by Alyssa Day
Quinn nodded, and Alaric, in spite of serious misgivings, allowed it. He felt the brush of powerful magic, so very foreign to his own that he couldn’t begin to comprehend it, and then the feeling passed as swiftly as a bird seeking prey in the cool night air.
The tiger shivered and then lay still. Daniel shook his head.
“I don’t know if he’ll ever return. All I know is that he’s somewhere in there. Deep inside, or maybe even not inside the tiger, but very nearby. But he won’t come back because we push him. He warned me quite specifically that if we try, he’ll choose never to come back.”
“If he thinks he’s more stubborn that I am, he’s sadly mistaken. Let’s go, Alaric. Take us away, and give me time to let this tiger heal and find himself again,” Quinn said, finally rising from her knees.
Alaric took her hand and called to his magic to lift Jack on a wave of power. He took a step toward the portal and then hesitated.
Duty, again. Somehow, after centuries thinking of nothing else, it was suddenly so hard to remember. He looked to Reisen, the warrior who had first betrayed Atlantis and now worked so hard to redeem himself. Or so Quinn said. Alaric had his doubts. One never trusted a traitor a second time. But Reisen wasn’t his concern. Healing the injured was.
“Do others here need healing? I forget my duties.”
Reisen shook his head. “No, we have only minor injuries in those still alive. You . . . you go to Atlantis?”
“You can return home,” Alaric said reluctantly. “Your exile was self-imposed. Conlan offered forgiveness and healing.”
Reisen didn’t move. “I have one final mission to perform for Quinn.”
The small human from Quinn’s group moved closer to Reisen and offered her thanks for his help as tears streamed down her pale face. She said something to Quinn; something about taking care of Jack, but Alaric didn’t listen. Didn’t care.
Everything he cared about in the world was wrapped up in Quinn’s happiness, and he’d failed her. He’d been unable to bring Jack back to himself. He started to follow her as she headed toward the portal, head bent, gaze on the ground. Her shoulders hunched around her neck, as if awaiting another blow.
Alaric issued a final warning to Daniel, whose quest with Serai must succeed, and then he and Jack, who still rested on his cushion of magic, followed Quinn into the shimmer of light, which would hopefully take them to the one place he doubted any would think to look for them.
Not even the sea god himself.
“Take us to Mount Fuji.”
Chapter 1
A hidden cave inside of Mount Fuji, Japan
The portal opened and Alaric, warrior and high priest of Atlantis, stepped through, followed by a shell-shocked rebel leader and a five-hundred-pound tiger shape-shifter who might have permanently lost his humanity.
“Oh, Alaric,” said the ancient man who stood waiting for them, sighing and shaking his head. “You do get into the most fascinating trouble.”
“Interesting you should say that, Archelaus,” Alaric said. “I need a place to hide for a time, while Quinn tries to help Jack remember that he’s human, too, and not just a tiger.”
Quinn barely glanced at him, her eyes dull with pain and exhaustion, but she never let go of his hand. It was more physical contact than he’d allowed himself to have with her in a very long time.
Archelaus took them all in with his sharp gaze. The old man, long since retired as mentor to the Atlantean warrior training academy, never missed anything.
“And Atlantis? Are the Seven Isles still in jeopardy?”
“Aren’t they always?” Alaric sliced a hand through the air in dismissal of the topic. “We need a place to rest. Food. A refuge—we need to hide a tiger.”
Archelaus pointed at something behind them. “Who is that?”
Alaric whirled around, shocked to see a stranger—a delicate, dark-haired woman—step out of the portal.
“Who are you?” he demanded, pushing Quinn behind him. None but Atlanteans could call the portal, and this woman clearly was not Atlantean, but of Asian descent.
She blinked in apparent confusion. “Konnichiwa,” she began, offering a basic greeting in Japanese, but then she continued in ancient Atlantean as she slowly collapsed until she lay curled up on the ground next to the tiger, who ignored her completely. “I am the spirit of the portal, and I am this woman, who came to Mount Fuji to die.”
“You came here to die. We came here to force Jack to live,” Quinn said, and then she started laughing, a terrible, almost hysterical laugh. “Lucky we have Poseidon’s high priest with us, isn’t it?”
Alaric stared down at Quinn and fought the tidal wave of unfamiliar, unwanted emotion threatening to swamp him. “Yes. I will do what I can for him, as I promised.”
Archelaus sighed again. “You have amazingly bad timing, my friend.”
“Timing has nothing to do with need,” Alaric snapped, finally out of patience with the day, the situation, and the centuries of standing alone as priest to a capricious god.
“Timing has everything to do with danger,” the older man returned calmly, as he draped his sweater over the unconscious woman who’d claimed to be what she couldn’t possibly be. “The vampire goddess Anubisa is back from her sojourn in the land of Chaos, and this time she swears to destroy Atlantis and every member of the Atlantean royal family. You have never been more needed by your people in your entire life, I would imagine.”
“I am needed here,” Alaric said, staring at Quinn. “Atlantis can burn in the nine hells for all I care. I have sacrificed enough to Poseidon. My days as high priest are done.”
* * *
Quinn collapsed onto a low bench against one wall of the room or cave or wherever they’d ended up. Strange that she’d spent more time in caves since becoming the leader of the North American human rebel contingent than she’d ever dreamed possible. Straight from caves in Sedona, where she’d battled vampires and evil bankers, to Japan. A wave of grief and exhaustion, fought back and repressed for far too long, swept through her and threatened to drown her in futility and despair.
Jack. Her comrade; her partner in the rebellion. Her friend. She could finally admit she loved him with some small part of her stony, blackened heart, although it wasn’t the kind of love he might want. She loved him like a brother; the one she’d never had and had never known she wanted. Her big, scary, wounded warrior of a brother, who just happened to shift into a quarter ton of tiger sometimes. They’d fought together for years—years of trying to fight back the tide of darkness after the vampires announced to the world that they were real and then promptly proceeded to try to take it over. No matter how hard they pretended otherwise, vampires viewed humans as sheep for the slaughter. Unfortunately, most people were easily fooled or else too apathetic to care that the town’s new mayor or sheriff just happened to be a bloodsucker making a power grab.
Easy enough to make people disappear from behind the authority of a badge. Even the FBI’s P-Ops division had discovered that, when they’d found traitors in their midst. The president fired the director of Paranormal Operations and half of his staff when that inconvenient truth had surfaced.
Quinn sighed, fully aware that her brain was jumping from thought to thought in a futile effort to quit thinking about Jack. If they couldn’t help him . . . but they would. Alaric would. She refused to question her unshakable belief in Alaric or even to peer more closely at the reasons for it. She didn’t have time to get involved with any man—and certainly not with a man who was bound by both sworn oath and magic to Poseidon. The sea god himself, swimming out of the page of legends and into the middle of her pain-wracked, screwed-up life.
She stared at the floor, unable to muster even a spark of interest as Alaric conferred with the older man. Archelaus. Although older might not apply. Just because the man looked to be at least a century old, appearances were deceiving with Atlanteans. A casual glance would put Alaric in his early thirties or even late twenties, until th
e one doing the glancing looked into the dark caverns of those emerald-green eyes.
Ancient eyes. Centuries of brutal knowledge, blood, and death had passed before them—those eyes that were always faintly glowing with the overspill of magical power he couldn’t quite contain. He was at least five hundred years old. Strong enough to be the most powerful high priest Atlantis had ever known, or so some said.
Differences of opinion on that subject had been emerging, however. Politics. Like she gave a flying crap about politics. Bottom line: he didn’t look like a man who’d lived half a thousand years . . . until you looked into his eyes.
He was nearly six and a half feet of pure, primal warrior. His black hair had grown past his shoulders; it had been a few inches shorter when she’d first met him. Not much time for haircuts when a man was saving the world, probably.
She laughed to herself. He’d saved her life and broken her heart. Strange that healing one bullet wound could accomplish all of that.
She closed her eyes but could still see his face, as if it had imprinted on her mind with the strength of a hammer into molten brass. A face too strong—too male—to be called beautiful, but too perfect to be called anything else. All hard lines and sculpted angles. The face of a man who commanded absolute obedience, unqualified respect, and . . . something else. Something he’d never wanted.
Terror.
Vampires and rogue shape-shifters alike were terrified of the rumors and the reality. Quinn had heard men call him the high priest of death—but they never called him that to his face, or even very loudly. That, by itself, was no bad thing in a warrior priest, to be feared by his enemies.
But it was more than that. Even Alaric’s allies sometimes feared him, and Quinn had seen how brutal a blow that was to him. Poseidon’s high priest would be called a wizard of the highest level if he practiced his magic in the human hierarchy. Hell, he blew the hierarchy out of the water.
Ha. Water. Atlantis. She’d made a funny.
Alaric shifted to capture her in his hot green gaze, and she wondered if he knew she’d been thinking about him. Archelaus said something, and Alaric turned his head back toward the man, giving Quinn the chance to study him unobserved. Even in ripped and bloodstained clothes from the battle they’d just fought, his body was a seductive delight, worthy of starring in any woman’s fantasies. All hard muscle and perfect proportion. Even she, who’d spent the past decade or so surrounded by warriors and soldiers in her rebel army, had to admit that Alaric was in a class all by himself.
And he could never, ever be hers. Even now, devastated and destroyed by what had happened to Jack, she felt a dull pang at that.
He turned toward her again, and this time he stared a blazing path down her body. Probably looking for any injury he could heal with his magic. She herself wasn’t much to look at. It never failed to surprise her that an Atlantean god of a man would be interested in a scruffy, skinny freedom fighter who dressed in other people’s castoffs and hadn’t worn makeup since she was sixteen years old. Back when the world was innocent of all the dark and twisted things that did far worse than merely go bump in the night.
Alaric headed toward her with that nearly vampire-fast speed of his, and he was kneeling before her almost before she’d seen him take his first step.
“Are you injured?” It was command more than question. The Tell Me Now was implied.
“No.” She lifted her chin, knowing he’d read her defiance. Not caring much.
His eyes narrowed, and he gently grasped her jaw in one strong hand, tilting her chin to the side.
“You lie. Blood is seeping from this scrape on your neck.”
A pulse of blue-green light shimmered briefly, and she knew from the accompanying warmth that he’d healed her.
She attempted a smile. Failed. Settled for truth. “Your manners could use some work. ‘You lie.’ Really?”
He released her chin but rested his hand against her now-healed skin, as if unwilling to break the contact. “How is stating fact a breach of manners?”
This time, she did smile, although it was a mere quirk of her lips. He was untamed and always would be, like the other feral man in her life.
“Jack,” she said, her voice anguished. “Alaric, will we ever find a way to restore his humanity?”
Her warrior priest turned his powerful gaze to the tiger, lying so still on the ground.
“I will do all in my power, Quinn, but I cannot lie to you. The chances are not good.”
Chapter 2
Six weeks later
Quinn sat in her claustrophobic room and stared at nothing, trying to ignore the quarter ton of tiger leaning up against her. She wondered if she should take another shower, wander back to the garden, or simply bash her head against the wall to alleviate the unmitigated disappointment and sense of failure. As always, the idea of showers in a cave vaguely amused her. She hadn’t bothered to ask how Archelaus had installed showers and other modern amenities in a cave. She’d seen enough of Atlantean power over the element of water to take it for granted. Of course, in a world where vampires, shape-shifters, and even the Fae had walked out of fairy tales and into reality a little more than a decade ago, there were many, many things that nobody bothered to disbelieve anymore.
The crystal clear water in her cup was from a mountain stream right here on Mount Fuji—no magic involved except that of Mother Nature herself. It tasted better than any water she’d ever had before. She stared down at it as if answers to her multitude of problems might be hidden at the bottom of the cup.
Whiskey would have been better. She could usually find an answer or two at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Even if they were the wrong answers, at least she had a place to start. The one thing she’d never, ever been good at was feeling helpless, and now she’d lived through six entire weeks of being completely and utterly unable to help Jack.
They’d rested. He’d healed from his physical injuries and eaten enough to clear out half of Japan’s livestock, probably. But human Jack—her Jack—still hadn’t put in an appearance, and it was looking less and less likely every day.
Jack looked briefly around the room and then dropped his head back down on her leg. The low bed sagged from the weight of five hundred pounds of tiger, but she wasn’t about to tell him to sleep on the floor. He’d voluntarily followed her into the room and up onto the bed, after ignoring her for the past week. She was glad and—maybe, just maybe—a little bit hopeful that he’d followed her at all.
She hesitantly put a hand on his head, and his eyes snapped open. Another mystery of the shape-shift: his eyes were green in human form and pure amber fire as a tiger. She stared into their depths, thinking of that saying about eyes being the windows to the soul. If it were true, then there was nobody home in Jack’s soul.
Nobody human.
Only a disturbingly feral intelligence peered out at her from behind that glowing amber. She steeled herself against the shudder trying to shake its way through her body and rubbed one silky ear between her fingers. Jack closed his eyes, and they sat there, two wounded warriors, heart-sore and silent, for several long minutes. Jack’s rumbling snore was hypnotic, and Quinn’s eyes started to close. Jack tensed and lifted his massive head a few seconds before she heard Alaric’s voice.
He’d been there for her, staying in the background and giving her the time and space she’d needed to rest and heal; the time she’d needed to try to help Jack recover his humanity. But during every minute of those long weeks, no matter how her heart filled with despair over Jack, Alaric had remained in her awareness. A solitary presence, brooding and watchful. He’d told her when Serai and Daniel had succeeded in their quest; he’d let her know that Riley and the baby were doing well. Other than that, he’d honored her request for time alone, but she could tell from the intensity of his emotion that his patience was coming to an end.
“Are you ready to talk to me yet?” he asked quietly, dividing his attention between her face and the tiger at her side.
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“Where is that woman, or portal spirit, or whatever she is?” Quinn asked. She hadn’t had the energy to be curious about anything before now.
“Archelaus and his people are tending to her. As you know, this place is a sanctuary, for those with the most dire need. They are well prepared to care for lost souls.”
“Is that what we are? Is that why you brought us here?” She heard the bitterness in her voice but was too tired to try to disguise it. The fight had been too long. The losses too high. More than a decade of her life fighting for human independence from the vampires and shape-shifters who were taking over the country and the world, and she was no further along now than she’d been as a desperate teenager. Even with the Atlanteans on her side, it never felt like enough. Never felt like the rebels could win. Now there were even some humans joining Team Evil—black magic practitioners and, horribly, non-magical human collaborators who willingly served the bad guys, like sheep volunteering for the slaughter.
She shook her head. “Let them do it. Why do we even care? It’s social Darwinism.”
“What are you talking about?” Alaric crossed the room to her side and pulled her to her feet, and she caught her breath at the electricity that surged between their clasped hands. Even the lightest touch from him was like a roundhouse punch to her emotions. She didn’t need to be an emotional empath to know what he was feeling right now.
Burning need. Intense desire. A furnace of wanting seared between them, and she fought to maintain her balance. She put a hand on his chest to hold him at a distance, but the feel of his heartbeat under her fingers only made it worse.
“I need for you to put a damper on all the strong emotion, please,” she whispered. “I don’t have the reserves of strength right now to handle it. I’ve spent so much energy trying to convince Jack to come back—”
