Heart of Atlantis

Chapter 19

Quinn lay on her side on a couch, its rough fabric scratching her face and the smell of years of dust and mildew clogging her nose. Ptolemy had bound her hands behind her back and tied a rag over her eyes. She didn’t bother to struggle. She had nothing left to fight for. She’d failed to retrieve Poseidon’s Pride in time, so Atlantis was probably lost by now, with everyone she loved in it, except for Jack, who had been lost to her for days. And Riley . . . Quinn’s heart shattered into tiny, broken pieces at the thought of her sister and nephew. She’d wanted to save them all, and now she couldn’t even save herself.

Even if she wanted to continue the fight—even if she could find some way to care enough to keep on keeping on—she’d been outed as the rebel leader and shown to be a cold-blooded murderer on international TV.

There was nothing left. She’d find a way to kill herself and take Ptolemy down with her. That was her one final mission. Her one final goal.

She’d tried to reach out to find Alaric with her mind, the way he always seemed to be able to find her, but the obstacle there was that he was a powerful magic-wielding Atlantean and she was a human with only a single talent. Even that was useless; Ptolemy’s tainted, foul magic clouded her senses so badly that she was sure she’d go insane if she didn’t keep her shields up, so even if Alaric were trying to reach her, she wouldn’t hear him.

Anyway, what good was a final good-bye? Alaric knew how she felt.

Maybe.

Probably.

She didn’t bother to try to nudge the mask from over her eyes, because she could see enough to know the room was pitch-black. Ptolemy had dumped her there after they’d gone through a vortex not unlike a fun house–mirror version of the portal. He’d quickly and expertly bound her and tossed her on the couch, with orders not to move. Apparently they were someplace where he didn’t have to worry about her screaming for help. She’d tried for a while, but nobody had come running to her assistance.

She’d waited for a long time but then finally, in spite of everything, she’d dozed off. Her body had been exhausted, and her mind had shut down to protect her from the hopeless despair of knowing she was all alone in the world. Always before, she’d had someone to fight for. She’d known she was making the world safe for her sister and her sister’s children to come. But now? The world could take care of itself.

She passed some time in fitful sleep, waking and then dozing again, she didn’t know for how long, before she heard voices. Ptolemy and someone else, a woman, but the voice was familiar in a horrible way. She hadn’t heard it in a long time, but it wasn’t another rebel, it was too . . .

Oh.

Oh, no.

She curled her legs into her chest, praying desperately for a wooden stake, a gun loaded with silver bullets, or divine intervention from God or, in fact, any of the gods. Unfortunately, she didn’t exactly believe in any of them. What kind of supreme beings would allow so much pain and suffering in the world?

Her mind was set to full-on babble now, as the one creature alive that she feared even more than Ptolemy and his demonic raping agenda entered the room where Quinn lay helpless, blind, and bound.

Anubisa. The vampire goddess.

This was going to be bad. She’d been ready to die, but her mind rebelled at the thought of meeting her end by slow torture.

“What do you have for me, my ally?” Anubisa crooned in her sickeningly sweet lilt. Her voice carried the tone and feel of rusty daggers and bashed-in skulls. Quinn winced in real pain, her eardrums aching from the sound.

“She is not for you,” Ptolemy said harshly. “Quinn Dawson is mine.”

“Quinn? I know that name,” Anubisa hissed. “She is mine. I must have my revenge against this one.”

Quinn rolled over onto her stomach with her legs underneath her, ready to piston her way back and hopefully smash somebody’s face with her head before she died. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had for a plan. Bound human versus demon and vampire goddess didn’t bode well for the human.

She heard tentative footsteps, and a new voice entered the mix. This one sounded like a girl, so Quinn put a pause on her head-bashing plan, as gentle hands lifted her and removed the scarf from her eyes. A scared-looking girl, probably in her late teens, stood in front of her, holding the cloth in shaking hands.

“Don’t fight him,” the girl whispered. “It’s even worse when you fight.”

Quinn studied the bruises that covered one side of the girl’s face, and any trace of fear in her own heart seeped away, to be replaced with cold, hard, welcome rage. Not the berserker kind of rage; no, not Quinn. She fueled her spirit with the kind of anger that knew how to plot, and scheme, and bide its time until she could find the best way to kill anyone and everyone who had hurt the innocents Quinn considered to be under her protection.

Like this girl.

“I’ll help you,” Quinn said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The girl clearly didn’t believe her, but Quinn couldn’t blame her for that. The circumstances didn’t really support her claim.

“Get out of the way,” Anubisa said, backhanding the girl with one small, slender white hand. The girl flew at least ten feet through the room and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, where she lay still, quietly sobbing.

Quinn looked up at Anubisa and smiled, careful not to look into the vampire’s eyes. “That’s one,” she said calmly.

“One what, stupid human?” Anubisa drew her hand back to strike Quinn, too, but Ptolemy stopped her by the simple virtue of pointing a stick at her and blasting. Anubisa fell to the floor, apparently unconscious or dead. She didn’t breathe, so Quinn couldn’t tell.

Quinn stared at Ptolemy and his stick of death, wondering if she were next. On closer examination, however, she realized it wasn’t a stick at all but the scepter with Poseidon’s Pride inset at the tip.

“You’re pretty brave, using one god’s possession to kill another,” she said, hoping to taunt him into making a mistake. Petty tyrants could often be trapped by the gilded ropes of their own vanity.

“She’s not dead, more’s the pity,” he said. “But, yes, it was rather fun. I wonder what I’ll do next. Maybe destroy your White House and turn the area into a parking lot for my new fleet of automobiles. Wonderful things, your cars. You actually pay money to move from place to place in vehicles that destroy your environment while you use them.”

He shook his head in apparent wonder, and she realized something she’d only guessed at before.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

He tilted his head, and for one brief second, his eyes flickered and changed from normal, dark brown human eyes to something different. Alien. There were no pupils at all; only swirling traces of color on a pitch-black background. No whites at all. His eyes weren’t the demon red she’d been halfway expecting. They were far worse.

They were nothing she’d ever seen before, or heard about, or read about, which meant only one thing. He really wasn’t from around here.

“You’re a Martian?” She started laughing. “I expected green skin and little antennas poking out of your head.”

He smiled, and for the first time, it wasn’t polished. It was nasty, which meant she was getting to him, so she smiled right back.

“Mars, no. Another dimension, far away and far different from this one? Yes. Not so far that my demon kin father couldn’t steal my Atlantean mother around twelve millennia ago. Not so different that he couldn’t force her to bear son after son for him until she killed herself after I was born,” he snarled, and the veneer of polished politician was chipping away fast. It was doing more than that; it was peeling off in sheets like ancient paint stripped from rotten wood, and suddenly Quinn wasn’t sure she wanted to be around to see what was underneath.

Anubisa stirred, and Ptolemy stepped back and pointed the scepter at her again.

The vampire came awake and up off the floor like a freight train, headed right at Ptolemy, but the threat of the raised scepter stopped her at the last minute. Anubisa flew up to the ceiling and floated there in the corner, staring down at them both and hissing.

“I am a goddess,” she screeched.

“A few more screws loose since the last time I saw you,” Quinn mused, and Ptolemy nodded in agreement, which made her flinch. She didn’t want to do or say anything that he agreed with.

“Yes, she has evidently been somewhere called the Void for a long time, and it made her a bit crazy, I’m guessing,” Ptolemy said, his terrible gaze trained on Quinn.

He hadn’t bothered to disguise his eyes again, and Quinn found herself falling into them. So he could subjugate a human mind in the same way a vampire could. She filed that away for future reference as she wrenched her gaze free. She wouldn’t look into the eyes of either of the monsters in the room again. Suddenly, she wanted to live long enough to kill them both. Not slowly, not by torture—she had no fancy or grand plans. She just wanted them dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

“Kill her,” Anubisa screamed. “Kill her, and I will allow you to be my consort.”

“Wow, there’s an incentive,” Quinn said, rolling her eyes and feeling stronger for it. Defiance suited her far better than fear.

Ptolemy laughed, and Anubisa screamed.

“I will eat your intestines,” she shrieked at Quinn. But she didn’t move from her corner. Apparently fear of what the scepter could do to her stopped her.

“I will, I will,” Ptolemy said to Anubisa in a soothing voice. “Later, after she has served out her usefulness. Why don’t you leave now and continue your hunt for the Atlantean false princes, so we can move ahead with our plans?”

Anubisa shrieked at Quinn one last time and then turned into a spiral of oily-looking smoke and flew out of the room. Quinn’s shoulders loosened, in spite of the fact that the monster who remained in the room with her was clearly the more deadly of the two.

“Where are we?” She looked around but recognized nothing that gave her a clue. She didn’t even know if they were still in New York. Magic portals being magic portals, they could be anywhere. She was guessing they were still on Earth, because it seemed unlikely that a separate demon dimension had bothered to invent ratty polyester couches.

“This is a room in an abandoned subway tunnel far down under the streets of Manhattan. We will move soon, but I knew Anubisa wanted to speak to me, and I have no intention of letting her know where my real lodgings are.”

He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again they’d transformed back to human shape and color. For some reason, that unsettled her even more, but all she had to do to firm up her courage was glance at the girl still cowering on the floor.

“Let the child go, already. You have the rebel leader as hostage, you don’t need some weak child,” she said, putting as much scorn into her voice as possible.

“Done.” He motioned to the girl. “You. Get up, get out. My future queen demands it. Remember that you have Quinn Dawson to thank.”

“Right,” Quinn said. “I know this trick. Your minions catch her right outside the door.”

“I don’t need minions,” he said gently, and it was more terrifying than if he’d shouted. Quiet confidence meant that he really was exactly as powerful as he claimed to be, in which case Quinn had no chance.

None at all.

The girl ran out of the room, and Ptolemy approached Quinn.

“You’ll have to tolerate the transport once more, and then you can rest.” He waved his hand, and a spiral of orange light enveloped them both. Quinn experienced another moment of gut-roiling nausea, and then they were somewhere else.

Somewhere far fancier, where polyester had probably never been allowed to rear its ugly head. It looked like a deluxe suite in a fancy hotel, not that Quinn had much experience with those, but she’d watched the occasional TV show.

“Are you planning to untie my hands before I lose all circulation and they fall off? And when are you going to tell me what you want with me? If you think I can convince the rebellion to work with you, you’re out of luck,” she said, sneering. Why bother with politeness? She had nothing left to lose.

He said nothing, merely turned her so he could reach her hands, and as his fingers unfastened the knots in the rope, Quinn scanned the room and stopped, frozen in shock, when her gaze reached the far wall. The entire wall was plastered with hundreds of photographs.

And every single one of them was a picture of her.