by Alyssa Day
Startled by the emotion in his voice, she turned to study his face, but he wouldn’t turn his gaze from the road. “Get some more rest, Erin. We have another hour to go.”
“But—”
“Rest. You’re exhausted. You can ask me all the questions you want when we get there. You’re safe now. Rest.”
He flicked on his stereo and something warm and classical filled the air. Another surprise; she’d expected headbanger music from the tough warrior. She relaxed, exhausted, back into the leather seat. As her eyelids began to drift closed, she heard him clear his throat.
“And Erin? Thank you. Your actions saved the lives of men I value as brothers, as well as my own. Though I would not have had you risk your life for ours, please know that I honor your aid more than I could ever repay.”
Her throat tightened a little and tears stung the edges of her eyelids. “What is formal speak for ‘you’re welcome’?” she asked, smiling a little.
He finally looked directly at her, and the heat in his eyes seared clear through her, deep down to something she’d locked away ten years before. Trapped in his gaze, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Finally, he wrenched his gaze from hers and looked back at the road. “Rest, Erin. You are still exhausted from calling such great amounts of power,” he said, voice husky.
“Okay. But just until we get wherever we’re going. Then I want to know everything that you know about Caligula.”
Ven nodded, his narrowed eyes promising retribution. “Yeah, well, the first thing I want to know is how in the nine hells they knew where we were. If we’ve got a traitor in Atlantis, I’m going to unleash all the fury of Poseidon on his ass.”
“I’ll be standing right next to you, helping,” she murmured as her eyes drifted closed.
She barely heard his next words, but they sounded a lot like “Over my dead body,” and she smiled.
Your dead body is exactly what I wanted to avoid, she thought, and then she couldn’t stay awake any longer and let the rhythm of the car’s motion lull her into sleep.
Chapter 7
Caligula’s cavern, below Mount Rainier
The pathetic human crouched in the corner, face turned away from the bodies of his dead colleagues. Blood dripped steadily from his open wounds, but Caligula forced himself to ignore the tempting aroma. Time enough to drain the fool after he’d gotten every bit of information from him.
“You swore to me that this device would be effective, Merkel,” Caligula snarled. “Years of experience with explosives, you said. No possible way anybody could survive a blast of that magnitude, you promised.”
He stalked closer to the quivering man, who covered his head with his hands and moaned. “Do you know what happens to people who fail me?”
He kicked Merkel’s ribs, holding back at the last moment so his boot didn’t go clear through the man’s rib cage. Still, he may not have held back enough of his strength, because Merkel’s limp body rose half a dozen feet into the air before smashing back to the ground. His moaning shrilled into a keening cry of anguish.
“I don’t know what happened—I promise you, that bomb should have gone off,” Merkel blubbered. “I checked every single component three times.”
Caligula’s new general drifted down from his perch on the wall from where he’d been watching the interrogation. Drakos had offered to handle it for him, but Caligula preferred to think of himself as hands-on when it came to torture. As they said in this century, if you want someone killed right, kill him yourself.
“There is another explanation beyond this man’s failure,” Drakos offered. “We know the Atlanteans channel the elements, and we know they plan to ally with the witches. Two very different types of magic may combine to be powerful beyond our expectations.”
Caligula leaned down and casually lifted Merkel by the back of his shirt until he hung in the air. He tilted the man’s head to face his own and forced Merkel to look into his eyes. Between the pain and the fear, it was only a matter of an instant to enthrall him.
“Speak truth or die,” he snarled. “Did your failure cause your device to malfunction?”
“No, Master,” the human replied in a flat, dead voice. “I knew you would kill me if I failed you. The bomb was fully functional. The drop was perfect. The witch shielded it from exploding on impact, but detonation should have occurred when the timer ran down.”
Caligula lifted his other hand, and almost gently caressed the side of the man’s face. The sheep all worshipped him, as was his due; it was almost painful when he lost even one. Adulation was his birthright; slavish devotion from his subjects his coin of the realm.
“And the witch who shielded it?”
“I killed her, as you directed, Master.”
“There, now,” Caligula crooned. “You did a good job after all, didn’t you?”
A glimmer of hope flickered for an instant in the man’s eyes, and Caligula chuckled. Then he drove his fangs into the side of Merkel’s neck and drained him dry. When he finished, he tossed the empty husk to the ground and carefully wiped his lips. “Their terror is so much richer when you give them a morsel of hope first, don’t you find?”
Drakos stood there, impassive. “I was taught never to play with my food,” he observed dryly.
Caligula narrowed his eyes and then burst out laughing. “Never to play with your food. Brilliant.”
The voice that sliced through the air was jarring in its beauty. The lilting tones of a dark angel whispering words of bloody death. “Laughter? Tell me that I do not hear laughter from my admiral when his plans have gone so badly wrong.”
Drakos shuddered and then moaned, the sound shockingly similar to the one the dead human had made, and hoarsely spoke a single word. A name.
A dark and twisted prayer for a redemption that could never be found.
“Anubisa.”
Dropping to the ground, Drakos knelt and bowed his head until it touched the dirt. Caligula remained standing, defiant; testing himself and his strength in the face of the matchless power of the goddess of the night.
Anubisa floated down from a point far above them, descending from high in the blackness of the cavern. Her midnight black hair glowed as the unseen stars caressed her hip-length curls. The silken white folds of her gown, unaffected by gravity or the speed of her descent, draped demurely around her ankles. As she neared Caligula, pressure built behind his eyes until he thought they must explode from their sockets.
“Are you truly willing to sacrifice your eyes in service to this petty defiance?” Her voice sizzled across his skin like acid, and blisters rose up on his arms and face in its wake. The pressure behind his eyes grew unbearable, and he dropped to his knees beside his general.
Her laughter drove needles into his brain, and the pressure behind his eyes continued to build. “Giving up so soon, Caligula? I am disappointed. I expected so much more from the most depraved ruler of the Roman Empire. What was it you are claimed to have said? ‘I wish the Roman people had but a single neck’?”
She took a step closer to where Caligula huddled next to Drakos on the dirt. “Singularly appropriate, or perhaps prophetic, don’t you think?”
The pressure in his head increased, and he clenched his teeth together and drove his fingers, lengthening into claws, into the ground in a futile attempt to keep from crying out. But the pressure built and built and built—surely his eyes would pop out from the pain screaming, blazing inside his skull. Caligula had a sudden, sickening visual of his eyeballs rolling across the dirt, finally surrendered, and he screamed.
He sacrificed two millennia of pride and screamed long and loud.
He screamed, and she laughed.
And her laughter raised a swarm, black as an ancient plague, of squirming discolored maggots that boiled up from the earth beneath him to crawl up his body. The pressure behind his eyes subsided, but he was beyond caring about mere bits of orbital flesh. He rolled on the ground, pressing his palms against his face,
protecting it from the bugs that feasted on the rotting dead.
He knew better than to try to flee.
Still she laughed.
“You disappoint me, but you amuse me. Since very little has amused me in these weeks since those cursed Atlanteans tricked me into killing my Barrabas, I will let you live,” she said. The rush of relief that roared through his ears was so loud that he almost missed her next words.
“I want Conlan’s baby brother,” she whispered, trailing one long fingernail down her cheek. “I will take the King’s Vengeance for my own.”
Caligula sat up, forcing himself not to flail as a wave of maggots squirmed up his body. It is illusion, it is illusion, it is illusion, he told himself.
Then they crawled into his mouth.
She laughed again at the sound of his soul-rending shrieks, clapped her hands together, and the maggots vanished.
It took him a few moments longer to be able to stop shrieking.
“I had heard that maggots were your particular…weakness,” she murmured.
He raised his eyes and dared to look at her face for the first time since she’d arrived, knowing he should not. Unable to resist. Immediately he sank, enthralled as any pitiful human, into the seductive flames in her red eyes, which glowed like unholy jewels set in her pale, pale face. Such spectacular beauty was obscene when imposed on the face of painful death.
Anubisa pushed him with one delicately shod foot and knocked him over. He fell on top of Drakos, who continued to moan quietly on the ground, finally catching the vampire goddess’s attention.
“My Drakos, is that you? Where were you when Barrabas needed you?” she asked, her voice betraying the first hint of uncertainty Caligula had ever heard from her. But it vanished so quickly he was sure he must have been mistaken. He didn’t dare to dwell on it for fear she would somehow know and make the maggots return.
“You are either unreliable, or you are a traitor, General Drakos,” she hissed, lashing out at the cowering vampire with her foot. He soared a dozen feet through the air and crashed into the craggy rock of the cavern wall, then lay on the ground where he fell, still and silent.
Caligula watched as Anubisa hurled herself across the cavern toward Drakos. “Either way, today is your day to die. Be advised that it shall not go quickly for you,” she called out, and her wild, insane laughter spiked shards of pain and madness into Caligula’s eardrums.
As Anubisa landed in front of him, Drakos finally raised his head from the ground and almost—but not quite—looked up at the goddess. “I am no traitor, and I can prove it,” he said, his voice rough and broken as his body soon would be. “I can give you the rebel leader, Quinn.”
Chapter 8
The palace gardens, Atlantis
Erin stood, entranced, staring at the vibrantly colored masses of flowers, many of which were species she’d never seen before. She’d rounded a corner on the stone path from the castle and spotted lush, dark purple flowers that looked a lot like roses—except each blossom was the size of a dinner plate. The blooms covered the dark green-leafed bushes surrounding a small white gazebo. The visual contrast was stunning, and she wished with a fresh stab of pain that her sister Deirdre were there to share it with her.
She’d slipped out of the spacious room assigned to her in the palace and found a door to the outside; fresh air and the space she craved. Now she stood alone for the first time in the several hours since they’d arrived in Atlantis, surrounded by the wild and delicate fragrances of a cascade of flowering beauty.
“Atlantis,” she whispered, tasting the syllables. Atlantis. A land born in myth, lost in legend. Yet, somehow, here she stood. It was impossible, but the impossible had become her reality.
The opals on her fingers sang out to her, warning her of his presence mere seconds before iridescent mist shimmered down in front of her. The sunlight—sunlight?—fractured into a prism of sparkling diamonds, and suddenly he was there.
Ven.
“Somehow I knew I’d find you here,” he said, bowing slightly. “Are you well?”
She stared up at him, not trusting the warmth she’d felt when he appeared. The feeling of safety. Of home. She did not know this man, regardless of what the rings on her fingers might be telling her. And it might be petty, but it didn’t help that he looked so damn good in his white shirt and jeans, with his wavy hair hanging loose to his shoulders. Actually, it kind of ticked her off.
Her emeralds sang again, and the opals chimed in on harmony, and she gritted her teeth against hearing their song. What do gemstones know, anyway? Useless hunks of rock.
“I’m fine,” she finally replied. “Other than the whole part where you dumped me into the frigid waters off Whidbey Island, expected me to believe some magical doorway was going to let me into the mythical lost continent of Atlantis, then brought me to the palace drenched and looking like a drowned rat.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Perfectly fine, thanks for asking. And how is there sunlight down here however many miles under the sea?”
He blinked, then a slow and dangerous smile spread across his face, and her heart started dancing to a rapid beat. “I’m sorry about the freezing water and the drenched part. The portal almost always sends us through dry. But it does have a mind of its own and likes to play practical jokes sometimes.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I noticed that you came through perfectly dry, in spite of being right there in the water with me. I just figured it was a royalty thing.” Not to mention that she’d been too busy fighting her gemstones and their reaction to him to shield in any way.
“No, trust me, the portal has no particular respect for my princely genes,” he said, laughing. “It very nearly let me drown the last time through.”
She gasped a little. “Really? Then why do you use it? It’s pretty obvious you’ve got enough power or magic or something to be able to figure out another way in and out of here.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But when you have a source of magic that does a job for more than ten thousand years, sometimes you quit looking for alternatives.” His voice was grim, and the shadow that crossed his face made her wonder if this was a conversation he’d had before. He held out his hand to her. “Shall we walk?”
She lifted her hand, and the emeralds in her rings trilled out a sharp, clarion call. She jerked her hand back and took a step away from him. His eyes widened, and he lowered his own outstretched hand to his side. “What is that song, Erin? What is that music I hear when I touch you or even come close to touching you?”
She took another step back, even as she realized flight was futile. She was standing on the lost continent of Atlantis, maybe miles below the sea’s surface, and “nowhere to run” took on a whole new meaning.
“Tell me, Erin. Tell me what it means to be a gem singer.”
Ven’s mind kept returning to the vision he’d had when the bomb had been close to detonating. Funny how the last thing the mind conjures up when the body is getting ready to be blown to hells and back kind of stays with a man. In his vision, Erin had stood in this exact place, near the gazebo that had been his hideaway as a child. Now she wore her jeans and sweater instead of the blue silk robes he’d…
His mind stuttered to a stop. Complete and total, full-on, not going there, STOP. But his brain—heart?—kept right on making the connection that he hadn’t seen before.
Blue silk robes. The traditional wedding attire for Atlantean royal brides.
My lord Poseidon, if this is your idea of a joke, I’m not laughing.
When he opened his eyes and unclenched his jaw, he realized Erin was staring at him as if she saw something peculiar.
Well, she did. The Atlantean who’d sworn all his life never to be tied down to only one woman was suddenly having visions of a witch in an Atlantean bridal gown. Clearly he was having some kind of mental breakdown.
“Bad timing,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Excuse me? Bad timing? For what? Bad
timing to be yanked out of my normal life? Okay, maybe it’s not all that normal, but normal enough that nobody was dropping bombs on me.” Her voice was getting louder and more high-pitched with each question, and Ven figured he wasn’t the only one on the verge of that rubber room. They were all going to be swimming under the cuckoo’s nest at this rate.
She stepped closer and jabbed her finger at him, almost but not quite poking him in the chest. “Bad timing to be whisked off to Atlantis? Bad timing to discover that my sister is not dead but may be a vampire slave to one of the most evil, depraved tyrants in history? And that the bastard wants me, too?”
He held up his hands in an “I surrender” gesture, but she wasn’t done with him.
“Don’t talk to me about bad timing, okay, Ven? Just don’t.” Her shoulders slumped, and her voice caught on the words. Suddenly, all the sane and practical reaons he had for keeping their relationship strictly professional flew out of his mind, and he wanted to hold her. Wanted to comfort her. Wanted to take away the pain in her eyes.
Couldn’t think of one valid reason not to hold her. He took a step closer and pulled her into his arms and—for the space of a single, perfect moment—she relaxed into his embrace.
The scent and feel of her silken hair caused things low in his body to tighten. He pulled her against himself, fighting his own instincts in order to be gentle. The feel of her soft curves against the hardness of his own body licked flames through his skin wherever they touched. Even though they were both fully clothed, holding her in his arms shot a raging case of hunger and need through him that was more powerful than any he’d ever felt before. His body jerked a little from the rush of heat, and he tightened his arms, unable to deny his primitive desire to hold her, claim her. Never let her go.
She gasped a little, and then she mumbled something under her breath, and he flew up and away from her and landed on top of the gazebo, flat on his back, the breath smashed out of his lungs. He stared up at the magically created sunlight and clouds at the top of the dome, wheezing, while he tried to force his lungs to cooperate and inhale a little oxygen.
