by Alyssa Day
Somehow the sounds of fighting from outside the circle didn’t register with her enough even to make her fear stray bullets. Every ounce of her consciousness was fixed on the life-or-death battle taking place in the circle before her.
The red panther screamed again and managed to escape from underneath his golden foe, and Travis started running, trying to escape. Ethan chased him down and pounced, and again the battle was joined as the two tried to literally rip each others’ throats out. Claws flashed silver and ivory in the moonlight, and blood stained the cats’ fur with black shadows.
Marie raised her hands to call water again, unable to stand idly by and watch Ethan die, but the tiger butted against her legs with its huge head. As much as she hated to acknowledge it, she understood what Jack was trying to tell her. For her to interfere would be just as wrong as it had been for Travis’s villains to do the same.
“But he’d better finish this quickly, Jack, or I’m going to do what I can. I’m past caring about ancient rules,” she said, not knowing if the tiger could even hear or understand her. Every slice of claw or fang in Ethan’s flesh screamed pain in her own.
The red cat gathered itself for a mighty leap and landed on Ethan’s back. The golden panther fought madly, twisting and bucking to get his deadly enemy off his back, but Travis sank his fangs into the side of Ethan’s neck, and Ethan crashed to the ground, hard.
Marie screamed as Ethan fell, but before she could move, the golden cat rolled his body over with a jerking motion and ripped his neck out of Travis’s mouth. Then Ethan reared back on his hind legs and smashed a mighty paw across Travis’s neck, ripping his throat out. The gushing spurt of arterial blood seemed to draw attention to itself by its very silence, and the sounds of battle around the circle slowly faded away to nothing.
Travis fell to the ground, obviously dead. As he fell, he slowly shifted back to his human shape. Ethan, still in cat form, stood near the body, head hung low, panting heavily.
Marie shoved past the tiger and ran to Ethan, falling to the ground in front of him. The cat raised its head, and Ethan stared out at her through its eyes.
“Now I may finally offer assistance,” she said, and she put her hands on him and called to the Goddess. As the healing warmth spread through her hands and into his body, she watched as the vicious wounds in his sides healed. The silvery blue light of her Gift combined with the golden shimmer of his shape-shift, and he returned to human form.
For several frozen seconds, kneeling on the ground in the middle of the blood-scented darkness, Marie tumbled over the edge of conscious reality and into Ethan’s soul. Images from his life rushed through her, and she felt his anguish at Fallon’s death and his self-loathing at having failed to protect so many of his pride from the vampires and from Travis. She gasped as the window to his deepest emotions opened up to her, and the strongest image she encountered was her own face.
She fell back as the healing ended, staring at him in shock. His own expression mirrored hers. “I saw your soul, Marie,” he said in a hushed tone. “I fell into your soul.”
Then he seemed to snap out of a trance and leapt to his feet, pulling her with him, while he scanned the circle for further danger. Jack, again in human form, and William, sporting a bloody scratch down the side of his face but otherwise apparently unharmed, strolled up to them.
“Report,” Ethan snapped out, staring at his second-in-command.
“We kicked their asses,” William drawled. “I’ll give you a full report tomorrow, but we’re going to turn these lawbreakers over to the reps from the other prides.”
Jack nodded in agreement. “They claim they had no idea what Travis was planning, which is probably true. Anyway, if they take Travis’s goons off our hands, there can never be any suspicion of unfair dealing on your part.”
Ethan considered their words, then nodded. “Fine. Casualties?”
“Nothing but a few scratches on our side,” William said. “Nothing, at least, that the change didn’t heal.”
“If I can be of service, I have some skill with healing,” Marie offered.
“Nope. You’re done doing anything but resting, ocean girl,” Ethan said, all the arrogant command back in his tone.
Marie bristled and started to argue, but he bent down and put an arm under her knees and the other one around her shoulders and scooped her up against his chest. “Please,” he murmured, for her ears alone. “I need you.”
“Well, since you put it that way,” she said, putting her arms around his neck, “how can I refuse?”
TWELVE
A week later
Marie awoke slowly to the smell of coffee and stretched luxuriously before she opened her eyes. She sat up and looked around Ethan’s bedroom, pleased anew at the changes to the formerly stark and barren space. She’d cajoled and teased her panther into painting and hanging light fixtures, though he’d left the shopping to her and Kat. Now warmth and color filled the space, and it was a retreat that they’d enjoyed for many hours of the night and even occasionally during the afternoon, after they made their daily trip to Dr. Herman to visit the now nearly healed panther.
Since she’d heard five days earlier from Alaric that he and Bastien were safe but still on the trail of Lord Justice, she’d been able to relax and enjoy this respite from worry. She’d firmly placed to the side any thoughts of what would happen between herself and Ethan when she had to return to Atlantis.
The door opened, and the coffee smell that had woken her entered the room in the form of a tray carried by a very sexy alpha male panther. “Good morning, ocean girl. I thought you might need some caffeine, after you kept me up all night.”
“I kept you up? Whose idea was it to try out every item of furniture?” She tried to sound indignant, but it came out as sleepy satisfaction. How the man could be so deliciously edible even in simple jeans and a white shirt was beyond comprehension. She tried not to think about how she must look, with her bed-tangled hair.
He placed the tray on the bedside table and leaned over to kiss her, then sat back, the smile fading from his face. “This is it, then.”
A sudden lump formed in her stomach. “Yes, this is it. Alaric arrives to transport me back to Atlantis this night. So we have several hours.”
He swore under his breath. “I don’t want several hours with you. I want several years. Several lifetimes, even.”
She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, then sighed. “I feel the same way about you. I never thought—you are the alpha, and Kat warned me—”
He interrupted her. “Kat warned you because of the way I was before I met you. But now I could never touch another woman, Marie.” He took her hands in his. “You’ve touched my soul, ocean girl. I don’t know how it happened, or even how it happened so fast, but there it is. I don’t know how I’m going to let you go.”
“The soul-meld takes whomever it will, Ethan, as you know. But free will reigns over all. You are…You may seek another if my absence—”
He cut her words short, his golden gaze burning into her as he frowned. “I don’t ever want to hear you say anything like that again. Whether you’re in my bed or thousands of miles away, you’re still mine. Don’t even think about forgetting that.”
She tried to smile. “Still such a surly kitten, mi amare. I thought I’d tamed some of that arrogance by now.”
“Never tamed,” he said, his voice husky. “But always yours.”
She felt the tears spill over her eyelashes. “But I must leave. My duties…I cannot abandon the temple, even if some part of me might wish it.”
He pulled her into his arms. “And as much as I might want to, I would never ask you to abandon your responsibilities. If anyone can understand responsibility, it’s me. But somehow it helps to know that some part of you thinks about it. For me.”
They’d discussed the matter frequently enough, and sometimes with Kat, too, that they both knew how unlikely it was that Poseidon would ever allow him entrance into Atlantis. Perhap
s at some time in the future. Certainly not now.
“I offer you my vow, Ethan of Florida,” she said, putting all of her love for him into her gaze. “We will find a way.”
“We will find a way,” he repeated. “I offer you my vow, as well. I love you, ocean girl. Remember that every time you look at that ring.”
She glanced down at the flawless diamond on her left hand, a symbol of a promise, he’d said when he’d offered it the night before. A tingle of curiosity made her wonder how it would resonate with the gems in the temple and what song Erin could sing from it. Surely such a beautiful gem, which held the promise of unending love, could sing powerful healing.
“You’ve got your scholar face on again,” he said. “What’s percolating inside that beautiful head?”
As his laughter rumbled in his chest against her cheek, she looked up to find his golden eyes filled with heat. Shimmering silvery blue light began to sparkle and swirl around her, and she fell back onto the bed, pulling him down with her.
“We have all day, my beautiful, fierce panther,” she said, lifting her face for his kiss. “Can you think of any way we might spend it?”
He kissed her with leisurely skill and tenderness until she gasped for breath beneath him. “Oh, I’ve got an idea or two,” he drawled. Then he cast a glance up at the ceiling. “Do you think I should get an umbrella?”
It took her a moment, but then the peals of her laughter rang through the room.
Together, she silently vowed, they would refuse to be daunted, no matter what peril the future might hold. Love and laughter would help them to surmount any obstacles. The shape-shifter had found his lady, and she had finally come home.
Read on for a sneak peek at Alyssa Day’s
next Warriors of Poseidon novel
HEART OF ATLANTIS
Coming from Berkley Sensation in December 2012!
A hidden cave inside of Mount Fuji, Japan
The portal opened and Alaric, warrior and high priest of Atlantis, stepped through, followed by a shell-shocked rebel leader and a five-hundred-pound tiger shape-shifter who might have permanently lost his humanity.
“Oh, Alaric,” said the ancient man who stood waiting for them, sighing and shaking his head. “You do get into the most fascinating trouble.”
“Interesting you should say that, Archelaus,” Alaric said. “I need a place to hide for a time, while Quinn tries to help Jack remember that he’s human, too, and not just a tiger.”
Quinn barely glanced at him, her eyes dull with pain and exhaustion, but she never let go of his hand. It was more physical contact than he’d allowed himself to have with her in a very long time.
Archelaus took them all in with his sharp gaze. The old man, long since retired as mentor to the Atlantean warrior training academy, never missed anything.
“And Atlantis? Are the Seven Isles still in jeopardy?”
“Aren’t they always?” Alaric sliced a hand through the air in dismissal of the topic. “We need a place to rest. Food. A refuge—we need to hide a tiger.”
Archelaus pointed at something behind them. “Who is that?”
Alaric whirled around, shocked to see a stranger—a delicate, dark-haired woman—step out of the portal.
“Who are you?” he demanded, pushing Quinn behind him. None but Atlanteans could call the portal, and this woman clearly was not Atlantean, but of Asian descent.
She blinked in apparent confusion. “Konnichiwa,” she began, offering a basic greeting in Japanese, but then she continued in ancient Atlantean as she slowly collapsed until she lay curled up on the ground next to the tiger, who ignored her completely. “I am the spirit of the portal, and I am this woman, who came to Mount Fuji to die.”
“You came here to die. We came here to force Jack to live,” Quinn said, and then she started laughing; a terrible, almost hysterical laugh. “Lucky we have Poseidon’s high priest with us, isn’t it?”
Alaric stared down at Quinn and fought the tidal wave of unfamiliar, unwanted emotion threatening to swamp him. “Yes. I will do what I can for him, as I promised.”
Archelaus sighed again. “You have amazingly bad timing, my friend.”
“Timing has nothing to do with need,” Alaric snapped, finally out of patience with the day, the situation, and the centuries of standing alone as priest to a capricious god.
“Timing has everything to do with danger,” the older man returned calmly, as he draped his sweater over the unconscious woman who’d claimed to be what she couldn’t possibly be. “The vampire goddess Anubisa is back from her sojourn in the land of Chaos, and this time she swears to destroy Atlantis and every member of the Atlantean royal family. You have never been more needed by your people in your entire life, I would imagine.”
“I am needed here,” Alaric said, staring at Quinn. “Atlantis can burn in the nine hells for all I care. I have sacrificed enough to Poseidon. My days as high priest are done.”
Quinn collapsed onto a low bench against one wall of the room or cave or wherever they’d ended up. Strange that she’d spent more time in caves since becoming the leader of the North American human rebel contingent than she’d ever dreamed possible. Straight from caves in Sedona, where she’d battled vampires and evil bankers, to Japan. A wave of grief and exhaustion, fought back and repressed for far too long, swept through her and threatened to drown her in futility and despair.
Jack. Her comrade; her partner in the rebellion. Her friend. She could finally admit she loved him with some small part of her stony, blackened heart, although it wasn’t the kind of love he might want. She loved him like a brother; the one she’d never had and had never known she wanted. Her big, scary, wounded warrior of a brother, who just happened to shift into a quarter ton of tiger sometimes. They’d fought together for years—years of trying to fight back the tide of darkness after the vampires announced to the world that they were real and then promptly proceeded to try to take it over. No matter how hard they pretended otherwise, vampires viewed humans as sheep for the slaughter. Unfortunately, most people were easily fooled or else too apathetic to care that the town’s new mayor or sheriff just happened to be a bloodsucker making a power grab.
Easy enough to make people disappear from behind the authority of a badge. Even the FBI’s P-Ops division had discovered that, when they’d found traitors in their midst. The president fired the director of Paranormal Operations and half of his staff when that inconvenient truth had surfaced.
Quinn sighed, fully aware that her brain was jumping from thought to thought in a futile effort to quit thinking about Jack. If they couldn’t help him…but they would. Alaric would. She refused to question her unshakable belief in Alaric or even to peer more closely at the reasons for it. She didn’t have time to get involved with any man—and certainly not with a man who was bound by both sworn oath and magic to Poseidon. The sea god himself, swimming out of the page of legends and into the middle of her pain-wracked, screwed-up life.
She stared at the floor, unable to muster even a spark of interest as Alaric conferred with the older man. Archelaus. Although older might not apply. Just because the man looked to be at least a century old, appearances were deceiving with Atlanteans. A casual glance would put Alaric in his early thirties or even late twenties, until the one doing the glancing looked into the dark caverns of those emerald-green eyes.
Ancient eyes. Centuries of brutal knowledge, blood, and death had passed before them—those eyes which were always faintly glowing with the overspill of magical power he couldn’t quite contain. He was at least five hundred years old. Strong enough to be the most powerful high priest Atlantis had ever known, or so some said.
Differences of opinion on that subject had been emerging, however. Politics. Like she gave a flying crap about politics. Bottom line: he didn’t look like a man who’d lived half a thousand years…until you looked into his eyes.
He was nearly six and a half feet of pure, primal warrior. His black hair had grown past his shoul
ders; it had been a few inches shorter when she’d first met him. Not much time for haircuts when a man was saving the world, probably.
She laughed to herself. He’d saved her life and broken her heart. Strange that healing one bullet wound could accomplish all of that.
She closed her eyes but could still see his face, as if it had imprinted on her mind with the strength of a hammer into molten brass. A face too strong—too male—to be called beautiful, but too perfect to be called anything else. All hard lines and sculpted angles. The face of a man who commanded absolute obedience, unqualified respect, and…something else. Something he’d never wanted.
Terror.
Vampires and rogue shape-shifters alike were terrified of the rumors and the reality. Quinn had heard men call him the high priest of death—but they never called him that to his face, or even very loudly. That, by itself, was no bad thing in a warrior priest, to be feared by his enemies.
But it was more than that. Even Alaric’s allies sometimes feared him, and Quinn had seen how brutal a blow that was to him. Poseidon’s high priest would be called a wizard of the highest level if he practiced his magic in the human hierarchy. Hell, he blew the hierarchy out of the water.
Ha. Water. Atlantis. She’d made a funny.
Alaric shifted to capture her in his hot green gaze, and she wondered if he knew she’d been thinking about him. Archelaus said something, and Alaric turned his head back toward the man, giving Quinn the chance to study him unobserved. Even in ripped and bloodstained clothes from the battle they’d just fought, his body was a seductive delight, worthy of starring in any woman’s fantasies. All hard muscle and perfect proportion. Even she, who’d spent the past decade or so surrounded by warriors and soldiers in her rebel army, had to admit that Alaric was in a class all by himself.
