Atlantis Awakening (23 page)

With his face still mashed into Jack's side, Justice had to agree with the smelly tiger part. Also with the killing part, except the killing he had planned involved a certain group of shifters and vamps.

By his oath to Poseidon, there was going to be much,
much
killing. And he was going to enjoy every bloody moment of slicing heads from bodies, just as soon as he could figure out where he was and how to get Jack and Quinn to safety.

“Drakos took the woman to Caligula, so why don't you come along with me and you can voice your complaints directly to the emperor?” The vamp's voice was sly with amusement. “I'm sure he'll be glad to find some way to…accommodate you.”

The shifters growled and stamped their feet a bit, then the one who'd been talking about “smelly tiger” finally spoke up. “Naw, just blowing off a little steam. We'll stay here and guard these two. You go ahead and do your vamp stuff.”

The vamp laughed. “No, our ‘vamp stuff,' as you so eloquently phrased it, is something that Caligula wants to share this time, so two of you stay here to stand guard until they start to stir. The rest come with me. The woman is important to the human rebellion in some way, and he wants to make an example of her. It should be quite a show.” He laughed again, and a chill whispering of torture and death skated down Justice's spine.

Almost simultaneously, the tiger's muscles clenched. The movement was so slight none of their captors would have noticed it, but it gave Justice very specific information and concerns:

First, Jack was waking up.

Second, depending on the reaction Jack had to the drugs in his system, Justice might be defending himself from a five-hundred-pound tiger any minute.

Without his sword.

The day kept getting better and better.

Ven watched Erin as she walked—almost staggering—forward through the woods beyond the cabin, holding her hands out in front of her, palms facing down. “What is it?”

“There were vampires here very recently. At least one of them called death magic,” she said. “We need to—”

“What is it?” He raised his sword and pushed past her, scanning the area for danger.

“A battle,” she said, her eyes going dark. “I don't know how, but I'm sensing the emanations of what happened here, not long ago. The Wilding is coursing through me, calling to me, but not…I don't know how to describe it.”

She pointed to a cluster of trees. “Through there. Death, but not death. Perverse joy…evil. Evil.”

Ven ran forward, sword held high, searching ground, trees, sky for possible attack. He slammed to a stop at the sight of an eight-or ten-foot-square spot of trampled snow. Vivid red spatters of blood showed up starkly against the bleak white. “Something happened here, all right. Looks like we found out what happened to Jack and Quinn.”

Erin's face paled to the color of the snow surrounding her. “But maybe they're still alive. If they'd killed them, wouldn't the bodies be here?”

“Maybe. Unless they didn't want to leave any evidence. Another snowfall would cover up the signs of the fight,” Ven said. “Wait! What…”

The breeze had ruffled the low branches of the lacy pines, and sunlight had flickered off a flash of blue. He swiftly crossed the trampled snow to a spot on its edge, under an overhanging branch, and knelt down. The sight of the familiar blue strands, ripped from their source, tore the breath from Ven's lungs.

It was Justice's hair.

Erin ran up beside him and dropped to her knees in the snow next to him. “What is it? What—oh, no. Is that your friend's hair? Is that blood?”

She put her hand on his arm. “What is happening? Why was he here? If they captured him, too, what can we do—”

“Stop. Stop it, Erin. There's nothing we can do but go forward,” he said. “If Justice had the opportunity to protect Quinn and Jack and kick a little vampire ass, he would have gone for it. We can only hope that our quest for the Nereid's Heart brings us to all three of them.”

“Damnit, when will this end? Every step we take seems to bring us further and further into Caligula's trap.” She slammed her hands down on the ground, then curled her fingers into claws in the snow. “I don't know how much more…Wait! What's that?”

She lifted something white and shook snow off of it, then handed it to him. “It's paper, probably trash, but it's a big coincidence that Justice's hair was right here, and I don't believe much in coincidence. You open it.”

He carefully unrolled the ball of paper and read the words written in dark, slashing handwriting, then looked up at Erin and gave a shout of triumph. “Finally! Chalk one up for the good guys! It's a note from Justice with directions and a map. It says
warded opening Point Success
. Does that mean anything to you?”

She took the paper from him and examined it. “Yes, it means we have to get to fourteen thousand feet and figure out a way to pass through another witch's warding.”

Turning her vivid blue eyes up to meet his gaze, she bared her teeth in a feral smile that would have made any warrior proud. It certainly made Ven proud, even as fear for her ripped at him. “Then we can join Justice in the vampire ass-kicking party.”

 

Quinn lay still in the darkness, slowly working her way back to consciousness, and wondered if anybody had gotten the license plate of the truck that had run her over. The image of the vampire's fist coming at her face flashed into her mind, and she sat up fast.

Big mistake.
Huge.

The concussion she'd probably sustained swirled nausea through her body, and she leaned over and threw up the remainder of her previous night's dinner onto the stone floor. When her aching stomach had pushed out everything it had, she scrubbed her mouth with a shaky hand and wished for water. Actually, she wished for a toothbrush and some mouthwash, too. Why not go all the way and wish big?

The thought forced a rusty laugh past her parched lips, and, as if in response to the sound, a viciously bright light seared into her eyes.

“If you hadn't turned your head at the last second, my fist surely would have driven your nose into your skull,” said an unpleasantly familiar voice from behind the headache-inducing light.

“Well, nobody wants that, do they? How would I even blow my nose without my brains coming out?” She was pleased to hear that her voice sounded faintly mocking, instead of faintly terrified. Which, to be honest, was a more honest description of how she felt, considering they'd stripped her of her weapons, may have killed her partner, and she was acting with diminished capacity.

Guess Jack was right. Sometimes the rebel leader
was
a girl.

The light lowered so it wasn't shining directly in her eyes, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Dry heaving had been imminent, and that was definitely
not
on her top ten list of fun ways to spend her free time.

But now she could see the vamp's face, and that wasn't much better. He looked a tad bit angry.

“If Caligula didn't want you for his little demonstration, I'd take care of you myself,” he hissed. “But don't worry, bitch. I may still get my hands on you when he's done. And I'll make sure you scream for a very long time.”

At the mention of Caligula's name, Quinn ran strategies through her mind, considering and just as rapidly discarding most of them. There wasn't much she could do until she found an opening. For now she'd have to wait and watch. But if they gave her the slightest chance, she was going to dance on the salted grave of one very old ex–Roman emperor.

“Bring it on, fang face,” she said, forcing herself to her feet. “Let's go meet the big bad.”

“Bold words, considering they may serve as your epitaph,” he snarled.

She shrugged, then winced. Right. No shrugging until large bottle of extra-strength acetaminophen found and consumed. “It's better than ‘Here lies Fred. He's dead.'” She laughed again, faking a humor she didn't feel in the slightest. “Or how about ‘Here's old John. He's gone.'”

He snarled a truly obscene curse and smacked her between the shoulder blades to shove her along. Her headache picked up drumsticks and started pounding out something with a heavy beat right between her eyes. Aerosmith, maybe.

“Sheesh. None of you dead guys ever has a sense of humor,” she managed, and then she stumbled in the direction he indicated, chin up and shoulders squared, praying that Erin somehow found a way to save Riley and the baby. If Quinn could help her by playing cat and mouse with a two-thousand-year-old vampire, that's exactly what she was going to do, even if the thought of it sent ice searing through her veins.

She glanced over at Mr. Undead and Unfriendly. “Hey, ugly. Do you think Caligula has any Tylenol?”

Point Success

After Ven had transported them up the mountain at a dizzying rate of speed, he'd shimmered back to his form and now stood silently, watching her. Erin found the warded area easily enough, but deciphering the magic was far more challenging. She paced back and forth before the area of ground that would be indistinguishable from the rest to any non-Magickal. Aside from the magic, only a slight decrease in the ambient air temperature marked it as different. Her amber sang out a warning whenever she stepped too closely to the warded area, and heat seared her skin when she reached out with her magic.

Ven tried brute force, in spite of her warning, and bounced off the edge of the transparent magical shield. “Isn't that a little odd? I mean, doesn't your average hiker kinda notice when he gets knocked on his ass by an invisible wall?”

She sighed and held out a hand to help him up. He shook his head and pushed himself up off the ground, grumbling something about
warrior, swords, and freaking witches
. She figured she was better off not asking him to repeat it.

“It doesn't work that way, Ven. A non-Magickal would simply be directed subconsciously slightly away from this area. It's probably no more than three square feet, so it wouldn't be noticeable. Especially since the spell is reinforced with a look-away spell, so they literally would not see this spot or even know that they'd been guided away from it.”

“Right. No offense, but I don't care how the spell works,” he said, stabbing the shield with his sword and cursing when it zapped a bolt of electricity up the sword to his arm. “All I want to know is, can you break it?”

She focused all her concentration on the ward's intricate patterns and sent her own magic out to meet it and unravel tangled skeins of power. For every step forward she made in the process, it seemed that the ward's magic knocked her a half step back. Finally she pulled back and looked at Ven.

“I'm going to have to call the Wilding. I can't get past this warding any other way.”

“So do it. You've already proven that you can control it,” he said. “I'll be right here with you.”

“It's not that, Ven. It's that vampires and anybody who is part of the dark seem to be able to sense the Wilding. By calling it, I'll be giving our position away.”

He turned those dark, warrior eyes on her. “I think we're past worrying about that. Breaking the ward may set off some kind of magical car alarm, for all we know. And if there's only one way in, it's bound to be guarded. I'd already given up any hope for stealth a while ago.”

He bent to place his sword on the ground, then scooped her up and kissed her fiercely. “No matter what occurs, remember that your soul has melded with mine, Erin Connors. I do not plan to let you escape me so easily.”

“Same goes, Lord Vengeance,” she whispered. “Same goes.”

Then she gently pulled away from him and opened her mind and soul and the power of her gems to the Wilding, and reveled in its power as it immediately came to her call and spiraled through her body. It was a matter of seconds to undo the ward, which now seemed almost pathetically simple to her. As the last strand of its magic snapped, destroying the warding entirely, the ground shook beneath her feet. The powerful sound of a tolling bell—or possibly a ruby calling to its singer—rang through the ground and up into the air through a dark opening that slowly appeared in the snow.

This time, even Ven heard it, if the startled glance he sent her way was any indication. “That's the Nereid's Heart?”

“I think it must be,” Erin said, finding it hard to speak over the gemsong, rubysong, and heartsong flooding through her senses. “It's lovelier than I ever could have imagined.”

He retrieved his sword and raised it, then peered down into the darkness of the hold. “There are steps carved into the rock, like a stone ladder, and what looks like a tunnel branching off from it,” he reported.

Erin simply smiled at him, feeling drunk with the wonder of the pure, undistilled power that poured through her, circled around her, and wrapped her in its heat.

His eyes narrowed as he watched her, but he said nothing, just held out a hand. She placed her own in his, and he squeezed it briefly and then started down into the hole. The ruby continued to toll its clarion call to her, to her, only to her.

The power. The power. Oh, the
power
. She could lose herself in it. She
wanted
to lose herself in it. To hide away from the pain and desolation of the past ten years.

“Erin.” The voice was faint and barely penetrated the music, but it kept nagging at her. “Erin! Snap out of it! I need you with me if we're going to do this.”

Ven. It was Ven, he'd climbed back out of the hole, and he was saying something. With difficulty, she focused her gaze on him. “Do you hear the ruby, Ven? It's singing to me and tempting me with so much power. A seduction of power,” she said, lifting her arms and twirling around, her voice lilting with the cadence of the rubysong.

“Erin! I need you to concentrate.” He grabbed her shoulders, stared down into her eyes, and spoke a single word. “Caligula.”

The name was a slap of cold water against the fog permeating her brain. Clear, sober thought instantly returned as she clamped all of her control down, hard, on the Wilding.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It just caught me for a minute.” She shuddered against him. “It's so seductive, Ven. It wants me to call it and own it, and it would be so easy to fall into the whirlpool of its power and never return.”

“You have to fight it. You must control it, or we'll never succeed.” The blue-green flames were back in his eyes, and for a momentary flash of time, she could see into his soul to the deep concern he had for her safety.

She twined her hands in his silky black hair and closed her eyes, not speaking, not thinking, just letting the pure tactile sensation of his thick hair sliding through her fingers occupy her entire present.

She stood that way for at least a minute, and then she released him and nodded. “I'm back. I've got it under control. It's okay.”

“Are you sure? I will not take you into the darkness if there is no hope of return, my lady,” he said quietly, dropping back into the formal speak that underscored the intensity of his words.

“I am sure. Into the belly of the beast, Ven,” she said, trying to smile. “Well, I don't mean that literally, of course.”

“I'm the only beast whose belly you're going to get near,” he growled, flashing a grin that belied his mock ferocity.

“Then lead on, beast. The sooner we go, the sooner we get through this,” she said. And then she followed him down the stone ladder into the dark.