It wasn’t really even a choice.
He caught the boy five feet from the sidewalk below, and Ven was right behind him.
The upper floors of the hotel exploded into a ball of fire over their heads.
Tokyo, Japan, in a car on the way to Narita International Airport
Quinn stared out the window at the passing scenery, not really seeing any of it. She listened with a fraction of her attention as the elderly Japanese man driving her to the airport tried to give her a history lesson on the area. He was gracious and kind, and she was in the mood for neither. She’d left her only real friend trapped in a tiger’s body, with no hope of ever seeing him again, and she had no idea where Alaric was. Not to mention that she’d never yet met her only nephew, who just happened to be the heir to the throne of Atlantis, and now she probably never would.
Life was just peachy.
She’d left Archelaus with only a hasty good-bye, as he worked the phone and his contacts to try to discover what the monkey-shifter attack had been about. Hello, more chaos. She had a feeling that there was more than enough on her plate at the moment, though, so she decided to stop worrying about flying monkeys—shape-shifters or otherwise. The two-hour hike to the parking lot at Fifth Station, midway down the mountain, had provided more than enough time for every worst-case scenario—many involving her own torture and death—to circle through her mind like wastewater through a gutter.
“I don’t understand this,” her driver suddenly said in an entirely different tone from the tour guide voice he’d been using. “We have no bad weather forecasted for this area today.”
Quinn sat up in her seat and stared forward, into a sky that had gone suddenly dark and sullen. Clouds whipped in a frenzy of storm formation, and apple-sized hailstones began to pummel the car and the road around them. The car just in front of them in the long line of crazy Tokyo traffic swerved and almost hit the car next to it, and a domino effect of near-collisions began all around them.
Quinn’s driver slammed on the brakes, throwing Quinn forward and almost into the dash, and then he made a weird yelping noise and pointed to his left. Quinn stared out at what he was indicating, and recoiled in horror. She hadn’t seen anything like that outside of a bad movie.
It was a funnel cloud, and it was heading right at them. The car behind them stopped too late and almost rear-ended them, throwing Quinn forward again. Score one for excellent seat belts. The air bag didn’t deploy, though, and she almost had time to wonder about that before the funnel cloud touched down in the single open spot of road in front of them, and a dark shape walked out of its heart.
Alaric.
He raised his arms as he walked, and the tornado flew up and away from the road at his command. He kept walking, never looking back or to the side, all of his grim focus on Quinn.
“Apparently this is my ride,” she said apologetically to her terrified driver. “Thank you, and I am so sorry for your fright.”
She unbuckled her seat belt, climbed out, and then stood, fists on hips, as Alaric approached.
“You don’t get to hurt innocent people, Alaric. That puts you on the wrong side of the equation, and I won’t stand for it.” She was proud that she stood her ground while a whirlwind of fury and magic in the shape of a man stalked toward her, caught her around the waist, and leapt into the air.
“No human is injured,” he told her. “Not even their machines.”
“You frightened them—”
“You will never leave me again,” he said into her hair, and his voice was agonized; crazed. The voice of a man driven to the brink of madness. “If Ptolemy captures you, or
Quinn drew upon reserves deep within herself to remain calm as she found herself swirling counterclockwise in the heart of a tornado, somehow protected by Alaric’s strength and magic.
“You can’t do this, ever again. You cannot hold innocent lives hostage against my cooperation. That makes you no better than the murderers—human, shifter, or vampire—who kill people every day. The ones I’ve spent ten years fighting,” she said, her mouth close to his ear so the wind didn’t snatch her words away.
He shuddered against her, as if fighting a tidal wave of emotion. “I know. Don’t you think I know? I, who pride myself on my logical, rational state of existence? I don’t know what to do, Quinn. You must help me.”
“I’d be better able to cope if we weren’t flying around inside a freaking tornado,” she shouted, finally losing the edges of calm. “Get me out of here!”
He nodded, and the glimmering oval of the portal appeared underneath them just before he dropped her. She screamed all the way down.
Chapter 7
An island in the Bermuda Triangle
After Alaric had calmed the storm and dispersed the tornado so none of the humans would be harmed, he followed Quinn through the portal to the beach on the other side, but prudently walked ten or so paces away, to give her a moment to recover from the fall. Now that he had time to consider the matter, it seemed that dropping her the five or six feet to the beach like that had perhaps not been the wisest course of action. After all, the woman was armed and definitely dangerous.
Dawn was breaking, and Quinn was so fierce and beautiful in the golden light of morning that he found himself almost unable to breathe at the sight of her, until she looked up and scowled at him. She sat, face like one of Poseidon’s darkest thunderstorms, in about six inches of water. Waves broke against her and splashed on the glistening white sand around her, and she was completely drenched.
“You are a total slime ball, you know that? A . . . a scumbucket, useless pile of—”
“Perhaps you should carefully consider your words,” he said, cutting her off before she had the opportunity to more fully demonstrate her command of insults. “I didn’t have a lot of time to control the portal, since you wanted me to protect your humans from the storm.”
“The storm
He couldn’t help it. He started laughing. She resembled nothing more than a kitten caught in a rainstorm, snarling and spitting her dismay.
She narrowed her eyes, scrambled to her feet, and started toward him, moving fast. He watched, expecting her to stop before she reached him.
She did not.
Instead, she hit him at a full-on run, and knocked him backward so hard that he fell flat on his ass in the surf and sat there, sputtering seawater out of his mouth and staring up at her in total shock.
Quinn’s narrowed-eye stare all but dared him to stand up again. “Do not ever,
“The situation has little likelihood of coming up again,” he said cautiously.
“You are so frustrating,” she shouted at him, kicking more water on him. “Why couldn’t you find some other tough rebel chick to drive out of her mind? Why did it have to be me?”
He shoved his dripping wet hair out of his face and, relief finally overwhelming him, grinned up at her. “World-bending kisses,” he smugly reminded her.
Her mouth fell open, and she stood there gaping at him for several long moments before she shook her head and started laughing. “You are insane, you know that, right? Totally, entirely insane.”
“The thought has often occurred to me,” he admitted. “May I stand now, or do you plan to knock me over again?”
She tilted her head, as if considering her options. “Just stay there,” she advised. Then she turned and walked away from him until she was about twenty feet from the surf line, where she sat down and stared out at the waves.
