by Stephen King
Alaric sat silent as the woman he loved stated his own innermost thoughts. Until Poseidon said otherwise, he was forced to believe the truth as the Elders had told it. And Poseidon--his "insane dictator of a sea god"--wasn't talking.
"Thank you all for your impassioned analysis of my sex life," he finally said, ice coating every syllable. "Now I would ask that we get back to discussing how to capture or kill this Ptolemy impostor and retrieve Poseidon's Pride before, all the gods forbid, Anubisa gets her undead hands on it."
The room subsided into silence and general noises of agreement.
Riley stood up and took her sister's hand. "No. Not tonight. Quinn has been through too much in too short of a time, and she needs a good night's sleep. We can discuss battle plans, and which of us are off to put our lives in danger this time, in the morning over a good breakfast."
Alaric rose and bowed to Riley, but he felt the wildness growing within him at the thought that anyone, even her sister, would take Quinn away from him.
"With all due respect, Princess, Quinn will stay with me tonight."
Quinn's eyes flashed. "Here we are, full circle, at the point where people are making decisions for me. Guess what? Quinn will do whatever Quinn damn well pleases, or Quinn will shoot somebody."
She pulled out her Glock and pointed it at the floor, an edge of violence in her eyes.
Riley held up her hands, palms out, and grinned. "It's not like I could ever tell you what to do. Why would I start now? What do you want, my darling sister?"
She glanced at Alaric. Considered. Decided. "I'll visit Poseidon's temple with Alaric. I've wanted to see it for a long time, and I'm too wound up to sleep now."
She whirled around and snapped at Alaric when he dared to smile. "And then you'll take me back to Riley, so I can get some uninterrupted sleep, without flying monkeys or tornados or anything else attacking me. Plus, I want to cuddle my nephew some more. He may be the only male I've ever met who isn't an arrogant ass."
"Give him time," Conlan advised, grinning. "It runs in the genes, or so my lovely wife tells me."
Riley just laughed. "Okay--temple, bath, bed, baby, breakfast, in that order. All discussions of impostors and danger are hereby officially on hold."
She hugged Quinn. "When you run with this crowd, you learn to take respite where you can find it. There's always another crisis."
Quinn blinked rapidly against the tears Alaric could tell she was battling, and he clenched his fists as he fought his powerful need to go to her and offer comfort. She wouldn't welcome it; she'd hate being made to feel weak in front of so many. But he could help in another way.
He took her hand before she could stop him, and the electricity that shot between them just at the touch of his fingers on hers reminded him of their kisses on that beach. His body clenched, hardening just from that slight touch, and she gasped. It was a tiny sound and probably none but he heard it, but it was enough to set his pulse racing. The uncharacteristically vulnerable look in her eyes called to every protective instinct he possessed, and he leaned down toward her.
"At least we know there won't be flying monkeys," he said softly.
She started laughing. "Lead on. Let's see this temple and get to the group singing, already."
This time, it was Alaric who laughed out loud. As he led the way out of the room, he glanced back over his shoulder and realized that every single person in the room was staring at him, mouth hanging open in shock.
"He laughed," Ven said. "Did you hear that? He actually laughed."
Alaric all but dragged Quinn down the hall to get away from them.
"I laugh," he muttered defensively.
"The occasional evil mwah ha ha doesn't count," Quinn said, grinning up at him.
He couldn't help it. He laughed again.
Damn it.
Chapter 13
Quinn climbed the steps and entered the imposing but somehow delicate building, all graceful arches and curves, and reflected that it was entirely unexpected.
"From everything I hear about Poseidon, I picture him as a self-indulgent thug. Seems odd that his temple is so graceful."
Alaric laughed, but a white-robed man with a face like a bulldog's gave her a scandalized look as he scurried by, muttering something in that liquid language that had to be Atlantean.
Quinn stared after him, bemused. "What was that? 'Blasphemy, you blasphemer' kind of thing?"
"He's sure Poseidon will strike you dead at any moment and wants to be out of the line of fire." Alaric's deep voice was rich with amusement, and a shiver tingled its way up her spine from the sound.
"Man up," she told bulldog guy, making sure that the fleeing coward didn't hear her. Her mother would have had her guts for garters for disrespecting someone else's religion. Of course, it wasn't the religion she didn't respect. It was the selfish god at its heart.
They walked from the foyer into a giant, high-ceilinged room bathed in soft light. The walls were marble, inset with jade, amethysts, and other precious stones that Quinn didn't recognize. She wasn't exactly a jewelry kind of girl, though, so it wasn't surprising.
Tall green plants flourished in every corner, and long, low upholstered benches were scattered about the space, beckoning the occupants to rest, reflect, or simply be. She looked around the room for a long time in silence, enjoying the peace and tranquility almost in spite of herself.
"Well, it seems like a place where you could commune with the gods quite happily," she finally said diplomatically.
"Poseidon is not a peaceful, communing kind of god," Alaric replied. "When he wants me, it is usually for something involving gaining power, jockeying for power, negotiating for power, or--"
"Yeah, I get it," she cut in. "Those old gods are still bloodthirsty and power-hungry?"
"Some things never change. He does his best to protect his children."
"Children?"
"We of Atlantis are his children," Alaric said. "Since you are aknasha, you're clearly descended from Atlantean ancestors, so technically you're his to protect, too."
"No thanks," she said firmly. "I've seen what he calls protection. Letting Riley die, branding her, the way he treats you--I don't want anything to do with any of it."
"If you accept me, you will have no choice," he said, taking her shoulders in his hands and turning her to face him. "Even if I were to leave the temple, I could never completely escape Poseidon. Would it be so bad a bargain?"
She shook her head, helpless to know how to answer. Her heart cried out for her to answer no, but her head urged caution.
"I need to kiss you again," he said.
She backed away, shaking her head. "I can't. Not now. Please. Just . . . just take me on the tour."
His face hardened from her rejection, but he nodded and took her hand again, as if he needed to feel her touch. As they left the room and entered a corridor, he gestured to a dull black wooden door.
"Through that door and down those stairs is where I faced the Rite of Oblivion. I eventually survived it and became high priest," he said with an obviously false nonchalance.
Whatever lurked down those stairs carried bleak and painful memories for him that were so powerful she caught faint traces of the emotions from around the edges of his mental shield. She knew she should ask--they needed honesty and acceptance between them--but she could not.
Would not.
She had her own secrets to keep. And after she'd miscalculated so badly and spent more than a year imprisoned by the vampire she'd targeted, a ritual named for blessed forgetfulness had a certain appeal.
In any event, she had no reserves of strength left. Not enough to face entering a room where something called the Rite of Oblivion took place. Not tonight.
His eyes darkened, and her throat tightened at the realization that she was failing him through her silence. She had to ask at least one question; discover the answer she most needed to know.
"What would have happened if you'd failed the test?"
&
nbsp; "I would be dead. You never would have met me. Perhaps an entire set of problems would have been avoided," he said bleakly.
"Never say that. Never. No matter what happens between us, now or in the future, the world has been a better place for having you in it, Alaric." Her throat felt raw from allowing the starkly sincere words to escape. Emotion, raw and vulnerable, burned inside her until she had to fight tears yet again. Twice in one night. She was falling apart. Maybe it was better for everyone that her days as a rebel were over.
He pulled her into his arms and rested his cheek on the top of her head. "You honor and humble me with your honesty, mi amara. I can do no other than return it. You must know by now that you are everything in the world to me. Please stay with me tonight. Just for a little while longer. Please."
And, for all of her defiance earlier, she couldn't refuse him. Not then, maybe not ever. She'd stay strong and stay out of his bed, but she couldn't refuse to hold him, even just for a little while.
As Quinn showered, Alaric paced through his austere suite of rooms, seeing the place with new eyes. With her eyes. Everything was gray and hard-edged and bleak. No softness, no color. It was like a portrait of the inside of his soul. No wonder she'd flinched when she first walked in. He vowed to change everything. He'd add color. Texture. Sensual fabrics. Art on the walls.
Maybe she wanted jewels or baubles or presents. He didn't think so, but Ven always told them women loved trinkets, and Erin certainly wore enough jewelry. All those rings. But wait, those were tools and symbols of her magic. Did that count?
He stopped dead on the edge of the floor and banged his head against the wall. He, Alaric, high priest to Poseidon, most feared man in Atlantis, had turned into a blithering idiot. All because there was a naked woman in his bathroom.
No, not a naked woman. The naked woman. The perfect woman. The one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
When the door finally opened, he was pretending to read a book, which he promptly dropped on his foot as soon as he saw her. Her short, dark hair was wet and combed back and away from her perfect face, and she was wrapped in his white silk robe. It was far too big for her, even with the sleeves rolled up, but she looked like a fallen angel; all porcelain skin and huge, dark eyes.
He wanted to run.
He wanted to shout.
He wanted to worship at her feet.
"I hope you don't mind that I borrowed this," she said nervously. "I washed my clothes out in the sink, so as soon as they dry out--"
"Keep it," he said hoarsely, fighting hard to keep from leaping across the room and pouncing on her like a lust-crazed youngling. "It looks far better on you than it ever did on me."
She plucked at a sleeve. "I feel like this is a huge mistake, being here, and wearing this, and--"
"Nothing could be further from the truth. Everything in my life that doesn't have you in it is a mistake," he replied with total sincerity. "I am willing to spend eternity telling you that."
He couldn't bear being apart from her for one more second, so he slowly crossed the room, giving her time to say no. "I need to touch you, Quinn. I need to taste you and feel your skin against mine. I need to know that this conflagration inside me isn't only one-sided."
She lifted her chin defiantly, but she didn't back away.
She didn't back away.
He sent a quick prayer of thanks to any and all gods who may have ever existed, simply because she didn't back away.
"It's not only one-sided, and you know it," she said softly, and she may have said something else, at least her beautiful lips formed words, but then he was kissing her and didn't hear anything but the rush of desire beating underneath his skin.
He devoured her lips and caught her tongue with his and kissed her so deeply he was unsure where he ended and she began. He was clumsy and frantic, and he was afraid that she would reject him for either or both of those things, but she gently touched his face and slowed down the kiss before breaking away and taking a deep breath.
"I'm right here," she whispered. "You don't have to make up for hundreds of years in the next five minutes."
His laughter held the edge of madness. "Do you promise? You won't disappear? Because I can't imagine how I'd ever survive if you did."
She took his face in her hands. "No sex. Not yet, maybe not ever, until we figure this out. But for heaven's sake, kiss me, already."
She didn't need to ask him again. He held her as tightly as he could and kissed her as if the world would end if he ever stopped. The earth could have cracked open and devoured them, and he wouldn't have cared, because he was finally kissing her. In fact, the room felt like it was shaking underneath his feet from the sheer rush of hunger desperate to be fulfilled. By all the gods, she was his, and he'd be damned to the lowest of the nine hells if he'd ever, ever let her go.
Quinn trembled in his arms, and suddenly his hand was under the silk of the robe and touching the silk of her breast. His body shook with the force of his need, and he feared he'd go off like an untried boy, right there in his pants, simply from the touch of her skin.
"Please touch me," she moaned. "Oh, this is dangerous, but I don't even care."
He didn't care, either, not about rules or oaths or consequences. His heart raced, and his blood burned like liquid electricity in his veins, and the sound of pounding battered at him until he realized it was actual pounding . . . on the door.
On the godsdamned door.
"Go away, or I will destroy you where you stand," he roared.
His chief acolyte, voice shaky but determined, answered him through the door.
"My lord, the Trident is malfunctioning. It's shooting blasts of pure magic throughout the temple. Two of our people are injured and one barely escaped with his life. My lord? You must help us."
Alaric's dazed mind took a few seconds to register that the floor probably had been shaking, after all. He snapped his focus to his surroundings and suddenly the erratic blasts of power emanating from Poseidon's Trident stuttered through his consciousness.
How in the nine hells had he been oblivious to that?
But even as his mind asked the question, he looked at Quinn and his gaze snagged on her lips, swollen from his kisses, and he knew the answer.
"Put me down, Alaric," Quinn said. She trembled like a leaf caught in a thunderstorm, but her expression firmed into resolve. "We have people to save, magical objects to fix, and a world to save. No time for kissing."
He groaned, but then nodded and released her. "When this is over, if it's ever over," he ground out from between clenched teeth, "I am taking you so far away from duty and responsibility and civilization that it would take months for anybody to find us."
"Maybe Fiji," she called out, laughing a little, as she ran for the bathroom.
She dropped the robe, and he saw the delicate line of her back and the curve of her lovely ass before she moved behind the door to dress, and he groaned again. "I might have to kill something for this."
"Count me in," she said, walking back out, checking her knives and guns. "I'm very handy when there are things to be killed."
He waved a hand at her damp clothes and sent the water from them, and she smiled her thanks. When they opened the door, they were both laughing, and the man standing there raising his hand to knock again looked at them as if they were insane.
He wasn't wrong, Alaric reflected. Not even a little.
Chapter 14
Quinn held out her hand, determined to make a fresh start with bulldog guy, in spite of the way he was staring at her flushed cheeks. "Quinn Dawson. Nice to meet you."
The man looked at her hand, and then back at her face.
"It's human custom to shake hands in greeting," Alaric said, already heading down the hall. "Myrken, this is the woman I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. Be nice."
Myrken, already pale, wobbled a little, as if he were going to fall over right there in front of the ancient tapestry on the wall behind him. Silvery
green dragons soared over an island kingdom of perfect, tiny stitches.
"He does that now," Quinn confided to Myrken. "Smiles. It's almost frightening, isn't it?"
"There you go again, making unfounded declarations about my future without consulting me," she called after Alaric's retreating back.
"Sorry, I have a crisis to solve." He flashed an unrepentant grin over his shoulder, and Myrken made a weird noise that sounded like a cross between a gulp and a yelp.
"Did he . . . Did Lord Alaric just smile again?"
Quinn shrugged. "I know. It's kind of freaking me out, too."
Leaving Myrken to his shock, she ran down the hall after Alaric. "Wait for me. Team, remember?"
They descended stairs and flew down hallways at top speed, arriving at a room Quinn had definitely not seen in the tour Alaric had given her on the way in. The entire room, maybe twenty-five by twenty-five square feet, was completely empty. No benches, no plants, no art on the walls. Nothing at all in the room except for a pedestal, topped with a cushion, where she guessed the Trident had previously been on display. Currently it was floating in the air, twisting and turning like it was alive, sending out brilliant flashes of white, blue, and green light.
She skidded to a stop, almost running into Alaric's muscular back.
"Is it supposed to do that?"
He shot her a look.
"I'll take that as a no. Do you think this has something to do with Ptolemy playing magic games with Poseidon's Pride?"
"Almost certainly. The Trident has never, in all of recorded history, acted like this."
She watched it as it whirled in a surprisingly elegant manner for what was, basically, an overgrown fork with jewels in it. She counted six jewels of various colors, plus one empty setting that was clearly waiting to be filled with the missing gem.
"Did you have to find all the others, too?"
"Yes, it has been an interesting time. The final gem must be safely in place in the Trident before Atlantis can rise."
Alaric bodily lifted her and leapt to the side as one particularly bright flash of white light blasted the spot where they'd been standing and smashed a hole in the wall.
