Vampire in Atlantis

a dead faint in the colonel’s arms.

St. Ives cast a long-suffering glance up at the sky. “Son of a bitch. I’m never going to get home, am I?”

Chapter 35

Serai woke up, groggy and dazed, to find that she was lying on a hard bed in the large mobile vehicle from which the colonel had exited when they arrived. She glanced around from under her lashes, not moving, assessing the situation before giving away that she was awake.

St. Ives was nowhere to be seen, and only two humans were in the vehicle with her, unless there were more hiding in cupboards. She took a moment to send her senses out to explore just such a possibility and found that she’d been right; there were only two of them.

And, for whatever reason, they weren’t very concerned about her.

“She okay? Think we should cuff her?” one of them asked, jerking his head in Serai’s direction. She quickly lowered her eyelids all the way and feigned unconsciousness.

The other one, a short and oddly square woman, snorted out a braying laugh. “Why bother? What can she do, bat her eyelashes at us?”

Perhaps just a little bit more than that. Serai refrained from glaring at the woman, or at the man when he laughed, and instead she reached inside herself to see if she could find enough power left for a few small tasks.

Yes. The magic came quickly to her call. It was less powerful than it had been, and she was exhausted just thinking about wielding it, but it came, blurred in form and shape and resonance. Some residue of her own Atlantean power, mixed with the vortex magic and the Emperor’s clarion call, all combined with what she’d gained from Daniel in the soul-meld and strengthened her until she thought she could move on to step two.

Sing the nice soldiers to sleep. She began to hum a little tune, all but under her breath, and by the time the woman finished realizing Serai was awake, both of the soldiers were asleep.

“Lovely trick, if you do say so yourself,” Serai said out loud, and then she immediately felt like a fool.

Find the Emperor now, pat yourself on the back for magic tricks later.

Okay, on to step three: Find the Emperor. Find Daniel. Save the day.

Actually, that was steps three through five, but she had the feeling that counting steps was very, very far down her list of upcoming priorities.

She called to her Atlantean magic and transformed into mist mere seconds before the door opened and Rob the polite driver entered the vehicle. She soared out above and past him so fast that he never noticed the nearly transparent cloud of water vapor as she departed.

Good-bye, Rob. Good luck with your future. May you have many fat babies.

The giddiness served as a warning. She was losing strength fast, and she had no time to spare. Her destination was easy enough to find, though. She headed in the direction in which all the soldiers were pointing their guns. She could find Daniel later, if he didn’t find her first. She had no worries about Daniel rescuing himself.

For now, the urgent mission was to find the Emperor. And since it was screaming at her, inside her head, reverberating through her skull, that wasn’t going to be too hard. She arrowed toward the entrance to yet another cave, which glowed with a powerful, pulsing beam of purple light.

Another cave. If she survived this, she would be happy to never, ever set foot in a cave again, no matter how long she lived.

She soared over the heads of the soldiers, marveling at how desperation and magic had overcome her fear of heights, at least while in mist form, and then she entered the cave and shot across the space, through empty air, around the vampire and the human woman and boy, until she reached the Emperor. Its call sounded in her head, in her blood, in her very bones, and she reached out to it, forgetting that it was the sea god’s toy, forgetting its enormous and terrifying power, forgetting that its fluctuations had already killed two of her sisters.

None of it mattered—all that was important was the magic, the power, the Emperor’s commanding call. Still in mist form, she reached out to touch the Emperor, and it responded by smashing her out of the air and into her physical body, which hit the stone floor of the cave so hard that she actually bounced back up and rebounded.

As she stared up at the ceiling, dazed, the boy’s face appeared over her in her line of sight.

“That had to hurt.”

She blinked up at him, probably looking like a deranged owl, and then started laughing. She was almost certainly going to die now, but at least she still had a sense of humor.

The woman she’d seen in her vision leaned over her next, hard suspicion in her eyes, and she pulled the boy, clearly her son, back and away from Serai.

“Why are you here and what do you want?”

Serai slowly sat up, making sure her head wouldn’t fall off her neck on the way. “I am Serai of Atlantis, and this gem belongs to me.”

The vampire bared his fangs at her. “Bold claim for a woman who was just knocked on her ass by the jewel she claims is hers. The King stone doesn’t seem to agree.”

Serai looked at him, feeling stupid and wishing there were a healer nearby for the pounding headache starting up in her brain. “What? Oh, the Emperor. Where did you get ‘King stone’? Although it’s certainly close, considering the true name was lost to you landwalkers eleven thousand years ago.”

His eyes widened. “Landwalkers? And you flew in here as mist? Are you really Atlantean?”

The boy rolled his eyes, and Serai felt an instant kinship with him.

“Of course not. Do you see a mermaid tail?” he asked the adults.

Bizarrely, all three of them stared at her legs. Serai could feel the hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her, and she forced it back down. “No tail, no fins, no gills. No mermaids. Atlanteans are ordinary people, quite like you, except we live underneath the ocean. For now,” she amended.

“That’s wicked cool,” the boy said, dropping down to sit cross-legged beside her. “Can I visit? I would get awesome extra credit for a report on Atlantis. Also, are all the girls as pretty as you? He ducked his head and blushed. “Um, ignore that last part. It was totally random.”

“Ian.” The woman scolded him. “What have I told you?”

Ian shrugged and grinned, unrepentant, at his mother. “Nothing about hot chicks from Atlantis, that’s for sure. I would have remembered.”

Serai smiled at him, delighted. “I’m a ‘hot chick’ ? Is that like the bee’s knees?”

He stared at her, clearly mystified. “What the heck does that mean? Do bees even have knees? How would you know? Who’d want to get close enough to find out?”

The vampire cleared his throat, although Serai could tell he was fighting not to smile. The entire situation was so impossibly strange and surreal that Serai was almost sure she’d wake up any minute, secure in the crystal pod, having simply been the victim of another stasis dream.

Hot chick, though—she couldn’t have made that one up.

She held her hand out to the boy, and he chivalrously helped her up, in spite of his mother’s not so subtle urgings to stay away from Serai.

“I am Serai of Atlantis,” she tried again. “And you are?”

“Ian Khetta. Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand and blushing furiously. “Sorry about the hot chick thing. That’s my mom, Ivy Khetta. She’s a smoking powerful witch. And he’s Mr. Nicholas, a vampire who says he eats people and uses their bones for toothpicks, but we haven’t seen that. He did pull a guy’s intestines out, but the guy had hit me and hurt my mom, so we weren’t too broken up about it.”

Serai tilted her head, fascinated by the boy’s candor and phrasing, and was trying to think of how to respond to that flow of information when the vampire did so first.

“He hit you? He swore he did not,” Nicholas snarled.

Ian rolled his eyes. “Right. Because bad guys never lie to each other. Dude, do you watch TV at all?”

“Don’t call me dude,” the vampire said, but he grinned at the boy without a hint of fang.