by Alyssa Day
The human flinched. “Sir?”
“Never mind. I have learned your group is very ambitious when it comes to gathering members of the Apostates, Mr. Rodriguez.”
A measure of the man’s nervousness subsided, and he leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, it has been my privilege. I hope to be at the forefront of a new wave of converts. We can definitely see the future, and it involves interspecies cooperation.”
Vonos was always amazed at the human capacity for utter and complete denial. Somehow, in the sheep’s mind, subjugation had become cooperation. Well, as they said, whatever gets you through the day.
“We find ourselves unhappy with the actions of the local vampire and his blood pride,” Vonos said. “From this moment on, you will coordinate all recruiting efforts through my office and through my local representative, whom I will introduce to you in the coming days.”
One of the men cowering behind the leader muttered something that was too garbled for Vonos to make out. “Would you like to repeat that?” Vonos asked. “By all means, share with the group.”
He did so enjoy these quaint human concepts.
“I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .” The man was stuttering too hard to get the words out. Fear tended to destroy conversational ability in the sheep.
“Please tell me,” Vonos said, calmly polite, with a slight emphasis on the word please. Then he aimed a gentle, encouraging smile at the man. “Or I’ll rip your tongue out by its root, and you won’t have to worry about telling anyone anything ever again.”
The sheep fell to his knees, babbling something incoherent, and Vonos sighed.
“Truly, he is starting to annoy me,” he said to the man in charge. “Perhaps you would care to translate, before I lose my patience and kill every one of you?”
“He’s afraid of what the local vampires will do to us if we stop cooperating with them,” the leader said hastily. “We’re—”
“I am uninterested in your rationales,” Vonos said, cutting him off. “Be advised that the local vampires will never again be a threat to you or anyone else. We were unhappy with their carelessness.”
Vonos’s cell phone rang, and he held up one finger for silence. The sheep were at least good with their technology. He did so love his iPhone. Maybe he should convert that Steve Jobs fellow? Hmmm. Idle thoughts for another time.
Vonos glanced at the caller ID and noted that it was his personal assistant, one of the very few vampires that he trusted. He flipped open the phone. “Yes?”
“You have an urgent call from the human leader of the Apostates in Ohio,” his assistant said. “He claims he has knowledge that you need.”
“I’m growing astonishingly weary of these humans,” Vonos said into the phone, while scanning the row of men cringing away from him. “Knowledge of what type?”
“I know it sounds insane, but he claims it’s about Atlantis. He says an Atlantean warrior kidnapped one of his colleagues right out of her office. You told me to watch out for anything we could use against the Atlanteans, as insurance for when they want to negotiate with the U.S. government. This could be it.”
Vonos narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. “The story sounds unlikely. The Atlanteans have been far too careful to allow anyone to witness something so lacking in finesse as a kidnapping.”
“He swears it’s true,” his assistant said, excitement in his voice. “The Atlantean did something to him, some form of mind control that knocked him out, but he didn’t stay out for long. He just lay there on the floor pretending to be unconscious and heard the whole thing. He says he knew that news like this would be crucial to our mission.”
“He actually said that, did he? Crucial to our mission? These humans and their sense of melodrama.”
“Well, this guy has been flagged for a while. He’s a climber; wants to move up the hierarchy and be in line to be turned eventually.”
“Ah. Immortality. The elusive prize at the end of all the sheep’s rainbows. It does, however, cast a certain shade of doubt upon his claim. Perhaps he exaggerates in hopes of gaining accolades,” Vonos said skeptically, but he allowed himself a tiny bit of cautious optimism. Anubisa would reward him well for building a strong case against the Atlantean advent into international politics. State-sponsored kidnapping of American scientists was certainly a good start.
“I believe I will visit this man myself,” Vonos decided. “Who is he and where is he?”
The sound of shuffling papers came over the phone for a moment, and then Vonos’s assistant came back on the line. “Here it is. Dr. George Grenning at Ohio State University.”
Chapter 19
Rebel regional headquarters, St. Louis
Alaric stepped through the portal into a scene of controlled chaos and immediately looked around for the Atlanteans. Alexios, blood matting his golden hair into heavy clumps, stood near the stark concrete front wall of the warehouse headquarters, shouting orders to the heavily armed humans as they rushed back and forth, many of them limping or carrying wounded comrades.
Alaric grimaced at the acrid tang of gun smoke in the air. Christophe leaned against a graffiti-covered wall, bent over, with his hands on his thighs as if propping himself up. Alaric detected the faint residual glow of blue-green energy that surrounded Christophe; the warrior must have expended enormous amounts of energy quite recently.
Denal was nowhere to be seen. Nor Reisen, Jack, or Quinn. Something in Alaric’s chest tightened painfully at the thought of Quinn, but he refused to allow it to overcome him. She would be fine. She had to be fine.
If Quinn were to die, he would have no reason to continue existing.
Although she’d made it very clear that she had no place in his future, just the knowledge that she was alive and walking through the same time as he made the bleakness of his life somehow more bearable.
He was a high priest imprisoned by the dictates of a god’s whim. She was a rebel leader tortured by the memory of a dark deed. There was no way they could be together, no potential realm of the future that promised any hope.
But the idea of her death held the extinction of all hope, and he could not countenance it. He rapidly crossed the room to Alexios, who took one look at Alaric’s face and immediately stopped issuing commands.
“She’s alive, Alaric. She was wounded, but it was minor,” Alexios said, a rough compassion in his voice.
A strange weakness raced through Alaric and he had to fight his own lungs to draw breath. Quinn was wounded.
“How minor?” he snarled. “Tell me, now.”
“Relax. It’s just a scrape. An overenthusiastic shifter caught her with a claw or two. Denal patched her up, and the two of them and Jack took off after the vamp leaders. Just to reconnoiter. They’re going to find out where they hole up, so we can go after them in full force later. They sent Reisen off somewhere else.”
Alaric narrowed his eyes. “Tell me nothing about the traitor.”
Jack had been Quinn’s partner for some years. They were coleaders of the North American rebels, and Jack also happened to be the fiercest shape-shifter Alaric had ever seen. But then, tiger shifters had never been known for their meek natures.
Jack was boldly confident, and Alaric suspected the tiger was developing more than a fellow-warrior attachment for Quinn. Not that it was any of his concern what Quinn did, he reminded himself, even as the pain of it stabbed through him.
He wrenched himself out of the poisonous thoughts. Alexios was wounded, and yet the priest who should be his healer was mewling like a cursed youngling. “Your head. How bad is it?”
Alexios jerked his head away from Alaric’s hands. “It’s nothing. A scratch. You know how head wounds bleed. I didn’t even pass out this time.”
Alaric caught the warrior’s gaze with his own, while he called the healing power. “If I had the time to cosset stubborn warriors, I would go through the usual exchange with you, since I know how much you and the rest of the Seven need to prove how fierce and unstoppable you
are. But we need you whole, so stand still before I lose the final shreds of my temper.”
With ill-concealed bad temper of his own, Alexios snarled something about “meddling priests,” but did as Alaric had asked. It was definitely more than a simple scratch, and Alexios had been quite fortunate to escape without losing consciousness. Alaric healed the wound quickly, making sure to flush out any lingering grime and blood, channeling a stream of pure water to encircle and cleanse the warrior’s head.
Alexios stepped away from him the moment he’d finished, still muttering under his breath, but then he flashed a grin. “Gotta admit that feels a lot better. I guess you temple rats have your uses, after all.”
“Glad to be of service,” Alaric said dryly. “At least you refrained from sulking, unlike Denal—”
Denal. The thought of the young warrior, gone with Quinn, turned his blood to ice in his veins. Was he experienced enough in battle to be of any assistance should Quinn really need him? He tried to frame the thought in a voice gone suddenly hoarse. “Denal?”
Alexios shook his head. “Don’t even say it. We all think of him as the youngling he used to be. But don’t forget Denal gave his life for Conlan’s future queen. Only her own sacrifice, in turn, brought him back. The battles he has seen in recent months have aged him. Even beyond that, Conlan and Ven did not choose the fiercest warriors in Atlantis for the Seven by random drawing.”
Before Alaric could respond, one of the rebels, a dark-eyed, golden-skinned human female, approached them. “Alexios, we need to move the wounded to the hospital. Are you confident that we’re good to go?”
The woman barely glanced at Alaric before dismissing him, but gave her full, respectful attention to Alexios. She wore the bow and quiver of arrows strapped to her body as though she were very familiar with the weight of such a weapon, and the daggers strapped to both of her long, lean thighs had well-worn tape wrapping their hilts.
“We’re good, Grace. Jack took care of the shifters who were blocking the Jeeps before he and Quinn left with Denal. Tell the others we’re moving out. You drive and I’ll ride shotgun,” Alexios said.
She nodded and then quickly walked away, leaving Alexios staring after her. “It still seems wrong to me that so many females must take up weapons in this battle,” he said, so quietly that Alaric nearly missed his words.
“And yet it is their future, and that of their children, that is being corrupted by the vampires and rogue shape-shifters. What power is more formidable than that of mothers acting in concert?” Alaric replied.
Alexios said nothing. He continued to watch the woman as she directed the others to gather up the wounded. Finally he wrenched his gaze away and turned back to Alaric. “I’ve got to go. They need protection in case we’ve got some threat waiting for us on the route to the hospital.”
“Do you have need of me?” Alaric lifted his hand and a shimmering ball of pure energy coalesced in his palm. “I would be most pleased to teach a few of the attackers a lesson or two in the power of Poseidon,” he said, the rage and frustration of the past few days searing through his nerve endings.
Alexios stared at him, eyes narrowed, then shoved his matted hair away from his face. “What I need is a shower. If I had five extra minutes, I’d call a freaking thunderstorm and scrub the stench of their blood off of me. Damn these marauding bastards to the nine hells, anyway. We can’t keep fighting them on so many fronts without reinforcements. Conlan and Ven had better step up their plans to increase warrior training.”
Alaric agreed, but simply nodded. It was neither the time nor the place to discuss war strategy.
The woman, Grace, approached them again, this time holding a deadly-looking pistol pointed at the floor. Even Alaric, who had little use for human weapons, recognized a top-notch weapon when he saw it.
“It’s time. Michelle is going to bleed out if we don’t get her to surgery,” she said.
“If you will allow me, I will heal her,” Alaric offered.
She looked startled. “I—I don’t know.”
“Just enough to get her to the hospital, Alaric,” Alexios said. “You’re going to need to conserve your strength in case Quinn . . .”
Alaric felt the words like a blow to his chest, but forced the emotion into a locked chamber in the back of his soul. Quinn was a survivor. He would heal this human, and Quinn would be fine.
He knelt by the stretcher and spread his fingers wide over the injured woman. She was slight, no larger than a child, with short dark curls. Her size and dark hair reminded him of Quinn, and for an instant he saw her face superimposed over Michelle’s. Then startlingly blue eyes opened and Michelle gazed up at him with a spark of humor in her gaze in spite of the hideously gaping bite wound in her throat.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I? That’s just brilliant. My first mission and I go out with a bite, so to speak,” she joked, surprising him with a crisp British accent. “Bloody vampires are even worse here than they are in London.”
Her humor touched a spark of warmth buried deep inside him, and he attempted a smile. “You’re not dying today. Consider this my version of diplomatic relations between countries.”
He called power and, as always, thanked Poseidon for gifting his high priest with the power to heal. As the sizzling blue-green energy sifted through his body and poured out from his fingertips, down into and over her wounds, the sluggishly pulsing gash in the woman’s throat sealed itself shut and the color returned to her cheeks.
As he sat back on his heels, the healing done, she blinked and a dazzling smile spread across her face. “If ambassadors actually looked like you, love, I think we’d have much better international relations. Any chance you’d be free for a cup of tea now that I can drink it without it coming out of the hole in my throat?”
An unexpected burst of laughter escaped from his throat, and Alaric lifted her hand to his lips. “Another time, brave one.”
Before he could rise, she caught his hand in her own, and her face turned somber. “Thank you. I didn’t think I’d make it to the hospital, and . . . well, thank you. If you ever need anything, please call me. Grace can find me.”
At the oddest times—moments that came so rarely during the centuries—a human would do something that gave Alaric hope for the future of their species. This was one of those times.
He could do nothing but give her courage its due. He stood up and bowed deeply as the others helped her to sit. “I am always grateful to find an ally, especially one so brave. Thank you, my lady.”
Grace fell to her knees beside Michelle and hugged her, then looked up at Alaric with tear-drenched eyes. “Thank you. Anything. Anything you ever want, anytime, I’m here for you.”
Suddenly uncomfortable at the unnecessary outpouring of gratitude, Alaric inclined his head and strode toward the door and a strangely grim Alexios, who was staring at Grace and Michelle.
“We need to go, now, Grace. There are plenty of our people with minor wounds who are better off going to the ER than draining any more of Alaric’s strength,” Alexios commanded. “Alaric, you should get going, too. Let me know what you find and if you need me.”
Alaric simply nodded, unable to decide what, if anything, he would do next.
Alexios gestured for the first group to head out the door. “Let’s do it.”
Grace lifted her gun and, one arm around Michelle, led the way out of the door. The others, carrying the wounded, lined up behind her.
Alexios unsheathed his daggers and started to follow, then turned back. “Alaric, go after her. Since Daniel forced the blood bond on her, Quinn has been different. Lost. She deserves better than for you to abandon her and, priest or no, you know it.”
Alaric lost all control at the thought of the vampire—their sometimes-ally—Daniel, who also called himself Drakos, who’d saved Quinn’s life even as he’d tied her to him. Alaric hurled the energy sphere at the wall farthest from the humans and watched with grim satisfaction as the windows exploded outwa
rd into the empty street.
“What Quinn Dawson deserves is far more than I could ever provide, whether she is blood bonded to a vampire or not.”
“Three exchanges, Alaric. It takes three exchanges for a human to become a vampire. He saved her life by doing it, but it was only one.” Alexios shook his head, clearly disgusted. “I have no time for this. Do as you will. I’m gone.”
He ran out the door, weapons drawn, after the last of the humans. Alaric started to follow. Stopped.
Took another step. Stopped. For perhaps the first time in all of his centuries of existence, he was nearly frozen with indecision.
Every instinct he possessed screamed at him to go after Quinn. Logic dictated that he assist Alexios. Emotion battled reason. Longing warred with rationality.
Emotion kicked logic’s ass.
He was going after Quinn.
Chapter 20
Atlantis, the cavern
Keely fought her way back to consciousness, feeling the after-math of the most intense vision she’d ever had kicking her butt like a tequila hangover. She was trapped; something was holding her down. Something . . . or someone.
Her eyes snapped open, and she looked up into his face. The face she’d known for years, even though they’d only just met. Her hand automatically went to the fish carving, still safely under her shirt.
The image of his infant self swam through her memory, disorienting her. She couldn’t help herself; she needed to touch his face. Justice flinched a little at her touch, but then leaned his head into her hand, his arms tightening around her. She realized she was lying in his lap and wondered why it felt so completely right.
Part of her knew that she should move away. The rest of her wanted to stay right there in his arms for a very long time.
She felt safe in an entirely unsafe situation, no matter that it was crazy. But, then again, she’d just lived through centuries of his life, and she knew him on a more fundamental level than she’d ever known anyone before.
