Heart of Atlantis

worse.

They were nothing she’d ever seen before, or heard about, or read about, which meant only one thing. He really wasn’t from around here.

“You’re a Martian?” She started laughing. “I expected green skin and little antennas poking out of your head.”

He smiled, and for the first time, it wasn’t polished. It was nasty, which meant she was getting to him, so she smiled right back.

“Mars, no. Another dimension, far away and far different from this one? Yes. Not so far that my demon kin father couldn’t steal my Atlantean mother around twelve millennia ago. Not so different that he couldn’t force her to bear son after son for him until she killed herself after I was born,” he snarled, and the veneer of polished politician was chipping away fast. It was doing more than that; it was peeling off in sheets like ancient paint stripped from rotten wood, and suddenly Quinn wasn’t sure she wanted to be around to see what was underneath.

Anubisa stirred, and Ptolemy stepped back and pointed the scepter at her again.

The vampire came awake and up off the floor like a freight train, headed right at Ptolemy, but the threat of the raised scepter stopped her at the last minute. Anubisa flew up to the ceiling and floated there in the corner, staring down at them both and hissing.

“I am a goddess,” she screeched.

“A few more screws loose since the last time I saw you,” Quinn mused, and Ptolemy nodded in agreement, which made her flinch. She didn’t want to do or say anything that he agreed with.

“Yes, she has evidently been somewhere called the Void for a long time, and it made her a bit crazy, I’m guessing,” Ptolemy said, his terrible gaze trained on Quinn.

He hadn’t bothered to disguise his eyes again, and Quinn found herself falling into them. So he could subjugate a human mind in the same way a vampire could. She filed that away for future reference as she wrenched her gaze free. She wouldn’t look into the eyes of either of the monsters in the room again. Suddenly, she wanted to live long enough to kill them both. Not slowly, not by torture—she had no fancy or grand plans. She just wanted them dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

“Kill her,” Anubisa screamed. “Kill her, and I will allow you to be my consort.”

“Wow, there’s an incentive,” Quinn said, rolling her eyes and feeling stronger for it. Defiance suited her far better than fear.

Ptolemy laughed, and Anubisa screamed.

“I will eat your intestines,” she shrieked at Quinn. But she didn’t move from her corner. Apparently fear of what the scepter could do to her stopped her.

“I will, I will,” Ptolemy said to Anubisa in a soothing voice. “Later, after she has served out her usefulness. Why don’t you leave now and continue your hunt for the Atlantean false princes, so we can move ahead with our plans?”

Anubisa shrieked at Quinn one last time and then turned into a spiral of oily-looking smoke and flew out of the room. Quinn’s shoulders loosened, in spite of the fact that the monster who remained in the room with her was clearly the more deadly of the two.

“Where are we?” She looked around but recognized nothing that gave her a clue. She didn’t even know if they were still in New York. Magic portals being magic portals, they could be anywhere. She was guessing they were still on Earth, because it seemed unlikely that a separate demon dimension had bothered to invent ratty polyester couches.

“This is a room in an abandoned subway tunnel far down under the streets of Manhattan. We will move soon, but I knew Anubisa wanted to speak to me, and I have no intention of letting her know where my real lodgings are.”

He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again they’d transformed back to human shape and color. For some reason, that unsettled her even more, but all she had to do to firm up her courage was glance at the girl still cowering on the floor.

“Let the child go, already. You have the rebel leader as hostage, you don’t need some weak child,” she said, putting as much scorn into her voice as possible.

“Done.” He motioned to the girl. “You. Get up, get out. My future queen demands it. Remember that you have Quinn Dawson to thank.”

“Right,” Quinn said. “I know this trick. Your minions catch her right outside the door.”

“I don’t need minions,” he said gently, and it was more terrifying than if he’d shouted. Quiet confidence meant that he really was exactly as powerful as he claimed to be, in which case Quinn had no chance.

None at all.

The girl ran out of the room, and Ptolemy approached Quinn.

“You’ll have to tolerate the transport once more, and then you can rest.” He waved his hand, and a spiral of orange light enveloped them both. Quinn experienced another moment of gut-roiling nausea, and then they were somewhere else.

Somewhere far fancier, where polyester had probably never been allowed to rear its ugly head. It looked like a deluxe suite in a fancy hotel, not that Quinn had much experience with those, but she’d watched the occasional TV show.

“Are you planning to untie my hands before I lose all circulation and they fall off? And when are you going to tell me what you want with me? If you think I can convince the rebellion to work with you, you’re out of luck,” she said, sneering. Why bother with politeness? She had nothing left to lose.

He said nothing, merely turned her so he could reach her hands, and as his fingers unfastened the knots in the rope, Quinn scanned the room and stopped, frozen in shock, when her gaze reached the far wall. The entire wall was plastered with hundreds of photographs.

And every single one of them was a picture of her.

Chapter 20

Alaric slowly rotated in the air fifty feet up above City Hall, his arms thrown wide to the sky, glowing with so much power that he wondered briefly if he would go supernova and shatter into a thousand miniature suns. Even in death, he could rain destruction down on the humans who had allowed his woman to be captured and harmed.

Kidnapped.

He couldn’t survive if he focused the blame on where it really belonged—himself—so he closed off that part of his mind. He could indulge in self-hatred after he’d found her.

The gods alone knew what that monster might be doing to her. A fresh burst of wrath infused his power with a further wave of deadly rage—enough to build up the leading edge of the tsunami bearing down on the city to even more towering heights. He’d kill them all. Drown the city, drown the state, drown the world.

He called to the portal, but silence was his only answer. Silence from the portal—silence from Atlantis. Poseidon’s Pride was gone; there was no chance to save Atlantis. Perhaps it was already lost. Quinn was gone; so the world must die. He spared a thought for Nereus, his kindred spirit. No wonder he’d nearly destroyed Atlantis when Zelia died. It must have seemed a minor price to pay.

A small voice somewhere deep inside him—a voice that sounded suspiciously like Quinn’s—yelled at him to cut it out. But he had no time for auditory hallucinations, so he shut it down, shut out the phantom Quinn, and continued to channel all of his pain and fury into the storm.

For a moment he thought he heard another voice telling him to stop, this one coming from far below him, but it was easy to ignore. It didn’t sound at all like Quinn. But then a bolt of searing flame shot through the air toward him and sliced through the leg of his pants, blazing a path of pain across his right knee.

Now he paid attention. He hurled down toward whichever stupid human dared to shoot at him, and found himself on a collision course with the only man idiotic enough to be still standing in range.