by Alyssa Day
But before she could even scream, it was 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 seriously 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.
“I intend to make an official apology to her and to the remaining five, as soon as I can find Serai and find a way to release the other maidens,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sure an apology will help,” Riley said, rolling her eyes. “Hey, we’re sorry we stole the past eleven thousand years of your life, here’s a gold watch. Have a nice day.”
“I’d like a gold watch,” Ven offered. Erin smacked him in the head again.
“Look, we’ll do whatever necessary—give them gold, jewels, houses, whatever they want,” Conlan said. “First, we have to find them. And right now? I’m worried that Serai is lost somewhere and hurt. What could she possibly know about surviving on the surface? What if she stepped out of the portal right into the middle of a vampire’s lair?”
A cold wind swept through the air, and all six of them looked up to see Poseidon’s high priest, Alaric, materialize in one of his dramatic entrances. “It’s worse than you realize,” Alaric said, as usual not wasting time with small talk. “I’ve just been to the temple, and the magic that maintains the stasis is in flux. We either figure out how to release those women now, or they may all die.”
Ven raised an eyebrow. “How’s Quinn?”
“I did not see the rebel leader on this trip to the surface,” Alaric said, his eyes glowing bright green with barely restrained power.
Ven snorted. “You mean, you didn’t see the woman you’re ass-over-priestly-teakettle in love with?”
Erin lifted a hand to smack Ven in the head again, but this time he caught her wrist and kissed her palm.
“Perhaps you should consider your next words carefully, Your Highness,” Alaric told Ven. “Should you wish to continue life as one of the palace peacocks, I can make that happen. How is your appetite for birdseed?”
The high priest balanced a sphere of glowing power in his palm, a not-so-veiled threat.
Ven held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Dude. Message understood. But you call me Your Highness again, and I’ll kick your ass.”
Conlan put a hand on Alaric’s shoulder. “Stand down, my friend. Ven has chronic mouth-runs-faster-than-his-brain syndrome, as we all know, but none is better in a fight. I doubt he’d serve Atlantis so well as a preening bird.”
“About Quinn, though, Alaric,” Riley said. “Have you seen my sister recently? She still hasn’t met the baby.”
“No, I have not. She is entangled with a problem in the southwest United States. Something about bankers funding magic to help the vampires cement their control over the human population.”
“A trifecta of bad, bad, and worse,” Keely said. “No offense, Erin, but the last thing we need is witches on the side of the vampires.”
“That certainly doesn’t offend me,” Erin said grimly.
“We’ve been fighting just that in my own coven. The way so many humans hate and fear witches makes the vampire’s acceptance very appealing to those who play deadly games with the black, though. An alliance between vampires and sorcerers would be a catastrophe.”
“We’re not going to let that happen. Not now, not ever,” Conlan said. “We are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the vow our predecessors first swore eleven thousand years ago is the same we swear today. We will protect humanity from dark witches and vampires, both. Now, more than ever, we need to find every single jewel lost from Poseidon’s trident, so Atlantis can rise to the surface and take her place in the world.”
“I’m a little tired of protecting people who help the ones trying to conquer them,” Alaric said, closing his hand over the energy sphere and squashing it. Sparks flew out between his fingers and fluttered to the ground, burning the grass wherever they fell.
“Not all humans are sheep, Alaric,” Erin said, as patiently as if she and Alaric hadn’t had the same conversation so many times before. “Wait. Back up a minute. What did you say about Quinn and black magic sorcerers? That’s not good. Not good at all. Does she need help?”
Ven’s lazy grin disappeared. “Why do you think that putting yourself in danger is the answer to every problem, Erin?”
Erin’s mouth fell open as she stared up at Ven. “Seriously? Did you just ask me that, Warrior Man?”
“That’s different,” he muttered, flushing a dark red.
“No, it isn’t,” Riley said, standing up. “Does my sister need help? Maybe I should go to her, since she won’t come to me.”
For the first time since he’d watched, terrified, as she struggled through a difficult birth to bring their son into the world, Conlan felt true panic. Riley in a nest of vampires and black magic practitioners? Over his dead body. But he knew better than to try to forbid it, either as prince or as husband.
“Aidan needs you here, mi amara. At least until he is weaned. Or did you plan to take our son, the heir to the Atlantean throne, into the midst of danger, too?”
Riley glared at him. “Of course I didn’t plan that. I just . . . I hate feeling helpless while Quinn is in danger, and now Serai and the other women, too. I need something to do.”
“I feel the same way,” Erin added.
Keely nodded. “I’m no witch or warrior, but I’m pretty good with planning and a fair hand with a shotgun. Just tell me what I can do to help, and let’s get to it. Those women don’t have much time, if Alaric is right, and he almost always is.”
Alaric bowed to her. “So pleasant to have someone acknowledge reality. Although the qualifier ‘almost’ was unnecessary.”
Justice pulled Keely closer and glared at the high priest. “Don’t humor him, Keely. His head will grow larger than the dome covering Atlantis.”
“Somebody has to go to Arizona and find out if Quinn needs help,” Riley said.
“I will go,” Alaric said, in a voice that rang with finality.
Since Conlan had been planning to ask him to do just that, he had no problem with it. “Fine. Before you go, though, is there anything else you can do here to help in the temple?”
Alaric shook his head. “Horace knows the magic of the stasis better than any in the recorded history of the temple. If anyone can keep them stable or find a way to release them, it’s him.
All my presence and interference is accomplishing is distracting him and making him nervous.”
“You? Make someone nervous? Say it isn’t so,” Ven said.
Alaric glared at Ven, and Conlan ignored them both. “Then go. Find out what Quinn needs,” Conlan ordered his high priest, as if Alaric ever took orders anyway. Conlan cast a glance at his wife’s pale face before continuing. “Then see if you can convince her to come back here with you for a visit. Tell her that her sister needs her.”
Riley’s smile was reward enough for any king, and Conlan allowed himself a deep breath as the smallest portion of the weight on his shoulders lifted. International politics, Atlantean magic, the protection of humanity—it was an enormous burden, all of it, but one he would gladly shoulder forever, if only his wife continued to smile at him like that.
Damn. Alaric was right. Marriage was turning him into a girl.
Conlan turned to watch the high priest as he strode off toward the temple, presumably to offer final instructions before he returned to the surface. If Alaric and Quinn ever did manage to work things out, Conlan would laugh his ass off to see Alaric’s turn to be humbled by love.
Oh, yeah, he couldn’t wait for that. Payback, as the saying went, was a barnacle that bit you in the nuts.
He turned to the rest of them. “Back to the war room, I’m afraid, after we dine. Atlantis must rise, and soon, and now we need to plan for every possible reaction and outcome.”
Keely shook her head. “Have you heard the saying ‘God laughs when man plans’?”
He nodded ruefully. “I’ve gone one better. I’ve heard a god laugh when he learned my plans.”
Keely’s eyes widened, and then she laughed. “I’m never going to get used to this place, am I?”
“We certainly hope you do,” Justice said smugly. “We will never let you leave.”
