Vampire in Atlantis

to let anyone else drink your blood. I’d kill anyone who tried.”

He thought he saw a hint of a smile on her perfect lips, but it was gone so quickly he wasn’t sure.

“Are you baiting me?” he asked, incredulous. “About drinking your blood?”

“Baiting is such a harsh concept. A little gentle teasing, perhaps,” she said, brushing loose tendrils of hair away from her face. “Not about you drinking my blood, but about any others doing so. You seem to be quite possessive about my blood, after all, for someone who claims not to want it.”

How had the conversation turned freaking sideways and upside down on him? He’d never been that great with women, and clearly he wasn’t getting any better.

“I don’t—I’m not—Oh, screw it.” He slung the pack over his shoulder, no longer worried about her seeing his erection, since the conversation had been just as effective as that cold shower he’d wanted. “Let’s go.”

He headed off in the direction they’d been walking before, and her peals of silvery laughter followed him.

They hiked in silence for a while, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. He was content simply to be near her, for as long as he could. Until she decided that the beast wasn’t who she needed in her life. He was surprised, however, that after thousands of years of silence, she didn’t want to talk. He wanted to hear her voice, but he didn’t know what to say.

He jumped lightly over a fallen log in the path and held out his hand to help her over. She put her hand in his, and a bolt of electricity shot up his arm from the contact, but he tried to hide his reaction from her. She tightened her fingers on his and her eyes widened, and he suspected she’d noticed. Either that, or she’d had a similar reaction.

He didn’t know which to hope for.

“The Emperor isn’t moving right now,” she said, after she’d crossed the log. She didn’t let go of his hand. He decided to take that as a good sign.

“Tell me about what you’ve been doing recently,” she said. “How long have you been awake from the hibernation? How long have you been working with Conlan and Ven? How did you become primator?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” he muttered, thinking silence hadn’t been so bad, after all.

“What?” She shivered, and he stopped to pull her jacket out of the pack and hand it to her.

“Nothing. It can get pretty cold here at night.”

She zipped up her jacket and raised one eyebrow. “That’s it? You think talking about the weather can get you out of answering my questions?”

He started walking again. “Are we almost there yet?”

“No. Maybe another couple of hours’ walk at this rate. Plenty of time for you to tell me about yourself.”

“Fine. I’ll talk, but then you have to tell me exactly how you can shift into a saber-toothed tiger.”

“Excellent,” she said, smiling. She held out her hand and he took it again without thinking, but then he realized he was growing far too accustomed to being with her. Touching her. Holding her.

All the things that would make it worse when she left him.

“I’ve been roaming the earth for the past thousand years or so,” he told her. “When I woke from the hibernation, the lessons I’d learned before had stayed with me. My goals had changed.”

“Goals?”

“From vengeance to redemption,” he said quietly. Easy words to say; so easy. Far more difficult to put into practice.

“You had so much to redeem?”

“Yes. Far too much. More than I can ever atone for, more than I can ever be forgiven for,” he said. “I can’t speak of those dark days after Atlantis vanished, Serai. I’m sorry, but I cannot. Not to you, not to anyone, but especially not to you. I can’t watch your perception of me change, as you realize the monster I became.”

She frowned. “You can’t think . . . After, then. When you sought redemption. What did you do? The world was a far different place then, even only a thousand years ago. Where were you?”

She stopped and retied the laces of her hiking boot, and he wondered where to begin.

“I was in Europe. Times were bad. Vampires openly captured and killed humans in many places. Fear and superstition, the lack of any consolidated response—it all added up to a very bad time.”

“Sounds like ‘very bad time’ is quite an understatement.”

“I’ve been accused of that a lot lately,” he admitted.

“What did you do?”

“What little I could. I decided that, as a vampire, I could go undercover, so to speak, and pretend to be just another vampire looking for a bloody good time. Once I gained entry, I’d . . . change the regime, let’s say.”

“You’d kill them,” she said, glancing up at him and then away.

“Yes. I’d kill them. More murders on my hands,” he said harshly.

“More lives saved, I’d say,” she retorted. “Do you count that in your tallying up? The lives you have saved by stopping the murders?”

“It’s not like I keep a running score in my head, Serai. You don’t understand. Saving the lives of a few can never make up for what I did.”

She stopped walking but didn’t let go of his hand, forcing him to stop, too.

“You saved the lives of far more than a few. Admit it. And I think you do keep a running score, only in your twisted perception of yourself, you only remember to count the ones you harmed, not the ones you helped.”

He laughed bitterly. “The ones I harmed? You mean, the ones I murdered? The ones I drained dry until there wasn’t a drop of their blood left in their bodies? Those?”

A single tear escaped her lashes and ran slowly down her cheek, and he wanted to rip his tongue out of his mouth for shouting at her.

“Don’t cry for me, Princess. Don’t ever waste your tears on me.”

“But it’s all my fault,” she whispered. “I chose this life for you. I caused you to be a nightwalker, to suffer the bloodlust and the years and years of torment. All my fault. How you must hate me.”

She fell to her knees and covered her face with her hands, but he could still hear her sobs, and the hard, blackened shell covering his heart cracked a little bit more.

“No,” he said, lifting her into his arms. “Never, ever think that. You gave me the chance to live. To do something worthwhile with my life. It is not your fault that I failed so spectacularly.”

She lifted her tearstained face to him. “But you’re not failing anymore. You aren’t. You’re making the world a better place now. You keep saying you’re a monster. Even a monster can be redeemed, Daniel. The gods themselves teach us that. Are you so arrogant that the precepts of the gods and their teachings about forgiveness do not apply to you?”

He kissed the tears from her cheeks, one by one. “Forgiveness is a pretty concept, mi amara. But some things are too horrible to be forgiven. I have helped to take down some of the worst monsters in history, and still the scales are not balanced. When will I ever be able to do enough? When will I ever be able to live at peace with my past? Never. Only death will give me peace.”

“Then you condemn me to live another life without you?” She put her arms around his neck and stared fiercely into his eyes. “Do you think I will allow that? Think again, blacksmith, before you try to defy a princess of Atlantis.”

Her soft sniffle diminished the effect of her proud words, but he knew what she was trying to do for him, and his soul warmed with gratitude that she would even make the effort.

“I can never deserve you,” he said solemnly.

She flashed a beautiful smile, the tears still glittering on her lashes like miniature stars in the moonlight. “No? Well, you have the next thousand years or so to try, but not a day longer.”

“There’s more,” he warned her, trying to make her understand before he began to believe her foolishness. Before he began to hope. “I am blood-bonded with Quinn. Ven’s wife’s sister Deirdre died because of me. Everyone I care about dies. You would do well to stay far away from me.”

“This blood bond, was it to save Quinn’s life, as you did with me?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And the other. Deirdre,” she said, persisting even though he could see the pain in her eyes and hear it in her voice. “Did you love her? How did she die?”