by Alyssa Day
“What the hells is wrong with that man?” he grumbled, bringing her back down to earth with a thud.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re still going at it,” he said in disgust.
She laughed, covering her mouth so Maria and Alejandro wouldn’t hear. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” he snapped. “Get dressed.”
She slipped his shirt over her head and handed it to him, then pulled on the loose white skirt and scalloped red blouse Maria had provided, trying to puzzle out why he was so annoyed.
Suddenly, she blinked. “You’re jealous?”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous! Jealous of what?” he growled.
“That Alejandro has so much . . . stamina,” she suggested, barely able to keep a straight face. “You shouldn’t let it bother you, honey. After all, you are a few hundred years older than he is. They say that’s the first thing to go . . .”
He narrowed his eyes. “You are not nearly as amusing as you believe yourself to be, woman.”
She cracked up. “Oh, yes, I am. You should see the look on your face.”
“I am not jealous of that human’s stamina, or anything else!”
The horrified denial on his face just made her laugh harder. When she could finally catch her breath, she let him off the hook. “You know, it probably took them quite a while to start ‘going at it’ as you so elegantly put it. Maria said Alejandro had never looked at her as anything but a child before. I’m sure that changed when he got an eyeful of her in those wet underthings.”
“What?” he said blankly, his eyebrows drawing together. “What about her?”
The snarky remark she’d been ready to say died on her lips when she looked into his eyes and realized that he wasn’t kidding. He really hadn’t noticed. Beautiful, voluptuous Maria. He hadn’t even looked at Maria, because every atom of his laser-like focus had been zeroed in on her.
She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a very passionate kiss. When they finally came up for air, he tilted his head.
“Not that I’m complaining in any way, but what was that for?”
“For not noticing Maria,” she said, handing him back his T-shirt but regretting when he covered up his magnificent chest with the fabric. “You know, there should be a law that you have to walk around naked all the time.”
Then she turned and started toward the village, humming.
Behind her, Justice made a strangled choking noise and then followed her. “Women,” he muttered. “I’ll never understand them.”
Keely just smiled.
Justice was content to follow Keely down the path, enjoying her strangely happy mood, though he had no idea what had caused it. Well, he knew what had caused part of it. He grinned, watching her lovely ass, wondering if she’d go along with another detour before they reached the others.
Probably not. He blew out a breath, weighing the pros and cons of simply grabbing her and speeding off to another isolated spot. Before he could talk himself into the result he wanted, he heard one of the men on patrol call out a greeting. Keely answered, and something about her lovely voice pronouncing the round vowels and liquid consonants of her fluent Spanish made him hard. He shifted in his pants. Maybe he could ask her to speak Spanish the next time they made love. He stopped dead when another thought struck him with the force of a tidal wave. By all the gods, when she learned Atlantean, he was doomed. He’d be chasing her around all day long, every day of the week.
“Justice,” she called back to him. “Are you coming? I’m going to go check on Eleni.”
He forced himself to put away thoughts of Keely whispering Atlantean endearments and shook his head. “Go ahead. I will take my turn on patrol.”
She flashed a huge smile that nearly dazzled him with its warmth and headed toward the safe house, and another realization hit him belatedly.
She’d called him honey.
When he sauntered into the clearing, grinning like a fool, the men shot knowing grins his way but said nothing. He waved and wandered over to the table where some of the women were setting out a midday meal. As he came close enough to smell the delicious aroma of spicy vegetable stew, his stomach rumbled, reminding him of Keely.
Of course, everything reminded him of Keely. Maybe he did need to have Alaric examine his mind and find out why he was turning into a love-struck fool.
Alaric. The portal. His smile faded as he realized he hadn’t tried yet that day to call the portal. Part of him knew his reluctance was due to fear that the magic would not answer him.
Part of him just wanted to avoid the consequences if it did.
Which part am I, then? the Nereid, who had been silent since the previous night, asked him. Your conscience or your goad?
Neither. Both, Justice replied. You are a part of me that I cannot deny and remain whole.
He closed his eyes and centered his consciousness, reaching for the portal’s magic to respond. Something shimmered at the very edges of his mind, just out of reach, taunting him with its nearness but still unavailable. If he could just focus more strongly, he would have it. He clenched his hands into fists and leaned forward, physically pouring his will into his effort. It was just there . . . just there . . . He could almost touch it . . .
And then Keely’s screams shattered the air.
Chapter 38
Keely clutched the shredded blanket in her hands, unable to believe the evidence although she was staring at it. She screamed again.
“I’m so sorry, señora,” the woman said through her tears. “She was sleeping, and we were all working very near this building, so we didn’t worry at all about leaving her alone.”
Keely couldn’t answer her. Should have been able to think of something reassuring; tell her it wasn’t her fault. But she couldn’t. Because it was Keely’s fault. She’d left poor orphaned Eleni alone.
The love-struck archaeologist had wild sex in the middle of a crisis, leaving an abandoned child to be captured and hurt. She would never forgive herself.
She didn’t deserve to be forgiven.
She couldn’t think, couldn’t react, couldn’t bear the slicing, rending pain that ripped through her body.
So she screamed again.
Justice smashed the door open and ran in with his sword drawn, then skidded to a halt. “What is it? Are you wounded? Tell me, mi amara.”
Keely finally stopped screaming and mutely held up the torn remnants of the blanket so the words on the sheet beneath it were clearly visible. Hateful words drawn in black charcoal, as if to mock the survivors huddling in the burned-out village.
WE HAVE THE CHILD.
SAN BARTOLO AT TWILIGHT.
OUR TURN TO BARTER.
Justice lowered his sword, but his sword arm was shaking as if with some immense inner pressure. “They took her. Eleni.”
Keely nodded, unable to force words out past the pain-filled lump in her throat. Then she pointed a shaky finger at the object that had caused her to scream. There, lying half hidden in the tangled sheets, was Eleni’s poor dead mother’s bloody slipper.
But some of the blood on it was fresh.
Justice roared, a hideous, wrenching sound of fury and pain, and Keely flinched and covered her ears. She couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t stand this feeling that her heart, finally given freely, would be ripped out yet again.
Her brain stepped in and ruthlessly clamped a lid on Keely’s emotional meltdown. Coldly, logically, she began to plan. Because there was no way in hell she was going to sit there on her ass when there was a child to save.
She blinked furiously to clear her vision, scrubbed the tears she hadn’t known she was crying from her face, took a deep breath, and stood up. “So now we figure this out,” she said flatly.
“Now we figure this out,” Justice echoed, ice coating his voice.
An hour later—an hour closer to dusk—and Justice wanted to kill something. Real bad.
They
’d huddled all the remaining children into the building and set armed guards inside and out. They’d ignored the old women who’d tried to bully them into eating. One of them, a sour-faced crone, had attempted to put forth the idea that Eleni was some kind of devil child and not worth saving. Keely had lit into her so savagely that the old woman had run away, muttering something about “guarding the children who deserved to be protected.”
At the table, they’d argued, they’d planned, they’d wasted sixty precious minutes, but they still hadn’t reached an agreement as to how they would handle the so-called barter.
Keely and Alejandro were to the point of shouting at each other when he’d finally had enough. “That’s enough.”
The words came out harsher and louder than he’d intended, but right at that moment, he didn’t give much of a pile of miertus .
Everyone fell silent, staring at him. He realized his hand was on the hilt of his sword and forced himself to release it. These people were not his enemy.
Finding one lost child is also not our mission, the Nereid said. We need the Star of Artemis. To return it to the Trident and take our rightful place as prince of Atlantis. The child’s fate is unfortunate, but children are dying all over the world. We can’t save them all.
“We can save this one,” Justice said fiercely. Alejandro, Keely, and the others turned puzzled faces to him, and he realized he was doing it again. Arguing with himself out loud.
We can save this one, he repeated, but this time in his mind. I hate to pull out a bad cliché, but you’re either with me or you’re against me, and I’m just a single one of Alaric’s mindfucks away from getting rid of you forever.
The Nereid fell silent, so Justice decided to talk to all the people who didn’t live in his brain.
“Look, we’ve been over this and over this for an hour. This discussion is useless and mind-bogglingly irrelevant.”
He pointed at Alejandro, whose dark eyes were flashing fire and vengeance. “You want to bulldoze our way in there, guns blazing, with every man we’ve got. Go before twilight and surprise them and snatch Eleni. Have I got that right?”
Alejandro nodded. “Sí. It’s the only way. We overpower them and—”
Justice cut him off. “It’s the only way, all right. It’s the only way to get the rest of your men killed. Vampires never take stupid chances. Their sense of self-preservation is matched only by their cowardice and depravity. They wouldn’t have taunted us with that note unless they had far superior numbers. Obviously they’ve got human or some kind of nonvamp help, or they couldn’t have taken Eleni during the middle of the afternoon. They sure as the nine hells won’t be sitting in the middle of the meet place playing jump rope with her.”
He looked at each one of them in turn. “We go in hard and fast and they kill us hard and fast. Then they kill her, wherever they’ve hidden her. Then just for kicks they come here and slaughter the rest of your people.”
Keely nodded, rubbing her reddened eyes. “I’ve been telling him—”
Justice cut her off, too. “You’ve been telling him that we threaten the vamps. Reason with them. Tell them that the P Ops patrol should be here tomorrow and if they give us Eleni, we won’t rat them out. Is that about right?”
Keely nodded, her eyes narrowing. She probably figured she wasn’t going to like what he said next.
She was right.
“Vamps don’t do logic and reason when they’re angry and want revenge. We can threaten them with P Ops, sure. They’ll cut their losses and move on somewhere new, to a nesting ground where we can’t find them. Of course, they’ll drain Eleni first and leave her dead body for us as a present, but they’ll be gone.”
Keely’s face went dead white at his cruelty, but he just added it to the list of his sins, the inner whip of self-flagellation cutting mercilessly into him. Yeah. He was a foul bastard who’d abandoned these poor villagers for an afternoon of selfish pleasure, and a tiny child would pay the price.
An orphan, like he’d been an orphan. But he’d at least had adoptive parents who’d loved him. Eleni had nothing but pain, torture, and death in front of her, unless he fixed it.
He was good at fixing things.
He unsheathed his sword and carefully placed it on the table in front of him. “This is the plan. Either get on board or get the hells out of my way, but this will be the plan. They want me, I’m guessing, since I’m the one with the nifty explosive trick.”
Alejandro slammed a fist down on the table. “They want me! The use of the word ‘barter’ was deliberate. If you are planning any solo trip to the vampire camp, you are mistaken. These are my people, and I failed them while I . . . while I—” he shot an anguished look at Maria who sat, sobbing, at the end of the table. “While I shirked my duty,” he finished, a dull flush on his cheekbones.
Justice met Alejandro’s gaze in a moment of perfectly shared understanding. They were both warriors who had failed to protect their charges. They both would die to make it right.
Fine. Let him come.
“What is the plan, then?” The bruised-looking skin under Keely’s eyes emphasized her stark, drawn pallor. “You’re the mighty Atlantean warrior, so why don’t you tell us all about it?”
Where there had been love and laughter in her eyes only a few short hours before, now there was nothing but desolation. Keely’s guilt must be as crushing as his own, he realized.
Not only Atlantean warriors carried the weight of innocents on their souls.
“They want to barter, so we barter,” he said flatly. “Me for Eleni.”
A chorus of dissent broke out around the table, but Keely looked down at her hands resting on the table and said nothing, although she flinched as if from a blow.
“They’ll kill you,” Alejandro said. “Kill you first, then Eleni, and then the rest of us. I have no illusions that we can hold off a blood pride of angry vampires with a few shotguns.”
“Maybe. But if so, I plan to take them with me,” Justice replied, never taking his eyes off Keely. “Anyway, plan A is that nobody dies but vampires. I suddenly have a lot to live for.”
Keely finally looked up at him, and the black emptiness in her eyes scared him more than the idea of facing a hundred vampires.
“Give me a shotgun,” she said.
“You will not come anywhere near that nest,” Justice began. “I’ll—”
But it was her turn to cut him off. She ignored him as completely as if he didn’t exist and turned to Maria, who was still weeping. “If you can shut up for five minutes, get me a shotgun,” she said with icy disdain. Then she lifted something from her lap and placed it on the table in front of her in an eerie echo of Justice’s action of mere minutes before.
It was the bloody slipper.
Maria, shocked into silence, traded a long look with Keely and then squared her shoulders and hurried off. Keely selected a piece of bread and started chewing it with grim determination.
“We need to eat,” she said, still in that utterly flat tone. “We haven’t eaten all day. It’s still an hour until twilight, and I won’t fail Eleni again because I was too damn stupid to put fuel in my body before I went to rescue her.”
Justice, who could function at full capacity for up to six days with no food, decided to follow her lead. Maybe letting Keely feel in control of something, even something as meaningless as the decision to eat bread and cold stew, would help her find her way back from her own personal hell.
She swallowed the piece of bread and began on her previously untouched bowl of stew, slowly and methodically eating one spoonful after another. It was like watching a zombie or one of those robots in the movies Ven liked to watch. There was nothing of human emotion about it, no trace of fear or sorrow.
Just spoonful after spoonful of cold stew.
His mouth dried out so much he was almost unable to swallow the bread. If by his folly he had lost both the child and Keely, there was nothing left for him. His mind tortured him with visions of a wo
rld without Keely, and a Void blacker than any Anubisa could conjure yawned like an abyss at his feet, beckoning.
Alejandro looked from Justice to Keely and then nodded as if reaching a decision. He broke off a hunk of bread and started chewing.
Keely dropped her spoon in her bowl and metal rang against metal; a hollow, haunting sound. Then she turned those dead eyes on Justice again and something in his soul shriveled.
“You told us what you’re going to do,” she said. “Now tell us how we can help.”
Chapter 39
Just before twilight, San Bartolo
The men from the village had hidden themselves as best they could in the trees and grass surrounding the temple, but the plan for them to cover Justice with protective gunfire was a dismal failure. The topography didn’t lend itself to any real cover; in order to see their targets clearly they’d have to come into the open or they’d be firing blind and take the chance of hitting Justice or Eleni.
Of course, if the vamps forced him to take the meeting inside the temple where the mural was, all bets were off. He’d be entirely on his own.
Keely, shotgun ready and aimed, lay on the ground on her stomach just over a slight rise in the ground, hidden by the tall grasses. Alejandro flanked her, kneeling, and between the two of them a pile of ammunition lay ready for reloading. Justice had tried to hold her, just for one last embrace before he went down to face the vampires, but she’d been stiff and resistant in his arms. He’d kissed the top of her head and let her go, hating that their last moment together would be like this.
He crouched down beside the two of them. “It’s time. Are you ready?”
Alejandro swore virulently, shaking his head. “No, we’re not ready. We’re nearly useless here. I need to go with you.”
“No. We’ve been over this. If I fall to them, I’ll need for you to come get Eleni and keep her safe. Keep Keely safe. I need your word,” Justice said.
