by Alyssa Day
Rob jumped out of the truck and saluted. He’d left the door open, so Daniel and Serai could hear everything he said. “Reporting with the prisoners, um, witnesses, as ordered, Colonel St. Ives, sir. One of them is a vampire.”
Serai glanced back at Daniel, her eyes full of concern and something else. Something worse. She was fading again; her strength draining out of her as he watched. The soul-meld and the vortex either hadn’t been enough, or the Emperor was sucking the magic out of her faster than she could keep up. Either way, this wasn’t good.
The colonel walked over to the car, opened the back door, and motioned to Daniel. A hands-on kind of man who didn’t stand on ceremony or wait for his minion to do things, then. Daniel admired that, so he didn’t immediately rip the man’s throat out.
While he stepped out of the car, St. Ives stared at him, his dark eyes assessing. “Why are you here, son?”
“I’m not your son,” Daniel said, reasonably enough, he thought.
“No need for rudeness. I’m sure you’re probably a few years older than me, in vampire years, but I’m an old country boy with a lot of bad habits. So perhaps you will give me your name and we’ll start over, but be warned, I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Daniel.”
St. Ives waited, but Daniel added nothing further.
“That’s it? Daniel? Mr. Daniel? Just Daniel? Okay, let me clarify my question. What the fuck are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with that woman who looks like she needs a doctor, only two short miles from the hiding spot of the worst vampire in the Southwest?”
Daniel took a minute to untangle that question. “My companion is ill, and we’d appreciate if you would escort us to a hospital. We were on our way back from our hike, to do just that, when your soldiers rudely abducted us. You can understand why I don’t feel all that friendly or like answering your interrogation. As to the rest, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The colonel eyed him skeptically. “Right. No idea why I would be suspicious of a vampire lurking around, not far from where I found a dozen other vamps hiding in various bushes.”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. “That sounds uncomfortable. Was there poison ivy? Vampires can get poison ivy, too, you know.”
St. Ives abruptly lost patience with Daniel. “Hold him here,” he ordered Rob, and he strode around to the other side of the truck and opened Serai’s door.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need to ask you a few questions,” he said.
Daniel didn’t hear what Serai replied, but it didn’t matter, since she stepped out of the car and collapsed into a dead faint in the colonel’s arms.
St. Ives cast a long-suffering glance up at the sky. “Son of a bitch. I’m never going to get home, am I?”
Chapter 35
Serai woke up, groggy and dazed, to find that she was lying on a hard bed in the large mobile vehicle from which the colonel had exited when they arrived. She glanced around from under her lashes, not moving, assessing the situation before giving away that she was awake.
St. Ives was nowhere to be seen, and only two humans were in the vehicle with her, unless there were more hiding in cupboards. She took a moment to send her senses out to explore just such a possibility and found that she’d been right; there were only two of them.
And, for whatever reason, they weren’t very concerned about her.
“She okay? Think we should cuff her?” one of them asked, jerking his head in Serai’s direction. She quickly lowered her eyelids all the way and feigned unconsciousness.
The other one, a short and oddly square woman, snorted out a braying laugh. “Why bother? What can she do, bat her eyelashes at us?”
Perhaps just a little bit more than that. Serai refrained from glaring at the woman, or at the man when he laughed, and instead she reached inside herself to see if she could find enough power left for a few small tasks.
Yes. The magic came quickly to her call. It was less powerful than it had been, and she was exhausted just thinking about wielding it, but it came, blurred in form and shape and resonance. Some residue of her own Atlantean power, mixed with the vortex magic and the Emperor’s clarion call, all combined with what she’d gained from Daniel in the soul-meld and strengthened her until she thought she could move on to step two.
Sing the nice soldiers to sleep. She began to hum a little tune, all but under her breath, and by the time the woman finished realizing Serai was awake, both of the soldiers were asleep.
“Lovely trick, if you do say so yourself,” Serai said out loud, and then she immediately felt like a fool.
Find the Emperor now, pat yourself on the back for magic tricks later.
Okay, on to step three: Find the Emperor. Find Daniel. Save the day.
Actually, that was steps three through five, but she had the feeling that counting steps was very, very far down her list of upcoming priorities.
She called to her Atlantean magic and transformed into mist mere seconds before the door opened and Rob the polite driver entered the vehicle. She soared out above and past him so fast that he never noticed the nearly transparent cloud of water vapor as she departed.
Good-bye, Rob. Good luck with your future. May you have many fat babies.
The giddiness served as a warning. She was losing strength fast, and she had no time to spare. Her destination was easy enough to find, though. She headed in the direction in which all the soldiers were pointing their guns. She could find Daniel later, if he didn’t find her first. She had no worries about Daniel rescuing himself.
For now, the urgent mission was to find the Emperor. And since it was screaming at her, inside her head, reverberating through her skull, that wasn’t going to be too hard. She arrowed toward the entrance to yet another cave, which glowed with a powerful, pulsing beam of purple light.
Another cave. If she survived this, she would be happy to never, ever set foot in a cave again, no matter how long she lived.
She soared over the heads of the soldiers, marveling at how desperation and magic had overcome her fear of heights, at least while in mist form, and then she entered the cave and shot across the space, through empty air, around the vampire and the human woman and boy, until she reached the Emperor. Its call sounded in her head, in her blood, in her very bones, and she reached out to it, forgetting that it was the sea god’s toy, forgetting its enormous and terrifying power, forgetting that its fluctuations had already killed two of her sisters.
None of it mattered—all that was important was the magic, the power, the Emperor’s commanding call. Still in mist form, she reached out to touch the Emperor, and it responded by smashing her out of the air and into her physical body, which hit the stone floor of the cave so hard that she actually bounced back up and rebounded.
As she stared up at the ceiling, dazed, the boy’s face appeared over her in her line of sight.
“That had to hurt.”
She blinked up at him, probably looking like a deranged owl, and then started laughing. She was almost certainly going to die now, but at least she still had a sense of humor.
The woman she’d seen in her vision leaned over her next, hard suspicion in her eyes, and she pulled the boy, clearly her son, back and away from Serai.
“Why are you here and what do you want?”
Serai slowly sat up, making sure her head wouldn’t fall off her neck on the way. “I am Serai of Atlantis, and this gem belongs to me.”
The vampire bared his fangs at her. “Bold claim for a woman who was just knocked on her ass by the jewel she claims is hers. The King stone doesn’t seem to agree.”
Serai looked at him, feeling stupid and wishing there were a healer nearby for the pounding headache starting up in her brain. “What? Oh, the Emperor. Where did you get ‘King stone’? Although it’s certainly close, considering the true name was lost to you landwalkers eleven thousand years ago.”
His eyes widened. “Landwalkers? And you flew in here as mist? Are you really Atlantean?”
>
The boy rolled his eyes, and Serai felt an instant kinship with him.
“Of course not. Do you see a mermaid tail?” he asked the adults.
Bizarrely, all three of them stared at her legs. Serai could feel the hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her, and she forced it back down. “No tail, no fins, no gills. No mermaids. Atlanteans are ordinary people, quite like you, except we live underneath the ocean. For now,” she amended.
“That’s wicked cool,” the boy said, dropping down to sit cross-legged beside her. “Can I visit? I would get awesome extra credit for a report on Atlantis. Also, are all the girls as pretty as you? He ducked his head and blushed. “Um, ignore that last part. It was totally random.”
“Ian.” The woman scolded him. “What have I told you?”
Ian shrugged and grinned, unrepentant, at his mother. “Nothing about hot chicks from Atlantis, that’s for sure. I would have remembered.”
Serai smiled at him, delighted. “I’m a ‘hot chick’ ? Is that like the bee’s knees?”
He stared at her, clearly mystified. “What the heck does that mean? Do bees even have knees? How would you know? Who’d want to get close enough to find out?”
The vampire cleared his throat, although Serai could tell he was fighting not to smile. The entire situation was so impossibly strange and surreal that Serai was almost sure she’d wake up any minute, secure in the crystal pod, having simply been the victim of another stasis dream.
Hot chick, though—she couldn’t have made that one up.
She held her hand out to the boy, and he chivalrously helped her up, in spite of his mother’s not so subtle urgings to stay away from Serai.
“I am Serai of Atlantis,” she tried again. “And you are?”
“Ian Khetta. Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand and blushing furiously. “Sorry about the hot chick thing. That’s my mom, Ivy Khetta. She’s a smoking powerful witch. And he’s Mr. Nicholas, a vampire who says he eats people and uses their bones for toothpicks, but we haven’t seen that. He did pull a guy’s intestines out, but the guy had hit me and hurt my mom, so we weren’t too broken up about it.”
Serai tilted her head, fascinated by the boy’s candor and phrasing, and was trying to think of how to respond to that flow of information when the vampire did so first.
“He hit you? He swore he did not,” Nicholas snarled.
Ian rolled his eyes. “Right. Because bad guys never lie to each other. Dude, do you watch TV at all?”
“Don’t call me dude,” the vampire said, but he grinned at the boy without a hint of fang.
Serai was confused. “So you’re not the evil villain the soldiers are here to capture?”
“Depends on how you define evil,” Ivy said.
So fast Serai was sure Ivy hadn’t seen it, a flash of surprise crossed the vampire’s eyes, probably because the witch had defended him.
“You should not have attempted to wield the Emperor, Ivy,” Serai said seriously. “It is one of the seven gems of Poseidon’s trident, and a mortal should never touch the objects of power that belong to a god. Not if she wishes to live.”
“And yet you touched it,” Ivy said, folding her arms across her chest, her body language a clear picture of defiance.
“I am linked to the stone; as are the remaining three of my sisters. I must take it back with me to Atlantis to save their lives.”
Nicholas stepped into the space between Serai and the Emperor. “I may have something to say about that,” he said ominously.
“Say it quickly, then,” Ian said. “Because those soldiers are heading right for us, and I think—”
The boy quit speaking mid-sentence and stared down at his shoulder and the knife blade which was suddenly protruding from it. He reached out for Ivy as he stumbled, and the brave young adult presence he’d been projecting crumpled as he fell.
“Mommy?”
Ivy screamed and ran to her son, but Nicholas was there first, catching him as he fell.
Serai raced to the cave entrance, calling to her magic as she ran, and by the time the horrible soldier who would hurt a boy had climbed the rest of the way up the stone steps and into the cave, she carried glowing energy spheres whose heat didn’t come close to her fury.
“You would hurt a child?” She didn’t wait for an answer, especially since the visual evidence—more knives in his hands—was clear for all to see. Instead, she blasted him with both of the spheres, and he fell back, unconscious, to the cave floor.
Nicholas tore past her in a blast of displaced air and before she could say or do anything to stop him, he wrenched the soldier’s head from his body and tossed both pieces out of the cave and to the ground below.
“I will have the same again for anybody else who approaches,” he roared out into the night.
Before Serai could protest, Nicholas leapt out into the air and was back mere seconds later, carrying a struggling soldier.
“This one is alive,” Nicholas shouted. “If you want him to stay that way, keep back.”
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Serai said, staring at the place where the first soldier had fallen.
“He hurt the boy,” Nicholas said, and then he punched the new soldier in the side of the head, knocking him out. “An unconscious prisoner is a lot less trouble.”
“My son is bleeding to death,” Ivy shrieked. “Do something. Get us out of here.”
Serai quickly crossed to her side. “Does your power not extend to healing?”
Ivy shook her head, sobbing.
Ian looked up at Serai and tried to grin, but he was pale and it was true the wound was bleeding badly.
“I can repair this injury,” Serai said. “I will need to use the Emperor.”
“No,” Nicholas shouted. “It’s mine. I need it.”
“It is not yours, and you are a fool to try to claim it,” Serai said calmly.
“Nicholas, you can’t let Ian die,” Ivy said, no longer shouting but with tears streaming down her face. “Not even you could be so cruel.”
The vampire stared at the boy, so many different emotions crossing his face that Serai couldn’t begin to identify them all.
“Fine,” he finally said. “I am a fool. A weak, emotional, irrational fool, but you may take the gem if it allows you to help the boy.”
“I will make it allow me to do so,” Serai said grimly. She needed Daniel, though. He should have been here by now. She sent her senses out, seeking him, and found him healthy but still detained inside one of the vehicles.
Daniel, I need you now. Inside the cave. I’m going to attempt to wield the Emperor, and I need your strength. Please come.
She waited and almost immediately his strength surrounded her in a warm wave of love—and fury.
Don’t you dare touch that stone until I get there, or I will personally tie you down and never let you out of my bed for the next eleven thousand years!
She almost laughed, in spite of the situation and the danger. Her fierce warrior mage, determined to protect her at all cost. Except this time, it was her turn.
She took a deep breath and centered herself, and then she cupped the Emperor in both hands and raised it into the air. She was prepared for the first punch of power this time, and she opened herself to it instead of fighting it.
“Emperor, answer my call. Heal this boy who does not deserve to be injured in the cross fire of this battle. Heal the women who struggle, caught in stasis beneath the sea, O mighty Emperor, object of power of the sea god.”
She realized that she’d spoken the words in ancient Atlantean, but it seemed fitting that she honor the gem with its proper tongue. The Emperor’s tremendous power seared through her like a bonfire through kindling and she was afraid, but slowly she adjusted, tuning her own magic to the resonance of the amethyst.
She knelt beside Ian and nodded to his mother. “Please remove the knife now.”
Ivy shook her head. “Now? Are you sure? What if you’re wrong and
removing it causes him to bleed out?”
Ian touched his mother’s cheek with the hand on his uninjured side. “No, Mom, she’s doing it already. I can feel the pain going away. Please take the knife out before my skin heals around it. That would be so gross!”
Ivy still hesitated, and Nicholas knelt beside her and gently moved her to one side. He took the hilt of the knife in one hand and then stared a challenge at Serai. She nodded, filled with the power of the Emperor.
“Yes, now, Nicholas of the Nightwalker Guild,” she said, and she heard the change in her voice. Heard the power of the Emperor taking her over again.
Nicholas looked puzzled and then a little awed, but he slowly removed the knife, and as Serai directed the stream of healing light and magic into the wound, Ian never even flinched. They all watched as the gash in his skin healed completely until nothing but a thin pink scar, barely visible, remained.
“I feel great, Mom,” he said bravely, and then his eyelids fluttered shut, and his head fell back against his mother’s shoulder. He let out a little hiccupping snore, and the three adults grouped around him looked at one another and laughed.
“I owe you my life, Serai of Atlantis,” Ivy said fiercely. “My son is everything to me. Anything in my considerable power to do for you, you only need to ask me. Ever, do you hear me?”
Serai inclined her head, the power of the Emperor calling her further and further away from mortal concerns. “Take your child to safety, that is all I ask,” she said, and then she stood and crossed to the entrance to the cave, still holding the Emperor.
“You mustn’t stand there, you’re a target,” Nicholas said, trying to pull her away, but the Emperor slapped out at him and he fell back, dazed from the jolt of electricity that had poured from the amethyst and into his body.
