Heart of Atlantis

Chapter 21

Alaric raised a hand to blast the annoying metallic monster out of the sky, but Quinn stopped him.

“No. Those are the good guys. Can’t we just make a quick getaway?”

So he swooped underneath the helicopter, darted right, and was halfway across the city before the machine had time to turn around. There were advantages to his method of flight.

She directed him to a large building near the water, and he landed in the alley next to it, managing not to draw any more unwanted attention.

After a brief battle where her desire to walk fought his need to hold her, he finally, reluctantly, released her. She led the way up three flights of stairs to an industrial loft with a state-of-the-art security keypad next to its massive steel door. She punched in a long string of numbers and then held her thumb over a small square of glass. It scanned her, and the door opened.

“Welcome, Quinn,” an electronic voice said, as they entered the space.

“She’s an artist, but she also does something for the northeast region of P-Ops,” Quinn explained.

Alaric didn’t know what to expect, given the location and security, but it turned out to be an artist’s studio. Finished and unfinished paintings and sculptures filled the enormous space. The tools of an artist’s trade littered every flat surface, paints and brushes crowding mallets, knives, chisels, and tools he did not recognize.

Quinn walked over to a large canvas propped against the far wall, near a bank of enormous windows, as the door automatically swung shut behind them and a metallic click announced that the security system was again engaged.

“This is amazing,” she said, her voice hushed. “Almost makes me believe in hope again.”

Alaric had no time for art, especially now. His first impulse was to blast a hole in the painting so his woman would turn around and look at him, instead of at a lifeless bit of canvas and paint. He took a steadying breath and shook his head.

Bad enough to be insane. He wouldn’t add childish to his list of flaws.

He walked over to join her, and she reached for his hand. The gesture went a long way toward calming the beast that had been raging inside him since he’d watched her be taken.

It was a deceptively simple canvas. A child and an old woman sitting companionably on a park bench, feeding the birds. But the details shone through to provide a spectacular sort of wonder to the mundane scene.

“The puppy chewing on her shoe. I don’t know why, I’m not really a puppies and kittens kind of girl, but there’s a hopefulness there, that a woman so old would get a puppy and believe she’d live to see it grow into a dog,” Quinn said softly, her face pale and strained with the weight of the horrors she kept imprisoned in her mind.

“You’re going to have to tell me,” he said gently, when what he wanted to do was rage and storm and break things. “What happened with Ptolemy, and what happened with that vampire? I need to know, and I think, even more than that, you need to tell it.”

She inhaled deeply, blew it out, and then finally turned to face him. “That’s just it. Nothing happened. I mean, plenty happened—he made me kill someone, Alaric. He made me kill the secretary-general of the United Nations on live TV.”

Tears shimmered in her lovely dark eyes, but she impatiently scrubbed them away with the back of her hands. “This dress—I need to get out of it. Now. Let me go take a long hot shower and find some of Lauren’s clothes, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

She ran up the metal spiral staircase as if she couldn’t bear to wear the offending garment a moment longer, and Alaric followed right behind her, because the last thing he planned to do for the foreseeable future was let her out of his sight. He slowed, however, as he realized that the shower itself posed a problem, because the gods themselves knew he had no idea where he’d get the control to keep from following her in.

By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the dress was wadded up in a metal trash receptacle and he could hear the sound of running water from behind a closed door. He scanned the high-ceilinged, clearly feminine room for obvious dangers, sent his magic searching for any that weren’t obvious, and then settled down on the floor in front of the door to wait for her, energy spheres in hand against any possible threat.

He finally took a moment to try to communicate again with Christophe and Atlantis, as much as a means of distracting himself from the image of Quinn’s wet, soapy, naked body as anything else.

We are well, but I don’t know for how long. Conlan is losing his mind, since we don’t know where the portal took the women and children, and it won’t answer our call. We cannot evacuate anyone. But the magic is holding, and somehow Serai realized what was happening, from wherever in the world she and Daniel are, and she’s reinforcing our magic, too. Between that and what you did, we are holding strong for now, but you need to find that gem and get it back here.

Alaric told him some of what had been happening, but left out anything to do with Quinn. There was no need for sharing that information. Or the news of the tsunami he’d almost used to destroy the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Poseidon helped shore up our defenses, Christophe. He said he’s locked in a battle with the gods of other pantheons to determine the fate of the world, but we don’t have time to worry about that until the current crisis is resolved.

Well, fix it, Christophe returned. That’s what you do, right? I’m just here temporarily, so don’t get any ideas about leaving the priesthood to me. No how, no way.

Alaric cut off the conversation without responding. He had no patience with Christophe’s carefree ways. Not now, when every fiber of his being was demanding he cut ties to his own responsibilities and flee with Quinn before anything worse could happen. Or perhaps his lack of patience was a mask for an emotion far darker—a manifestation of his own bitter envy.

He could never do it—doom his people to extinction without even trying to save them. Not even for Quinn. But it was surprising how enticing the idea was to him; he, who hadn’t been tempted to swerve in his duty even once in so many centuries, suddenly wished fervently to throw it all over and live a simple life with the woman he could finally admit he loved.

Tempting brought him back to thoughts of Quinn in the shower, and his pants suddenly no longer fit properly. Yes, the body knew what it wanted to do, and the parts definitely worked, so there were two concerns alleviated about the possibility of ending hundreds of years of celibacy. The sound of the running water stopped, and he groaned at the lovely mental image of Quinn drying off her body. Driven by a primal hunger that was far older than Atlantis itself, he climbed to his feet, shoved his dagger in its sheath, and put his hand on the doorknob.

There were some things a man—even a warrior—should not have to endure.

Quinn dressed in an old pair of jeans and a sweater of Lauren’s and opened the door to find Alaric on the other side, hand on the doorknob, an expression of such intent hunger on his face that she almost backed up a step.

“I cannot bear to be apart from you a moment longer,” he said, his voice rough.

She nodded, feeling the exact same way, but suddenly apprehensive about what would happen next. None of their problems had gone away; Alaric was still bound to a terrible promise to a cruel god. And yet here they were in another bedroom, and she had the feeling there would be no malfunctioning Trident to save them this time.

She wrapped her arms around his waist, leaned her head against his muscular chest, and stood there, content to feel his arms around her. Content with the silence.

“I never get this,” she finally said. “To allow myself to depend on someone else’s strength. I had Jack, of course, but we didn’t lean on each other like this.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Alaric said, a tinge of a growl in his voice.

“I’ve been in charge for so long I’ve forgotten how to let someone else be strong, just for a moment’s respite. A break in the action.” She wanted to do what she’d never done before—surrender. To Alaric’s strength and protection. A purely feminine impulse that was so shocking to her, she who’d lived her life as a fighter. He made her want to love and protect and be cherished in return.

Forbidden longings teased the surface of her skin, and something hard and cold in her heart unfurled like one of the fantastical Atlantean flowers. It was too much, too quick, and her emotions threatened to sweep her under like a bit of driftwood caught in a storm-tossed ocean.

That her mind presented her with metaphors of the sea made her smile, press her face into his shirt, and breathe deeply of the scent of sea and salt and sun that was so uniquely Alaric.

“And yet you are so quick to defend me and so fierce about it,” Alaric murmured, stroking her back. “The warriors and I fight together, but never in all the years of my existence has someone tried to protect me the way you have. I do not deserve it, and I am humbled by it.”

She pressed even closer to him and suddenly noticed the very hard bulge pressing against her abdomen. Her cheeks flamed hot, and she tried to move back, but he tightened his arms.

“No. Not yet. I cannot bear to let you go until I can truly believe you are safe.”

He lifted her into his arms and moved to the bed, where he sat carefully on the edge with her in his lap and told her everything that had happened with Poseidon and also what Christophe had reported.

She gave him a reproachful look when he told her about the tsunami, but she didn’t say a word. Perhaps she was beyond words. He needed to know, though. She owed him that.

“Now it’s your turn. I want to know everything, Quinn. Can you bear to tell it?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. I need a few minutes.”

After warding the room with his strongest magics, Alaric left Quinn to gather her thoughts. He only went as far as the bathroom, where he sped through a quick shower, but every instinct he had urged him to hurry, hurry, hurry.

After he cleaned and dried his clothes with Atlantean water magic in the space of a few seconds, he returned to sit silently next to her on the bed. When she raised her tearstained face to him, he asked her again.

“Can you bear to tell it?”

She nodded and fisted her hands in the fabric of her sweater. As she told him all of it, from the press conference to the murder, he grew more and more furious, but at her first mention of Anubisa, he glowed nearly incandescent with rage.

Literally.

She had to shield her eyes.

“Hey, you’re going to need to tone it down for the human,” she said gently.

He instantly dimmed the energy so she could bear to look at him again.

“My apologies. I am holding so much power, channeling it to support Christophe and Serai in stabilizing the dome and the Trident, that it takes little to push me over the edge.”

“I understand, but if you want to hear all of it, you’re going to need to calm down a little. I don’t want to cause your brain to explode.”

He nodded, but she could tell from the way the muscles in his jaw clenched that he was gritting his teeth very hard. She told him the rest of it, right up to the point where he’d arrived to rescue her.

“He told you he wanted to impregnate you,” Alaric said.

She could tell from the way he so carefully enunciated that he was on the verge of going berserk.

“He said it, but he didn’t touch me. Not like last time,” she said softly, almost too softly to be heard.

His entire body tensed beneath her, as if steeling for a blow. “Last time?”

She bowed her head and told him something she never, ever talked about anymore. “Six years ago. When that murderous bastard of a vampire kept me as his plaything and—worst of all—I let him. Alaric, I know you think you want me, but you’d be far better off without me.”

Silence. Utter, complete silence. It took a while for her to gather the courage to look up at him, but when she did, the revulsion and rejection she’d expected were nowhere in sight. Instead, a far more powerful emotion blazed forth from those beautiful emerald eyes, and he kissed her so thoroughly that she’d nearly forgotten her own name by the time he lifted his head.

“There is nothing you could ever do that would make me think less of you, mi amara,” he said. “There is no deed, no matter how horrific you may have found it, in your past that could compete with the grace and courage of your soul. Tell me, if you will, or do not tell me, if you would rather never speak of it. Know this, though: I will fight everyone on this planet—even you, if it must be—who attempts to make me give you up.”