He'd first noticed the tail three days ago in Prague. A shadow that moved wrong, lingering at the edges of his vision. By Vienna, he'd been certain. By the time his private jet touched down at SeaTac, he'd known whoever was following him wasn't giving up.
And wasn't human.
Ten thousand years gave you instincts. The way someone moved, the pattern of their breathing, the subtle wrongness that marked something pretending to be human but failing in microscopic ways. Marcus had seen it all before—vampires in ancient Sumeria, demons wearing flesh suits in medieval France, things without names that crawled up from places best forgotten.
He just didn't know which one he was dealing with yet. "You're too generous, man!" A college kid with a backward cap clapped him on the shoulder. Marcus forced a smile. The contact made his skin crawl—not because of the kid, but because every touch was a potential distraction. Every moment his attention wavered was a moment the thing tracking him could strike.
"Celebrating," Marcus said simply.
"What's the occasion?"
Still being alive. "Got a promotion."
The kid laughed and returned to his friends. Marcus turned back to his drink, using the mirror behind the bar to scan the crowd. Forty-three people by his count. Twenty-six men, seventeen women. Three couples arguing. One group of office workers trying to forget their week. A cluster of college students playing darts. And somewhere among them, or just outside, something watching.
His hand tightened on the glass. In ten millennia, he'd become many things. Warrior, scholar, merchant, beggar. He'd fought in forgotten wars with bronze weapons, built empires that crumbled to dust, loved people whose bones were now powder scattered across continents whose names had changed a dozen times.
But he'd survived by being smart. By being careful.
By never, ever assuming he was the apex predator.