Atlantis Rising (19 page)

A frantic pounding of feet interrupted whatever response Conlan might have been able to think of, and he and Alaric both turned to see Riley running full speed around the corner.

She saw the scene and screeched to a halt, shaking, and began to scream. “Quinn! Where are you?”

Conlan ran to her, but it was Justice who caught her as she went down. He swept her up in his arms and handed her carefully to Conlan, then made a slight bow. “Your human, my prince.”

Conlan ignored the trace of mockery in the warrior and bent his head to Riley. “Shh. She’s not gone yet. You have time to say good-bye.”

She gasped in heaving breaths and started screaming again, pushing and clawing at him to try to get down. “No! Not my sister. Let me down. Let me down now!”

Instead, he pulled her closer, turning her face toward his chest, so she wouldn’t have to look at the carnage surrounding them. Then he strode over and around the bodies toward Alaric.

When he reached the deadfall of trees, he relaxed his hold on Riley and set her gently on the ground. Alaric was kneeling in front of the body of a woman. A wound in her shoulder was pulsing blood. Conlan scented the air. The sulfur smell of gunpowder.

She’d been shot.

Quinn had short dark hair, instead of Riley’s gold, but her silken white skin and delicate facial features were stamped with Riley’s strength and beauty.

Riley threw herself on the ground and put her arms around her sister, sobbing. For an instant—a split second that passed so quickly Conlan wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it—Alaric tensed, fingers curling into claws, as if he were going to attack Riley.

Even as Conlan moved to place himself between the two, the moment faded. The green flames in Alaric’s eyes muted slightly.

“Help her!” Riley lifted her sister’s head carefully onto her lap and stared at Alaric. “Help her! I know you can do it. You healed poison and sword wounds and broken heads. You can surely heal a little—oh, my God, it’s a gunshot wound. Please,
please,
” she begged, somehow sobbing and issuing a command all at once.

Alaric shook his head back and forth, a dazed expression on his face. His eyes were wild, almost rolling around in his head. Conlan had never seen him like this.

“I can’t,” he muttered brokenly. “I can’t reach her. I can only feel the pain she’s sending out. I can’t get past it.”

Conlan dropped to one knee beside Riley and put his arms around her, hoping to give some comfort. She elbowed him viciously and shook him off, never for a moment looking away from Alaric. She curled her lips back from her teeth and snarled so ferociously she almost looked like a shape-shifter herself.

“You can, and you will, because I will
push
you past it.” With that, she grabbed Alaric’s forearm in a viselike grip and forced his hand down to her sister’s shoulder. “I’ve seen healings on TV. Witch healings. They need to touch in order to do it. I’m guessing it’s the same with you.”

As Conlan watched, somehow Riley managed to win the struggle with Alaric, combating his reluctance with sheer desperation. As the priest’s hand passed through the last inch of space separating it from Quinn’s shoulder, Conlan saw an aquamarine glow pass from Alaric’s palm into Riley’s sister.

When Alaric’s fingers finally touched Quinn, her body, resting in Riley’s lap, jumped at the contact, and her feet drummed into the red-and-gold pile of fallen leaves in which they lay. Riley, still holding tightly to Alaric’s arm, closed her eyes.

Alaric threw his head back, flinching, the cords in his neck standing out in stark relief as every muscle in his body seemed to tighten.

Conlan lifted his hands to Riley’s shoulders, but an electric shock slammed him back away from her. For the space of several seconds, the three—Alaric, Quinn, and Riley—were frozen in a painful tableau, limned in a luminous blue-green light.

Then, as one, Riley and Alaric slumped forward, gasping for breath. Conlan caught Riley before she could fall forward onto her sister, gently taking her chin in his hand and searching her face for signs that she had been harmed.

Alaric caught himself, one hand on his knee, the other still in place on Quinn’s shoulder. “I do not know why you were caught up in the healing process, Riley. I have never channeled the healing powers like that before. Are you harmed?”

Before Riley could respond, a quiet, slightly husky feminine voice cut across the sound of rasping breaths. “If you move that hand one inch closer to my boob, I’m going to cut it off.”

Alaric took one look into Quinn’s eyes as they opened and fell back away from her. Shooting to his feet with such speed that Conlan almost wasn’t able to track him, Alaric backed away from them, shaking his head and muttering something to himself.

Conlan was unable to make out the words, but he heard the cadence of ancient Atlantean and wondered at it. He stroked Riley’s hair, a brief touch more for his comfort than hers, and stood to follow Alaric.

He caught the priest on the other side of the path as Alaric began to shimmer into mist. “Stop,” he commanded. “Where in the nine hells do you think you’re going? What just happened?”

Alaric reverted to corporeal form and whirled around to face him. “You want to know what happened?” he asked, wild fury in his voice, desperation dark in the harsh lines of his face.

“You want to know what
happened
?” With two steps, he was right up in Conlan’s face.

“I’ll tell you what
happened
, my prince,” Alaric continued, rasping out the words. “What happened was I sent my healing energy inside Quinn. Inside that
human.
And she grabbed hold of me.”

He shoved a hand through his hair and laughed a little wildly, eyes flaring green and hot.

Savage.

“She dug her mental claws into my
balls
, is what happened. I healed her, and she destroyed something in me. Shredded it.”

“What—” Conlan never got the question out.

“My control,” Alaric snarled. “The absolutely rock-hard control that I’ve spent centuries perfecting. Your little girl-friend’s sister reached out with her emotions, or her witchy empath nature, or what the hell ever, and all I wanted to do was
fuck
her.”

Conlan moved back half a step at the ferocity in the priest’s voice and dropped his hands to his dagger handles. For an instant, icy death menaced in the air between them.

Alaric laughed, bitter again. “Oh, you don’t need your blades. In spite of the fact that I wanted her more than I’ve wanted anything in my life, I won’t touch her. Although, even now, my mind tortures me with images of pounding into her body, right there on the ground in the mess of her own blood, fucking and
fucking
her until I drive myself into her soul.” Alaric viciously kicked at a tree and shards of bark flew into the air, then disintegrated in the green energy bolts he shot at them.

This was new and dangerous territory, and Conlan attempted to proceed with caution. “Alaric, you must—”

“Yes. I
must
. I must never succumb to any lusts, or my power is ended. Certainly, I would be of no further use to you or to Atlantis. No use to the jealous bastard of a sea god whom I serve,” the priest said flatly, his voice suddenly devoid of the rage and passion that had infused it moments before.

“I
must
get away from her,” he continued. “Now. From this place. I am ruined for this day, in any event. This . . . this energy drain has voided any hope I had of re-scrying for the Trident until I recover. I will meet you back at Ven’s safe house tonight.”

Conlan grasped his friend’s shoulders, shaken by the blasphemy he’d never heard from him before. “Alaric, know that your use to me and to Atlantis goes far beyond the powers you gained from Poseidon. Your wise counsel has served me well for centuries, and I will need you when I ascend to the throne.”

Alaric stared over Conlan’s shoulder toward Riley and her sister. “These empaths. They signal a treacherous difference in our ways, Conlan. I can sense it. Change is coming. Peril that comes from within our very souls.”

With that, he took two running steps and leapt into the air, transforming into sparkling mist that quickly vanished.

Conlan watched the air into which Alaric had disappeared for a long moment, considering his parting words.

But Alaric had been wrong. Change wasn’t coming.

Twenty minutes later, Conlan stood with Ven, grimly contemplating the pile of bodies they and the rest of the Seven had pulled behind the deadfall of trees. Centuries of serving as a warrior had yet to inure him to the foul stink of death, and his stomach growled an urge to reject its contents. He scrubbed at his hands with leaves, then realized the futility of the effort and called water from the surrounding leaves and a tiny stream some hundred yards away to cleanse his hands.

The mist became fluid in the cupped bowl of his hands and he washed the blood from hands and forearms, wondering how Reisen and his remaining warriors had escaped undetected after surviving this carnage. They must have been spattered with gore.

Except, of course, when they traveled as mist. Which may have explained why Riley no longer detected them. He’d have to test his theory with her sometime. Sometime when a dozen dead men weren’t lying at his feet.

Almost involuntarily, his mind reached out to hers, but she’d slammed those damned shields of hers down so tightly he wouldn’t know she was there if he hadn’t just left her. It was better that way, though. There was only so much that she could be expected to endure.

Justice and Bastien were roaming through the woods on either side of them, searching for any sign of Reisen and his remaining warriors, while Christophe and the others stood guard.

Emotionless Brennan stood with Riley and her sister.

Riley had told him they were wasting their time. “They’re gone. Or they’ve magically learned how to mask their emotions in the past half an hour. Because I can’t feel a thing.”

Conlan was unsure of how far he could rely on her ability to sense the Mycenaean warriors, given the extent of the terror she’d just experienced. But her senses, however compromised, were all he had.

Alaric was gone.

“We’ve got to get rid of the bodies. We can’t leave this mess for the human authorities,” Ven growled, wiping sweat off his forehead with his arm. “It’s a nightmare.”

Conlan nodded. They’d tallied seven dead shape-shifters and five Atlanteans. The evidence of the battle needed to be destroyed. “We’re not exactly going to dig a big hole,” he replied. “There is one way, but it will take both of us to do it to so many.”

Ven shot a look at him. “You’re not thinking—”

“What else could I be thinking? We must employ the final solution.”

Ven whistled. “
Mortus desicana
. I didn’t even know you knew how to channel that kind of power. Have you ever—”

Conlan cut him off. “No. Not that I wouldn’t have tried it on Anubisa, if I’d had a fraction of a chance. But this is different. These men are already dead. The penance would not be tasked against us.”

“Are you sure about that? What does the temple rat say?”

Conlan hesitated, unsure of how much to divulge. Alaric would hate to be exposed in any weakness.

In any event, there was no time. “He’s gone. The healing—he returned to the safe house.”

“What? He went all girly after healing a simple bullet wound? I’m going to give him so much grief—”

Conlan heard rustling in the trees approximately fifty yards away and concentrated. It was Justice. But the sound underscored their need for haste. “Ven. Focus. Will you help me channel the
mortus desicana
to destroy these bodies, or do I do it myself?”

“I’ll help you. Poseidon help us both if you’re wrong about the penance. Twelve bodies . . . we might not survive it.”

Looking around quickly to make sure that Brennan still kept Riley away from the bloody pile of the slain, Conlan took a deep breath and held his hands up, sending his call into the wind.

If she saw this, she’d think he was the same kind of monster who’d created this bloody nightmare.

Beside him, Ven did the same, and they both began to chant.

“Poseidon, Father of Water,

“Lord of elements, avatar of justice for all Atlanteans,

“Hear our plea, feel our need,

“Lend us your power for the
mortus desicana
,

“Hear our plea, feel our need.”

“For a moment, nothing. Despair surged through Conlan. Had Poseidon truly abandoned him as unworthy after what Anubisa had done to him?

Damaged goods. Damaged goods. Damaged
—

Then a surge of electric power stormed into his body. From the air, from the water in the ground, from the wind itself. Up through his feet, through his skin, down into his skull from the cloudless sky. The power of the elements ripped through his flesh, screamed through nerve endings, tore at his control.

He fought with it, contained it, channelled it. Not even realizing he was doing it, he roared out his dominance over the power. “I am Conlan of Atlantis, and I command you to the
mortus desicana
!”

With that, he flung the power out of his body through his hands at the pile of bodies and watched, gloated,
gloried
in the
power.
The roaring rush of the elements covered and surrounded the bodies of the dead, rushing into every pore in their skin, into every orifice, and did their terrifying work.

Sucking,
draining
every ounce of water—every drop of fluid—out of the bodies. Sucking it out and returning the fluid to nature, from whence it came. Drying,
desiccating
the bodies of the dead.

Whispering to Conlan with fury, with frenzy, with the sly Siren call of unadulterated power. The
mortus desicana.