by Alyssa Day
Nicholas bared just the slightest hint of fang. “Are you so sure they were unrelated?”
Smithson recoiled a little, but said nothing.
“The vampire goddess Anubisa—Chaos praise her, wherever she may be—long ago laid down a prohibition against sharing our history with mortals. But none of that is your business. All you need to know is that the legend from the pictograph told of a magical gem from the city beneath the waters, and that it could find treasure such as gems and gold and silver, because like called to like.”
“The city beneath the waters? Venice?”
Nicholas wished for a moment that he could afford simply to drain the fool now and give his dead body to the members of his blood pride to dispose of. Sadly, necessity made strange crime-committing fellows.
“Atlantis, you idiot.”
Smithson started laughing. “So it’s a fairy tale. Great. You’re basing our hope of funding for the consortium’s initial investment on Atlantis? Why not just ask Santa Claus for the money?”
“Atlantis most definitely existed and still does. From what I hear, it’s nearly ready to take its place in the world again, if you and your kind don’t bomb it back to the deep when it rises. But those are problems for another day. For now, we feed our witch and her son and let them rest, because this evening we’re going out to the canyons and caves to see what we can find when fewer prying eyes will be around.”
Smithson’s expression still said he didn’t really believe any of it, but just then Ian, having settled his mother on the bench inside the interrogation room, walked over to the file cabinet and pulled open the drawer which the gem had pointed out just minutes before.
“Holy crap, Mom! There’s a freaking fortune in here!”
“Don’t say holy crap, Ian,” Ivy said tiredly, not even bothering to open her eyes. She’d wiped the blood off her upper lip, Nicholas saw, but she looked pale enough to faint at any moment. Nearly unconscious and clearly in pain, but still mother enough to chastise her son for bad language. As Nicholas watched the lovely witch, he felt something in his chest warm in a way he hadn’t felt for more than three hundred years, and he flinched away from the window.
He’d been wrong. There was danger here, after all. He watched her a moment longer and then turned to the banker.
“Bring me the man who hurt that boy. I want to have a word or two with him over breakfast.”
He laughed, fangs fully descended, as the banker scurried from the room. Nicholas was in a wonderful mood, and why not? The witch would find the gem, the consortium was on track, and to top it all off, the blood of a man who had hurt a child would taste so much better than scrambled eggs. He glanced through the one-way glass again, his gaze returning to the lovely witch and her son.
Yes. So much better than eggs.
Chapter 15
Oak Creek Canyon, just after nightfall
“Are you sure this is right?” Daniel looked around, his night vision excellent, and wondered if Serai’s exhaustion was playing tricks upon her connection with the Emperor. She’d fallen back into a deep sleep at the hotel after their conversation about plans, not even waking when Melody’s friends brought the gear. Apparently the events of the day and night before and the strain from the Emperor’s fluctuations had weakened her far beyond what she’d wanted to admit. He’d spent a restless day trying to sleep, listen for danger, and keep from touching her. Or biting her. Or fucking her.
Or all three at once.
He’d also had three cold showers and a brief period around noon where he feared he was descending into lunacy. Oh, yeah, it had been a hell of a day. And now his fragile, darling, innocent sex kitten of a princess was telling him to shut up.
“Yes, as I said the other five times, Daniel. Please be quiet now, so I can try to sense the Emperor again.” She leaned against a tree and looked up into the sky. “Look. It’s Draco, curled around the Little Dipper. Was that one of your names?”
“Honey, there’s nothing little about my dipper.”
She rolled her eyes, but at least he’d made her smile. It lightened the shadows in her eyes, if only for a moment. “No, Draco. Or Drakos.”
“How could you know that?”
“Oh the attendants in the temple loved to gossip, and the exploits of Conlan and his warriors were constant fodder. I heard much of their vampire ally Drakos. A vampire who was a friend to the high prince’s brother was very gossip-worthy. It never occurred to me that Drakos could be . . .” she finished in a strained voice.
“I’ve had many names over the years,” he said, shrugging the backpack to a more comfortable position. “Something to pass the time. Daniel was not always a name that fit in where I happened to be.”
“What are some of the others?”
He breathed deep of the pine-drenched desert night air and caught the slightest scent of sea salt and woman.
His woman.
He shook his head. She was his only in his dreams. The beauty never ended up with the beast, despite brief moments of pleasure and the beast’s futile wishes.
“Names? Or are you ignoring me on purpose?” she asked teasingly.
“They almost always began with the same letter, for ease of remembering. Drakos, Demetrios. Lately, Devon. Once, for a memorable period, D’Artagnan. Generally back to Daniel whenever possible.”
“Because it’s your real name.”
“Yes, but that’s not the reason. I kept coming back to Daniel because it was the name you’d called me,” he said softly, but he knew by her indrawn breath that she’d heard him.
“I . . . Wait. Daniel, I can feel it. The Emperor. It’s closer than ever before, and it’s moving.” She started running forward and he caught her arm.
“No. Let’s not charge headlong into danger, okay? It’s safe to bet that whoever has the gem is not going to want to give it up and is almost certainly not after it for innocent reasons. It has a lot of power, which tends to draw the attention of those who want to accumulate a lot of power. These are rarely the nicest people you might want to meet.”
She turned toward him, and he tried not to think about touching the curve of her neck, or the delightful curve where her hip met her waist. Tried not to think about unbraiding her hair and wrapping his hands in fistfuls of those lush curls.
Tried not to think about it. Failed miserably, but at least he’d tried.
“Daniel. You’re looking at me the way I looked at that chocolate cake,” she murmured. “I confess I like it, but now isn’t the best time.”
He leaned down and stole a single kiss. It would have to tide him over. “You’re right, of course. Now tell me about what you feel, and how close you think the Emperor is to where we are now.”
“It’s north—no, west of here. Where is that?”
“It’s the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness area,” Daniel said grimly. “Of course they couldn’t be at a coffee shop. Well, enough of this. We can’t do much with the car Melody’s friends brought us, since the direction you’re sensing is pure hiking country, but we’re certainly not hiking, in spite of these fancy clothes and boots. You’re wasting energy you don’t need to expend, especially when you’re traveling with someone who can fly.”
“No!” She backed away from him, violently shaking her head back and forth. “I can’t.”
“I’ll keep you safe. It’s just a matter of closing your eyes if you feel dizzy.” He knew it was easier to show her, so he swept her into his arms and launched into the air. He made it about ten feet above the ground before she started to scream.
In his ear.
He was so startled he nearly lost his grip on her waist, and she slipped a little and then started screaming even louder. Then her entire body started shaking and spasming in his arms, and he headed back for the ground, fast. When he landed and her feet were firmly on the ground, though, the screaming didn’t stop. If anything, it intensified in volume, and she kept shaking so hard he was afraid she was having a seizure.
“Serai, please,
tell me what to do. I’m sorry, I didn’t know, please help me. Damn it, I don’t know what to do here,” he said, holding her tightly to try to calm the spasms.
Slowly—ever so slowly—the shaking subsided. She stopped screaming and began sobbing, loud, hoarse sobs that were almost as painful to him as they must be to her. She pulled away from him and sank to the ground, still sobbing as if her heart would break any minute.
“Delia. Oh, no, poor Delia, she was the youngest of us. All that lovely golden hair, oh no, oh no, oh no,” she kept repeating, tears streaming down her face.
He crouched down and took her in his arms and patted her back and stroked her hair—anything that might offer her some comfort. He had a sinking suspicion about who Delia might be, and even the monster crouched inside him roared its anguish at the thought. If one of the other maidens had just died, how long might it be until the person wielding the Emperor’s powers caused Serai to join her?
Daniel would find this witch and kill her. Take the Emperor back to Atlantis, so Alaric and the rest of them could figure out a way to save Serai and the others. He’d capture Poseidon himself and demand the sea god’s help, if need be.
Whatever it took.
“Whatever it takes,” he said, out loud, as Serai’s sobs began to quiet. “We will find the Emperor and rescue your sisters. I swear this to you on my life.”
She finally stopped crying and took a deep, shuddering breath before looking up at him. “I felt it, Daniel. I felt her die.”
“Delia?”
She nodded. “Yes. She—The Emperor’s connection to us stuttered and grew weak, but then a powerful surge of energy speared out through it and the witch who’s trying to access its power. She’s learning how to use it, Daniel. But I don’t think she has any idea that she’s hurting people by doing it. She’s . . . afraid, I think. And Delia. Oh, Daniel. She never had a chance to live her life at all. It’s not fair.”
As she cried, curled against his chest like a wounded child, his heart shattered and then re-formed in ice and granite. So the witch who played with the Emperor’s magic was afraid, was she? Not yet she wasn’t. She hadn’t known anything like the terror he was going to crash down on her head. When he got his hands on her and anyone else who’d been participating in this deadly game, they’d all be very, very afraid.
They would be afraid, and then they would be dead. He swore it on his ancient oath as a mage of the Nightwalker Guild.
“I can’t fly, Daniel. I’m sorry,” she whispered, interrupting his silent plans to rip, tear, and maim.
A horrible thought jumped into his mind. “Is that why you had the seizure? Serai, I’m sorry. I thought if you saw how safe it is, you’d—”
“No. No, the seizure was due to the Emperor, but I can’t fly. I’m terrified of heights, and I don’t know how to calm down. I don’t think we have time for me to try to learn how to be unafraid, not now. Maybe later?” She attempted a smile, but her face was far too pale, and her terror was evident in her eyes and the way she bit her lip.
“Don’t worry about it. We can find another way. I can walk almost as fast as I can fly. We’ll find the Emperor. I promise you.”
They took a few minutes to drink some water, and Serai splashed a little on her face, and then they resumed following the path that only she could sense, to wherever the Emperor was now. The hike would have been beautiful in the daytime, Daniel imagined, but imagination was all that he’d known of sunlight for so long—other than those brief moments in Atlantis—that he didn’t dwell on it. There was a unique kind of beauty in the dark. The moon’s silvery light cast fascinating geometric shadows on the red rock formations for which the areas was famous. He could tell by Serai’s pounding heartbeat, though, that she had no attention to spare for scenery.
“Tell me about the fear of heights,” he said, mostly to distract both of them from what waited ahead in the night. “I wouldn’t have thought there were all that many high places in an undersea city.”
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Not that many. Enough.”
He could hear it in her voice: this was no random fear. “Enough?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said flatly.
“Maybe I need to hear it. What happened?”
“I threw myself off one of the palace towers. I wanted to die.”
* * *
Serai sped up her pace, but she might as well not have bothered. Daniel’s fingers bit into her shoulders as he swung her around to face him, and his face was strained and harsh in the moonlight; as forbidding as if a stranger faced her. Which, after all, was exactly what he was now, despite what they’d shared in that hotel bedroom. He’d lived thousands of years that she knew nothing about, while she’d waited, trapped in a crystalline cage, bound to millennia of nothingness.
“Why?” His harsh voice echoed in the clear, cool night air. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“Have you never looked into your future and found it so bleak that you decided not to face it?” She shot the question at him but was surprised when he flinched.
“But you were a princess. You had everything to live for—”
“I had nothing. You were gone, and they told me you were dead. After my father’s physician verified my maidenhood was intact, he told me the wonderful news. I was to be put to sleep and locked in a cage for centuries, if not longer, and when I woke up I would get to be queen! Of the Seven Isles! No matter that everyone I’d ever known and loved would be dead and rotted to dust by the time I awoke.”
His face hardened, probably at the bitterness in her tone. But what did she care for his feelings? He’d been happy enough to abandon her with no concern for hers.
“I came back for you,” he said in a voice like broken glass. “I came back as soon as I was able, and you were gone. No, you went one better than that—you were gone and you’d taken your entire continent with you. Atlantis was gone, Serai. Gone forever. Destroyed and all of you dead, or so the Atlanteans remaining on the shore told me. I wanted to die then, too. Tried my damndest to make it happen, but the monster I’d become took over, and all I knew for hundreds of years was the bloodlust.”
He bent down to pick up a stone and hurled it through the air so hard it shattered into dust when it struck the nearest rock face. “Bloodlust and despair. Bleak emptiness, for centuries. When I finally met these Atlanteans no more than a year or two ago, it never would have occurred to me to ask about you—a woman who’d lived so many millennia ago. I’m sorry. That was my failure. But had I known you lived, and had I known how to find a city at the bottom of the sea, either then or now, I would have braved the wrath of Poseidon himself to come for you.”
She froze, caught by the raw sincerity of his words. It was impossible to do anything but believe him, which meant he hadn’t willingly left her.
“You didn’t abandon me,” she whispered, and he pulled her into his arms in a fierce embrace.
“I would never have left you. But now you have survived imprisonment and stasis, and you deserve to have a life with someone other than an ancient monster.” He held her so tightly, almost as if he were saying good-bye, and the surety came to her that he would leave her as soon as they found the Emperor, if she did not take steps to prevent it.
Starting now.
“I will tell you what happened that day, if you like,” she said quietly. “If you promise not to leave me again.”
He tried to pull away, but she tightened her arms around his waist.
“I promise not to leave you until we have completed this task and you are safe,” he finally said, before he broke away and started walking again.
It was her turn to grasp his arm and pull him to a stop. “That’s not good enough. You want me. I know you do.”
He groaned. “What does that matter? I’m not what you’ll want—what you’ ll need—when you’re safe and you’ve had a chance to think about your future.”
“Then promise me that. You won’t leave me un
til I ask you to do so.”
He bowed his head and blew out a breath, but finally nodded. “Yes. I will promise that.”
She smiled and rose up on her toes to kiss his cheek, and then started on toward the Emperor’s faint but steady presence somewhere west of them.
“Though it will probably kill me, when you do ask,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.
She raised her chin and smiled a little. He’d have a very long wait coming if he was waiting for her to ever ask him to leave. Especially after the last time . . .
“Do you want to hear? About what happened that day after you were injured?”
“Yeah. Why not? We have a long walk in front of us, I’m guessing,” he said casually, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other. But she knew better. She knew she mattered to him.
She was counting on it.
“You, first. What happened after you pushed me down through that trapdoor, to the hiding place underneath the shop?” She paused for a moment to confirm her sense of the Emperor, and then kept walking, not giving Daniel a chance to argue. Still, they walked along in silence for another five or six minutes before he finally spoke.
“I did my best, but I was a foolish boy. The soldiers who attacked were well-armed and no strangers to battle. Or looting and raping and pillaging, for that matter. I probably would have been better to have hidden with you.”
“You wanted to protect me,” she said, touching his arm. “You wanted to protect the shop, too, over your sense of loyalty to your absent mentor.”
He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Right. Absent. He was there all the time, all those days I thought he was out buying things for the shop. He was sleeping beneath my feet, hiding from the sun. Sleeping in the dirt like an animal, like he taught me to do.”
She shivered at the stark bitterness in his voice. “But I thought he helped you. He was so elegant, the few times I met him, and the jewelry in the shop so exquisite. Where did he find that?”
Daniel shrugged. “I made some of it. The not-as-elegant pieces, although I tried so hard—Well. That’s another story. But he purchased some of it, and I did see him fashion some of the more amazing abstract pieces himself. I remember thinking at the time that he had uncommon strength in his hands and fingers, the way he could bend the metals.”
