by Alyssa Day
“Is Justice badly injured? And the others? Quinn? Are they—”
Ven shook his head and his eyes darkened. “Justice is the least injured. Quinn nearly died; she took a knife thrust in her lungs. Brennan and Alexios were badly injured, as well.”
She struggled to stand up, forcing her bruised and battered body to cooperate. “Let me up! I can help them. I can sing—”
“Shh,” he soothed, gently pushing her back against the cushions. “Alaric has healed them all, as much as he could before even his energy faltered. That trick he pulled off nearly killed him, I think, but he won’t admit it. He saw Quinn fall and went ballistic. Your friend Gennae said that somehow he pulled magic from every witch in the city and channeled it along with his own in order to send that destructo-bolt of lightning through the warehouse. It was powerful enough to incinerate every vampire in a two-block radius on contact. We found piles of melting vampire slime all around the building. Clearly they were sending reinforcements.”
“What about your friend? Daniel? Was he destroyed as well?”
Ven shook his head. “I’m not sure I’d call him a friend. Seems like a friend could have warned us earlier or warded off that attack completely. To answer your question, I don’t know. The last I saw, he was hitting the ground with my bullet in his gut. It seems unlikely that he could have gotten away.”
A flash of something grim crossed his expression, and Erin impulsively reached out for his hand. “It’s not your fault. He asked you to shoot him. He must have known the danger he was in.”
His dark eyes iced over, and he pulled his hand from hers and stood up. “I feel no guilt for the death of a vampire. It has been our sworn duty for more than eleven thousand years to destroy their kind. If you are sure you are well, I need to go find Jack and ask if he will help me search for Christophe and Denal. I need their assistance to transport our wounded to Atlantis.”
She nodded and watched him walk away, thinking that whether he admitted it or not, he almost certainly regretted causing the death of even a single ally when the world seemed filled with enemies.
A familiar tingle of magic flickered at the edge of her consciousness, and she turned to see Gennae crossing the room toward her, her arms full of blankets. A young novice witch followed her with a tray of cups and mugs. Gennae nodded at Erin, then distributed the blankets, taking time to be sure her patients were comfortable. She and the novice handed out cups and mugs to any who were awake, and then Gennae carried a steaming mug over to Erin.
“Drink this, child.” She handed the fragrant tea to Erin and sat on the edge of the couch near Erin’s feet. “Are you well? That warrior seems to have appointed himself your personal bodyguard and would scarcely let me get near you.”
Indignation furrowed her brow. “As if I would hurt you. All he kept saying was, ‘We have traitors, lady, and I don’t know if you’re one of them.’ That Alaric person finally had to tell them that he’d scanned me, and I was no traitor. The nerve of them both!”
Erin swallowed a brief glimmer of amusement at the idea of Gennae facing up against Ven and Alaric. She’d never known a witch stronger than Gennae. But then again, Ven had said that Alaric pulled power from all the witches in Seattle…
“Did it affect you?” She knew the question was impertinent, but she suddenly needed to know. “When Alaric pulled power from the witches, did he pull yours as well?”
“No, I shielded. But I certainly felt it.” Anger and then a trace of bewilderment flashed across Gennae’s normally expressionless face. “I have only felt power like that once before, many years ago, from a wizard who was channeling death magic at the time. The power this Atlantean called was free of any taint of the dark, though. It was crystalline in its purity, and evocative of an ancient power that only the eldest of the Fae describe.”
“That would make sense then, since the Atlantean race seems to be as old as that of the Fae.”
Gennae nodded, then reached out to touch Erin’s hand. “I am afraid I must tell you that we have had bad news upon bad news tonight, Erin. Attacks occurred in several parts of the city simultaneously with the attack upon you. Several witches are dead, and others captured. One entire squad of the new paranormal ops unit was murdered; all five members were left hanging, eviscerated, off the roof of the Seattle Police Department.”
Erin shuddered at the image. “Caligula? It had to be him, Gennae, and you must see why we need to destroy that monster.”
For once, the older witch did not disagree. “There’s more. For me, personally, the worst news of all—” Her voice broke, and she bowed her head. Erin saw the tears fall onto Gennae’s clenched hands.
“What is it?” She looked around again, suddenly realizing who was missing. “Berenice and Lillian! Where are they?”
Gennae’s shoulders shook with the force of her suppressed sobs. “They are gone. Missing or possibly dead. What’s worse—much, much worse—is that one of them may have betrayed us.”
Chapter 18
Alaric watched Quinn sleep. Even while she was asleep, incapable of conscious thought, the force of her emotions swirled around him in an aura of deep blue, wine red, and misty gray. Some had named him the most powerful high priest ever anointed by Poseidon. Yet as he stood there and stared down at the fragile human female, he knew she had the power to destroy him.
He lingered, greedy for a few more stolen moments in her presence. Not knowing how she’d somehow climbed inside his soul. Not knowing why.
Not caring.
Only certain, with the knowledge born of dark and implacable hungers, that he wanted her—her touch, her mind, her soul—more than he’d ever wanted anything before.
Also certain that his duty and his destiny forbade it.
But duty surely wouldn’t deny him a single taste of her lips. He bent down silently, but as he came near, her eyes opened.
“Alaric. We have to stop meeting like this,” she said, her lush, soft, kissable lips curving in a smile. Somehow, he couldn’t take his eyes off her mouth. Even a priest of Poseidon, sworn to celibacy, could fantasize about her mouth.
She licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, and a bolt of lust slammed through him. He staggered back a step on knees suddenly gone weak.
Quinn sat up on the narrow bed, and her gaze darted around the small room the witches had given him for her. “Are you all right? Your face is a shade of gray that can’t be healthy. What happened? Where are my people?”
He held up a hand to stop the flow of questions and sank down into the single chair in the room. “A moment, please. It appears that my strength is not what I might wish it to be.”
A shocked awareness dawned in her eyes. “The attack. That vampire—he stabbed me—I should be dead.”
She swung her legs down off the side of the bed and braced herself with her hands. “The last thing I remember was feeling like I was drowning in my own lungs, and then either I passed out or the sky exploded. And why do I have a strong feeling that you had something to do with that?”
He stared at her and wondered how he ever could have mocked the poets. Clearly it was possible to drown in a woman’s eyes. Or at least to wish to be trapped inside her for all eternity.
But thoughts of being inside Quinn led to dark and impossible longings to strip her bare and plunge inside her right there on the bed where he’d finished healing her. To drive so far into her that she would never let him go.
Never want to let him go.
Impossible longings.
“Alaric?” Her breath caught on his name, as if she had seen his fantasies, or read the hidden corners of his mind. She was aknasha, and perhaps he was not shielding enough.
As he stared at her, still unable to speak, the temptation flashed through him. Just to let go, to drop his shields. To let her fully inside his barren soul, only for a few moments. Only long enough to see if she could discover any trace of the humanity that centuries of serving as Poseidon’s justice might not have burned out of h
im.
But duty was ingrained too deep. Destiny rode him too hard for him to imagine any other path. He locked down his shields and took a deep breath. “I am sorry, Quinn. I am…weary.”
She pushed herself off the bed to stand, unsteady on her feet. “I understand. I have the idea that I may need to thank you for saving my life again.” She crossed the narrow width of the room, knelt down in front of him, and put her hands on his knees. “So, thank you.”
He sat, frozen in place, the heat from her hands searing through his pants to the skin below, to the nerve endings, to the very blood cells that rushed through his veins. Caught in a sparkling prism of sensation, he knew that her gratitude would be his destruction.
“You cannot—” He could barely force the words past the pain suffocating him. “You cannot touch me, Quinn. You cannot ever touch me.”
She stared up at him, her enormous eyes gone as dark as despair and filled with an anguish beyond what could possibly be borne by such a fragile human. “I know, Alaric. I know I’m not worthy to touch you. I could never be worthy. But in this one moment, stolen from reality, please let me.”
He shook his head. She didn’t understand. It was he who could never be worthy of her, he who could not abandon his people and his duty and Atlantis, he who had performed such unredeemable actions that he could never erase the stains from his soul. “Quinn, no, you do not understand—”
But before he could finish the sentence he did not know how to form, she rose and touched her lips to his, and his world shattered. He leapt up in one powerful movement and yanked her into his arms and kissed her with all the passion and fury and urgent need that had been clawing at him since the first time he’d seen her face. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back, fervent longing in her taste, in her touch, in the glory of her warm and welcoming mouth.
He kissed her, his arms wrapped so tightly around her that a distant, sane part of his mind recognized that he might hurt her and he loosened his fierce hold, just a fraction. Not enough to let her go; he could never let her go.
She pulled back for a moment to draw a breath, and he pressed kisses to her face and neck and cherished her with a stream of words in Atlantean, words she could not understand, words she could not know spoke of longing and need and desperate, soul-deep hunger.
He lifted his face to claim her lips again, and saw the iridescent sparkle of her tears as they streamed down her face. “I knew it would be like this between us, Alaric,” she whispered. “I knew, and I knew it would be so much worse for me if I ever touched you. If I ever had a single taste of what I can never find or have or hold.”
Pain sliced through him, agony so fierce and grinding that his back arched from the strength of it and he jerked, startled, when his head bumped the ceiling of the room. He blinked and looked down, only to realize that he had floated, carrying her, several feet off the ground. He focused enough of his waning energy to gently lower them so that their feet touched the floor again, and then, his arms still tightly wrapped around her, he kissed the tears as they fell from her eyes.
“You honor me with your tears, mi amara,” he whispered. “I cannot be what you need, but know this. There has never walked the earth or the waters of the oceans a more worthy woman than you. Your courage and spirit shine brightly enough to pierce the most evil darkness. If I could have nothing else in this lifetime or the next, I would wish for an eternity at your side.”
She inhaled sharply, a harsh sound of pain that crushed the fragments of his heart that still remained in his chest. “Alaric, if you only knew…The things I’ve done. I can’t—”
He could no more stop himself than he could cease his need for breath. He bent to kiss her again, to somehow claim a kiss that would suffice to warm the next several centuries of his barren, lonely existence, but then stopped, alerted by a noise in the corridor. He flashed to stand between Quinn and the door a mere second before it slammed open.
Denal stood there, misery etched in every line of his face. “Conlan sent a message to us with one of the warrior trainees. It’s Riley. She’s worse. If we don’t get Erin and the Nereid’s Heart back to Atlantis in the next seventy-two hours, Marie says Riley may die.”
Ven drained the last of the coffee from his mug and refilled it, holding the pot up in a silent question to the rest of the room. The kitchen incongruously smelled like butter and cinnamon, homey scents that jarred with the grim mood of determination and despair that rode the room’s inhabitants.
Only Quinn and Erin nodded yes, so he poured the remaining coffee from the carafe into their mugs, walking past Justice, who sat with his head propped up in his hands. The head wound must be causing him pain, not to mention the slice across his chest he’d taken from a vamp’s sword, but the warrior had refused to allow any of the witches or Alaric to expend healing energy on him.
Alaric sat in a chair as far from Quinn as was physically possible in the spacious yellow and white kitchen, but the heat in the looks that the two of them kept shooting at each other was likely to set the place on fire. Ven didn’t know when he’d ever seen such naked anguish on the priest’s face, except maybe for when they’d learned that Anubisa had taken Conlan.
Gennae sat near Erin, speaking into her ear in a low tone, and Ven’s hands itched to go lift his gem singer into his arms and get her far, far away from this damned town. Away from the entire fucking state. He’d kidnap her if he had to, if only so much more than their own lives weren’t at stake.
He studied the weary droop to her head, the way she kept tucking her blond curls behind her ears in a nervous gesture, and amended that last thought. If her life were in danger, he might kidnap her anyway. Not that she’d ever forgive him if she believed Riley died through her own inaction.
Not that he’d ever forgive himself. The choice of risking Erin’s life or risking the lives of Riley and the baby ate at him worse than any torture that Anubisa could ever have planned. Of course, the vampire goddess was alive, according to Daniel. So maybe she’d had one of her unholy hands in the making of this dilemma.
Denal stumbled into the room, grief and exhaustion harsh in the lines around his mouth and eyes. “Brennan—he almost died, didn’t he? And Alexios, he’s still in bad shape, too. If I’d been there, maybe I could have—”
“Maybe you could have been killed or nearly killed, too,” Justice said, clenching his hands into fists and slamming one on the table. “We need to find out who the traitor is. They know every step we’re making, and they’re coming after us in numbers large enough to wipe us out.”
Gennae nodded. “We are sadly afraid that one of our ruling three is possibly a traitor. I can hardly countenance it, but the evidence suggests that Berenice betrayed us to Caligula and his blood pride either captured or killed Lillian.” Her voice contained only a hint of unsteadiness, and Ven got the idea that the women were very close to her but she’d be damned if she’d show any weakness.
Gotta admire that in a witch.
Erin’s hands tightened on her mug until her knuckles went white. “Berenice,” she said, all but spitting out the name. “I knew she was up to no good. Always poking and prodding at me with her jibes, trying to get me to give up my training and forget about my plan for revenge against that monster.”
As if she remembered that he’d named himself a monster, Erin’s gaze sought out Ven.
“They’re after you,” he said flatly. “They were after you in the attack here, and they were trying with everything they had to get through your shield tonight. Caligula wants you for some reason, and he’s throwing everything he’s got at us to try to get you.”
The little color she’d had in her face drained out at the words, but she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Well, he’s not going to get me.”
“Don’t worry, little witch. He’ll have to go through me to get to you, and that’s not going to happen,” Ven promised, amazed again at her courage. Amazed and—however reluctantly—impressed.
; “It’s not just about her, though, Ven,” Denal said. “Christophe and I scoured the city. You wouldn’t believe the destruction. The vamps tore through town in the space of an hour, from what we could learn. Anybody in their path is either dead or captured, probably to be turned. The P-Ops unit was caught completely off guard, and one entire squad is dead. Brutally murdered and left as a warning.”
Christophe came through the doorway from the hall. “All clear outside,” he said. “Whatever wards you’ve got on this place are apparently vamp-proof; we found more than a dozen smoking piles of decaying vamp slime around the perimeter. Two of your witches, one of our men, and Jack and a few of Quinn’s shifters are patrolling outside.”
“The wards of countless witches for more than a century protect this building,” Gennae replied, a hint of pride in her tone. “They will not get inside.”
“Wards are all well and good, but this ancient Roman emperor has entered the demolition age, don’t forget,” Ven said. “If he drops another bomb and Erin—or somebody who is awake and alert and can shield—isn’t around, kaboom! So much for your wards.”
Gennae shuddered but didn’t disagree. Erin stood up. “Well, Erin isn’t going to be around. I’ve changed my mind. He wants me, and he’s going to get me. If that will stop this carnage, I will gladly go and slit his throat in person.” The fact that her hands were shaking at her sides made the determination behind her words even more impressive, in spite of the fact that Ven wasn’t going to let her get anywhere near Caligula.
“No. There is no way you are going to come within a mile of that bastard,” he gritted out. “We will try to find the Nereid’s Heart, but then we get out, and I take you and it back to Atlantis to help Riley. When Brennan, Alexios, and Alaric are back up to full strength, we will go after Caligula with everything we’ve got and take him out. But you are not going to be part of it. Do you understand me?”
