by Alyssa Day
Riley jumped up, with some thought of protecting her sister from Alaric, who was the scariest man she'd ever seen.
A man who just happened to have magic powers of death going for him.
Inexplicably, Quinn started to laugh. The sound shivered through the room, high and wild. "Welcome to the tea party, fish face. I have a strange feeling that you and I need to talk, especially after you practically had your hand on my boob," she said, still smiling that eerie smile. "At the very least, it seems like you owe me dinner."
Riley looked at them all—Conlan, Ven, Alaric, and her sister—and slowly shook her head. "Has the whole world gone insane?"
Chapter 22
Reisen limped down the stairs of the abandoned warehouse Micah had located for them. Thank Poseidon that the Trident was safe, still strapped to his back under his coat.
He'd been lucky.
Luckier than five of his men. Five warriors slain, and for what? To protect a human population stupid enough to welcome the shape-shifters and the bloodsuckers with bared necks?
The only possible glimmer of light in the black fucking tunnel of his day was that there hadn't been any mention of the battle in the media. Of course, the furry-assed controlled the media since they'd taken over CNN and the broadcast networks, so he guessed it wasn't enormously surprising.
Still, he decided to take it as a point for his side. After all, Alaric couldn't follow a news story that he never heard.
The priest would be tracking the news. Alaric would make it his life's mission to find a way to track Reisen down and separate his balls from his body.
Slowly.
He glanced at the glowing numbers on the face of his father's silver pocket watch. It was ironic that the only remembrance he carried of his father was the one rendered unstable by the powers he channeled.
Watches didn't like the powers of the elements, much. He pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket, grimacing at the blank screen.
Not much machinery did, come to think of it.
But he wouldn't need to confirm his appointment with the Platoist Society. It wasn't a meeting they were likely to forget.
And when the Trident was whole and in his control, the five he'd lost today would be avenged.
His father, too.
The landwalkers would burn.
Conlan positioned the players in his impromptu meeting quite deliberately. Alaric leaned against the wall on one side of the room.
Riley sat with Quinn on a couch directly across the room from Alaric.
He and Ven took the other two walls, so it looked like some weird game of four-player Atlantean chess, using real game pieces.
Come to think of it, he'd felt a hell of a lot like a pawn ever since his return.
That shit was over.
Quinn stretched her legs out and crossed one boot over the other, in a clear display of studied nonchalance. She was every bit as tough as her sister but—unlike Riley—Quinn knew she was a hard-ass. She owned it.
And for a few seconds, when he'd allowed her inside his mind, he'd felt the black stain on her own soul. She had secrets, Quinn Dawson did.
Dangerous ones.
"Are we talking or just staring at each other all night?" Quinn drawled. "Not that you aren't all a fine bunch of eye candy, but I've got things to do, people to kill."
Riley stared at her sister in disbelief. Conlan sent a light touch to Riley's emotions, checking for any false note.
No, nothing. She was completely bewildered by Quinn's presence in this disaster.
Conlan folded his arms over his chest. "Interesting choice of words. Perhaps you're ready to tell us what you were doing with those shape-shifters you call 'your' wolves."
Alaric said nothing, merely stared at Quinn, unblinking, eyes glowing a hot green.
Quinn laughed. "Yeah. Right. Well, you show me yours and I'll show you mine, as they say."
"Hey, what exactly do you want to see? I'm game," Ven said.
At the words, the room trembled, as if an undersea fault line threatened. Conlan felt the icy wind shear past his face toward his brother, and knew what caused the temblor.
Or, rather, who.
"Cut it out, priest," he growled. "Whatever you're playing at, we don't have time for this shit. We need to put our respective cards on the table, now."
It was as if he hadn't spoken.
"You want me to show you mine?" Alaric stalked across the room toward Quinn and Riley, but stopped a half dozen paces away, before Conlan or Ven had a chance to move. "Well, how about this?"
Eyes glowing hotter than Conlan had ever seen, Alaric casually lifted first one, then the second, of his hands into the air. In tandem with the motions, Quinn and Riley were lifted off the couch until they were levitating inches from the ceiling, still in seated positions, resting on glowing balls of blue-green light.
"How's that?" Alaric demanded. "Or how about this?"
He sliced both hands in a downward motion, then raised then, palms up, muttering something under his breath. The women plunged down toward the floor, then a fountain of water caught them and gracefully lifted them both back onto the couch.
With another abrupt hand movement, the water disappeared. Neither Riley nor Quinn had a drop on them.
Riley gasped a little. "Wow, that was pretty… that was—"
"Cute parlor trick, fish face," Quinn said. Then she feigned an enormous yawn. "Are we done with the smoke and mirrors? Or, excuse me, that was water and mirrors, right?"
In the space of a single heartbeat, Alaric was lifting her off the couch and up against him. "Don't push me, female. We would both regret it."
But it wasn't anger that Conlan heard in Alaric's voice. It was an almost-pleading desperation.
When Quinn answered, her voice was so quiet that Conlan could barely make out her words. When he did, they didn't make any sense.
"Forget whatever you think you saw in me, beautiful one," she murmured. "I am ruined."
What she did next sent both Conlan and Ven rushing across the room to protect her. Because she lifted her hands and put them on Alaric's face.
A sound Conlan had never heard before issued from the priest's throat, a hard, choked sound filled with soul-destroying pain. A shock wave of a sound that literally smashed Conlan and his brother backward, landing them hard on the floor.
In the seconds it took for him to catch his breath and look up, Alaric was gone. Quinn stood alone, hands still frozen in place where Alaric's face had been.
Tears running down her own.
Riley jumped up and put her arms around her sister. "Maybe we should put this off until the morning," she said, glaring at Conlan. "I think Quinn has been through enough today. We've both been through enough. I need to take her home, Conlan."
Before Conlan could utter a word of protest, support came from an unexpected source. Quinn wiped the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then cleared her throat.
"No," she said. "I think you should stay with them."
The four of them sat around the kitchen table, Riley and Quinn holding mugs of hot, sweet tea. Conlan and Ven each had a beer. Conlan sat near enough to Riley that she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to.
It's not like she needed to touch him.
Much.
Most of the other men had all stopped by, trailing in by ones and twos, some bringing food and beer, some bringing news.
None bringing results. Reisen had vanished.
Riley had tried to smile at each of them, especially Denal, who'd kneeled in front of her and presented an armload of flowers, then backed out of the room, careful to maintain a safe distance from Conlan and Ven.
Ven had made some crack about Denal's schoolboy crush, but nobody'd even mustered up a smile.
Now they sat, each of them lost in his or her own private thoughts. When Justice appeared, it was almost a relief.
"So, the gang's all here," he said in that smart-ass way he had. Of course, anybody who
could carry off a waist-length blue braid worn over a sword strapped to his back probably could be as much of a smart-ass as he wanted.
She'd seen what he could do with that sword.
"My lawn will never be the same," she muttered.
Quinn looked up from contemplating her mug and caught sight of Justice. "You!" she gasped. "I thought you were an urban legend."
Ven leaned back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. "Right. The nutball axe murderer who hangs out at Lover's Lane, and Justice. Makes sense, really, when you think about it. Both of them give you a case of the ugly creepies, right?"
Justice ignored the ribbing and focused in on Quinn. "What exactly have you heard?"
"Oh, defender of the weak, modern-day Robin Hood, blah blah blah. You're a little hard to miss," Quinn returned, sweeping her gaze from his boots all the way up the six and a half feet or so to the top of his blue-plaited head.
Justice bowed slightly. "You, too, would be difficult to miss. Your fury and grief burn brightly enough to light up the city. You might wish to learn from your sister the technique of shielding your emotions."
With that, he left the room, long strides eating up the floor, leaving Quinn scowling at his back.
Riley thought it was past time for her to intervene. "What is going on, Quinn? I'm getting the feeling that you're not an administrative assistant for an insurance company, after all."
Quinn's laugh sounded rusty, as if it had been a long time since she'd found anything funny. "No, not for an insurance company. Like I said before, I need to know what the deal is with the Atlanteans before I tell you anything."
She pinned Conlan with a stare. "What side are you coming down on?"
"Side of what?" Riley asked. "What are you talking about?"
"Side of the revolution, baby sister."
Riley sucked in a breath. Sure, she'd heard rumors of a revolution against the rapid encroachment of the supernatural species into human society and government. But she'd stayed out of it. She wasn't political—she had enough to do just trying to keep her clients healthy and fed.
And alive.
Conlan nodded slightly. "Okay. Here's as much of the truth as I'm willing to tell you right now, and I do it on the condition that neither of you share this information with anyone."
Ven's chair came down on all four legs with a bang. "You can't do this, Conlan. You can't—"
"Riley has a right to know, since we are taking her home with us. And her sister must therefore know, as well."
Riley felt the nerves in her neck go board rigid. "You said that before. Funny, I don't seem to remember being asked to go anywhere."
Conlan took her hand in his and squeezed it. "Do you trust me?"
"I—" She paused, thought back to the glimpses she'd had into his memories; into his soul. "Yes. I trust you. This aknasha thing we have between us—it may be overwhelming my common sense, but I do know that I can trust you. But where is home? Are you really talking about the lost continent of Atlantis?"
Ven snorted. "We were never lost. Just hiding from you fools."
Quinn leaned forward, resting her folded arms on the table. "I'd watch who you called fools if I were you, fish boy."
He grinned. "Wanna check me for gills?"
"Enough! Can we quit with the bickering and just get on with it?" Riley asked.
Conlan nodded. "Yes. We're from the continent of Atlantis. More than eleven thousand years ago, the Seven Isles rode the surface of the waters as do your own lands. Our civilization and technology were far superior to that of the humans of the time, but we shared such knowledge of the sciences and the arts as we deemed appropriate."
"So you condescended to help out us poor lowly humans?" Quinn sneered.
"Quinn. Not helping," Riley murmured, and her sister rolled her eyes, but subsided.
"As often happens, the humans with whom Atlantis had always enjoyed a peaceful coexistence became greedy," Conlan continued. "Not all; not even most. But a few corrupt ones in power. Enough to push the idea of conquering our lands and taking for themselves what was ours."
"Yeah, like especially the gold and anything of value," Ven growled.
"We could have worked it out. According to the ancient scrolls, we were on the verge of working it out. But that's when the vamps decided to get involved," Conlan said.
Riley shuddered. "You had vampires even back then?"
"The bloodsuckers have been around since the beginning, when the god Chaos bedded his twisted daughter Anubisa and began the whole foul—" Ven lapsed into a lyrical-sounding language that wasn't the least bit recognizable to Riley.
"They may be aknasha, but they don't understand ancient Atlantean, Ven," Conlan observed, a wry grin quirking up the edges of his lips. Then the humor faded from his face and an expression so terrifyingly haunted took its place that Riley squeezed his hand, hard, to try to pull him out of whatever hell he saw in his mind.
It seemed to help, a little, but Riley still saw the stamp of a predator on the fierce cast of his face. She was careful not to reach out and touch his emotions.
She knew she didn't want to visit whatever he saw in his mind.
"Anubisa," he ground out. "The unholy union of Chaos and Anubisa, the goddess of death. Their offspring were the ancestors of all bloodsuckers. Anubisa is a vamp herself but, as near as we can figure out, she feeds on negative emotion more than blood. The more passionate, the better."
"Like the pain of torture," Riley whispered, suddenly understanding what she'd seen and felt in Conlan's memories.
He pulled his hand away from hers and smoothed his expression to a mask of calm.
A false mask of calm, most likely. How could he have survived that? How could anyone?
With the thought came despair. "How can we defeat somebody who thinks she's a goddess?"
"She is a goddess," Ven said.
Riley shook her head. "Not to me. I'm monotheistic and only recognize one God. Not that I'm disagreeing with your beliefs in any way, but I have to have faith that she's not all-powerful. In any event, if she has godlike powers, we're in trouble."
"You forget, we are also led by a god. Poseidon's power exceeds that of Anubisa," Ven pointed out.
Rage tore through her. "Well, where the hell was he when his own prince was being tortured nearly to death?" Riley shouted, shoving her chair back to stand. "Where was your stupid sea god then?"
Conlan pulled her into his arms for a brief hug, then smoothly pulled her to a seat on his lap, as if he'd been doing so for years.
"I am honored that you would defy Poseidon himself in your defense of me, mi amara aknasha" he murmured into her hair.
The feel of his breath on her ear stirred something down low in her abdomen, and her thigh muscles clenched. If Quinn and Ven hadn't been sitting right there, both of them staring with openmouthed disbelief, she would have turned in his lap and planted some major lip-lock on Conlan.
She might do it, anyway.
Quinn's eyes narrowed. "Fine. So big problems with the humans, and then what?"
Ven answered this time. "Then the gods got into a big stink of a fight, and the Cataclysm happened. Big, 'earth itself might be destroyed' kind of catastrophic shit that happens when a bunch of children start fighting over their toys."
Conlan's voice was a rumble in his chest against Riley's back. "Though my brother edges close to blasphemy, he is essentially correct. Atlantis was forced under the sea to protect itself, both from the humans who threatened and from the battle between the gods. First magic, then a mix of magic and technology have shielded us from discovery for these many years."
Riley, suddenly feeling shy, slid off Conlan's lap and back onto her own chair. "But you've been coming up to the surface all this time?"
"No, not always. It took time to learn the secrets of travel between our land and the surface. But we had sworn the oath as Warriors of Poseidon. The warriors of that time would stop at nothing to find a way to return to guard humans from the incr
easing vampire and shape-shifter threat."
Conlan drained his beer, put the bottle back on the table with some force. "It's our job to keep you safe, even when you do your best to hinder us."
Quinn toyed with her mug and then seemed to reach a decision. Shoving her curls out of her eyes with one hand, she started to speak. "Okay. I've been scanning you both and, for what it's worth, your emotions tell me that you're giving us the truth. I say for what it's worth because, if you really are Atlantean and an entirely separate species—"
She looked up for confirmation and Conlan nodded.
"Then it's possible that my much-prized abilities to scan emotion are worth precisely nothing when it comes to you. Are your emotions even remotely similar to ours?"
Ven started to respond, but she held up a hand. "No, don't bother. It feels true to me, and I have to go with my gut instinct, or I have nothing. And if I start doubting my gut now, the game, as they say, is up."
Riley put a hand on her sister's arm to confirm what her senses were telling her. Quinn was telling a truth that was very painful for her. Riley's nerve endings flinched back from the anguish underlying Quinn's words.
"It's okay, Quinn. Whatever you need to say. I'm right here," she murmured, sending waves of reassurance and love through their personal sister link.
"Well, tall, dark, and ugly over there called us fools. He's right. Not all of us, but enough of us hid under a rock and let change happen without trying to fight it," Quinn began, voice flat.
Riley winced at the echo of her earlier thoughts. Maybe Quinn thought she was a fool, too. "Not being political or marching on Washington doesn't make a person a fool, Quinn," she said. "Some of us try to make a difference on a local level."
Quinn grabbed her in a brief hug. "I wasn't talking about you, honey. You give twenty-four-seven to those losers you work so desperately to save. I'm talking about the people who sit on their fat asses and do nothing while vamps take over our government."
"They're not losers," Riley said quietly. "They're people who never had the basics to improve their lives. I try to help with that."
"I'm sorry. I know you do. You're right, they're not losers. And you're pretty much a fucking saint to do what you do. But my path is a little different."
