by Alyssa Day
“Now would be a good time to get out of here,” Alaric told the boy. “You’re safe. The tsunami is gone. You don’t want to be caught up in whatever punishment Poseidon metes out to me.”
“No thanks to you,” Faust said, still eyeing the sea god. “Hey, you don’t deserve it, but I’m going to put the call out to my contacts and see if we can find your girl. If, you know, Poseidon doesn’t crush us both.”
Alaric stared at the boy, unable to understand why he’d do such a thing for the man who’d nearly killed him.
Poseidon had to make his opinion known, of course:
ONE OF ARES’S BRATS, I SEE. STAY AWAY FROM THAT ONE, ALARIC, HE’S PROBABLY AS TRICKY AS HIS FATHER.
Faust actually winked at Alaric, before he turned and ran away.
One of Ares’s brats? But Poseidon didn’t give Alaric time to think about Faust any further.
ATLANTIS IS SAFE, FOR NOW, BUT IT WILL NOT HOLD FOR LONG. I MUST RETURN TO MY BATTLE. FIND MY GEM AND RESTORE MY TRIDENT. ITS CALL WILL BRING ME BACK TO ASSIST IN ATLANTIS’S RISING.
Alaric bowed. “Yes, I will find Poseidon’s Pride and save Atlantis. But when I have succeeded, I am done. You will have to find another high priest.”
FUNNY. I WAS GOING TO SAY, SUCCEED OR DIE HORRIBLY. I LIKE MINE BETTER.
With that, the sea god vanished, and the last of Alaric’s strength drained out of him. Christophe’s message on the Atlantean mental pathway rang into Alaric’s mind, loud and clear.
Thanks for whatever you just did. We probably have around forty-eight hours now before the dome collapses, so use it well and find what we need. And don’t block me again, or I’ll kick your ass when you get back.
Alaric realized that his own rage and pain must have blocked Quinn and Atlantis from contacting him before. In his desperation, he’d actually caused his own suicidal idiocy and despair. He groaned once, but then pushed it out of his mind and distilled burning fury to icy calm as he reinforced Atlantis with all of the power he could send such a long distance.
Forty-eight hours. Quinn was alive, and Atlantis still had a chance. He called out to Quinn.
Where are you?
She sent him a visual impression of the images out her window, so he knew she was in a building overlooking Central Park, and he could follow his senses to find her.
It’s warded by pretty strong magic, so be careful, Alaric. It’s demon magic—from another dimension.
Oddly enough, he was relieved to hear it. At least it took a monster from another dimension to create something strong enough to have kept him away from Quinn.
It wouldn’t happen again.
He transformed into mist and arrowed toward the park. Toward Quinn.
Toward a future he suddenly wanted to live in, again.
Quinn walked around the palatial bedroom, which was dressed in rich blues and tawny golds, silk and fine linens. Whatever hotel this was, they’d spared no expense in the décor. Even the air smelled like money—cool and crisp. She didn’t have time to appreciate luxury, though—she needed to find a way out. The windows were impossible without tools she didn’t have, the air vents were too small, the doors were bolted from the outside with unpickable locks, and the phones had been ripped out of the walls. Ptolemy had abruptly told her he needed to go out for a while, locked her in this room, and left.
At least he’d given her food. Before he’d gone, he’d had room service deliver a cart full of various delicious meals for her to sample, and she’d done her best to devour as much as she could. It was much easier to plot and scheme on a full stomach, even though now that she’d been fed, her exhaustion was pulling her down, trying to suck her into sleep.
The moment she felt Ptolemy’s demonic presence disappear into a wave of creepiness that felt like that portal again, she tried to contact Alaric. She didn’t know how to call out to him, exactly, so she opened her senses as far as she could and shouted his name. An image flashed into her mind: Alaric in the air, rage burning through him, as he went entirely nuts trying to find her.
He was—oh no, oh holy crap, no—he was trying to destroy the world. Flashing impressions of a giant tsunami and of Poseidon roaring at Alaric punched into her mind, and she yelled at Alaric to cut it out, but he either didn’t hear her or he was too far gone to care.
She took a deep breath and put every ounce of energy she had into trying one more time, before he did something so horribly destructive it could never be fixed, and she yelled at him—out loud and in her mind.
I said, cut it out, you idiot.
This time, somehow, she was sure he heard her, but the momentary connection between them faded. To distract herself she decided, in typical rebel fashion, to eat while there was food. By the time she’d eaten two more plates of dinner and worked her way to the chocolate mousse, she couldn’t keep her worry at bay any longer. What if Poseidon had killed Alaric? Or smited him, or whatever gods did to misbehaving high priests?
Alaric’s voice sounded in her head, and she nearly fell off the chair in relief.
I am on my way to you now.
He was alive. He was alive. She scrubbed at the tears running down her face with one sleeve and tried to send a message back to Alaric.
The staff here is either not allowed on this floor or has been paid well to ignore shouting. You’ll have to find a way to get a key, and—
The window shattered, and Alaric blew in before she could finish the thought. Right. Who needed a key when you had an Atlantean?
He hit the floor running, caught her up in his arms, and took possession of her lips with deliberate, possessive intent; branding her body and heart with his fire. Searing her soul with his passion.
“Never, never, never leave me again,” he murmured, over and over, as he kissed her, but he didn’t allow her breath to respond before he captured her mouth again .
She’d never been kissed with such single-minded intent as this man brought to it—her skin flashed hot, and her entire being rose up to meet him, as though gravity lost its claim on her when Alaric touched her. He kissed her so completely—so deeply and thoroughly—that it was almost hard to remember they were surrounded by shards of glass in what had briefly been her very well-decorated prison.
But she finally did remember, and she reluctantly pulled away.
“We have to get out of here, Alaric,” she whispered, her voice trembling from the aftershocks of intensity.
If they ever made love, she didn’t know how either of them would survive it. Just from his kisses, she was weak at the knees. And hot in places north of the knees, which made her face flush to realize.
“Where is he? I need to kill him and get that jewel,” Alaric said when he finally raised his head. His eyes were pure green fire, and she never, ever wanted him to let her go.
“Your cheeks are quite charmingly pink,” he said slowly, a smile spreading across his gorgeous face.
Of course, that only made her blush harder.
“Forget my cheeks. Focus. Ptolemy left, I don’t know where he went, and he took Poseidon’s Pride, I’m sure of it. He always has it on his person or very close to him,” she told him. “I felt a blast of that creepy magic, only a thousand times worse than usual, just after he locked me in here. I think he might have temporarily returned to his demon dimension to get backup.”
“Then we will leave now and develop a plan, and I will return to confront him once you are safe. We have maybe forty-eight hours, I’m thinking forty to be safe, and then Atlantis collapses. There is no time for Ptolemy to disappear into another dimension. If he doesn’t return soon—”
She interrupted him. “Oh, I don’t think he’ll leave me alone for long,” she said dryly. “Take a look in the other room.”
Alaric gestured with one hand, and the door flew open, smashing into the wall behind it. He stal
ked out into the other room, keeping Quinn behind him until he could check for danger, and then he stopped dead, just as she had earlier, and she knew he’d seen the Wall of Creepy.
“He has been after you for a long time,” Alaric finally said, his voice so coated with ice she was surprised a snowstorm didn’t spontaneously form in the room.
“I know. Don’t you think I know?” Her teeth started chattering from delayed reaction. “Some of these pictures are from years ago. He wants— He said he wants—”
Alaric swept her into his arms. “I don’t care what he wants. He’s not going to get it. We’re leaving, now, and you’ll never have to see him again.”
With that, he blasted the glass out of the windows, picked her up, and flew out of the building with her in his arms. She closed her eyes, held on to him with all her might, and offered up a sincere wish that he was right. Also, that he wouldn’t drop her.
They were due a little good luck, weren’t they?
Even as she thought it, she realized she’d probably jinxed them, because that was how the life of Quinn Dawson, ex–rebel leader, was going these days. Would it be fire, hail, or a plague of flying cockroaches?
They rounded the corner of the hotel, heading for the park, and nearly ran into a police helicopter and the officer hanging out the side with a loudspeaker.
“Stop flying now, land on the nearest surface, and put your hands up,” he commanded, and Quinn started to laugh. She couldn’t help it.
“Here we go again.”
Chapter 21
Alaric raised a hand to blast the annoying metallic monster out of the sky, but Quinn stopped him.
“No. Those are the good guys. Can’t we just make a quick getaway?”
So he swooped underneath the helicopter, darted right, and was halfway across the city before the machine had time to turn around. There were advantages to his method of flight.
She directed him to a large building near the water, and he landed in the alley next to it, managing not to draw any more unwanted attention.
After a brief battle where her desire to walk fought his need to hold her, he finally, reluctantly, released her. She led the way up three flights of stairs to an industrial loft with a state-of-the-art security keypad next to its massive steel door. She punched in a long string of numbers and then held her thumb over a small square of glass. It scanned her, and the door opened.
“Welcome, Quinn,” an electronic voice said, as they entered the space.
“She’s an artist, but she also does something for the northeast region of P-Ops,” Quinn explained.
Alaric didn’t know what to expect, given the location and security, but it turned out to be an artist’s studio. Finished and unfinished paintings and sculptures filled the enormous space. The tools of an artist’s trade littered every flat surface, paints and brushes crowding mallets, knives, chisels, and tools he did not recognize.
Quinn walked over to a large canvas propped against the far wall, near a bank of enormous windows, as the door automatically swung shut behind them and a metallic click announced that the security system was again engaged.
“This is amazing,” she said, her voice hushed. “Almost makes me believe in hope again.”
Alaric had no time for art, especially now. His first impulse was to blast a hole in the painting so his woman would turn around and look at him, instead of at a lifeless bit of canvas and paint. He took a steadying breath and shook his head.
Bad enough to be insane. He wouldn’t add childish to his list of flaws.
He walked over to join her, and she reached for his hand. The gesture went a long way toward calming the beast that had been raging inside him since he’d watched her be taken.
It was a deceptively simple canvas. A child and an old woman sitting companionably on a park bench, feeding the birds. But the details shone through to provide a spectacular sort of wonder to the mundane scene.
“The puppy chewing on her shoe. I don’t know why, I’m not really a puppies and kittens kind of girl, but there’s a hopefulness there, that a woman so old would get a puppy and believe she’d live to see it grow into a dog,” Quinn said softly, her face pale and strained with the weight of the horrors she kept imprisoned in her mind.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” he said gently, when what he wanted to do was rage and storm and break things. “What happened with Ptolemy, and what happened with that vampire? I need to know, and I think, even more than that, you need to tell it.”
She inhaled deeply, blew it out, and then finally turned to face him. “That’s just it. Nothing happened. I mean, plenty happened—he made me kill someone, Alaric. He made me kill the secretary-general of the United Nations on live TV.”
Tears shimmered in her lovely dark eyes, but she impatiently scrubbed them away with the back of her hands. “This dress—I need to get out of it. Now. Let me go take a long hot shower and find some of Lauren’s clothes, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
She ran up the metal spiral staircase as if she couldn’t bear to wear the offending garment a moment longer, and Alaric followed right behind her, because the last thing he planned to do for the foreseeable future was let her out of his sight. He slowed, however, as he realized that the shower itself posed a problem, because the gods themselves knew he had no idea where he’d get the control to keep from following her in.
By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the dress was wadded up in a metal trash receptacle and he could hear the sound of running water from behind a closed door. He scanned the high-ceilinged, clearly feminine room for obvious dangers, sent his magic searching for any that weren’t obvious, and then settled down on the floor in front of the door to wait for her, energy spheres in hand against any possible threat.
He finally took a moment to try to communicate again with Christophe and Atlantis, as much as a means of distracting himself from the image of Quinn’s wet, soapy, naked body as anything else.
We are well, but I don’t know for how long. Conlan is losing his mind, since we don’t know where the portal took the women and children, and it won’t answer our call. We cannot evacuate anyone. But the magic is holding, and somehow Serai realized what was happening, from wherever in the world she and Daniel are, and she’s reinforcing our magic, too. Between that and what you did, we are holding strong for now, but you need to find that gem and get it back here.
Alaric told him some of what had been happening, but left out anything to do with Quinn. There was no need for sharing that information. Or the news of the tsunami he’d almost used to destroy the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Poseidon helped shore up our defenses, Christophe. He said he’s locked in a battle with the gods of other pantheons to determine the fate of the world, but we don’t have time to worry about that until the current crisis is resolved.
Well, fix it, Christophe returned. That’s what you do, right? I’m just here temporarily, so don’t get any ideas about leaving the priesthood to me. No how, no way.
Alaric cut off the conversation without responding. He had no patience with Christophe’s carefree ways. Not now, when every fiber of his being was demanding he cut ties to his own responsibilities and flee with Quinn before anything worse could happen. Or perhaps his lack of patience was a mask for an emotion far darker—a manifestation of his own bitter envy.
He could never do it—doom his people to extinction without even trying to save them. Not even for Quinn. But it was surprising how enticing the idea was to him; he, who hadn’t been tempted to swerve in his duty even once in so many centuries, suddenly wished fervently to throw it all over and live a simple life with the woman he could finally admit he loved.
Tempting brought him back to thoughts of Quinn in the shower, and his pants suddenly no longer fit properly. Yes, the body knew what it wanted to do, and the parts d
efinitely worked, so there were two concerns alleviated about the possibility of ending hundreds of years of celibacy. The sound of the running water stopped, and he groaned at the lovely mental image of Quinn drying off her body. Driven by a primal hunger that was far older than Atlantis itself, he climbed to his feet, shoved his dagger in its sheath, and put his hand on the doorknob.
There were some things a man—even a warrior—should not have to endure.
Quinn dressed in an old pair of jeans and a sweater of Lauren’s and opened the door to find Alaric on the other side, hand on the doorknob, an expression of such intent hunger on his face that she almost backed up a step.
“I cannot bear to be apart from you a moment longer,” he said, his voice rough.
She nodded, feeling the exact same way, but suddenly apprehensive about what would happen next. None of their problems had gone away; Alaric was still bound to a terrible promise to a cruel god. And yet here they were in another bedroom, and she had the feeling there would be no malfunctioning Trident to save them this time.
She wrapped her arms around his waist, leaned her head against his muscular chest, and stood there, content to feel his arms around her. Content with the silence.
“I never get this,” she finally said. “To allow myself to depend on someone else’s strength. I had Jack, of course, but we didn’t lean on each other like this.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Alaric said, a tinge of a growl in his voice.
“I’ve been in charge for so long I’ve forgotten how to let someone else be strong, just for a moment’s respite. A break in the action.” She wanted to do what she’d never done before—surrender. To Alaric’s strength and protection. A purely feminine impulse that was so shocking to her, she who’d lived her life as a fighter. He made her want to love and protect and be cherished in return.
Forbidden longings teased the surface of her skin, and something hard and cold in her heart unfurled like one of the fantastical Atlantean flowers. It was too much, too quick, and her emotions threatened to sweep her under like a bit of driftwood caught in a storm-tossed ocean.
