Atlantis Betrayed

Before he could think of a response, she tucked her gun into a holster on her leather belt and stepped closer to him. Her scent teased him again, swamping his senses with the light fragrance of jasmine underneath a spring rain.

“Perhaps just a taste? As a sort of good-bye?” she murmured, maybe to herself, and then she rose up on her tiptoes and pulled his head down to hers with one hand. With the other, she lifted her mask a little and pressed a soft, gentle caress of a kiss against his lips. Utter shock kept him motionless just long enough for her to drop her mask, step back, and press something hard into his abdomen.

“Lovely. I really do regret this,” she said.

And then she shot him.

“You shot me—” he blurted out, but looking down, it wasn’t the expected bright red of his blood flowing out of his body that he saw, but bright red . . . feathers? A dart. It was a dart.

And feathers. Dancing feathers, and the room spun around them. Magical feathers? Oh. Oh, no. Not magic . . .

Drugs . . .

As he hit the floor, his Atlantean metabolism instantly began to push the drugs out of his system. But instantly wasn’t quick enough, if the way the floor was trying to suck him into it was any clue.

She bent down, and his senses reeled at the sight of her features all gone topsy-turvy, until his drug-hazed mind realized that he was looking at her upside down. Her mask had dropped down a little to show the wry curve of luscious lips. Even after she’d shot him, he still wanted to taste that mouth again.

“I really am sorry, you know. Hopefully since you haven’t actually stolen anything yet, they won’t imprison you for too very long,” she said, with what sounded like sincere regret. “Best of luck to you.”

She said something else, but by then the drug had temporarily—at least, he hoped it was only temporarily—overwhelmed his body’s efforts to push it out, and the gray pushing at the edges of his vision swarmed in to take over his conscious mind. The last thing he saw before the blackness claimed him was the small rectangle of paper, with its tiny scarlet image, that she’d dropped on the ground.

“Ninja,” he managed.

Her unexpected peal of laughter echoed in the swirling dark.

* * *

Fiona clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling the laughter. Fool. She was out of time and had nearly been out of luck. What was she thinking to kiss that man? He could have grabbed her and ripped her mask off or, worse, held her for the authorities. He was certainly big enough to have overwhelmed her and done hideous things to her with his hard-muscled body.

Lovely, dirty things. Or at least naked things.

She stifled another laugh. Clearly panic and adrenaline had combined to drive her mad. The man was a thief, she reminded herself, acknowledging and then proceeding to ignore the obvious irony.

She could almost hear Hopkins’s voice in her head. Lady Fiona Campbell did not kiss common criminals.

She allowed her gaze to travel the length of his hard, muscled, and quite decidedly male body. Well. She shouldn’t kiss uncommon criminals, either.

Declan’s tinny voice squawked from her wrist, and she tapped the button to silence it. Time was up. She gathered the shadows around herself and stepped into the corner behind the door. The guards would be joining them any moment. Unfortunate, that. She rather hoped the man didn’t face too much trouble, but the stakes were too high to let him interfere with her plans.

This job was too dear. The Siren was on the auction block; that absolutely flawless and enormous square-cut aquamarine centered on Vanquish’s hilt was meant to be hers. The anonymous buyer who’d put the word out had also said those magic words: Money is not an object.

There was no possible way to even cost it out. The sword itself was priceless and the Siren was as well known as Vanquish. According to history, William had always claimed it came from his own many-times-great- grandmother, and she was an actual siren. The kind who sang sailors to their deaths. Apparently old Grandma the Conqueror had kept at least one sailor alive long enough to get a little frisky with him.

Fiona figured she’d start high and negotiate her way down. She wasn’t planning to steal the sword, after all. She wasn’t irretrievably destroying a national treasure. Just defacing it a little. They could put a different jewel in the hilt. A paste one. Fakes were brilliant these days; nobody would even be able to tell without a jeweler’s eye.

Guilt whimpered and tried to raise its ugly little head in her conscience, but she firmly pushed it back down. Vampires didn’t feel guilty, so why should she?

The man on the floor—the man she’d just shot, for Saint George’s sake—stirred and groaned. Guilt didn’t just whimper, this time. It jumped up and down and sang an aria. She’d never shot anyone before. She didn’t want to ever shoot anyone again. She was not her grandfather’s child.

The warning gong clanged as the security door began to rise, and she swung her attention to the glimmer of light that slowly widened between the floor and the bottom of the steel door. Right on schedule. Time to make her way home and decide what to do next. She focused with all of her concentration on shadowing her presence—sight, sound, and scent—from even the shifters and their ultrasensitive noses and ears, then cast one last regretful glance over her shoulder at the ever-so-gallant thief.

It was quite fortunate that her shadows dispersed the sound of her gasp even as it left her mouth, because the floor was empty.

The man was gone.

* * *

Christophe made it as far as the roof of the White Tower before he collapsed out of mist form and fell heavily to the stone. The drug had left him weak, barely able to reach for and channel the magic that had helped him escape before the Tower Guard found him lying helpless as a mewling babe on the floor.

Wicked little wench. She was going to be very, very sorry she’d ever shot an Atlantean warrior. He might have to tie her up and take a considerable amount of time teaching her a lesson.

With his lips.

And his cock.

The thought of her warm, willing body underneath his flashed a sizzle of heat through him that got him up and moving. Now was not the time to be caught on the grounds. He’d come back for the Siren; he’d seen enough to know she hadn’t taken it. Not yet.

Now he wanted to find her. Needed to find her. The Scarlet Ninja was suddenly the only mission he cared about. He’d wanted a challenge, hadn’t he? She was definitely that. How had a woman he hadn’t really even seen aroused him more with a brief brush of her lips than any tumble in the sheets had done in decades?

He pulled himself up and, from a crouching position so as not to shout his presence to the world, scanned the grounds for the uniquely bending shadows that had signaled her presence inside the Tower. It took several long seconds, but he found her. She was running, and she was still shadowed. There was nothing magical or preternatural about her running speed, however, and he would easily catch up.

Wouldn’t she be surprised at what she found when she finally stepped outside her magical shadows? He laughed and, channeling the power of Poseidon once again, threw himself off the roof and into the rain. This would have to be his last effort to travel as mist until he’d had rest and food. Exhaustion was pulling at him, amplified by the remnants of the drug still working itself out of his system. The transformation itself should help remove the drug, though, balancing out the drain on his magic as he changed forms yet again.

He focused on the way the curving shadows moved through the grounds and toward the gate, barely perceptible in the drizzling rain. She moved so gracefully, almost dancing between one raindrop and the next. It couldn’t be just the light she was bending with her magic. Shifters had extremely powerful noses, and she’d been within scenting range. But clearly they hadn’t caught so much as a whiff—or the sound of her heartbeat, either. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought she was a vampire.

He did know better, though. More than two centuries spent fighting vamps had taught him how to recognize