Atlantis Unleashed (39 page)

Justice smelled the smoke before he saw it. He immediately took them back down to the ground, a safe distance from the jaguar pair, and rematerialized. Automatically, his hand checked to see that his sword had made the transition with him. Reassured, he pulled it from its sheath.

“Keely, I need for you to stay here while I check it out.”

She shook her head. “That's not happening. The two of us will investigate together.”

He glared down at her, giving her the fierce look that had caused many warriors to quail before him. “This is my area of expertise, Dr. McDermott. You will do as I say and stay out of the path of danger.”

The obstinate set to her jaw told him that he didn't intimidate her in the slightest. By all the gods, she was magnificent.

“Yes, well, my area of expertise involves not getting myself killed on expeditions,” she snapped. “You're the one with the fighting skills and the weapons. I'm the one who is not going to wait alone for you here, in the path of who knows how many hungry jaguars or raiding mobs of criminals. The State Department doesn't issue travel warnings about Guatemala for no reason, you know. This is a lovely country with wonderful people, but it holds real danger, and I don't even have my passport with me to back up my identity.”

She was right. He hated to admit it, but to leave her there might expose her to even more danger than to take her with him. “Fine, but you do exactly what I say when I say it. I will be very unhappy with anyone who puts you in any danger, and that includes you.”

She lifted her chin. “I'm not an idiot or a stupid coed from a cheap horror flick. I'm not going to run screaming into the arms of the guy with the chain saw. I'll do what you say, as long as it makes sense.”

He wanted to shake some sense into her. He wanted to kiss the sense
out
of her. He'd finally found his true mate, and she was annoying the
miertus
out of him.

“Fine. Let's go. Stay behind me.” He took off, nearly running. Something about that smoke raised a sense of dread in his gut. He'd seen too many burning battlefields, too many towns and villages razed by predators intent on herding the humans into the waiting jaws of vampires and shape-shifters.

She'd said vampires had taken over the San Bartolo site. Maybe they'd decided to expand their territory. After all, a formerly lost Mayan temple wouldn't offer them any chances to feed, but a Guatemalan village, cut off from any governmental protection, would.

He turned, still running, and lifted Keely into his arms. They'd move faster this way, and suddenly he had an urgent need for speed.

Keely stared in shock at the scene that lay before them when Justice stopped running and put her down. A small village—or what was left of the village—lay in ruins, smoldering and still burning in places.

“What happened here?” she whispered.

“More like
who
happened here, I'd guess,” Justice said flatly, his fury-darkened eyes scanning the area. “It's a common vamp trick; burn out your prey when they try to hide out. Vamps can't enter sanctified places, as you probably know. So they burn the churches first.”

He indicated the largest of the smoking piles of rubble, and Keely gasped when she saw the charred remains of a large wooden cross.

“But . . . the people? Do you think they got them all?” Tears ran down her face, unheeded, at the thought of the villagers being burned alive in the church.

The unmistakable sound of a shotgun shell being cham bered came from behind them. “No, señora, they did not get us all. Do you and your friend intend on finishing us off?”

Justice snarled a string of words so harsh and guttural that she was sure she never wanted to understand what he'd said.

He whirled around, placing himself between her and the man with the shotgun.

“We are not your enemies, but if you threaten my woman, you will welcome the return of the bloodsuckers in comparison to what I will do to you and yours,” Justice growled. “What is your name and what is the name of your village?”

Keely peered over his shoulder at the man with the gun. He was lean, with shaggy dark hair falling into his eyes. He wore jeans and a torn white shirt that gleamed against his bronze skin. His facial features bore the clear evidence of his Mayan heritage.

The man shrugged, either unimpressed or too weary of violence to respond to Justice's threat. “My name is Alejandro and you are in Las Pinturas. As to the rest, I care little for your threats, sword or no. However, I do not harm women, unlike those vampire bastards who attack us again and again.”

“Why are you still here?” Justice asked. “You're fools if you think they won't come back again and again.”

Alejandro's eyes turned to ice. “You think I would not have removed my people from danger if I could? The first things they destroyed were our vehicles.” He indicated a smoking pile of metal nearly hidden behind one of the buildings. “We have our radio, and we've radioed for help, but there is apparently a wave of violence occurring right now and we are low on the priority list.”

“We'll help, won't we?” Keely said, putting a hand on Justice's arm. “We have to do what we can.”

Justice said nothing but gave a slight nod, his expressionless face giving away nothing of his feelings. Keely tentatively tried to reach out with her emotions or her mind, but encountered nothing but darkness. He'd shielded his mind from her, and she didn't know enough about the soul-meld to understand how to break through. She moved her hand to clasp his, anyway, and the slight pressure of his fingers reassured her. He'd gone into protective warrior mode; that was all.

Looking around at the destruction, she couldn't exactly blame him.

Alejandro's gaze skimmed over Keely and Justice, and whatever he saw seemed to reassure him, because he lowered the gun and called out, “They are safe enough. You can come out now.”

At first one, then another, then finally nearly twenty adults came out from wherever they'd been hiding behind the smoking burnings. Only after they had completely surrounded Keely and Justice did six children cautiously appear to join their parents.

Keely's heart plunged at the sight of the children's terrified faces. “We won't hurt you,” she called out in fluent Spanish. “
Somos amigos
.”

One small girl, no older than five or six, pushed between the rank of adults and stood staring up at Keely with enormous dark eyes, clutching a dirty stuffed animal in her arms. None of the villagers rushed to claim her; in fact, many of them looked at her with varying degrees of suspicion, and one old woman even surreptitiously made the sign against the evil eye and then spat on the ground. The girl flinched and Keely suddenly, fiercely, wanted to slap the superstitious old bat's face.

“Eleni,” Alejandro called sharply. “Don't get too close to them.”

“But Justice will put the fires out with his water,” Eleni said. “And Dr. Keely will help us find Mama.”

Keely gasped. “How did you know our names?”

“Eleni often . . . knows things,” Alejandro said in English. “She doesn't speak any English, though, so I will use your language to tell you that her father died long ago and her mother has been dead for several weeks. The vampires took her and left her head for me to find. We have tried to tell her this, but she either cannot or does not want to understand.”

The lines on Alejandro's handsome face deepened and the fury in his eyes promised vengeance. Justice wore a matching expression on his face. The two warriors were nearly a mirror of each other, though from vastly disparate cultures.

Or, perhaps not. If the Atlanteans had settled in Mayan lands more than eleven thousand years ago . . . Keely shook her head to clear it of the random musings. Now was certainly not the time to lose focus.

Eleni made some small sound and looked up at Keely, deep wells of loss and sadness in her eyes. The girl made no move to come closer, but just huddled into herself as though fearing a rebuff. Keely was completely unable to maintain any kind of detachment looking at this poor child who reminded her of another little girl, so long ago.

A little girl whose own parents were afraid of what she was.

But at least Keely had had parents, even though they were unable to provide much in the way of emotional support. Poor Eleni had lost both of hers. Keely dropped to her knees and held out her arms to the girl, who came willingly to her and laid her small head on Keely's shoulder and held up the stuffed animal for Keely to see. Keely felt a sharp wrench in her stomach when she realized it wasn't a toy at all, but a fuzzy, well-worn slipper matted and stained with blood.

“Mama left her slipper, you see,” Eleni confided trustingly. “I'm worried that her poor feet are getting cold.”

Las Pinturas, twilight

Justice carried the last load of useable goods to the single house that had been left relatively unscathed by the vampires' destruction and handed them to the women who were organizing the stores. Some of the canned goods had survived. Several charred-at-the-edges but still serviceable blankets. Various personal items that the villagers had pulled from the wreckage.

What the fires hadn't ruined, he had. He walked back to look at what was left of the village, and self-disgust roiled like acid in his gut. He'd had no choice but to call water to put out the fires. They'd have lost everything if he hadn't. But the sight of that little boy clutching his soaking-wet collection of half-burned baseball cards had turned his stomach.

Or wrenched an organ further up in his chest, not that he'd admit it.

These people reminded him of the American colonists he'd been fighting to save back on that long-ago night when he'd carved Keely's fish. Brave and stubborn. Willing to live their lives here in the wild, by no man's—or government's—rules or constraints. They were farmers eking out a subsistence living, but they were proud. Alejandro perhaps the proudest of them all. He'd done the work of ten men, ordering and cajoling his people to work quickly to save all that could be saved and barricade the building so they could hide the women and children inside when darkness fell again. Proud and courageous, both. Alejandro would make a fine warrior.

They are fools,
the Nereid sneered in his mind.
No protection from the Guatemalan Paranormal Ops patrols this far out. They're nothing but bloodsucker bait.

“They radioed P Ops this morning after the vamps left,” Justice said. Then he realized that he'd just answered himself out loud. “Okay, now I'm ready for the Temple protective rooms; that's for sure.”

Keely walked across the charred ground toward him. Her face was smudged with dirt and ash, but to him she glowed like a flame. She'd tied her wealth of hair back away from her face, and he wanted to let it loose and bury his face in the silken strands. Inhale her sweet scent after so many hours of the smell of burning filling his nostrils and lungs.

“Did you say Temple protective rooms? What are those?” she asked, always the inquisitive scientist, even bone weary as she must be.

He bent his head to kiss her, because he could do nothing else. A feeling so huge coiled inside him that the pressure would surely burst his rib cage. There was nothing more important than Keely, no moment in his life from this day on that he would not spend thanking all the gods for her. He closed his arms around her and pulled her so close that he could feel her heart beating against his chest.

But a warrior preparing for battle must plan strategy with his head, not with his heart, and so he reluctantly let her go.

“I want to get you out of here,” he repeated for the twentieth time since they'd first arrived. “I have tried and tried to call to the portal, and it will not answer my call. Perhaps I am too damaged and the Atlantean magic will not recognize me again.”