Vampire in Atlantis

kept repeating, tears streaming down her face.

He crouched down and took her in his arms and patted her back and stroked her hair—anything that might offer her some comfort. He had a sinking suspicion about who Delia might be, and even the monster crouched inside him roared its anguish at the thought. If one of the other maidens had just died, how long might it be until the person wielding the Emperor’s powers caused Serai to join her?

Daniel would find this witch and kill her. Take the Emperor back to Atlantis, so Alaric and the rest of them could figure out a way to save Serai and the others. He’d capture Poseidon himself and demand the sea god’s help, if need be.

Whatever it took.

“Whatever it takes,” he said, out loud, as Serai’s sobs began to quiet. “We will find the Emperor and rescue your sisters. I swear this to you on my life.”

She finally stopped crying and took a deep, shuddering breath before looking up at him. “I felt it, Daniel. I felt her die.”

“Delia?”

She nodded. “Yes. She—The Emperor’s connection to us stuttered and grew weak, but then a powerful surge of energy speared out through it and the witch who’s trying to access its power. She’s learning how to use it, Daniel. But I don’t think she has any idea that she’s hurting people by doing it. She’s . . . afraid, I think. And Delia. Oh, Daniel. She never had a chance to live her life at all. It’s not fair.”

As she cried, curled against his chest like a wounded child, his heart shattered and then re-formed in ice and granite. So the witch who played with the Emperor’s magic was afraid, was she? Not yet she wasn’t. She hadn’t known anything like the terror he was going to crash down on her head. When he got his hands on her and anyone else who’d been participating in this deadly game, they’d all be very, very afraid.

They would be afraid, and then they would be dead. He swore it on his ancient oath as a mage of the Nightwalker Guild.

“I can’t fly, Daniel. I’m sorry,” she whispered, interrupting his silent plans to rip, tear, and maim.

A horrible thought jumped into his mind. “Is that why you had the seizure? Serai, I’m sorry. I thought if you saw how safe it is, you’d—”

“No. No, the seizure was due to the Emperor, but I can’t fly. I’m terrified of heights, and I don’t know how to calm down. I don’t think we have time for me to try to learn how to be unafraid, not now. Maybe later?” She attempted a smile, but her face was far too pale, and her terror was evident in her eyes and the way she bit her lip.

“Don’t worry about it. We can find another way. I can walk almost as fast as I can fly. We’ll find the Emperor. I promise you.”

They took a few minutes to drink some water, and Serai splashed a little on her face, and then they resumed following the path that only she could sense, to wherever the Emperor was now. The hike would have been beautiful in the daytime, Daniel imagined, but imagination was all that he’d known of sunlight for so long—other than those brief moments in Atlantis—that he didn’t dwell on it. There was a unique kind of beauty in the dark. The moon’s silvery light cast fascinating geometric shadows on the red rock formations for which the areas was famous. He could tell by Serai’s pounding heartbeat, though, that she had no attention to spare for scenery.

“Tell me about the fear of heights,” he said, mostly to distract both of them from what waited ahead in the night. “I wouldn’t have thought there were all that many high places in an undersea city.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Not that many. Enough.”

He could hear it in her voice: this was no random fear. “Enough?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said flatly.

“Maybe I need to hear it. What happened?”

“I threw myself off one of the palace towers. I wanted to die.”

* * *

Serai sped up her pace, but she might as well not have bothered. Daniel’s fingers bit into her shoulders as he swung her around to face him, and his face was strained and harsh in the moonlight; as forbidding as if a stranger faced her. Which, after all, was exactly what he was now, despite what they’d shared in that hotel bedroom. He’d lived thousands of years that she knew nothing about, while she’d waited, trapped in a crystalline cage, bound to millennia of nothingness.

“Why?” His harsh voice echoed in the clear, cool night air. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Have you never looked into your future and found it so bleak that you decided not to face it?” She shot the question at him but was surprised when he flinched.

“But you were a princess. You had everything to live for—”

“I had nothing. You were gone, and they told me you were dead. After my father’s physician verified my maidenhood was intact, he told me the wonderful news. I was to be put to sleep and locked in a cage for centuries, if not longer, and when I woke up I would get to be queen! Of the Seven Isles! No matter that everyone I’d ever known and loved would be dead and rotted to dust by the time I awoke.”

His face hardened, probably at the bitterness in her tone. But what did she care for his feelings? He’d been happy enough to abandon her with no concern for hers.

“I came back for you,” he said in a voice like broken glass. “I came back as soon as I was able, and you were gone. No, you went one better than that—you were gone and you’d taken your entire continent with you. Atlantis was gone, Serai. Gone forever. Destroyed and all of you dead, or so the Atlanteans remaining on the shore told me. I wanted to die then, too. Tried my damndest to make it happen, but the monster I’d become took over, and all I knew for hundreds of years was the bloodlust.”

He bent down to pick up a stone and hurled it through the air so hard it shattered into dust when it struck the nearest rock face. “Bloodlust and despair. Bleak emptiness, for centuries. When I finally met these Atlanteans no more than a year or two ago, it never would have occurred to me to ask about you—a woman who’d lived so many millennia ago. I’m sorry. That was my failure. But had I known you lived, and had I known how to find a city at the bottom of the sea, either then or now, I would have braved the wrath of Poseidon himself to come for you.”

She froze, caught by the raw sincerity of his words. It was impossible to do anything but believe him, which meant he hadn’t willingly left her.

“You didn’t abandon me,” she whispered, and he pulled her into his arms in a fierce embrace.

“I would never have left you. But now you have survived imprisonment and stasis, and you deserve to have a life with someone other than an ancient monster.” He held her so tightly, almost as if he were saying good-bye, and the surety came to her that he would leave her as soon as they found the Emperor, if she did not take steps to prevent it.

Starting now.

“I will tell you what happened that day, if you like,” she said quietly. “If you promise not to leave me again.”

He tried to pull away, but she tightened her arms around his waist.

“I promise not to leave you until we have completed this task and you are safe,” he finally said, before he broke away and started walking again.

It was her turn to grasp his arm and pull him to a stop. “That’s not good enough. You want me. I know you do.”

He groaned. “What does that matter? I’m not what you’ll want—what you’ ll need—when you’re safe and you’ve had a chance to think about your future.”

“Then promise me that. You won’t leave me until I ask you to do so.”

He bowed his head and blew out a breath, but finally nodded. “Yes. I will promise that.”

She smiled and rose up on her toes to kiss his cheek, and then started on toward the Emperor’s faint but steady presence somewhere west of them.

“Though it will probably kill me, when you do ask,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.

She raised her chin and smiled a little. He’d have a very long wait coming if he was waiting for her to ever ask him to leave. Especially after the last time . . .

“Do you want to hear? About what happened that day after you were injured?”

“Yeah. Why not? We have a long walk in front of us, I’m guessing,” he said casually, as if it didn’t matter one