Heart of Atlantis

Chapter 9

Alaric had never been more in danger of losing his sanity than he was right at this moment with this woman he held so tightly in his arms. If she stopped kissing him, he was sure he would die from the loss of her touch. Everything he was and ever had been was centered on the burning waves of need and hunger rushing through him. He wanted Quinn like he’d never wanted any woman before in all the long, lonely centuries of his life.

He needed her. To the nine hells with the repercussions.

“Alaric? Your emotions just changed. What are you thinking about?” Her eyes were dark and dazed, but trying to focus.

“Nothing important,” he said firmly and kissed her again.

“No,” she said, struggling to put a bit of space between them. “That’s not true. What is going on in your brilliant but dark and twisty mind?”

He shook his head and leaned toward her again, but she put a hand up between them and pushed.

“Tell me.”

He gave in, knowing she would persevere until he did so. “All of my life, I have been told that the vow of celibacy is the key to my power. The Elders strongly impressed upon me the need to protect myself from the desires of the flesh or the call to softer emotions.”

She squeezed his arm and then backed away a step so she could look up into his face as he continued.

He had no choice now. He had to tell her, and there was no way to pretty up the stark truth, so he just said it. “There’s a good chance that if I break my vow of celibacy, I’ll lose my magic.”

The bald statement hung in the air between them for several long moments, and then Quinn backed away from him so fast she stumbled and fell on the ground. He moved to help her, but she shook her head, scrambling backward on all fours.

“Don’t touch me! How can you possibly say that to me and then try to touch me?” Her voice held a tinge of hysteria, and her eyes were wild. “I can’t bear that burden, Alaric. Don’t ask me to.”

“No, you don’t understand. This is only what the Elders told me. Keely, the scientist who has soul-melded with Justice—she’s an object reader. She told me that the Elders lied or at least were wrong. That in truth the most powerful high priest in the history of Atlantis was not only not celibate, but he was actually married. Nereus was married to Zelia, and from what Keely said, they were extremely happy and in love.”

She kept shaking her head, back and forth, over and over. “Keely said. She’s human, right?”

He nodded the affirmative.

“So a human who claims to be picking up psychic woo-woo emanations from objects tells you that, okay, sure, Alaric, it’s okay to break your sacred vow, it will all be fine, no worries, and you think that’s good enough?”

“Serai confirmed as much,” he said, a little desperately.

“Right. And there couldn’t be anything wrong with her memory, after eleven thousand years of stasis, right?” Quinn shook her head. “We can’t take that chance. Maybe this Nereus never had to swear the same vow you did. Maybe his powers worked differently. Or maybe she’s just wrong.”

“When you say it in those terms, of course—”

“And what happened to this Nereus? Happy ever after? Many fat babies?”

He paused. This was where the story broke down. “Actually, Zelia died, and Nereus tried to drown the world. He nearly destroyed the dome and everyone in Atlantis with it.”

“So he went nuts, is that what you’re saying?” Quinn scrambled to her feet and continued backing away from him. “Bat-shit crazy, insane, loony tunes, rubber room material? Nearly destroyed your entire civilization, but hey, let’s get naked?” Her voice had risen and she was shaking.

“The two are probably unrelated,” he began cautiously. He had no idea how to fix this, but he was desperate to find a way to do so—to fix everything—so that the terror and disbelief he heard in her voice would disappear.

His body, rebelling after so many years of denial, ached with frustration and the desolate certainty that his chances of remaining celibate for the foreseeable future were increasing with every word out of his mouth.

“Probably. Unrelated. Sacred vow, insanity, destroy Atlantis, but it’s okay, probably unrelated,” she muttered, stalking off toward the beach. “Get me out of here, Alaric.”

“We don’t have to leave now. I refuse to take you anywhere until we talk this out,” he commanded, following her.

Unfortunately, the irritating woman didn’t respond at all well to commands.

“Get. Me. Out. Of. Here,” she said, enunciating each word as if slicing it with a dagger. “Also, don’t touch me again. Not now, not ever. Or at least not until your people don’t need you anymore, and you’re old and gray and retired.”

He strode ahead of her to hold a low-hanging palm frond out of her way before she marched right into it, and she stopped and poked a finger into his chest.

“Except that won’t happen. You won’t get old and gray. I’ll get old and gray, if I live that long, which I probably won’t, and you’ll still be young and beautiful and hot and sexy, and I can never kiss you again, and you made me want what I can’t have, and right now I kind of hate you for it.” She finally stopped to draw breath. “And—and—put your shirt on!”

He watched her stalk off down the beach, completely unable to think of a thing to say that would fix everything and get them back to the part where she was kissing him. The faint tingle of magic behind him alerted him to the portal, and he whirled around to see the high prince himself step out onto the sand.

Conlan looked at Alaric and then at Quinn’s departing figure, and then he whistled. “What did you do to my sister-in-law? Riley only stomps off like that when she’d rather be punching me.”

“I only wish she would strike me,” Alaric said glumly. “I fear this problem is far too big for that.”

“How bad can it be? At least you didn’t threaten to abdicate the throne for her,” joked Conlan, who had done just that for Riley, Quinn’s sister.

“Worse. I threatened to break my vows to Poseidon.”

Conlan’s eyes widened. “You’re willing to trust that Keely is right about your magic?”

“What choice do I have? I petitioned Poseidon, over and over, and he refuses to answer. I petitioned the Elders, and they tell me exactly what they always have: if I ‘succumb to fleshly evils,’ I will lose all of my power. I can believe them and spend the rest of my life alone, or I can believe Keely and Serai are right and claim Quinn for mine.” Alaric smashed an extra-large energy sphere into the sand in front of him out of pure frustration.

“Serai?” Conlan raised an eyebrow.

Alaric filled him in on what Serai had told him.

“Quinn doesn’t seem to be in the mood to risk your future,” Conlan observed, as Quinn flopped down on the sand, with her back pointedly toward them.

“Quinn needs to be convinced,” Alaric growled. “I can best do that in Atlantis.”

“I can’t influence you on this, I know, without the utmost hypocrisy, but I’m worried about the repercussions, too. I can’t imagine you as anything other than the high priest of Atlantis, and there’s the little matter of how in the nine hells we’re going to retrieve Poseidon’s Pride if you can no longer touch it,” Conlan said, his face somber.

“That, as always, is the ultimate truth,” Alaric said, clenching his hands into fists. “My duty must always come before anything else.”

“Now that we’ve figured out your love life, or lack thereof,” Conlan said, smiling ruefully as if to let Alaric know he shared his dismay, “what else is new?”

Alaric smacked himself in the forehead, and Conlan’s mouth fell open.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you do anything so uncontrolled in your life,” the prince said.

“My life is so far out of my control right now, I don’t even recognize it.” Alaric smashed another energy ball into the sand next to the intricate glass sculpture the first had formed. “The most important thing of all, and I’m only now mentioning it. My apologies.”

“Mentioning what?” Conlan said with elaborate patience.

“There is a pretender to the throne. He calls himself Ptolemy Reborn and claims to be descended from Alexander the Great. He stole Poseidon’s Pride, and he plans to crown himself king of Atlantis.”

Conlan blinked once and then bared his teeth in a grim parody of a smile. “This? This I think we’d better sit down for.”

Quinn didn’t need much persuading to go to Atlantis. She’d been anticipating this moment since she first learned her sister was in love with the Atlantean high prince. Plus, she had a tiny nephew she was dying to meet. She’d ignore the insane high priest and his magic-giving-up lunacy for as long as necessary, and then she’d escape and make her way to New York, hope Ptolemy was still there, and confront him. Or else find a way to go get him. It was a plan.

Not a good plan, or even much of a plan at all, but it was a start. If her heart would only stop aching so much at the thought of it.

She stepped into the portal again, wondering how many trips through a magic doorway it took before a person became blasé about it. Whatever that number was, she hadn’t reached it yet. Maybe she never would. She certainly didn’t anticipate traveling to Atlantis very often, in what was left of her sure-to-be short life.

The magic doorway deposited her on a grassy space, and remembering Noriko, she turned around to face the shining oval. “Thank you for the transportation, and for not dropping me to my death in that tornado. I appreciate it.”

The armed guards standing in a loose semicircle around the space stared at her with varying expressions of amusement, until the portal flashed with a brilliant blue light and a deep male voice emanating from the center replied.

“You’re welcome.”

Then the guards’ expressions changed to astonishment, and it was Quinn’s turn to be amused.

“It never hurts to be polite,” she said loftily to the one who looked like he was in charge.

He bowed, a grin quirking at the edges of his lips. “Yes, my lady.”

“I wondered about that,” Alaric said, but he tightened his lips against saying anything further when she deliberately turned away from him and toward Conlan, who was staring at the portal with slightly widened eyes.

“So is this it? Is this the famous . . . oh. Oh, holy cow.” She stopped talking; she almost stopped breathing, as she looked up and up at the crystalline structure curving gently above her head. The dome. It was really true.

A scattering of twinkling lights swam past the outside of the surface of the dome nearest her, and she walked closer, fascinated, until she was close enough to realize they had done just that—swum by—because it was a school of some kind of tiny iridescent fish whose bellies lit up like Christmas lights. It was beautiful and breathtaking, and Quinn finally allowed herself to calm down and simply enjoy the moment.

When she slowly turned away from the fish, and looked up, she realized that the twilit sky inside the dome sparkled with starlight, but in patterns she didn’t recognize.

“Are they representations of constellations you saw before? Back when Atlantis was still on the surface like the rest of the continents?”

Conlan nodded. “Yes. It’s a self-perpetuating magic, created more than eleven thousand years ago. We understand the stars have shifted since then.”

“And of course you’re here in the Bermuda Triangle, which might affect any stars you see, too, right?”

“Yes, but we hope that changes when we rise and take our place on the surface again. We believe the magic required to sustain and hide us so far beneath the waves is what causes the temporal disturbances above.”

She didn’t even want to tackle that. Sounded like physics or science fiction, and she was too tired for either. In the meantime, she’d noticed something else.

“There’s no moon.”

Alaric shook his head. “No. Never a moon. An oversight or deliberate, we don’t know.”

She turned to look at him and was nearly undone by the sadness in his eyes. He was caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma, and she didn’t want to be part of his downfall. Couldn’t be. Couldn’t watch him turn bitter with despair, as his inability to help his people ate at his soul.

She knew that kind of despair, up close and personal. She would never willingly cause it in another. Especially not Alaric. Never him.

So instead she pasted a happy smile on her face. “Now I think it’s time I meet my nephew, don’t you?”

Conlan grinned. “He will steal your heart and drool all over your shoulder. I’m just warning you in advance. This teething thing is a barnacle.”

She laughed. “A barnacle? We say something difficult is a bear.”

“I know, but it doesn’t make any sense. Bears are fluffy things that roam. Barnacles are hateful creatures that stubbornly stick around for far longer than you want them.” The prince ran a hand through his hair, and she was suddenly struck by his resemblance to his brother Ven.

Her nephew would look like these men, tall and dark and classically gorgeous, and look like a Dawson, too. She wondered if he had Riley’s deep ocean blue eyes or her own dark ones, maybe. If he had golden curls like his mom, or Conlan’s dark beauty.

She quickened her pace. “You have a point about barnacles. I think I’ll use that expression from now on. But can we hurry, um, Your Highness? I haven’t seen Riley in far too long.”

Conlan laughed again and slung a companionable arm around her shoulder. “Hey, none of that. We’re family now.”

Family. Atlantis. The myths just kept coming and coming.