Heart of Atlantis

Chapter 33

Alaric’s rage exploded outward in a storm of lightning bolts at the sight of the monster who had abducted Quinn not once, but twice. The demon who’d forced her to kill an innocent man.

Alaric had gotten his wish. Ptolemy had come back from the dead, just so Alaric could kill him again. Slowly and painfully.

From across the roof, Jack’s roar sounded over the noise of battle.

Ptolemy glanced back at the tiger, and then he started laughing. “Oh, the gang’s all here. Even my beloved’s kitty-cat friend.”

“You die tonight,” Alaric said, and he started toward Ptolemy, striding over dead vampires and striking down any not yet dead ones that got in his way.

“How does the interdimensional demon speak perfect English, even down to American slang?” Ven called out.

“We’ll discuss later,” Quinn said, and then she shot Ptolemy in the head.

Or at least she tried to. Apparently the demon’s head was made of bullet-deflecting materials. She screamed in frustration as the bullet bounced off Ptolemy, but Alaric steered its path so that it ricocheted right into the ass of one of the atrocities and the entire creature exploded. Then it was Ptolemy’s turn to scream in rage, and Alaric smiled the smile that had made fully trained warriors fall to their knees.

“Hey, guess your baby brother won’t be looking for any emotional empath mates,” Quinn said, taunting.

“I will hurt you for that,” Ptolemy snarled. “I will make you bleed and beg when I fuck you.”

“I think not,” Alaric said, and when Justice finally turned from the four vampires he’d been slaying, he saw Alaric and gasped.

“What in the nine hells?” Justice was so busy staring at Alaric that he almost missed the atrocity getting ready to jump on his leg, teeth first.

Quinn shot it for him. “Two,” she called out, and Ptolemy gnashed his teeth, tearing strips of skin off his face as his features grew even more bestial in form.

“Quinn, to Riley,” Alaric commanded, forgetting that Quinn didn’t take commands very well.

Naturally, she took a step toward Ptolemy, pointing her gun again. Another creature rushed her, and Alaric incinerated it with another lightning bolt.

“Isn’t lightning somebody else’s gig?” Quinn said. “What’s Poseidon going to say about that?”

“That is no longer my concern. The impending death of this demon, however, is,” Alaric said calmly. He circled his hand in the air—once, twice—and a miniature tornado formed at the edge of his fingertips and shot across the roof toward Ptolemy.

The demon didn’t even see it, though, because all of his attention was on Quinn. As he stalked toward her, Ptolemy’s shape enlarged and contorted, until he was nearly unrecognizable as the suave politician they’d first seen on TV.

“You took it, didn’t you, you sneaky thief?” Ptolemy took another step, and the tornado, which had grown to at least ten feet tall, crashed into him, whipped him up off the roof, and smashed him into the stone wall of the palace, hard. The demon screamed, and Alaric’s eardrums reverberated with the echo of Ptolemy’s rage.

He scanned the rooftop. Conlan, Ven, Justice, Jack, and Quinn were destroying the rest of the creatures who’d rushed through the portal, and Riley, holding Aidan, was crouching down near Noriko, who was awake now and holding a force field around the three of them.

In the chaos, Anubisa had vanished. Again. But one glance at the night sky, spectacularly lit up by the stars, the moon, and Alaric himself, showed a new problem. A black swarm was advancing on Atlantis over the open sea.

“It’s the fucking apocalypse,” Justice said, his face hard. His deadly sword slashed and sliced, decapitating demons in a vicious whirlwind of death. “I have to go to Keely. Now.”

“How is that possible? Vampires can’t travel over the ocean,” Ven said, staring at the sky. “They’re terrified of water. It messes with their powers.”

“They’re more afraid of Anubisa. If she tells them to stick stakes in their own hearts while munching on garlic and wearing crosses, they’ll do it,” Quinn said grimly. “And maybe they hijacked one of those ships. All it would take is for Anubisa to have rolled one captain with her eyes, and the ship would be hers.”

“Don’t ignore me,” Ptolemy screamed, picking himself up off the ground. “Where is it? Where is my gem?”

“Not too worried about your family, are you?” Quinn taunted him, as she shot another of the creatures.

Ptolemy screamed with rage again.

“Poseidon’s Pride wasn’t yours, and it never will be. Nor will Quinn,” Alaric told the demon, launching himself across the rooftop toward the demon and blasting him with his new and more powerful energy spheres. He got a direct hit, and the demon screamed and bled, but then Ptolemy called up his own power and formed a spear made of hideous orange-red light, which he hurled at Alaric with every ounce of his demonic strength.

The spear was only inches away from Alaric’s chest when he destroyed it with an energy sphere. He hadn’t expected that kind of speed from a monster who’d become as bulky and grotesque as Ptolemy’s new shape.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Alaric called to his new, vastly increased power and drew a shining sword from thin air. The sword’s edge burned with the pure white energy of magic, and Ptolemy flinched before it. Alaric himself blazed ever brighter, until the remaining monsters cowered at the sight of him.

He hurled more energy spheres at Ptolemy with his left hand and then—realizing his hands were not needed—he simply stalked forward, surrounded by spheres that formed and attacked the demon just because Alaric willed them to do so.

He was on fire—he was the most powerful high priest Poseidon had ever known—he was a god.

Quinn’s laughter sounded in his mind.

Don’t get carried away, there, god-boy.

Her warmth and humor snapped Alaric out of the power’s seductive grip and back into himself, just in time to crush Ptolemy’s sneak attack with what appeared to be a magically created battle-axe.

The two of them battled with everything in their respective arsenals, seemingly equally matched, until Alaric balanced on the edge of utter fatigue and a potentially fatal case of magical exhaustion. He’d been carrying Atlantis’s safety and the stability of the Trident for too long, and it had drained him. Ptolemy, sensing weakness, laughed and threw a dagger at Alaric, who sent a pulse of magic to deflect it.

Except it wasn’t a magical dagger. It was ordinary steel, and the magic had no effect on it. Alaric realized it just as it pierced his side, and he felt the hot, wet gush of blood running down his ribs almost before he felt the pain of the stab wound.

“Not as good as you think you are,” Ptolemy sneered. “You don’t deserve Quinn, and I’ll remind her of that every day when you’re dead and she’s pregnant with my heir.”

Something vital snapped in Alaric, and any restraint or caution he might have felt toward accepting the full promise of his new powers vanished. He flew up into the air, trailing actual flames, and then he dove toward Ptolemy with the strength and speed of a raptor seeking its prey.

The demon never had a chance.

Ptolemy’s magical shields and weapons blew apart like tissue paper in a windstorm in front of Alaric’s towering fury. Alaric hurled the demon back, farther away from Quinn, and smashed him back to the rooftop every time Ptolemy tried to get up.

A primal rage thundered through Alaric with hurricane force. “Nobody touches my woman, do you understand me?”

But Ptolemy was beyond words. The demon shrieked unintelligible, garbled sounds of hate and frustration, and gathered his strength for one final rush at Alaric, who let him do it. When Ptolemy had almost reached him, hands outstretched for Alaric’s throat, Alaric threw open all of his shields and channeled the power.

All of the power.

Endless oceans of power poured into him and filled him and burned to be set free. Alaric roared out his triumph and his mastery over the magic, and it obeyed his mental command and formed into a lightning bolt of pure energy that shone as brightly as Alaric himself now did.

“Now you will die,” he told Ptolemy, and then he plunged the lightning bolt down and through the top of the demon’s skull. The magic cut through bone like butter, and Ptolemy shrieked with all the anguish of the nine hells, and then his body split in two, right down the middle, and the two halves fell to the ground, already dissolving.

Alaric watched, breathing hard, as the demon melted. And then he smiled.

The creatures who’d been trying to sneak up behind him shrieked and ran away at the sight of him, but it was too late. Alaric threw a rapid-fire burst of energy spheres at them and incinerated them all.

They’d tried to hurt his woman. They died. Nothing could be simpler.

His gaze arrowed toward Quinn, who was standing, a gun in each hand, in front of Noriko and Riley and the baby, and he laughed.

I see you have rescued yourself again.

She smiled at him across the fallen bodies of their enemies.

Not bad yourself.

Quinn was fiercely, overwhelmingly glad that Ptolemy was dead.

“What happened to Alaric? Why is he all Johnny Torch?” Ven shouted, but Quinn shook her head. No time.

She pulled out the Uzi and swept the roof clear of the few remaining of Ptolemy’s brethren, and she cheered at the sight until her voice was hoarse.

Threaten to “mate” with her, would they, the little monsters? Now they wouldn’t be mating with anybody.

Quinn, my love, leave me something to kill.

She waved at Alaric and blew him a kiss.

I think you’ve done enough.

A brief flare of pain alerted her to Alaric’s injury. He was still shining, but not quite as much as he had been.

Hey, you’re hurt. You need to heal that right now.

It is nothing, he replied.

She started toward him. “Tell me that again, and I’ll shoot you myself. Let me see it.”

She pulled his shirt up and her heart jumped into her throat at the sight of the wound. “That’s not nothing. Fix it. Now.”

Instead, he pulled her closer and kissed her so deeply that her knees buckled. His magic poured into her like a high-voltage current, and for a minute she was afraid she was going to have an orgasm right there on the roof surrounded by the Atlantean royal family and a whole lot of dead demons.

“Now I will heal it,” Alaric said, when he finally released her.

She blinked up at him, dazed, and he smiled that completely male, entirely self-satisfied smile again. It made her want to hit him.

It made her want to kiss him again.

She settled for neither. “You did slay an interdimensional demon for me, so I guess I’ll let you get away with this one.”

His smile faded. “But Atlantis is not safe yet. Where is Anubisa?”

As if on cue, Atlantis rocked like an earthquake had shattered its foundation, and Quinn fell against a stone pedestal and knocked off a marble statuette of a porpoise.

With her head.

“Ow,” she complained. “Why is it always my head?”

“Hardest part on you?” Ven suggested, and she groaned.

“Anubisa,” Alaric said, staring into the far distance at something only he could see. “By all the gods, Anubisa is going after the Trident.”

Conlan, who was comforting Riley and Aidan, froze. “Alaric—”

“I know,” Alaric said grimly, as he started running for the stairs. “If it falls into her hands, all of Atlantis is doomed.”

Jack snarled, and Quinn wanted to do the same.

Ven groaned. “Why can’t we ever catch a damn break?” He took off after Quinn and Alaric, and Justice and Jack followed close behind, silent and deadly.

“We need to end this, once and for all,” Conlan said, matching pace with Alaric.

Alaric nodded, the movement all the more striking since he was glowing again and tiny sparks arced from his motion. “I agree. Tonight we discover how to kill a goddess.”