by Alyssa Day
Never again.
* * *
Serai fought against the pain ripping through her insides as the vortex swallowed her and Daniel. It was the Emperor. Someone had it and was trying to work its magic. Someone not Atlantean—someone who didn’t know what he or she was doing. That must be why she’d awoken now, off schedule, and had been able to escape.
The fluctuation in the gem’s energy seared through her and doubled her over. She thought instantly of her fellow maidens, still trapped in stasis, and wondered how this would affect them. If they would survive it. Another burst of pain wrenched through her, and she wondered if she would survive it. What a great joke the universe would be playing if she survived millennia in stasis only to die in the first short hour of freedom.
The portal’s light warmed around her in a magical caress, as if it felt her pain and wanted to comfort her. At the same moment, Daniel’s strong arms wrapped around her. She rested her head against the hard muscles of his chest and sent a mental thank-you to the portal, just as it opened again and deposited them in the torch-lit darkness of what looked like a smallish cavern. Stumbling a little as her bare feet touched the cold stone of the floor, though she was still safely ensconced in Daniel’s embrace, she had a mere second or two to register the small cluster of humans surrounding them before the tiger attacked.
Chapter 4
Serai screamed and Daniel pushed her behind him, putting his body between her and the tiger and yelling at it.
“Jack, no!”
Jack? He knew the tiger’s name?
The tiger ignored Daniel and charged, leaping through the air in full feline fury, its mouth opened in an earth-shattering roar. If she hadn’t been so terrified, Serai might have admired its feral beauty. Daniel leapt up to counter the tiger’s attack, and the two of them met in midair with a crash that resounded like thunder.
The tiger caught Daniel in its deadly embrace and swiped at him with paws the size of dinner plates, each tipped with long, sharp claws. Daniel’s nightwalker strength was a match for the tiger, though, and he shoved the beast’s forearm away from his face and then hurled it across the cavern, where it smashed into the wall.
A woman yelled at Daniel, by name, and Serai’s eyes narrowed as she examined the human female. Scruffy, small, and tough, with a waiflike exterior that covered a steel core, if the look in the woman’s dark eyes told true.
“Daniel, leave Jack alone. How dare you blast in here and hurt him?” the woman shouted in one of the landwalker languages. English. Serai knew it, of course. The Emperor had taught her all languages.
“Quinn, he attacked me, in case you didn’t notice,” Daniel replied, with what Serai believed to be admirable calm, under the circumstances.
“What do you expect, you idiot?” Quinn snapped, hands on hips, as the tiger shook its massive head and staggered to its feet.
Serai’s fear vanished and anger took its place. Lovely, warming anger, which stiffened her spine and reminded her she was a princess of Atlantis. She stepped forward until she was standing next to Daniel and gave Quinn her haughtiest glare.
“Stand back, female, or face my wrath,” Serai declared in English, holding her hands out to her side in the ready position.
Quinn’s mouth fell open, and the impudent woman began to laugh. At Serai. Anger heated up, became rage.
“Seriously? ‘Face my wrath’?” Quinn shook her head. “Daniel, where did you get her? Melodrama R Us?”
Serai’s face flushed. It had sounded a little over the top even as she said it, but she wasn’t exactly experienced at facing down humans in combat. The tiger paced forward, snarling at Daniel, until it stood next to Quinn.
“I’m out of practice at issuing warnings, human,” Serai snapped. “But how is this for something you can understand ? Keep your pet kitten away from Daniel, or I will be forced to harm it.”
The tiger paused, mid-snarl, tilted its head to the side, and stared at her, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. It almost looked like he, too, was laughing at her.
Quinn laughed. “Right. Daniel, tell your girlfriend there that we don’t have time for all this posturing and to stay away from Jack or she’ll get hurt. Now we need to talk about what you’re doing here—”
The tiger’s snarl interrupted the human just before it signaled its intent to attack by bunching its powerful muscles and tensing for the leap. Daniel growled deep in his throat, almost as wild as the tiger, but Serai was suddenly fed up with all of them. She called to the pure magic of Atlantis, the magic she had once wielded with little skill but that now rushed to her call. Jack leapt into the air again, but this time Serai knocked Daniel out of the way, and she sprang up to meet the tiger.
On its own terms.
* * *
Daniel fell backward, knocked out of the way by more than a quarter ton of tiger. He landed on his ass, and bounced back up immediately, wincing as the tigers crashed into each other. Serai had transformed in an instant’s shimmer of magic into an enormous tiger—bigger even than Jack, nearly as big as a horse. She roared, and Daniel almost fell over.
She wasn’t just a tiger. She was a saber-toothed tiger.
“Daniel!” Quinn screamed, just as he leapt toward the two tigers. “Do something! She’s going to kill him!”
The few other humans in the room that he’d ignored up to that point suddenly had weapons in their hands, and Daniel didn’t know what to do first to protect Serai. As it turned out, he didn’t have to do anything at all. Jack, who was probably even more shocked than Daniel, did it for him. The big cat rolled onto his back and presented his snowy white belly to Serai in a blatant display of surrender and submissiveness. Daniel, who’d seen Jack fight in both his tiger and human forms, was amazed. No way would the Jack he knew have backed down from a fight.
The shimmer of shape-shifter magic curled around Jack’s form even as Serai lightly clamped her massive jaws around his neck, so gently that the enormous curved sabers of her teeth didn’t break the skin of Jack’s human neck when he returned to human form.
His naked, human form.
It was Daniel’s turn to growl. “Get dressed, shifter.”
Quinn made some kind of signaling gesture and the rest of them immediately put their weapons down. Daniel nodded to himself. When the leader of all North American human rebels gave her troops a command, she could expect instant obedience. She’d certainly earned their respect.
She’d always had his.
“Maybe you could ask your girlfriend to let me up?” Jack said, smiling a little but carefully not moving at all. Serai released him and backed away, then stalked over to Quinn and snarled at her.
Quinn held her hands up in front of her, the universal signal for “you win, don’t bite me,” and Daniel could have sworn Serai, still in tiger form, smirked. She padded over to him and curved around his body for a moment, then shifted from extinct tiger to haughty Atlantean princess in seconds. She, unlike Jack, was fully clothed.
Jack laughed and quickly dressed in clothes someone tossed him. His shifter magic was so powerful he generally shifted into human form with his clothing intact, but he either had been shocked out of his routine by the saber-toothed tiger suddenly appearing from nowhere, or the display of nakedness was simply to poke at Daniel.
If the latter, it had worked. Daniel started after Jack again, but Serai caught his arm.
“I think we’ve had enough of this,” she said quietly, and he whipped his head around to look at her, really look at her, and realized she was on the brink of collapse. “I’m very tired, Daniel. It has been a long . . . time.”
Her eyes rolled back in her head and he caught her, swinging her into his arms just before she fell to the stone floor of the cave. Pain and remorse stabbed at him. Yet again, after all these years, even when given a miraculous second chance, he was failing her.
“Quinn, I need your help,” he said, ignoring Jack. “She’s weak and needs to rest.”
Quinn swep
t her gaze over Serai’s unconscious form, still dressed in the silken gown, and then she nodded. “Of course. We can get you a place to sleep and warmer clothes for her. We’re camping out here, but you probably knew that, or why would you be here?”
He grimly shook his head. “Trust me, I had no idea. I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
Jack walked closer, ignoring Daniel’s scowl, and inhaled deeply, as if scenting Serai. “I wasn’t about to hurt her, and you know it, vampire,” the cat shifter said. “She’s beautiful, Daniel. She’s not a shifter, though, and she smells like . . . Atlantean? How did she do that? And a saber-tooth? They’ve been extinct so long—”
“Probably around ten or eleven thousand years,” Daniel interrupted dryly. “I’ll explain later, if you’re done trying to kill me.”
Jack scowled at him. “If I’d been trying to kill you, you’d be dead.”
“Think again, little kitten,” Daniel advised flatly. “Remember who hit the wall.”
“Children,” Quinn interrupted. “Enough. Let’s get her some rest, and then you have some explaining to do, Daniel.”
Daniel’s temper flared, and for the first time in the years he’d known her, he let it loose at Quinn. “I am vampire. Senior mage of the Nightwalker Guild, and formerly primator of all vampires in this infant of a country. Tread softly before you think to issue orders to me, human.”
He felt her shock through the blood bond he’d once had to force on her to save her life. Jack started to say something, but Quinn cut him off with a raised hand. The uncomfortable truth was, the blood bond ran both ways. She could probably sense Daniel’s emotions, too. She was certainly looking at him with more than a little sympathy in her dark eyes.
“Daniel deserves our trust, Jack.” She issued a few quiet requests, and one of the humans motioned to Daniel to follow him down a dark corridor.
Quinn’s slightly raised voice stopped him. “We’re near Sedona, Arizona, Daniel. And we’re in big trouble.”
He almost smiled. “With you, what else is new?”
* * *
Serai woke as Daniel put her down on a pallet in what looked like another room in the same cavern. Same dark stone walls. Same dank stone-and-dirt-cavern smell. A small fire glowed in a corner of the room, giving off a bit of heat and light, but not enough to really help. She was shivering bone deep and felt like she might never be warm again.
Daniel sat on the edge of the narrow bed as he pulled rough blankets around her, but his hands stilled as he realized she was awake and looking at him.
“How are you feeling?”
She lifted one shoulder. “I’ve been better, but I’m alive. I’m free. There’s much to be said for that.”
An awkward silence fell, and she watched him as he looked at the blankets, around the room, anywhere but at her. Maybe he didn’t want to be around her. Maybe he’d forgotten about her long ago, and she was an unwelcome reminder of a painful past. Maybe—
His hands shot up and grabbed her shoulders, and he finally stared directly at her—into her eyes, as if the secrets of the universe hid there for him to find.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, anguish in his rough tone. “How can you be alive, all these millennia later? You’re not a vampire, but you’re still exactly the same as the day Atlantis fell and not a day older. How is that even possible?”
“Have you ever heard the tale of Sleeping Beauty?” she asked wryly.
He just looked at her, silent, and for a moment a hint of the shy boy he’d been surfaced in his eyes. But only for a moment. The hard, deadly man he’d become had no patience for whimsy, she suspected.
“They put me in stasis,” she explained, arranging the blanket around her shoulders and pulling her knees to her chest. “Maidens intended as brides for future kings of Atlantis. Not just me. There were others, many of them woken long ago, but six of us remained. We’ve been asleep since Atlantis dove beneath the seas more than eleven thousand years ago.”
He released her shoulders and stood up, impatient or disbelieving, and she felt the ache of loss as he walked away from her toward the small fire. He tossed a few pieces of the wood stacked nearby onto the flames and considered his handiwork before turning toward her, still crouched beside the fire.
“That’s not possible. What magic could do such a thing? Even Alaric, and the gods know he’s more powerful than any sorcerer or witch I’ve ever met, couldn’t do that.”
The name distracted her. “You know Alaric?”
“I’ve worked on the same side as High Prince Conlan and his warriors several times,” Daniel said. “Poseidon’s high priest often accompanies Conlan and his elite Warriors of Poseidon on missions.”
He crossed the room and motioned to the edge of the bed, as if for permission. She nodded, and he resumed his seat, not touching her this time.
“Your Atlanteans have to fight the big, bad vampires, don’t you know?” he said, mockery in his voice and raised eyebrow.
“I’ve heard about the warriors. The temple attendants gossiped enough,” she said bitterly. “And I’d prefer not to talk about Conlan. Not now, not ever.”
It was his turn to be surprised. “I’ve always found him to be a decent enough guy.”
“He didn’t leave you imprisoned in a crystal cage for hundreds of years after he learned about you. He didn’t plan to wed you, either, and then abandon you to remain in that prison after he found a human woman for whom he was willing to abdicate his throne.” She shook her head. “Trust me when I say I will never take the man’s hand in friendship.”
She finally looked up at Daniel and caught her breath. His eyes glowed a fiery red and his face had gone hard and feral. For the first time since she’d found him again, she thought about what becoming a nightwalker truly meant, and her breath caught in her throat.
“Plan. To. Wed. You?” he gritted out between clenched teeth. “You were betrothed to Conlan? After . . .”
“Jealousy? You dare show me jealousy when you abandoned me to be caged and imprisoned for eleven thousand years?”
“I didn’t know!” he shouted. “I thought you were dead. I woke up and you were gone, and they told me you had died. They took me to deal with the newness of the bloodlust, and by the time I could control it and came back for any scrap of news of you, you and your whole godsdamned continent were gone.”
A flare of something very like hope flamed in her chest, and she tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. Not until he touched a finger to her cheek and it came back wet did she realize she was crying.
“You thought I was dead? You didn’t abandon me?”
The red flames had vanished from his eyes, and they shone a strange, almost silvery black as he stared at her. “I would never have abandoned you. But you were quick enough to leave me.”
Frustration robbed her of fluency and she dropped back into her native Atlantean. “How can you think—”
The pain crashed through her again and she cried out, doubling over as the Emperor sent a discordant slice of energy searing through her body and mind. “Someone has it. Make them stop, make them stop,” she said, almost sobbing.
Daniel pulled her into his arms. “What is it? Someone has what?”
“The Emperor. They’re tampering with the Emperor, and whoever it is will kill all six of us, if we don’t find it soon.”
Chapter 5
Montezuma’s Castle National Park, Arizona, inside the castle structure
“Priestess, I’m . . . I’m sorry. My skills aren’t up to this. I can’t cast a glamour that would cover us both.”
Ivy Khetta, high priestess of the Crescent Moon coven, turned away from the view that the Sinagua Indians had enjoyed for several hundred years, until nearly A.D. 1400, when the clan of vampires banished to the desert by their unforgiving goddess, Anubisa, had wiped out the native Americans. These days, none but national park employees and archaeologists were allowed to walk inside the structure that had been hand-built wi
th stone, sweat, and adobe plaster so many centuries ago. She raised a hand to almost touch a spiral design that one of the Sinagua had incised into the plaster wall maybe a thousand years ago, just so she could feel the energy that still pulsed from the long-ago magic and passion of the artist.
She wasn’t ready to activate the vortex energy, though. Not just yet.
Ivy was definitely breaking more than a few federal laws just by stepping foot inside the castle, but nobody knew she was here and—in spite of her apprentice’s incompetence— nobody would, except those she couldn’t control. She managed—barely—to keep from looking for the vampire and his companions.
Instead, she focused on the young witch. Of course, the fledgling couldn’t hide them from the park rangers and crowds of tourists who would soon swarm over the grounds like ants on a coyote’s corpse. Ivy was the only witch in the entire state powerful enough to wield such strong magic.
After all, she wasn’t a witch at all.
She was a sorceress who specialized in the black. Best that nobody else ever learned that, though, since her particular brand of dark sorcery was punishable by death. Ugly, bloody death that not even a sorceress who could call the black arts would be able to escape. If not death, at the very least she would face eternal imprisonment in dungeons built inside the Rocky Mountains. No, it was better that nobody figured out her secret. At least until she was ready. Nobody would ever treat her like they had her mother.
Best nobody heard about that, either.
“Don’t worry about it, ah—”
“Aretha,” the witch offered helpfully, nervously smoothing her pale brown hair behind her ears.
Ivy blinked. “Seriously? I thought it was Moon Blossom. Not sure which is worse.”
Aretha blushed. “That was what I was trying on for a witch name. My mom’s a music fan, so my real name is Aretha. It was almost Madonna. Can you imagine Madonna Moskowitz?”
