She grinned at him. “Figure of speech. ‘Stripped of my wand’ just sounds cooler than ‘stripped of my elemental magic and the Wilding,’ right?”
Conlan glared at all of them. “Can we focus? Now? Please? Consider this a royal decree, if that helps.” He pointed at Ven. “You and I will discuss your lack of communication skills later.”
Ven snorted and flung himself into an upholstered chair near the table, one long leg draped over the arm. Alaric told them everything. Everything about Ptolemy Reborn, the attack in Japan—all of it. Except for what had occurred between him and Quinn on the island, of course. Some things were meant to be private.
Conlan sat back in his chair, stunned, when Alaric finished his recitation. “The portal is alive? We guessed it had some form of sentience, but this is . . . surprising, to say the least. And now apparently the portal spirit is male, not female, if the voice we heard when Quinn spoke to it is an indicator.”
“I think we have no time to concern ourselves with the portal just now,” Alaric said.
“Yeah. It’s worse than even you know. That blast, Alaric? The one Ptolemy blew up the hotel with? News reports are saying that the king of Atlantis announced his presence in the world by killing seventeen people,” Ven said grimly. “Those Platoists and a few of the hotel staff.”
Conlan’s face turned to stone. “I have been preparing the way for Atlantis’s arrival on the surface for months. Foreign dignitaries, heads of state, all of it ruined by this impostor.”
Alaric’s fury rose up inside him with the force of a typhoon over open ocean. “Yes,” he snarled. “We wouldn’t want the deaths of a few innocent humans to get in the way of
“You know I don’t mean that,” Conlan shouted at him. “How long have you battled beside me? Has anything ever gotten in my way when it comes to protecting humanity? I take my oath as a Warrior of Poseidon very seriously and you should know that.”
“He has Poseidon’s Pride, Conlan,” Alaric said quietly. “He’s able to use it. And it gets even worse. I think he might be demon kin.”
“Yeah, demon kin, whatever,” Ven threw in. “You want worse? Anubisa is back. Archelaus wasn’t just slinging rumors. She walked into the Primus today and destroyed every vampire member of Congress in one fell swoop. Told the humans who happened to be there to pass along the word that no vampire in the world was safe until they delivered the heads of the Atlantean royal family to her on a plate.”
“She has always had a flair for drama,” Alaric observed, mostly to give Conlan a chance to regain his composure. Anubisa, the vampire goddess, had held Conlan captive and tortured him for seven long years before he’ escaped. Alaric thought that a bit of madness still lurked in Conlan’s mind from the ordeal. How could it not?
“Good. Maybe she’ll kill Ptolemy for us,” Ven said.
“Why would she go after the vampires, though, is what I don’t understand,” Erin said. “They’re her progeny, right? Why not threaten to kill humans instead?”
“Humans don’t have the juice to find us,” Conlan answered. “She knows every blood pride in the world will be after us now. One of them is bound to get lucky.”
“Yeah, and we have an answer to your flying monkeys, too,” Ven said. “Shape-shifter communities are going wild all over the world. Losing any vestige of civilization and turning feral. Interestingly enough, all of this started within a day of when those scientists in Turkey found Poseidon’s Pride. The jewel must be driving them nuts somehow.”
“The Trident may act as a stabilizing influence on its raw power,” Alaric said.
“Which is why you need to go find it,” Conlan said. “Take Ven, take everybody you need. I’d go, but I’m going to have to do a lot of damage control right now. When you find the bastard, call me, though. I’d love to face this man who would be king.”
Alaric defied his prince only rarely.
This would be one of those times.
“I will not leave Quinn. Didn’t you hear what I told you? He announced her identity to the world. Every vampire, rogue shifter, and any of a dozen other shapes and sizes of big and bad will be after her.” Alaric called to his magic until his body glowed bright blue-green from head to toe and he held so much power inside him that one simple flick of his fingers could have leveled the palace. “I will never leave her side, or allow her to be in danger again.”
“She’s safe in Atlantis, and you know it. No vampire or shifter can enter through the portal,” Conlan said calmly. “And turn down the lights, my friend. We get that you’re scary. We get that you have an insanely overprotective need to make sure Quinn is safe. We’ll find a way, but we have to stop this man, or demon, or whatever in the nine hells he is. Now.”
A quiet voice came from the doorway, and they all turned to see Quinn standing at the open door, sheer rage stamped on her delicate features. “Perhaps the next time you decide to discuss my future, you might remember to include me in the discussion. Especially when the future of the whole damned world is at stake.”
Chapter 11
Abandoned subway tunnel, New York City
The one now known to the entire world as Ptolemy Reborn slouched insolently in a chair while Anubisa, goddess of Chaos and Night, matriarch to all vampires, supreme ruler of the dark, vibrated with fury as she hung floating in midair, halfway to the ceiling.
Frankly, she was boring the shit out of him.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” He finally interrupted her tirade. “You’ll help me in my quest to take the throne of Atlantis, and I’ll deliver the current royal family to you. Do you just want the two and a half princes, or do you want the women and the baby, too?”
She froze, mid-rant, and stared at him, then levitated back down until her silk slipper–clad feet touched the floor. “Baby? Did I know there was a baby?”
She flung her arms out and did her best impression of a mad ballerina as she capered and twirled around the room, her hip-length black hair floating around her like a cloak of spider silk. “Oh, I don’t remember, my time in the Void was so long and so dark and twisted, with lovely, broken creatures. Did I know there was a baby? Did I?”
“Whether you did or not, there is one. Conlan’s kid. Heir to the throne. Do you want him?”
She smiled at him in a grim parody of happiness, and her fangs sliced into her lips and chin, gouging flesh and blood that ran down her face.
“Oh, yes, I want the baby,” she whispered. “I must have the baby, I will count his little fingers and his little toes, and then I will bite them off and drink every drop of blood in his fat little body, and finally,
Ptolemy was a little skeptical about her calling anybody else hideous, seeing as how she was a few dozen bricks short of a load, but as they liked to say in his world, “
He planned to have a
“I’ll deliver them to you, and you’ll hold up your end of the bargain. The vampires will recognize me as the true king of Atlantis and uphold my sovereignty.”
She levitated again, cackling, still chanting about the baby, but then a look of sly calculation swept over her face. In spite of the gore and madness, it was still the most stunning face he’d ever seen; she had a deadly dark beauty that would cut and bleed any who dared come close.
Good enough. He had no plans to get close to this crazy bitch. Soon he’d have Quinn. He thought about all that would entail, and he finally smiled. Anubisa mistook his smile for appreciation of her wonderfulness, apparently, because she glared haughtily down at him from a few feet up.
“The likes of you will never have me, demon,” she hissed.
He yawned. “I am no demon of your realm to be cowed by you, vampire,” he said. “My Atlantean mother bore me to the Higher Demon who stole her from her home, and their blood, combined, will make me the most powerful ruler Atlantis or this world has ever seen. Join in or be left behind. It matters little to me now, and will mean even less when I use the power of Poseidon’s Trident to open the doors between worlds and allow my brethren access to this garden paradise of a planet.”
