Alyssa Day - Vampire in Atlantis

Nicholas walked carefully around the dead human on the floor and motioned to one of his blood pride to deal with it. He stood a couple of paces away from the fallen sorceress and stared down at her, listening to the faint, stuttering beat of her heart.

“Are you sure we can’t take it away from her?” Smithson asked, greed shining in his beady eyes.

“No. Everything we know about this stone tells us that only the most powerful sorcerers even dare touch it. She has obviously achieved a connection, and it would almost certainly kill both her and whichever unfortunate being tried to take it from her.”

“Can we touch her?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Vampire looked at human, neither willing to be the first to drop his gaze.

Nicholas finally laughed. “For a human, you’re surprisingly unafraid of me.”

His temporary ally shrugged. “I’m not just a human. I’m an investment banker. Some would call me an even worse bloodsucker than you.”

Nicholas laughed again. “Ah, such self-awareness in one so young. This alliance may prove to be most entertaining. Are you sure that Ivy Khetta will agree to continue? The young one died, and I doubt she intended that.”

The banker, Smithson, smiled. Nicholas had seen just such soulless smiles in the rare demons he’d encountered over the centuries. He managed not to shudder, but just barely.

“She’ll have incentive. Trust me,” Smithson said.

Smithson pointed at a couple of his thugs, who were hovering far enough away that they hadn’t heard the conversation about the possibility of hideous death. “Bring her. Carefully. We have to get out of here before the park personnel show up.”

They lifted the sorceress and . . . nothing blew up.

Nobody else died.

Nicholas was faintly disappointed.

Daniel watched Serai as she tossed and turned in a restless sleep, her hair tangling around her. He wanted to stroke it back from her face, whisper soothing endearments to ease her, but those were a lover’s prerogatives, so he refrained. Also, if he touched her, she might wake up, and she needed to rest. She was exhausted and the sun’s pull called to him to sleep, too, but he wasn’t willing to close his eyes for a minute. She might disappear again. This dream he was living in which a long-dead love suddenly returned to him at the moment he’d finally decided to face his own death was too surreal to be true. He couldn’t trust it yet.

He wasn’t sure he trusted her, either.

It was too . . . something . Too coincidental, too unexpected, too unreal.

And so, here he was again, back to reality, or the lack thereof. His mind and heart had fought over the problem during the past hour or so while she slept, but he couldn’t quite reach a conclusion. Quinn and Jack had been real enough. He didn’t know whether to laugh or snarl at the memory of Jack rolling over to show his belly like a submissive kitten being chided by its mother. If Jack had hurt Serai, Daniel would have ripped him to tiny, furry pieces.

Slowly.

But Serai hadn’t needed his help. A saber-toothed tiger, of all the impossible things. He’d known she had some magic, back when she was a girl, but this? Again, his mind stuttered at the paradox. Back when she was a girl—no. She’d been a woman then, as she was now. Almost to her twenty-fifth birthday when he’d known her. An important one, in Atlantean culture; the birthday that signaled she was old enough to be courted. To wed.

He’d had plans for that birthday. He’d begun sketches for a piece of jewelry he wanted to craft for her from the most amazing Atlantean metal, orichalcum. Like copper infused with silver, tensile and malleable yet stronger than steel. He’d wanted to design and forge a pendant that captured her beauty and her grace, but nothing had seemed good enough. Never elegant enough.

He’d been a blacksmith’s apprentice, after all, not a jeweler’s.

She kicked the blanket off again, and he gave in to the impulse and gently pulled her onto his lap. He wanted—no, he needed —to hold her in his arms again. To prove to himself that she was real. Her soft warmth belied the notion that she might be a ghost, and he had to fight himself to keep from holding her so tightly she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She stirred a little, but didn’t wake.

The scent of the ocean surrounded her; more fragile and yet more perfect than any perfume. She smelled of sunlight, salt water, and hope. The hope that he might indeed have a future. One with someone other than his faithful, constant companions over the last millennia: loneliness and despair. The search for redemption alone was never enough to keep a man warm at night, not body or heart or soul.

But Serai—she was everything. If only she could ever forgive him.

If only he could trust her.

If only he could trust reality. He tightened his embrace, as if strength alone could capture moonlight.

Her eyes flew open and she stared up at him, terrified again, as if she remembered nothing, or else far too much. She started to speak, but her body suddenly went into spasm, and she arched up in his arms, her head almost smashing into his chin before he jerked his head back and out of the way. She screamed loud and long, with such a piercing shriek that two of Quinn’s guards ran into the room, weapons at the ready.

“It’s just a bad dream,” he yelled at them. “Stay out.”

“Hell of a bad dream,” one of them observed.

But they left, and that’s all he cared about. As she gasped for breath, he rocked back and forth, making soothing noises, trying to think of what might calm her down or wake her up or whatever it took to make her stop screaming as if she were dying.

The world might not survive the monster he would become if she left him for a second time.

“Daniel?” She looked up at him with those enormous ocean-blue eyes, eyes a man could drown in, and he knew that he was lost. “Why did you leave me? What really happened that day?”

“Shouldn’t we talk about more current events? Like what just happened? What or who is the Emperor, and why is it affecting you like this?” He forced himself to release her when she pulled away from him to sit up on the pallet, leaning back against the wall.

She drew in deep breaths, and he tried not to think about what interesting things that did to her breasts under the filmy dress she had on, but hell, he was only a man. Vampire, yes; mage, once; politician, no more; but before and after all of that, he was only a man, and hot damn but she was beautiful.

“The Emperor is a gemstone from Poseidon’s trident,” she finally said, when her breathing was back under control. “One of the seven that the Atlanteans of my time scattered throughout the world when Atlantis dove beneath the sea.”

“Why? And who had the balls to steal jewels from the sea god?”

“There’s no need to be crude,” she said, and he was intrigued to see the flush that rose in her cheeks, visible even by firelight.

She was blushing. Eleven thousand years old and still an innocent. The lustful images his mind had been playing as he watched her in the firelight washed away in a wave of guilt and shame. She was lost, in trouble, and hurting. She was a maiden, she’d said, and though part of him was primitively, stupidly glad that no man had ever touched her, the weight of the knowledge sobered him. She was a virginal Atlantean princess, and he was a monster. Beauty and the beast never had a happy ending together in real life. He of all beasts knew that.

“Poseidon gave his trident to Atlantis so that we could escape war on the surface,” Serai said. “I think it was only supposed to be a temporary measure. But as the years, centuries, and then millennia passed, the secret of where the jewels had been originally hidden—not to mention where they had gone since then—was lost.”