Vampire in Atlantis wop-7

by Alyssa Day

  She was shouting by the time she reached the end, and everyone stared at her in shock.

  Finally, Melody raised her hand again. “So, Atlantis has an emperor? That’s cool. I always thought Napoleon was the bomb. Who has him? Can I meet him?”

  Quinn sighed. “You’d never know she was the smartest hacker ever to turn down an offer from the CIA’s elite computer squad, would you?”

  Before anybody could respond, June came running in, out of breath and holding her arm, which was bent at an impossible angle. Tears ran freely down the woman’s face, but her voice was perfectly steady. “We’re under attack, Quinn. Vampires. A lot of them. Three of us are already dead.”

  Daniel yanked Serai out of range of the entrance and placed her, back to the wall, in the farthest corner from danger, as the others rushed out of the cave.

  “Stay here,” he commanded.

  “You don’t get to tell me what to do, either, Nightwalker,” she snapped.

  “I can’t protect you if—”

  “I didn’t ask you to protect me,” she said, cutting him off. Then with a rush of power that smashed through the space between them, in a few short seconds she again shimmered into the shape of a saber-toothed tiger. When he started to speak, she snarled at him and shouldered him out of her way before springing across the floor to follow the others.

  Daniel swore steadily in a long-dead language as he raced after her. He was going to slaughter anyone—vampire or otherwise—who dared to get anywhere near her. And when this was over, he was going to throw her over his shoulder, take her somewhere safe, lock her up, and maybe invest in some catnip.

  * * *

  Serai stumbled a little as she bounded across the floor, and hoped Daniel hadn’t seen it. If he realized that the loss of connection with the Emperor was making her as weak as she felt, he’d probably spirit her away and bundle her up in a bubble of safety somewhere. Rather exactly like how she’d spent the past eleven thousand years.

  She thought not.

  The tiger’s night vision gave her a clear picture of the area and the dark forms attacking Quinn’s group. Jack was already in tiger form himself and launching his body through the night air toward a vampire rushing toward him. They collided with a thud, and seconds later the vampire’s head rolled off its body. Serai felt nauseous, exhilarated, and terrified all at once—a far cry from any of the feelings or emotions she’d known in the pod. Daniel snarled something at her about staying down, and then he shot up into the air, daggers extended, and decapitated two more vampires in midair. They immediately began decomposing into an acidic slime that her sensitive tiger nose despised. She backed away from the mess, so it didn’t get on her paws, and looked around, stunned at the noise and fury of the battle.

  Daniel was a whirlwind of berserker rage, slicing through the attackers like an avenging god. She’d never seen him in battle mode, and she caught her breath at the stark deadliness of his every move. His entire body was an extension of his weapons, and he smashed through a wave of the enemy in a brutal dance of death and destruction.

  She shook her massive tiger head and looked around, realizing she’d been spellbound by Daniel for almost long enough that someone could have attacked her from behind. She was lucky; the battle raged on all around her, but none of it approached her yet. Her companions were not so fortunate. Alaric was right in the middle of it, flinging energy spheres from both hands, standing back-to-back with Quinn, who wielded a deadly looking gun in each hand. The rebels were outnumbered, but they apparently didn’t think so, or didn’t care, because they were steadily evening the odds. Daniel made a joke out of odds anyway. None could stand up to him.

  A shout rang out somewhat ahead and to the left of where Serai stood, and she jerked her gaze away from Daniel again.

  “A Mycenae!” Reisen shouted, pledging his part in the battle to his royal house in Atlantis, as he plunged a sword into one vampire’s heart and then withdrew it to remove the fallen foe’s head.

  Serai snapped out of her mental paralysis at the sight. Daniel was destroying the attackers, Jack was doing the same, even the humans were fighting hard, and Reisen was dispatching enemies with only one hand. While, she, a princess of Poseidon turned into a fearsome beast of old, had four good paws and a mouthful of sharp saberlike teeth, and yet she stood there helplessly, like the foolish girl she’d promised herself she’d no longer be.

  She took a moment to find the nearest threat and identified one of the vampires trying to sneak up on Reisen from behind. She roared a challenge and a warning and sprang across the dozen or so paces to where the vampire had frozen, staring stupidly at the oncoming tiger.

  Seeing an extinct animal charging him might have thrown him off his game.

  She would have laughed if she’d had human vocal cords, but instead she roared again and then swiped one massive claw across the vampire’s throat and jumped aside as the fiend’s head dropped from its body.

  Guess her claws were pretty sharp.

  Reisen stared at her in openmouthed disbelief. She tried to smile at him, but when he stepped back a pace, she realized a smile full of teeth like sabers wasn’t all that reassuring. She bounded off to find more enemies, instead of worrying about it, and then fell heavily to the ground, mid-bound, when every ounce of her energy and magic suddenly drained completely out of her body and left her nearly unconscious. There was nothing gradual about it; one moment she’d been ferociously killing that vampire and then she was on the ground as if smashed by a giant hand.

  She lay on her side, panting, a stupendously large tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, and then the magic sustaining her shape-change vanished and she lay, limp, one helpless Atlantean maiden in the center of a massive battle.

  Out of the stasis pod, into the grave. Perhaps that would become a new popular expression after she died. At least she’d retained her clothing during the shift and wouldn’t die naked. There was something for her memorial service. Didn’t die naked.

  Daniel flew through the air toward her—actually flew; her muddled mind told her that if she survived this she had to ask him how he did that—and landed on the ground with one foot on each side of her waist, standing over her prone body.

  “If you die, I’m going to haunt you,” he growled at her, his fangs fully bared, and then another of the attackers came at him, screaming something about points for killing the Primator. Daniel met the attack with crossed daggers and then he sliced downward, and another head rolled across the ground.

  Serai’s thoughts tumbled crazily; she realized she was near hysteria when she started to hum “vampire heads are falling down” to the tune of some song buried in her memory about a London bridge, and then when everything went suddenly, eerily quiet, she wondered if she’d lost her hearing or her mind.

  Or both.

  But then a woman—it sounded like June, maybe, but Serai wasn’t sure—screamed, “The tiger is down.” Serai had just enough time to be touched that the landwalkers cared about her even though they’d just met her, before Quinn raced past. A moment later, Quinn started screaming, too, and even Serai’s exhausted mind began to realize that it wasn’t her they were talking about.

  She wasn’t the tiger who was down.

  “Jack!” Quinn screamed, over and over. Just his name, again and again and again.

  Then Serai heard Alaric’s unmistakable voice. “I’m sorry, Quinn. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 11

  Daniel stared down at the limp, blood-soaked form of the tiger who’d been Quinn’s best friend in the world, and a bleak sense of futility washed over him. Why? Why was it always the good guys—the best of them—who paid the highest price? He tightened his hold on Serai, who had insisted on standing on her own two feet when he’d picked her up from the ground. When he’d seen her fall, he’d almost faced death for the second time that day. If he lost her now . . . but no. Better to focus on the immediate reality.

  Jack was down, and Quinn was losing her mind over it.
He could feel her maddened anguish searing through him because of the blood bond and realized, yet again, that he couldn’t help her.

  Alaric tried to pull Quinn away from Jack, but she screamed and fought him off.

  “No, leave me alone! Wait. You can heal him,” she said imploringly, tugging on Alaric’s hand. “You healed me before. I’ve seen you heal lots of people. You can do it. Fix him.”

  But the priest was shaking his head, a universe of sadness in his somber expression. “He’s gone, Quinn. I can heal grievous wounds, it is true, and you know I would do anything for you, but I cannot heal death. Only the gods can do that.”

  Quinn screamed again, a sound of such utter, hopeless rage that it sent chills snaking down Daniel’s spine. Serai shuddered and turned her head to look up at Daniel, and the deep blue of her eyes had spread from her irises to completely cover the white, so that her eyes were entirely blue.

  “He’s not gone,” she said, her voice gone deep with ancient power. “He’s almost gone, but a small part of him remains.”

  Alaric stared at her and raised his hands almost as if to block any attack Serai might try. She made a dismissing motion and ignored him, focused entirely on Quinn and Jack.

  “Put me down. There next to Jack,” Serai ordered Daniel, and he found himself obeying her without question. The magic resonating in her voice called to him on such a visceral level that it echoed in his bones. He wouldn’t have been able to refuse her—looking around, he saw that everyone but Alaric had stepped forward in response to her command, as well.

  He helped her to sit on the ground next to Jack, and she gently nudged Quinn to one side and then lay down across the badly damaged tiger, so that her body draped across Jack’s.

  Quinn grabbed at her. “No! What are you doing? Get off him!”

  But Alaric gently pulled Quinn back and held her back by wrapping his arms around her. “Give her a chance, Quinn. The ancients had magic we have long forgotten.”

  Quinn shook her head back and forth, over and over, but subsided, watching Serai with huge eyes filled with tears that she wouldn’t let fall.

  She had reason to cry. Gashes so deep that Daniel could see bone in some of them covered every quarter of Jack’s body. Serai grasped his fur with both hands and started to hum softly, then turned those blind and darkling eyes to Quinn.

  “Part of him lives, but only his animal side is still—barely—on this side of the river of death,” she said, so softly it was almost a whisper. “I can call to the tiger that is Jack and help him come back, but his human side is almost certainly lost forever.”

  Quinn stared at Serai, pain and terror and awe mixed in her expression. “What are you?”

  “I am Serai of Atlantis, and the Emperor gifted me with ancient magic not seen on this world since before my continent dove beneath the oceans,” Serai said in that terrible, beautiful voice of power. “I gift you his choice, as another once gifted me the choice of life or death for one I loved. Shall I let him seek out his ancestors in the afterlife or do you wish him to live, though it be perhaps only a half life?”

  Her gaze met Daniel’s, and he understood, in a way he never had before, what it had cost her to make that choice for him—both that day and every day of her life since. Now she offered the same painful choice to Quinn, and he could do nothing but stand helplessly by and watch them.

  The knife he’d pulled out of his side a little while ago during the battle had hurt far less.

  “I choose life,” Quinn said, her voice ringing out. “You make him live, do you hear me? No matter what it takes. Make at least part of him live, and I can find the rest of him somehow. Someday. You make him live.”

  Serai nodded and began singing, first softly and sweetly, and then stronger and more powerfully, as magic threaded through the lyrics and melody of her song. A gentle, glowing, golden light rose from Jack’s body and surrounded them, until they shone as if lit from within by miniature suns. Everyone watching them held his or her breath in unison until, seconds or centuries later, a rough coughing noise sounded and Jack’s body shuddered fiercely, almost rising completely up off the ground before it fell back down.

  Quinn cried out and put her arms around Jack’s neck, but the tiger snarled at her and Alaric yanked her back and away, putting his own body between the two of them. Daniel pulled Serai away, too, but she shook her head and he settled for crouching down next to her, between her delicate skin and Jack’s powerful jaws.

  “Does he know who he is?” Alaric demanded.

  Serai shook her head but then nodded. “I think so?” The power had gone from her voice, and all that remained was exhaustion.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what he knows,” she admitted. “Or who he knows. If he has reverted fully to tiger and only tiger, he’s not safe to be around.”

  Quinn squared her shoulders but then dropped down to put a hand on Serai’s shoulder. “Thank you. No matter what else, you brought him back from death. We’ll figure the rest out. I owe him that much.”

  Alaric called to his own particular brand of Atlantean power, and a silvery blue light soared up from the priest’s hands and then spread out to surround the tiger, who snarled weakly and then sat up, shivering in the light. Jack’s bloodstained fur was dark and matted, but the gashes were healed.

  “I can’t tell,” Alaric said. “I just don’t know. Shape-shifters are too different from Atlanteans, and Poseidon’s power recoils from trying to analyze the mind of a tiger.”

  “Your magic is unbalanced without the soul-meld,” Serai said absently, brushing Alaric aside as if he were a troublesome child.

  The priest stared at her, his eyes widening. “What do you mean? I am the most powerful—”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve heard it,” Serai interrupted. “Most powerful high priest in the history of Atlantis. But it’s not true, you know. I’ve been around for all of them since Atlantis dove beneath the sea. Your power is not even close to that Nereus wielded. At least, before his wife died and he almost drowned the world.”

  “What—”

  Quinn cut him off, and her voice was hoarse with barely repressed pain. “I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it right now. Not the bankers, or the rebellion, or any damn part of it. I sure as hell don’t care about Atlantean ancient history. I’m leaving, and I’m taking Jack with me. Somewhere he can be safe, until we figure this out. I owe him that. I owe him my life, several times over.”

  Alaric took her hand in his and nodded. “Of course. I know just the place. I’ll take you there now, and I’ll never, ever leave your side again.”

  The shimmer of magic that surrounded Alaric as he said it told Daniel that the priest had just made a vow he wouldn’t be able to break without serious consequence. Words had power, and some more than others. Their future would be even more complicated now.

  Alaric slashed a hand through the air, and the now-familiar portal began to shimmer in the dark.

  “You should come with us, Princess,” Alaric said. “We can help you.”

  “You need my help, priest,” Serai said, putting a hand on Daniel’s arm. “I have protection beyond your knowledge in the presence of the mage beside me.”

  Daniel didn’t deserve her praise. Skills learned as a mage millennia ago were so long gone as to be rusty with disuse. Only good for destroying furniture and cake. He couldn’t help, unless . . .

  Unless he called to the dying soul of the human—which happened to be a special talent of the Nightwalker Guild. It was better to leave a live body behind than a dead one, according to the rules they’d stuffed in his head. Common decency or morality had nothing to do with guild law, but practicality ruled all.

  “I can help, possibly,” he said. “Let me try to reach Jack.”

  “What can you do? Try to blood bond a tiger?” Quinn shook her head. “Go away, Daniel, there’s no need for your special skills here.”

  “I have forgotten more magic than most of your human witches ever possess, Quinn, a
nd one of my talents as senior mage of the Nightwalker Guild was to teach others to call out to the souls of dying mortals,” Daniel said. “Let me try. It can’t hurt him, not now. Maybe I can help.”

  Surprisingly, Quinn looked to Serai first, then Alaric. Both of them nodded, Alaric perhaps a little skeptically, but it was still a nod.

  “Fine. Try what you can. But then we take him away and let him rest and heal.” Quinn moved a few inches to the side, keeping one hand on Jack’s fur. The tiger followed her with its eyes but made no move to attack, just sat, shivering, in the center of their small group.

  Daniel reached deep inside himself again, for the second time that night, and called for the constructive alter-ego of the destructive force he’d unleashed earlier. The power was too long unused and responded only sluggishly to his call, and at only partial strength of what he dimly remembered from days long, long gone. He’d fought with fists, daggers, and his vampire physical abilities for so long he’d nearly forgotten his magic. Perhaps he didn’t deserve a response from power he’d discarded and scorned.

  But it did respond. Slowly and painfully, but it finally answered him. He invoked words of power in languages that had existed long before French had dreamed itself into being, and the magic rose to his call, at least enough to fuel one not-so-simple question.

  Jack. Are you there? Jack Shepherd of the tiger pride, have you gone beyond reach of mortal call?

  Daniel waited for what seemed a very long time. Just when he was about to admit defeat, a weak, thready voice that was almost unidentifiable as Jack’s answered him.

  I don’t know where I am, or if I can come back. I don’t know if I want to come back. Leave me be, vampire, or magician, or whatever you are. Leave me to make my own choices. Don’t call me again, or I’ll leave forever. The choice to die is so very tempting.

  Daniel waited, but the message was complete. Jack had to choose to come back, and nothing they could do would influence him, or so the shape-shifter thought. Daniel, though, knew better. He himself had once rejoined the living for the dream of love of a woman.