Wild Hearts in Atlantis (10 page)

Bastien leaned against the porch railing. “Mind control? This has never worked on large populations of shape-shifters, or we would have had armies of them to fight throughout the centuries.”

“Evidently Terminus and Organos learned some new tricks from some scrolls Anubisa gave to them and Barrabas before Conlan and Riley dusted him,” Justice drawled. “They’re trying it out in a small way now. Today Florida, tomorrow the world, sort of thing.”

“We need proof,” Bastien said, remembering his pledge to Ethan. “The alpha gave me forty-eight hours to bring him proof, or else he allies with Organos.”

Justice swore under his breath. “Yeah, about that. We had a nice little bloodsucker who sang like an undead canary, but he was so terrified of what the big bad O might do to him that he staked himself.”

Denal grimaced. “Yeah, right in the car. It was disgusting. I hope I don’t get charged for a cleaning by the rental company.”

Bastien and Justice both turned to stare at the young warrior, who squirmed a little under their incredulous stares. “Okay,
okay, I get it, end of the world more important than my rental car agreement.”

Justice rolled his eyes, then turned back to Bastien. “In any event, we will need to go back to the source, so to speak, a dive bar in Miami, and get another songbird if you need proof.”

“And keep any sharp wooden objects away from this one?” Bastien prodded. “In the meantime, I’ll arrange a meeting with Ethan to let him know what you found out and what’s going on now. Once you bring me the evidence, you can report back to Atlantis and relay the news to Conlan, Ven, and Alaric.”

Justice grinned at him, not moving an inch.

“What?” he asked, impatient to be moving. Doing something to protect Kat and her pride of panthers.

“For one so reluctant to take up the mantle of authority, you wear it well,” Justice said, still grinning.

Bastien paused, realization dawning. In the past, he might have looked to Justice to form their strategy. He glanced at the house. The knowledge that Kat slept inside, still wrapped in the scent of his body, had forged steel in his mind to match that in his spine.

He was a leader now, and a leader could not give in to petty annoyances. He bowed slightly to Denal. “My apologies, my friend. I should have informed you of my feelings before expecting you to respect them.”

Denal rubbed his throat again, more dramatically, then flashed his boyish smile. “No problem, man. It’s worth it to see the mighty warrior laid low by a kitty cat.” He ducked back, still grinning, before Bastien could smack the back of his head.

Justice leaped off the porch first. “To work, then. We shall return with all haste with your proof, Bastien. Happy hunting.”

Denal was close behind him. “Say hello to the lovely ranger from me, Bastien,” he called out. Then both shimmered into mist and soared over the trees toward the ocean.

Bastien watched them for a moment, then went into the house to wake Kat. Middle of the night or no, he needed to visit the pride’s alpha.
Now.

Kat rose slowly through several layers of warm, contented languor to the sound of her name and the feel of hands gently rubbing her shoulders. “Kat, you have to wake up,” the husky voice insisted. Sexy voice.

Bastien’s voice. Her eyes flew open, and she looked up at his face. Not a dream, then. It had been real.
He
was real. “What is it?
When
is it? I’m starved,” she murmured, reaching to touch his cheek with her hand. Then she blushed, remembering where the last conversation about hunger had ended up. “I mean, for dinner, not—”

He smiled, caught her hand, and pressed a kiss into the palm of her hand. “I would love to hear more of your hungers. I had intended to cook for you, also. But we must call on Ethan for a meeting.”

She sat up, instantly awake. “What happened?”

He sat back, face drawn in harsh lines. “Organos. Perhaps Ethan will heed my warnings this time, now that I have learned the true nature of Organos’s plan.”

“Which is?”

“To mind-thrall your pride. First you, and then scores of
others. Once you are imprisoned by the vampires, humanity will be unable to win free of utter subjugation.”

She shot out of bed, mind whirling, and pulled on the nearest clothes to hand, a pair of khaki pants and an old T-shirt. “Slavery,” she said flatly. “Just what my father never wanted. If we enslave the humans, and the vampires enslave us, the world truly will end, won’t it?”

In some corner of her mind, she distantly noted that by “us” she had aligned herself with her shape-shifter pride. Irrevocably.

Startlingly, he smiled as he stood. “You forget Atlantis, which is perhaps normal, considering you have so little experience with us. But we will fight the bloodsucker plan with everything in us, and the warriors of Poseidon are not an easy foe to defeat. Even now, Justice and Denal are on their way to gain proof of this plan that will satisfy Ethan.”

She ran to him and hugged him, suddenly afraid that their moment would never return. Tears burned her eyes at the thought, but she furiously fought them back. A warrior deserved a woman worthy of him.

He kissed her, hard, and then grasped her shoulders and held her from him. “You need to get out of here. Now. I will not allow you to be in any danger. If you were to be harmed, my heart would shrivel within me, more barren than ever before.”

The tears spilled over, but she was shaking her head
no
before he finished speaking. “Ask me anything else, Bastien. But I will not and cannot leave you, nor my family. If my gift for calm was ever good for anything, it must be now.”

“Does it work on vampires?”

She blinked for a moment, and then her heart plunged down to her feet. “I don’t—I’ve never tried it on a vampire. I don’t know if it works or not.”

His mouth flattened into a grim line. “I would doubt very much that it will, Kat. Vamps are immune to much that affects humans, shifters, and the children of Poseidon. They are already dead and thus impervious to many weapons dangerous to the living.”

She cast around for a response more reassuring than
we’ll have to find out
, or something equally inane, when they heard it. A high-pitched, female—or feline—scream.

The meaty thud that followed it.

The booming echo of a voice so purely evil that it burned the edges of her mind. “Come out, man from Atlantis. Come out, half-breed. It’s time to play.”

Terror turned her blood to ice. “Bastien, I know that voice. I’ve heard it before. That’s Organos.”

He shot over to the window to look outside, then turned to face her. “Stay here. Do not, under any circumstances, look outside. I would spare you that, at least.”

Then, before she could protest, he pressed one last kiss to her lips, shimmered into sparkling mist, and vanished.

Bastien shimmered through the house, stopping only to retrieve his weapons, then returned to mist to fly through the open doorway and into the sky in front of Kat’s house. He prayed to all the gods of his ancestors that she would listen to him and stay hidden. He did not want her to see the broken body on the ground. She’d held no love for Fallon, but Kat was far too compassionate to wish to see her like this, sightless eyes staring into the night.

He cast his senses out, while still in mist form, in an attempt to find the master vampire. Finally, he was forced to admit defeat and return to his corporeal form as he spiraled down to stand, daggers ready, in front of the house. “Do you fear me, then, evil one?” he called, shouting out his challenge.

The chilling laughter materialized before its source. “Fear you, Atlantean? I think not. You are a minor annoyance, a boil on my ass, nothing more. I didn’t even bother to bring any of my blood pride along to deal with such a minor irritant.”

Bastien impassively measured the vampire who floated down to the earth not a dozen feet from him. From the ghostly white pallor of his skin to the red fire flaring in his eyes, this one’s every feature proclaimed his dangerous nature.

“A cape? Really? Isn’t that a little out of fashion?” He kept his voice level and amused, knowing that nothing knocked a master vampire off balance faster than facing one who was unafraid.

True to form, the vamp hissed with rage. “You
dare
? Do you see what I did to the pathetic alpha’s mate? She wanted to strike a bargain with me, can you countenance it? A puny female cat daring to match wits with one of more than a thousand years of power?”

“She was a fool.” Bastien slowly dropped one dagger to the ground, retaining the dagger in his left hand, and drew his sword with his right. “I am not.”

“Yet you do not ask the nature of the bargain,” the vampire mused, slitted eyes watching every move Bastien made. “Are you that confident or merely that stupid?”

“Perhaps you should decide, undead one,” Bastien returned calmly, uninterested in being drawn into wordplay with the creature.

The vampire laughed, and the sound of it skittered down Bastien’s spine like the chittering of a horde of death beetles in ancient Egypt. Death whispered in its wake. “Oh, but I want you to hear this. I smell the half-breed whore’s pussy on you, so you might find it of interest.”

Snapping his head up, Bastien fought to contain his rage. Barely restrained himself from charging at Organos’s filthy head, sword raised to slice the undead head from its neck. He clenched his jaw and said nothing, but called water to form ice shards and flung them at Organos, aiming to slice the vamp’s head from its neck.

The vamp laughed and lifted one hand to deflect the ice. It melted in midair. “This one begged me to suck the life out of your half-breed. Although I killed Fallon for her boldness, it might amuse me to turn the ranger to my use. I can think of many uses for a beautiful woman in thrall, especially one who has the strength of both of her natures to help her survive my darker urges.”

A haze of violent rage, so dark a red it was nearly purple, spilled over Bastien’s vision, as fury blazed through him. “You will not have her,” he roared. He leaped straight into the
darkened night sky, calling upon the element of air to drive him toward his enemy.

Organos sneered and waved a hand in front of himself before disappearing and reappearing directly behind Bastien. The agony of a dagger between the ribs brought Bastien crashing down to his knees on the hard ground, his sword falling from suddenly nerveless fingers.

“Simple enough to defeat an Atlantean, then. I wonder at Terminus’s weakness, if the rumors are in fact true?” Organos said, voice filled with scorn and contempt as he floated down to stand before Bastien, then reached down to snatch his sword from the ground. “Perhaps I will preserve your head to grace my wall.”

As the vampire raised Bastien’s own sword to kill him, the warrior gathered himself for one last, desperate attack.

The sound of her voice stopped them both. “Oh, Organos, you can do better than that. You can have me, willing, if you let the Atlantean go.”

Bastien looked up at Kat, standing defenseless before the ancient vampire, and his heart shriveled in his chest.

Kat feigned bravery, when really all she wanted to do was curl up and hide. Fallon, though no friend, especially after what she’d just overheard, had not deserved to die like this. The first man she’d ever loved knelt, bleeding, on the ground in the shadow of a master vamp’s upraised sword.

She admitted it to herself, though it made no sense. Somehow she’d already fallen in love with this fierce warrior. “There’s no way I’m going to let him die,” she muttered.

Then, louder, she repeated her offer. “What fun is an enthralled mistress, shifter or no? Wouldn’t I pretty much just lie there?”

She ignored Bastien’s roar of protest, didn’t allow herself to even glance at him. “Let him go, and I promise to play all the dirty games you like, vampire.”

Staring straight at him, eyes open and alert, she thrust waves of peace and calm at Organos with everything she had. Futile, perhaps, but she had to try. Something in her head
snapped at the force of it, and she felt blood trickle from one nostril.

Organos never even blinked. He stepped back a pace from Bastien, clearly wary only of the fallen warrior and not of anything she had done, then flicked a considering look her way. “You will play my games regardless of your volition, whore. What makes you think I do not prefer it to be while you are in thrall to my whim? I know of your so-called gift,” he sneered. “Even should you wish it, you would be unable to defy me. And such trifles do not work against my kind.”