by Alyssa Day
It was a dark-haired woman, kneeling on the floor, clutching at her belly. Her enormous, rippling, pregnant belly. The woman was clearly in labor, and the agony of it made Keely rethink any random yearnings she’d ever had for children. She cried out again. It must be contractions. If they came this quickly, one on top of the other, didn’t that mean something?
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. The woman was about to have a baby—right there on the floor. Keely started to call out, but the sharp, searing pain that sliced through her throat told her that the woman she’d become in her vision wasn’t going to be talking anytime soon. What had happened to her? She gingerly felt her neck and flinched from the sting of torn flesh. Her fingertips traced the wound and discovered a long slice in her skin; it seemed to be shallow but was bleeding quite a bit.
From the way the side of her face hurt, someone had struck her quite recently, but her questing fingertips couldn’t find any cuts on her cheek or near her eye, where the pain centered.
She wore a simple cotton dress and sandals. No jewelry or adornment. She was probably seeing the room through the eyes of a servant girl, then. But why a servant girl? Usually the visions took her to someone who had a close personal connection or deeply emotional connection to the object she touched. Would a servant girl ever . . . ?
Slowly, a horrifying thought crossed her mind. She lowered the hand clutching her throat and stared almost blindly at the bright red blood that stained her fingers and palm.
She tried to seek answers in the terrified mind of her host, but all she could see was an image of the sword, coming toward her—no, headed for the pregnant woman. The servant girl had only been unlucky to have gotten in the way of the backstroke, when the crazed man wrenched his sword up over his shoulder in preparation to strike. Whoever he was, he’d literally cut her throat, and now there was a pregnant woman going into labor right in front of her.
And there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She was no more than an observer in her visions, unable to change actions that had happened long ago in the far-distant past. All she could do was suffer their pain, and pray that the vision released her soon.
The woman on the floor screamed again. She fell to her side and drew her knees up, curling into a ball, as if trying to escape. “Help me! Somebody help me,” she cried out, pushing her tangled hair away from her face.
Her tangled midnight blue hair, Keely realized. What if this woman were related to Justice? She tried, in spite of everything she knew about the visions, to force her host body to go to the woman. To help her, in spite of the servant girl’s obvious terror.
But it was like trying to move a pyramid with only her mind. She couldn’t affect what was long over and done. No matter how much she wanted to do so.
When the contraction eased, the blue-haired woman managed to raise her head and scan the room. Keely did the same and gasped again. Marble columns lined the walls, and a golden throne graced one end. She must be in the palace throne room, then.
But she wasn’t alone.
How could she have missed him? The man standing in front of the throne. His dark hair, aristocratic features, and regal presence had so much of Conlan and Ven in him, and she recognized the sword he held as the one that had hurled her into the abyss.
Except now it was wet with her blood. Drawn by some hideous fascination, Keely stared at the evidence that this man had sliced her throat. Her host’s throat.
Their throat. Blackness began to whirl behind her eyes, and she didn’t know whether to try to stay conscious or hope that fainting would yank her out of the vision. Would her host faint?
Would the man with the sword punish her if she did?
And since Keely couldn’t affect the past, was she only experiencing the dizziness of her host, surely due to fear and loss of blood?
The pregnant woman cried out—a long cry filled with suffering and hopelessness. She stared up at the man, beseeching, from where she was curled up on the cold, hard floor, all alone. “Help me, please. I beg of you. This baby is coming, and now.”
Distantly Keely recognized that she was somehow hearing and understanding ancient Atlantean. The cadence of the language was almost musical; it seemed wrong to use such a lovely language to describe such suffering. The harshness of English would be better.
Can’t you see I’m in pain here? Or, Help me, you bastard.
Three contractions in a row swept over the woman, pressing her back to the floor with the weight of the pain. Her abdomen tightened, visibly hard as a rock, with each one. But whatever was supposed to happen didn’t seem to be happening.
At least as far as Keely knew. She hesitantly glanced at the woman’s legs, bare under some kind of silken skirt, praying that the baby’s head hadn’t breached yet.
Not yet. But Keely noticed something new. Something her shock had kept her from noticing before. The skin of the woman’s legs and hands were the color of ivory tinged with the palest blue. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t even Atlantean. She was something . . . other.
The contraction seemed to ease again, and the woman was reduced to sobbing, lying on the floor. Keely tried again in vain to force her host to go toward the woman and help her. But the servant girl’s fear was far too great to allow compassion to translate into motion.
Anger swept through Keely’s consciousness in a blazing swath, and a single very determined thought popped into her mind: if she ever survived this vision, she was going to stab Justice with his own sword.
King SOB finally spoke. “I cannot believe you dare to come to me with your bastard child, Éibhleann. After what you and Anubisa did to me, you’re lucky I don’t strike you dead where you lay on the floor.”
The pregnant woman bared her teeth and actually hissed at him, an alien sound that ricocheted off the walls. “It was not me. It was never me. I was as much a captive as you, Your Highness. If you, who are the all-powerful king of Atlantis, could not resist Anubisa’s mind control, how could a simple Nereid maiden hope to do so?”
She threw her head back, clamping her teeth shut, but then giving in to the howl as another contraction hit. When she could breathe again, she continued. “You know that Nereids see the destined face of our true love as part of our vision quest. Believe me when I tell you that I never once saw yours. I, too, was sacrificed to Anubisa’s jealous obsession, although I will not love our child less because of it.”
The king’s confusion almost overruled the fury that hardened his features. Just for a moment, but it was enough to give Keely a little hope that he would help the woman.
“If what you say is true . . .” he began, but then shook his head. “But, no. It matters not. I will not raise the bastard child borne of the vampire goddess’s mind rape as my own.”
As another wave of pain from the contractions smashed into Éibhleann, something happened that had never before occurred in one of Keely’s visions. She spoke out in her own voice, from her own knowledge, in a way that ran counter to her host body’s every instinct.
“You are a pathetic excuse for a king,” she shouted up at him, her voice hoarse. “Conlan and Ven would be ashamed of you if they knew about this. You need to help this woman before she has her baby right here on your floor.”
The king snarled and lifted his bloody sword, taking a step toward Keely, but a new player entered the room. A shaky but determined feminine voice spoke up from behind Keely. “Yes, my husband. We must help her. Call for the First Maiden of the Temple of the Nereids immediately to assist with the childbirth.”
Keely was almost afraid to try to discover who was speaking, although she had a pretty good idea that it was Conlan and Ven’s mother.
“Thank you,” she whispered, through her raw and injured throat.
The queen slowly moved into view, her face starkly white with either shock or pain. She barely glanced at Keely at first, but then jerked her head around, staring at Keely’s host’s wounded throat.
“You are welcome,” the queen said, barely ab
ove a whisper. “Now we will find the healer for you and the First Maiden of the Nereids for this woman and her child.”
Either relief, exhaustion, or both combined rippled through Keely, still locked inside her host’s mind, and her tenuous grip on consciousness faded. As the edges of the room grew dark, she fell, twirling and spinning in the vortex of the vision that clearly was not yet done with her.
The door opened behind Keely, who stood in the darkened room staring down at a swaddled infant in a wooden cradle. A familiar voice murmured a hello. The queen.
A strand of silvery hair fell forward into Keely’s face, and that and the absence of pain in her throat made her realize that she was not inhabiting the same woman as before. With the relief from the servant girl’s injuries and terror, Keely was able to think more clearly.
Justice’s mother. Éibhleann must have been Justice’s mother, then. But where was she? And who was hosting Keely now? Tears welled in her eyes and clogged her throat as the knowledge filtered through her host’s mind.
Éibhleann was dying. The birth had been too much for her. There was nothing further to be done but pray.
A wave of sorrow and pity washed through Keely as she stared down at the delicate curve of the infant’s tiny hand, his fingers curled like a fragile sea anemone. This must be Justice, then. No wonder he was so damaged, with a start like that.
“First Maiden,” the queen said, entering the room. She carried a candle, and the light from the flame illuminated the wildly spiking blue-tinged hair of the sleeping baby. “How fares the child?”
Keely realized the First Maiden was her/them, when her host responded to the query. “He does very well, Highness. But the mother . . . I fear that she is beyond my power to heal.”
The queen turned to face Keely. Head held high, quiet determination in every line of her face, she spoke softly, but with definite purpose. “Although this Nereid female has known my husband, due to Anubisa’s vile manipulations, I would not have any harm come to her. Do everything you can to heal her, please. For me and for this child, who is blameless.”
“And if she does not live? She is very ill, and we have had no gem singer in the Temple for thousands of years. The legends say that a gem singer can draw upon the power of the goddess herself, more powerfully than even a First Maiden, in order to heal.”
“Then I will raise him myself, as my own child,” the queen said, her eyes carrying the weight of ravaging pain, but still dry. “He carries the blood of my husband and is kin to my son Conlan and to any future children I might bear. Could I do any less?”
“Could you love this child?” Keely asked, registering in the back of her/their mind the First Maiden’s courage to dare to question a queen so. “He deserves to be loved and not made to feel unwanted.”
“I will love him,” the queen replied firmly, as though trying to convince herself. “I must love him.”
The baby sleepily opened his eyes and looked up at Keely. She reached out to touch his cheek, and she fell, plunging back into the dark.
The visions came fast and faster; one after another. Brief snippets of memory the sword had gathered throughout its long existence. Blessedly, Keely was observing only as a bystander throughout, as she was thrown from moment to moment.
The throne room
“He cannot know,” the king said to a man and woman who stared down, overjoyed, at the baby she held in her arms. “He can never know.”
As they agreed, words tumbling over each other in their haste, the queen stood behind her husband with tears rolling down her face.
A rocky shore, in the midst of a thunderstorm
Waves crashed against the cliffs, and the king stood alone, silhouetted against a tempest-painted sky. A voice, somehow larger and louder than the waves, surrounded him. “You must tell him. His name shall be Justice, and he will serve as a reminder of the injustice that will result if Anubisa is allowed to extend her dominion over the human race.”
The king bowed his head, his fists clenched at his side. “I cannot tell him. I cannot risk my sons, and the enemies of my sons, knowing of his existence.”
The voice, again. The voice that somehow Keely knew—although it was impossible for her to know it, it was impossible that it was true—was that of the sea god.
Poseidon.
“Do not defy me in this. You will tell him, as I have ordered. I have set a geas upon him, and he is cursed never to reveal the circumstances of his birth, unless he should then kill everyone who has heard him.”
“Then you have created a monster and a murderer,” the king shouted, pointing his sword—the sword—at the waves.
“No,” thundered the god. “I have created a weapon, unlike any that ever has been honed for battle. He will serve your sons, and he will serve my justice. When he is ten years old, you will give him your sword, and you will rename it Poseidon’s Fury, to ensure that my fury at Anubisa’s treatment of my chosen king is never forgotten.”
Lightning crashed down on the waves, and a dark, undulating shape arrowed through the water toward the shore, but before Keely could catch a glimpse of it, she fell back down into the dark.
Outdoors, in front of a small cottage
The small, blue-haired boy looked up at the king, bewilderment on his face, then down at the sheathed sword that rested in his thin arms. “But, but I don’t understand, Your Majesty. Why would you give me your sword?”
The king stared down at him with no tenderness in his expression. “There’s something I need to tell you—”
And Keely fell.
Twisting, turning, and whirling through the centuries, Keely fell from vision to vision. The one constant was Justice, growing from child to man to seasoned warrior, always with the sword either strapped to his back or being used in battle. Battle after battle. Desperate fight after desperate fight. Vampires and shape-shifters, all of them with the goal of enslaving or eating humans.
All of them defeated by Justice, wielding Poseidon’s Fury.
Keely fell, and fell, and fell, in a never-ending vision. Vision wrapped inside vision, bloody battle after bloody battle, until she couldn’t remember anything but carnage, pain, and death.
But she grew to know him—oh, yes, she grew to know this wild man who’d stolen her away. The anguish that lived deep inside him. The loneliness. The bitterness that came from living for centuries as a tool in an angry god’s quest for vengeance.
Her heart turned over, and Keely felt the helpless tears rolling down her face. “Enough!” she cried out. “Enough, already. Please, I can’t take any more of this. Please, please. No more.”
She fell, again, down into the dark. But this time, instead of falling away, she fell toward—she fell toward a blue-haired warrior with flames in his eyes.
Chapter 18
St. Louis
Vonos materialized in the roomy den of the mansion in St. Louis’s nouveau riche suburb of Ladue, and it was clear that nobody had been expecting him. They’d been looking for the recently deceased Xinon, and they’d not expected him until later in the week. So they were totally unprepared for the vampire to show up in their midst.
Which was just how Vonos liked it.
Dressed in a meticulously creased custom-made Savile Row suit, complete with exquisite Zegna tie and Ferragamo shoes, he knew exactly the impression he made upon the polo-shirt-and-khaki-pants-clad humans in the room. He did nothing without deliberate purpose behind it, even down to the choice of what to wear to help these idiotic sheep underestimate him.
The supermodel vampire, the press had labeled him. The Primator of haute couture. They didn’t know whether to admire him or ridicule him for his polished-to-perfection appearance. A human politician would have been booted out of Congress for being too elitist. Not a “man of the people.”
The thought amused Vonos. He was a man of the people. He just preferred to eat them.
In any event, the fascination—and fear—that he provoked in the populace was only enhanced by h
is carefully cultivated style. He was the leader of the Primus, the new, vampire-only, third house of Congress, and his constituents would never respect one who was not more powerful than they.
He finally deigned to notice the humans huddled around the desk. They were gaping at him like a particularly mindless species of carp. However, one who possessed, possibly, an iota of intelligence bowed deeply. “My Lord Primator. To what do we owe this honor?”
“Honor is an interesting word, human. May I call you human? Or do you prefer to tell me your name, which I will then immediately forget as I do most petty annoyances?” Vonos smiled widely enough to show his fangs and was amused when one of the men, a skeletally thin man with a very bad haircut, collapsed into a faint.
But the man who’d first spoken and must be some sort of leader had more presence of mind. “You may call me whatever you wish, of course, Primator Vonos, but my name is Rodriguez.”
“Of course it is. How fitting. Do you know that I first resided in your lovely environs back when it was Spanish territory? They called it Northern Louisiana, I believe.” He smiled at the memory, but then frowned as the pleasant recollection of simpler times and plentiful humans to feed on gave way to another, far more disagreeable memory. This wasn’t the first time Atlanteans had confronted him on this turf. More than two centuries ago, a band of them had come to town and, with the help of both the colonial settlers and the native Illini, viciously murdered nearly all of his blood pride. Naturally, faced with the death of his vampire family, he’d been forced to flee. Discretion, valor, et cetera, et cetera.
“I will never flee again,” he said, his nails digging into the edge of the desk so hard the wood cracked.
