by Alyssa Day
Quinn must have heard them, and she turned to smile at Serai. “We have plenty to eat, and you must be hungry,” she said, pointing to a long metal table covered with plates and bowls. “Please help yourself.”
Serai returned her smile, almost in spite of herself, and queued up in line behind two of the guards she’d seen earlier. They nodded to her but didn’t speak, too busy filling up their own plates. She selected a plate and then stopped, stunned at the sight and smell of so much food.
Daniel stepped up next to her and looked at her empty plate. “Not fancy enough for your ladyship?”
She heard the mocking challenge in his tone but was too paralyzed to snap back at him. Instead, she shook her head, and when she spoke, her voice trembled a little.
“I don’t know what to try first. I haven’t touched actual food in more than eleven millennia, Daniel. I don’t . . . I don’t even know what I like or don’t like anymore. Will my stomach reject food? Do I dare try unfamiliar plants, like that green one? How do they make it transparent like that?”
The hard lines of his face softened, and he almost smiled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think,” he said softly. “Of course you haven’t. Why don’t you do what someone recuperating from an illness does? Try a little of a few different things and see how your system takes it.”
He raised one hand and brushed a tear from her cheek, making her feel a fool. She hadn’t even known she was crying, and over food, of all the stupid things to finally make her break down. Before she could apologize, or sink into the floor, or do any of a dozen other things she might have done, he poked one long finger at the clear green food.
“And this? Is Jell-O. I’m not sure that it’s really food at all,” he said in an overly loud whisper, making her wonder why everyone else started laughing.
She took his advice and chose a few tiny portions of the most recognizable foods. A bit of what clearly came from a game bird or domesticated fowl. Fresh fruit. A sliver of a luscious cake that she probably shouldn’t risk, but she couldn’t resist the rich, sugary aroma that rose up to tantalize her. She noticed that Daniel piled a plate high with nearly as much food as the human men had taken, which answered the question of whether or not the nightwalkers—vampires, they called them these days—still ate food or subsisted entirely on blood. Her neck tingled at the thought of Daniel biting her. She wasn’t sure if the sensation was from revulsion or desire.
He sat on the floor next to the small stool she’d chosen to sit on, crossing his long, elegant legs in front of him and resting his plate on his lap. He glanced at the contents of her plate and grinned up at her.
“Well? What will you try first?”
She bit her lip, wondering the same thing. Of course she should eat the fruit and meat first, that was only proper, but the sweet dessert tempted her so much.
“Go for it,” he advised, following her gaze. “One of the few benefits of being all grown up is that you can eat your dessert first.”
She laughed and was rewarded by his answering smile. Still, she hesitated until he leaned over, speared a bit of cake on his fork, and held it up to her lips. She was shocked by the intimacy of the gesture; only a courting or wedded couple would feed each other in Atlantis. Or so it had been thousands of years ago.
Daniel’s dark eyes held a challenge and something else. Admiration? Desire? A tingle of almost savage glee raced through her, and she leaned forward to allow him to place the cake in her mouth.
I’m not in Atlantis anymore.
She closed her lips around the fork and moaned with pure, hedonistic joy at the sugary explosion of taste in her mouth. Oh, by all the gods and goddesses, this was surely the most wonderful pastry she’d ever tasted. She opened her eyes to see that Daniel’s had gone dark and wild, and even she, with her limited knowledge of men, knew a moment of very feminine triumph.
He wanted her. In that moment, no matter what else or who else entangled him, he wanted her.
“If you make a noise like that again, Serai, I’m not responsible for what I do to you,” he murmured, his voice a rasp of steel over velvet, and suddenly parts of her body that had felt nothing for millennia warmed and tingled in an entirely fascinating way.
As he slowly drew the fork back, she parted her lips to release it, and gained another small victory when he inhaled sharply. His face had gone hard and predatory, and she suddenly knew that had they been alone, he would have pounced on her. She wasn’t quite sure if she would have fled or pounced right back. Something about the way he was looking at her, as though she herself were a bit of sugary cake that he wanted to taste, made her think pounce.
Definitely pounce.
A wave of warmth started around the vicinity of her toes, heading north, and she enjoyed it far too much.
“I hope you like the chicken,” one of the women guards said to her. “That’s my mama’s special recipe. I’m June, by the way.”
Serai tried a bite of chicken and smiled at June, delighted simply to be awake; sitting, eating, and having an actual conversation. If only people knew how wondrous it was to do such ordinary things. “I like it very much. Please thank your mother for me and tell her it is wonderful.”
A hint of sadness crossed the woman’s face. “Thank you, honey, but Mama is up in heaven with the angels. She got in the way of a vampire.”
Daniel stopped eating and rested his fork on his plate, then respectfully nodded his head to June. “I am sorry for your loss.”
Serai was impressed with the woman’s dignified demeanor. Not a hint of anger toward Daniel showed in her expression or manner.
“I thank you for that, but you should know that I don’t blame you for what happened to my mama any more than I blame Jack for what happened to my uncle or, for that matter, blame Quinn for what humans have done wrong in the world,” June said with quiet dignity. “There’s just no accounting for evil and meanness, and we can’t judge a species by a few bad apples.”
“You are truly wise, Lady June,” Serai said, handing her plate to Daniel and standing up to curtsy to the woman and give honor to those she had lost. “May the oceans of your ancestors bless and protect you and your family.”
June wiped tears from her cheeks and enfolded Serai in a huge hug.
“Oh, bless your heart, honey.” She patted Serai’s back and then let her go before pointing at Daniel. “You take care of this nice girl or you’ll be hearing from me, young man.”
Daniel nodded gravely, although Serai saw a hint of a smile playing around his lips, probably at being called “young man” by this youngling who’d only lived a handful of decades. “I promise I will.”
June bustled off, and Serai resumed her seat and her exploration of the fruit that was so like and yet unlike Atlantean blushberries. She held the large, ripe, red fruit up and raised an eyebrow.
“Strawberry,” Daniel said. “How’s your stomach doing?”
“So far, so good.” She took a bite of the strawberry, almost humming with happiness as the fruit’s sweet and tart taste exploded on her tongue. Just for a short while, sitting here and eating what was quite like a picnic back home, she could almost forget the danger she and the others faced. She could almost be an ordinary woman, not a freak conjured by magic and the dictates of an ancient society’s breeding program. Right at that moment, she thought she would be perfectly happy to never, ever step foot in Atlantis again.
Naturally, that’s when the Atlantean warrior raced into the cave and, taking in the room at a glance, leapt across the floor toward Daniel, drawing a lethal-looking sword as he came.
“If you hurt her, I will end you, vampire,” the warrior shouted.
Faster than thought itself, Daniel was up and off the floor, blocking Serai from the madman. Daniel had drawn his daggers, but she’d seen sword against daggers when Atlantis was attacked, and she never wanted to see it again. Especially not when Daniel was the one with only the daggers.
But before she could even scream, it w
as over. In midair, Daniel twisted and ducked under the warrior’s sword arm and disarmed him, and then slammed his elbow into the man’s face on the way down. She’d been right, she saw, staring down at his unconscious face on the floor at her feet. She hadn’t mistaken those features. He was clearly and classically an Atlantean warrior, and he’d hit the ground so hard the dust he’d displaced was still settling on and around him.
She looked at his body for the distinguishing mark of the elite Warriors of Poseidon, but he was fully covered, not even his arms bared, and the mark was rarely found on a warrior’s hand . . .
She froze, and the scream she’d bottled up earlier found its way out of her throat. She screamed again and pointed, and only when she realized that Quinn was staring at her like she was a lunatic did she stop and manage to speak.
“Why, Daniel? Why did you do it?”
Daniel’s dark brows drew together as he looked from her to the fallen warrior. “Why? Did you know him? He’s fine. He’ll be awake in a few minutes.”
She backed away, fighting the waves of dizziness that threatened to claim her. “No,” she cried, shaking her head back and forth and pointing at the unmistakable evidence. “No, no, no, no. Why did you have to cut off his hand?”
Impossibly, cruelly, hideously, Daniel began to laugh. “Serai, you don’t understand.”
Serai didn’t want to understand a world where a man she thought she loved laughed at dismembering his foes. Instead, she ran, pushing past a startled-looking Quinn. She ran, escaping all of them, out into the bright sunlight, where neither shadows nor vampires could follow.
Chapter 8
Atlantis, the palace gardens
Conlan looked around at his family and wondered how to begin a conversation that would almost certainly explode into a battle, right there in the middle of the flowering bushes and blooming trees. Not exactly a typical battle scene, by any measure. His wife and he didn’t exactly see eye to eye on the issue of the maidens in stasis.
Actually, it was more a matter of degree. He wanted to find a way to release them. She wanted to find a way to release them—yesterday.
His brother, by title the King’s Vengeance, and by reality the high prince’s chief pain in the ass, solved the problem for him.
“So,” Ven said, lounging on a marble bench next to the fountain. “This is a cluster, uh,” he cast a quick glance at his consort, Erin, a very powerful human witch with little tolerance for profanity, “cluster futz of royal proportions.”
Lord Justice, Conlan’s other brother, laughed. Technically Justice was Conlan and Ven’s half brother, but nobody set store by that. He sat on the ground with his back leaning against his consort, the human archaeologist and object reader Keely. “That’s one way to put it. Does anybody know what happened? For example, how Serai got out, where she went, or what in the nine hells is going on?”
Conlan’s wife, Riley, high princess of Atlantis and former human social worker, shook her head. The sight of her glorious wealth of red-gold hair flying in the slight breeze reminded Conlan of what they’d been doing with and to each other during one of their infant son’s increasingly rare naps, before the crisis in the temple occurred.
Not that this was the time to think of sex. Not even earthshatteringly good sex. Though Riley’s eyes were flashing with so much anger he doubted he’d get to do much more than think about sex for quite a while.
“I told you we needed to release them from that impossibly cruel prison,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get the elders to move their venerable asses on this subject since I first came to this archaic, chauvinistic, sorry excuse for a society.”
“You love it here,” he said mildly, knowing he was right.
She looked around, her gaze lingering on the flowers and fountains before moving to the delicate crystal-and-marble curves of the palace towers and spires. “Yes, I do. Except for this. Conlan, it’s wrong to keep women imprisoned like prized heifers at the county fair for an ancient idea of a breeding program. You know it, I know it, and—”
“Virginsicles,” Keely interjected, a dark look on her face. Justice wrapped an arm around her legs and glanced up at her. He never let the stunning redhead get far from him, since her love was the only thing that had ever been able to help him control his dual nature.
Keely almost absently smoothed a strand of Justice’s long blue hair off her pants leg and then scowled at Conlan. “I call them the virgin popsicles. Frozen in that damn stasis until they get to be released to be bedded and bred.”
“Trust an archaeologist to be blunt,” Ven drawled.
Erin lightly smacked Ven on the back of head. “She’s right.”
“I know she’s right. I didn’t say she wasn’t right, just that she was blunt,” Ven said. “Also, ow.”
Conlan felt like he was rapidly losing any slight bit of control he’d had over the meeting. He should have called them to the war room. He felt he had at least some semblance of control—or the illusion of it—over his opinionated family members there.
“We’ve been trying. You know we’ve been trying,” he told them all, but he was looking right at Riley. “The last time the priests and mages were able to release one of the maidens from stasis was when they freed my mother, hundreds of years ago. We have been unable to use the Emperor since then.”
“Then how exactly did you expect to marry Serai?” Justice asked, making Conlan want to kick his ass.
Riley’s glare turned from hot to glacial in a split second, since, after all, they were talking about the woman who’d been Conlan’s intended bride. But he couldn’t help or change past history. All he could do was fix the present and do his best to chart the future.
“The priests didn’t tell me,” he muttered. “The previous temple chief attendant was sure he’d be able to figure out what was wrong, and the high priest before Alaric was afraid to let anybody know there were problems for some asinine reason. We’ve been working on it since we found out, which was when they were trying to release Serai from stasis for our, ah, for—”
“For your royal wedding,” Riley said through clenched teeth.
“Yes. Yes, damn it, yes,” he said, frustrated and worried all at once. “We’ve had our best mages and Alaric himself trying to discover how to free those six women from stasis, and the best they can do is tell me there has been something wrong with the connection to the Emperor. Now, apparently, it’s worse.”
“And Serai escaped? Or vanished? What exactly happened?” Erin leaned forward. She’d been gone to one of her coven’s council meetings on the surface when it happened, and Ven must not have had time to fill her in yet.
“She definitely escaped,” Conlan said grimly. “She somehow blasted out of the stasis chamber, knocked out the attendants, then made it to the portal dock and knocked out both of my guards—although how a woman who has been in stasis for thousands of years can take out two of our best guards is beyond me—and fled. Somewhere. The gods themselves only know where.”
Erin shrugged. “The answer to part of your problem is easy enough. She has enough magic to take out at least half of all of your warriors in one shot. Maybe more. Maybe all.”
Conlan, Justice, and Ven all looked at her in utter shock. “What?”
“Didn’t you realize it?” Erin walked over to one of the bushes and leaned down to sniff a cluster of pale pink flowers. She turned back to face them and surveyed their surprised expressions, then shrugged again. “I thought you knew. Just walking by the temple where they slept gave me such a charge of powerful, yet contained, magic that I got a buzz like a champagne drunk.”
“Maybe it took a witch or at least someone sensitive to magic to feel it,” Keely said. “I’ve been inside several times, in the course of my studies of everything about Atlantis, and never felt anything like that.”
Justice shot up off the ground and grabbed Keely’s shoulders, lifting her up and almost off her feet. “Did you touch the stasis pods? That kind of magic could seriou
sly harm you. We would be very distraught if you were to be harmed again.”
Ven met Conlan’s gaze. When Justice started to speak of himself in the plural, it meant the deadly Nereid half of his soul was rousing to fury, and nobody within reach was safe when that happened. Nobody but Keely, of course.
Keely knew it, too. She put her hands on either side of Justice’s face and leaned forward to kiss him. “Put me down, you Neanderthal, or I’ll dye your hair pink when you’re sleeping. Think how silly you’d look.”
Everyone held a breath until Justice grumbled but lowered her feet to the ground and then embraced her tightly. “It’s Nereid, not Neanderthal,” he muttered.
Keely laughed and hugged him back. Justice released her, but didn’t let go of her hand.
“No, I didn’t touch the stasis pods. I learned my lesson about objects of magical power with Poseidon’s trident.” She bit her lip. “Maybe, if it’s the only way, I could try—”
“No. We forbid it,” Justice roared, and Conlan pulled Riley behind him out of pure reflex. He didn’t think Justice would ever harm her, but when the Nereid was out of control, there might be explosions.
“No,” Conlan said. “It’s too dangerous and probably not useful. The objects tell you something about the past, right? What we need to know is where she went after she escaped.”
“I wish you’d quit saying ‘escaped,’ like she truly was a prisoner,” Riley said, folding her arms across her chest. “She left. I’d leave, too, if I’d been held hostage against my ovaries for all that time. I’d have done more than just leave a few people unconscious behind me, too.”
Conlan very carefully did not smile at his fierce but tenderhearted warrior woman. She would never have hurt innocents, in spite of her tough talk, but he understood her point very well.
