Heart Of Atlantis (22 page)

Chapter 27

Somewhere inside a demonic dimension

Quinn cautiously moved behind Ptolemy, considering him the lesser of many, many evils, as she watched his “brothers” caper and tumble around on the ancient mosaic tile. Its beauty compared to their hideousness created a sickening juxtaposition that her brain kept trying to reject. Apparently the mind shut down when reality took such a horrible left turn. Her stomach also contributed to her general misery, since it roiled at each new assault to the senses.

Ptolemy’s family wasn’t just a
visual
tragedy.

Oh,
no
.

They
stank
, too. They reeked with a stench like rotting sewage and sulfuric acid, which led her to wonder anew if she really had landed in her dimension’s version of hell. It certainly smelled bad enough.

She finally ventured a question, when Ptolemy and his brothers ended a conversation that had consisted of squeaks, grunts, and shrill whistling noises. “What do they want?”

“They want you,” he said, sounding amused. “
They
don’t have mates, either.”

“Oh,
hell
no,” she blurted out.

He turned to her and smiled that hideous smile full of teeth. “Possibly they only want to eat you, though. Suddenly I look better to you?”

She wanted to disagree, but in comparison to this bunch, he was at least mostly human-looking. She’d be damned if she’d be signing up for either option, though.

The din built up to a dull roar again, and Ptolemy turned to give his family his full attention. Probably safest. Quinn watched with growing interest as he drew a familiar small wooden box out of his pocket. She didn’t know what he’d done with the scepter.

“I have retrieved the crown jewel of Atlantis!” He withdrew the tourmaline, placed the box on a ledge, and flourished the gem about. The chattering and squeaks rose to a nearly unbearable level, and then a hush fell on the room as Ptolemy prepared to do . . . nothing.

He waved Poseidon’s Pride about in a high arc over his head, and absolutely nothing at all happened.

“Maybe it doesn’t work here?” Quinn held out her hand. “Want me to take a look?”

“It’s not a faulty handgun, you moron,” Ptolemy snarled at her. “What possible use would you, a mere non-magical human, be?”

She held up her hands, palms out, in surrender. She didn’t have any desire to be his next victim. “Hey, I was just offering to help. Shutting up now.”

One of the bolder brothers—cousins? uncles? Quinn had no idea and didn’t really want to think about it—started to lurch closer, chittering loudly, until Ptolemy leapt forward and smashed it in the face with one clawed hand. Sensing weakness, the others swarmed the fallen one and tore it to shreds before moving back and giving Ptolemy and Quinn a little space.

She’d been in enough battles to realize that the temporary retreat wouldn’t last. This was pretty clearly an “eat what you kill” kind of society, cousin or not, and she was starting to worry that she would be the one who got eaten. Or worse. Her mind stuttered away from the alternatives.

“It must be useless in my dimension,” Ptolemy finally said, and Quinn rolled her eyes.

“Gee, I wish I’d thought of that.” She sniped, and Ptolemy casually backhanded her so hard she flew backward and cracked her head against the wall before falling in a heap to the floor.

Maybe there really
was
a time to quit being a smart-ass, and captive in a demonic dimension was a good place to start. Her skull rang with pretty little bells for a few long minutes, as she blinked and tried to focus. She was fairly sure he’d torn open her lip, too, but she didn’t care enough to take her hands away from her poor, aching head, until she noticed one of the smaller atrocities staring at her like she was catnip and he was a very hungry kitten. Then she started to worry. More.

“Wipe your face,” Ptolemy said, throwing a piece of cloth at her. She looked at it and realized he’d torn it from his shirt.

“Human blood is a delicacy to them,” he said nonchalantly, but she noticed his gaze was fixed a little bit too intently on her chin.

“Only to
them
?” She wiped the blood away and then rolled up the cloth and threw it as far as she could from where she still sat on the floor. Several of the creatures hurled themselves into a biting, snapping frenzy over the cloth, which she didn’t find reassuring in the least.

“If I can’t get this to work, we might have to run for it,” Ptolemy said, continuing the hit parade of
not reassuring
. He shoved the gem into his jacket pocket and scowled as he scanned the room.

“Can’t you just call your portal and get us out of here?”

“Not without taking some of them with me. Do you think your world is ready for them?”

She looked around at the mass of monsters inching bit by bit closer, many of them actively drooling long, glistening ropes of slime as they watched her with, generally, more than two eyes each.

“No, my world is definitely not ready for them,” she agreed. She put a hand on her knife hilt and prepared to kill as many of them as she could before they killed her.

She just hoped Alaric found a way to be happy, one day. The thought of Alaric reminded her of the shell he’d given her and bolstered her courage, in spite of the pain still ringing in her skull, and she climbed to her feet, the better to fight off the atrocities.

“I’m not asking this to be a smart-ass, but why did we come here again?”

“I wanted you to see why I must escape this place, so you would better understand me when we are mated,” he said sadly. “Instead, I have caused you to become even more horrified by me.”

For one brief moment, she almost felt sorry for him. She thought
she’d
had sibling rivalry problems, when she and Riley hit puberty together, and there were two emotional empaths in the same house. At least neither of them had tried to kill and eat the other one’s boyfriend.

Of course, neither she nor her sister was a murderous kidnapper who wanted to take over somebody else’s world, either.

She squared her shoulders and tried to put a tiny bit of empathy in her voice as she forced herself to lean forward and hug him. “I actually do kind of understand, and I’m sorry for what you’ve endured, but kidnapping me and forcing me to have your kids, plus conquering my world, isn’t the way to my heart.”

He looked surprised, and then he laughed. “I don’t care about your heart. It’s another organ entirely that I need.”

Leering, he patted her stomach, and any shred of sympathy she’d had for his plight vanished in the wave of revulsion that punched her in the gut as hard as he’d punched her in the face.

“For now, though, you have to go,” he said as, at some unknown signal, his family started to swarm the spot where they stood. “I’ll hold them off and then make it back to you later. You’ll be safe enough.”

He picked Quinn up and threw her at the wall as hard as he could, over the gaping, shark-toothed maws and grasping, claw-handed reach of the atrocities who were leaping for her. She braced for impact and wondered if she could survive a shattered skull, but the wall dissolved into the garish orange light of his portal, and she fell through it. The last thing she saw of his dimension was one of his relatives stabbing its swordlike appendage into Ptolemy’s back so hard that the tip of it came out the front of his chest, exactly where his heart would have been if he’d been human.

Ptolemy opened his mouth to scream, and a blackish-green oily liquid gushed out. Surely that had killed him.
Surely
. In spite of the nausea-making vortex, she smiled fiercely—both with triumph and because she had a wonderful secret. Those creatures were trapped on their side of the vortex; none of them seemed to be smart enough to figure out the portal.

And, even better, Quinn’s past had come to her rescue. One of her mentors in her early days of rebel training had been a champion pickpocket. Quinn had forced herself to embrace Ptolemy for a very, very good reason. She put her hand inside the front waistband of her borrowed pants and double-checked that the leather pouch she’d borrowed from Lauren’s things was still secure.

And that Poseidon’s Pride was secure inside it.

She’d known she was quite likely to die from daring to touch the gem, but she’d had to try, and apparently Alaric’s magic, which he’d shared with her, was powerful enough to protect her. Or else it was gearing up to incinerate her, but she was frankly too tired to care which, especially if this never-ending trip through the demon portal didn’t end soon.

As if on command, it dumped her—out of the portal and into the frying pan, so to speak—and she landed in the same hotel room where Ptolemy had held her hostage before. The windows Alaric had blown out were in the process of being replaced, and seven thugs pointed seven guns at her.

She raised her hands in surrender and sank slowly into a velvet chair. “Hey, as long as I’m here, can we order room service again? I’m kind of hungry.”

“You don’t get food, bitch,” one of the uglier ones said. These were all humans, though, so ugly was relative compared to what she’d seen back in Ptolemy’s homeworld.

Ha. Ugly was
relative
compared to his
relatives
. She’d made another funny. Either that or relief was making her giddy. She laughed out loud.

Big, bad, and comparatively ugly raised his hand, as if to hit her, and suddenly the other six guns were trained on him.

“Ptolemy said not to touch her. Not to lay a single finger on her in any way, or he disembowels all of us,” a very serious-looking man dressed in all black said firmly. “I like my intestines where they are.”

“She laughed at me,” the first one complained, and the man in black shot him in the head.

Quinn quit laughing, fast.

Brain spatters on your clothes tended to do that to a person.

She lost the battle, after all. She leaned over and threw up all over one of the thugs’ shoes. Then she sat there, huddled into a ball in the chair, with her eyes shut tightly as she tried to contact Alaric. She could still feel him through the soul-meld link, and even more strongly than when she’d been in the same room with him, which made her wonder if her own terror or the presence of the tourmaline was causing that.

She didn’t care which it was, ultimately, so long as it worked.

After a little while, she decided to conserve her energy for another try later. She opened her eyes and looked for the man in black. The brain shooter.

“I need to go to the bathroom, please,” she said politely.

He nodded, and she walked straight to the bathroom, closed the door, and cleaned up the best she could. She washed the blood and brains off her face and hands and clothes and realized that very few people could say that about themselves, that they’d washed brains off their clothes.

Then she realized that her racing thoughts, breathing, and heart rate meant that she was slipping into a state of shock, which made sense, given the events of the past several days. She had to sit down on the edge of the tub, put her head between her knees, and take deep breaths.

A knock sounded at the door, and it opened before she could answer.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” It was the man in black again. He must be in charge.

She raised her head and considered him for a moment. “Would you be?”

Something shifted in his icy blue gaze, but he simply nodded. “Fair enough.”

He retreated and closed the door, and she sat alone in the bathroom, on the cold edge of the tub, for a very long time. When she thought she had the strength to try to call Alaric again, she powered up and fired out the loudest mental blast she could manage.

Alaric, I need you
right now
.

This time, he answered.

I’m on my way.

Quinn smiled again, doing little more than baring her teeth. The guy with his brains on the floor might be the lucky one of the bunch.

Chapter 28

Atlantis

Alaric walked out of the temple to a scene of mass confusion. Dozens of people seemed to be milling about; a few were laughing and talking, but mostly they conversed in quiet and serious tones. On closer inspection, he realized they weren’t random people. They were the Warriors of Poseidon, and they were all back in Atlantis.

The Seven were together again, for the first time in far too long. Even Denal, who seemed to have aged years in the months he’d been in the Fae lands. Unfortunately, that was a risk that anyone who entered the Summerlands had to expect. He was hugging Riley, who was laughing and crying at the same time.

Apparently a family trait.

Alaric’s mouth suddenly fell open, and he had to clamp it shut. A
family
trait. One she shared with her sister. Now that he and Quinn had reached the soul-meld, did that make him brother-in-law to the high prince and princess? He shook his head at the irrelevance of the question, given the current situation, but he couldn’t help but flinch at the idea. Riley was the type to expect regular family dinners, no doubt.

Given the circumstances, if they even survived long enough to have family dinners, Alaric resolved to appreciate them.

“Alaric,” Daniel called out from where he was talking to Bastien and his mate, Kat Fiero, and Alaric nearly did a double-take at the sight. He scanned the area and, sure enough, there was Ethan, another panther, sweeping Bastien’s sister Marie into a passionate embrace.

“There are shape-shifters in Atlantis,” Alaric said wonderingly, and Conlan, who’d suddenly appeared from the gods only knew where, clapped him on the back.

“Who would have thought we’d see the day?” the prince said. “I’m glad the old taboos have fallen, but I could have wished they’d picked a better day to visit.”

“They’re visiting?”

“No, it was a poor attempt at a jest,” Conlan said grimly. “The portal abducted them all and brought them here. Everybody’s story is the same. They suddenly heard ‘you have need,’ saw a flash of light, and the portal whisked them here. Everybody except Denal showed up with the person or persons who’d been with them. Even Grace and Alexios brought a very surprised rebel training class.”

Conlan pointed at the group of mostly young humans standing off to one side gaping at everything.

“Denal?”

“He left Maeve behind, but he’d planned to do so, anyway, he says, so he’s not in the least upset.” Conlan scowled at the youngling. “I see he’s already hugging my wife again.”

Alaric started to reply, but a mental blast cut through the noise and the chatter and all but stripped the gears in his brain.

Alaric, I need you
right now, Quinn mentally shouted at him.

I’m on my way
,
he sent back, and then he clapped Conlan on the shoulder so hard he nearly knocked the prince off the temple steps.

“She’s back. She’s back, and I know just where she is,” he crowed. “That hotel must enjoy replacing windows, though.”

“What do you need?” Conlan asked, instantly grasping the situation.

Alaric yelled for Justice, who was standing near Alexios. “Bring me a sword.”

If his magic misfired around the demon, he wanted a backup option. To Conlan he said, “What do I
need
? Interesting question.”

“Hey, portal,” he shouted. “Come listen to what I
need
, or I’ll let Atlantis be crushed under five and a half miles of water.”

“Nice touch,” Conlan murmured. “I’m guessing portals don’t understand about bluffing.”

Alaric shot him a look. “Who says I’m bluffing?”

Conlan’s smile faded, but then the portal appeared, surprising both of them.

“If these people and my baby die because you kidnapped them and dumped them here, I’ll make it my mission in life to exterminate you, you egotistic, pathetic excuse for an elevator,” Riley said, marching up to the portal with a sleeping baby in her arms.

Aidan didn’t even open an eye. Perhaps he was used to his mother’s fierce personality and was comforted by it. It occurred to Alaric with the force of a spear to the chest that perhaps he and Quinn would one day have a child a lot like Aidan. He suddenly found it hard to breathe.

“Get in before it disappears,” Conlan said. “Hurry up, Alaric, we need that stone.”

Alaric jumped into the portal. “Take me to Quinn.”

As he traveled through the vortex, the strangest thing happened. Alaric thought he heard the portal say, “Duuude.”

Before he could analyze
that
bit of oddity, it dumped him in the middle of a room filled with a gang of armed men, a dead man, and one human female who glowed—at least to
his
senses—with the intensity of a miniature sun. The sight of the Atlantean energy gave Alaric hope he hadn’t dared to feel, which surged up inside him, dancing with his joy and relief from Quinn’s presence.

She was alive and safe. Thank all the gods.

But then Quinn turned her head toward him, and he saw that the side of her face was one massive bruise, and her lip was split and swollen.

A blinding rage swept through him, and he attacked the men with the sword and with his power, driving ice spears through their throats one by one. Distantly, he heard her yelling at him to stop, but a primal fury had crushed his reason and destroyed his logic. He sensed that Poseidon’s Pride was enhancing and increasing his power, but he had no intention of trying to stop.

They’d hurt her, so they had to die.

There was only one left alive—a man dressed in all black who’d tried to shoot Alaric until he’d frozen the man’s gun to his hand in an impenetrable block of ice. Alaric raised his sword again, but then Quinn stepped between him and his target.

“No,” she shouted, waving her arms. “This one protected me from the others, and even more important, he might know more about Ptolemy’s plans.”

Alaric slowly lowered the sword as her words penetrated his raging mind. “He hurt you. I see your face.”

“No, that was Ptolemy. I’ll tell you everything, but it wasn’t this man. He protected me.” She stepped closer and put her arm around Alaric’s waist, careful not to block his sword arm.

“This one protected you,” he repeated, still not believing it.

She nodded. “He shot the dead one for trying to hurt me.”

“And yet he held you captive at gunpoint,” Alaric said, his outward calm back in place. “He will die for that alone.”

“I can’t tell you anything if I’m dead,” the man said, finally speaking up. He must have had ice in his veins, since he wasn’t shaking or begging or crying.

“Do you know anything to tell?” Alaric placed the tip of his sword against the man’s throat and pushed, just hard enough to cut the skin. Blood dripped down the man’s neck.

Quinn nudged Alaric to the side a little. “What’s your name, and what did Ptolemy tell you?”

“I’m Westbury. He didn’t tell me much, unfortunately,” the man said. “His plan once he arrived was to head to the Bermuda Triangle, if that makes any sense at all.”

Alaric exchanged a grim glance with Quinn. It told them far too much.

“It’s a measure of your integrity that you admit you know little,” Alaric said. “And yet you have no loyalty, to admit so much.”

“He doesn’t deserve my loyalty,” Westbury said, holding up his ice-encumbered right hand with his left. “He took my sister and promised to give her back to my family in exchange for my services. Now I may never see her again.”

Quinn’s eyes widened. “What does she look like?”

“I have a picture, but . . .” The man glanced pointedly down at his frozen arm.

Quinn looked at Alaric. He considered, then nodded. Made the ice vanish.

Westbury showed her a photograph on his telephone, and Quinn smiled.

“I met this girl. She’s fine, or at least she was mostly fine when I last saw her. Bruised but mostly unharmed,” Quinn said. “I don’t know—”

The man’s phone rang at that moment, and a different photograph of the same girl flashed on the screen. Westbury answered it, spoke briefly but with unmistakable emotion, and then closed the phone.

“She’s in the emergency room. She said that you saved her, and I was . . . I can never make this up to you,” he said hoarsely to Quinn, and Alaric watched as she made another conquest right before his eyes.

“Go. She needs you,” Quinn said, brushing Westbury’s gratitude aside.

She was embarrassed when they did this, the thankfulness. The devotion. Alaric knew her well enough to understand this.

Westbury was wise enough to look to Alaric, though, before moving. “Either kill me or let me go to my sister.”

Suddenly, Alaric wanted nothing more than to be alone with Quinn . He came to a decision.

“Go. Your actions were somewhat offset by your motives,” he said abruptly. “But never let me see you again.”

Westbury nodded before taking a card out of his pocket and handing it to Quinn. “Any time, any place. Just call me, and I’ll be there.”

As soon as the man left the room, Alaric called to the portal, which again appeared almost instantly. He wrapped his arms around Quinn, and together they stepped into the portal.

“Back to Atlantis, now,” he commanded.

“I had to sacrifice the shell you gave me. I needed the weight for the switch,” she told him.

“I’ll find you another,” he promised.

“I have it,” Quinn whispered. “Poseidon’s Pride.”

“I know,” he said, and then he healed her lip and face before kissing her senseless. He sank into her emotions with the first touch of her lips, and he claimed her mouth with every ounce of possession and need he felt for this miracle of a woman.

His
woman.

His for all of eternity.

He was still kissing her, with her enthusiastic participation, when they arrived in Atlantis. Suddenly the air rang with applause, and Alaric realized they were the center of attention.

“Oh, no,” Quinn said, pushing away from him. “Put me down right now.”

He did as she asked and then held out his hand. She withdrew Poseidon’s Pride from her pocket and handed it over, and in the exact moment when both of their hands were touching the gem, a thunderclap sounded
inside the dome
, and a lightning strike of power sizzled through Alaric’s body. Quinn cried out in shock, so she must have experienced it, too, but then someone started screaming that Atlantis was collapsing.

“Not on our watch,” Quinn said, but it would have sounded better if she hadn’t been having such a hard time catching her breath.

A part of Alaric wanted nothing more than to return to the kissing, especially now that every nerve ending in his body was on fire with the gem’s magic, but the current emergency outweighed all else. So instead he took Quinn’s hand and headed into the temple. At least twenty people followed them.

Quinn couldn’t believe she’d been caught kissing Alaric in the middle of Atlantis, during the worst crisis in the history of the continent, but after what they’d been through, she kind of didn’t care. When she passed Riley and Aidan on the way to the temple, Riley gave her a thumbs-up.

“Way to go, sis.”

Alaric growled and walked faster, and Quinn had an insane urge to laugh. Family dinners were going to be interesting.

Alaric stopped outside the door to the Trident’s room, where a half dozen exhausted men and women, plus Myrken, sat against the wall. Five more were asleep or unconscious on the floor a little farther down the hall.

“Stay here,” Alaric commanded. “I do not know how bad this will get.”

She nodded but said nothing, not even
“Have you
met
me?”
As soon as he went inside the room, she looked at her old pal, Myrken.

“Got any rope? I’ve got an idea.”

He jumped up before the words were out of her mouth. Not bad for someone who looked as though the Trident had drained all the life out of his body. She headed for the stairs and on the way explained the exact place she was seeking. When they arrived at the vantage point she’d been hoping for, she explained her plan and watched Myrken turn seventeen shades of pale.

“If I get you killed, Lord Alaric will kill me next.”

She shook her head. “I won’t let him kill you, and anyway, I won’t die. So pull that panel off the wall, so I can find out if I can squeeze into that vent.”

She managed to fit, just barely, but it was tight, and her newly discovered claustrophobia came screaming back. She didn’t have time for phobias, though, and so she powered through, all of her mental focus on what was going on in that room beneath her. When she pushed through to the end of the vent and edged out onto the narrow niche, she looked down and flinched.

Alaric was leaning forward, clearly straining to control the Trident, which appeared to be trying to beat him to death. Or else it was trying to reunite with the tourmaline and being really aggressive about it. Either way. Alaric was in trouble, and he’d closed or sealed the door to the room, so nobody else was there to help.

Quinn to the rescue. She didn’t stop to wonder whether or not being able to touch Poseidon’s Pride meant she would be able to touch the Trident. She didn’t stop to think she might be plunging to her death on a rope that wasn’t strong enough to hold her.