by Alyssa Day
But the worst of them were bloodsuckers like the dark goddess they worshipped. Part of her blood pride.
These were humans.
Humans. And they were screwing each other as they bled, right there on the carpet.
Alexios felt the bile roiling in his gut. “Poseidon save us. That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long—”
Christophe cut him off. “To each his own, Alexios. Just because you didn’t enjoy whatever Anubisa did to scar your pretty face doesn’t mean that some of us don’t like to play a little rough sometimes.”
Whirling to face the other warrior, Alexios didn’t even realize he’d drawn his fist back to strike until Brennan caught his wrist in one powerful hand. “Christophe’s words, as is often the case, outpace his thoughts, old friend,” Brennan said calmly. “But we are only three and cannot countenance dissension between us if we are to learn any news of Lord Justice.”
Alexios nodded, still boring a hole in the side of Christophe’s head with his gaze. “You’re right, Brennan. But when this is over, there will come a reckoning time.”
Christophe never even turned to face him, but remained staring into the window, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Power rolled off of him in waves, until Alexios thought the inside of his skull would burst from it.
“Christophe, ratchet it down. Now.”
Christophe didn’t bother to respond, but the pressure in Alexios’s head diminished as Christophe’s entire body stiffened and he pointed at the glass. “I bet that’s our slimeball. Look at the way all the red robes are bowing and scraping.”
The man—no, the vampire; anybody with a face that color of fish-belly white could only be the undead—striding into the room had to be at least six and a half feet tall. His bald head gleamed as though oiled, as did the rest of his body. Or at least what they could see of it, which was way too much for Alexios’s taste.
“What is he wearing?” Christophe said, disgust dripping from his words. “The newest thing in leather and chains?”
“My eyes are bleeding,” Alexios groaned.
“Deplorable taste in clothing or not, we perhaps should act now,” Brennan murmured.
Christophe raised his palms, and two glowing spheres of pure blue-green energy instantly formed, the power of Poseidon searing through him like channeled electricity. “Now works for me,” he said.
“Don’t hurt the humans,” Alexios shouted, but it was too late. Christophe shot the spheres at the enormous wall of glass, shattering it inward in a thunderous explosion.
The cult members nearest the window screamed and threw themselves away from the deadly shards of glass arrowing toward them, scrambling away on newly bloodied hands and knees. Shrieks and cries filled the air as everyone in the room ran or crawled away from the window.
Great. That wouldn’t alert hotel security. Alexios sent a quick prayer to Poseidon that at least the security force wasn’t composed of shifters, then shoved Christophe out of the way and flew through the jagged hole.
The cult members scrambled to put even more distance between themselves and the intruders as the Atlanteans soared into the room and landed on the glass-covered carpet.
Everyone but the leader. He stared straight into Alexios’s eyes, and he smiled. “I expected you before this, weaklings. Do you wish to join the ways of Algolagnia? I, Xinon, would be delighted to demonstrate how pain can become pleasure.”
“I think we’d rather demonstrate how pain can be nothing more than pain, bloodsucker,” Alexios said, scanning the room for further threat. “Nice panties, by the way.”
The vamp glanced down at the leather straps he wore in place of pants, and then he smiled again. “Yes, I’d heard that you enjoyed our games when you were our . . . guest.”
The fragile control Alexios had on his temper after Christophe’s idiotic stunt frayed near to snapping, and he raised his daggers. “You’re closer than you know to the true death, vampire, so maybe you should keep your mouth shut.”
Brennan started circling the room, throwing stars in hand. The sight of the warrior’s icy features had a bizarrely quieting effect on the wailing humans who huddled in the corners. As he passed each cluster, they shrank back from him and muffled their sobs with their hands.
Brennan ignored them and called out a question. “This stinks of some form of mind control. Can you release them, Christophe?”
On the opposite side of the room from Brennan, Christophe stalked closer and closer to the leader, juggling more energy spheres—this time two to a hand. His eyes glowed so brightly with power that the humans shielded their eyes from the sight. “Maybe I’ll just kill old Xinon here and see if that does the trick,” he said.
The vamp just threw back his head and laughed. “Do you seek to intimidate me, Atlanteans? I have lived more than one thousand years and have survived war, famine, and village mobs with flaming torches.” Xinon paused and shook his head, the silver rings that pierced his ears flashing in the light. “Such a cliché, that. But do you really believe that you pose any threat to me?”
“Tell us where that evil whore of a goddess is keeping Lord Justice, or I’ll show you my version of a threat,” Alexios growled. He sliced his dagger through the air in a prearranged signal, and he, Brennan, and Christophe all advanced on the vampire.
“From what I hear, your Lord Justice went willingly into the arms of Anubisa, most exalted goddess of Chaos and Night,” the vamp taunted them, hissing a little as his fangs extended and he dropped into a crouch. “Perhaps he does not want to be found. Perhaps even now he lies in her arms enjoying her favors.”
Before Alexios could move or even think, Brennan whipped his arms forward and down, and two of his silver throwing stars shot through the air so fast that even Alexios’s Atlantean vision barely caught a glimpse of it.
One after the other, the stars drove into the vampire’s neck with such force that the first sliced halfway through and the second completed the job. Alexios stared, caught between shock and fury, as the only hope they had for finding Justice dissolved into a sizzling pool of acidic vampire slime that burned through the carpet to the concrete floor.
He whirled to face Brennan. “What in the nine hells were you thinking? We needed to get him to talk, not to—”
The words shriveled in his mouth at the expression on Brennan’s face. The calm serenity of centuries was nowhere to be seen. Brennan’s eyes burned like molten silver and his face contorted as his entire body shook with what could only be rage.
Rage. In Brennan, who was cursed to feel no emotion at all.
Christophe’s low whistle startled Alexios out of his trance. “What the hells? Brennan? Centuries of no emotion, and you pick now to go bat shit on us?”
Alexios couldn’t even speak. It was as if up were suddenly down. As if fish flew and birds swam. Brennan, in a rage. The shock of it swallowed lucid thought.
Brennan evidently had enough words for them all. A torrent of bitterness—harsh words made lyrical by the cadence of the ancient Atlantean tongue—poured from between the warrior’s bared teeth. Brennan’s eyes flashed that eerie metallic silver color as he spoke, but it wasn’t until Alexios saw the blood dripping from Brennan’s clenched fists that he realized the warrior still held the deadly sharp throwing stars in his hands.
Brennan seemed not even to notice the blood or the pain, because he kept ranting in low, hoarse tones, now turning in a slow circle to sweep the room and the cowering humans with his gaze. The haunting refrain spilled from his lips; still in ancient Atlantean, but of course Alexios understood every word. It was, after all, their native tongue.
“Kill them. Kill them all.
“Kill them now.”
Chapter 5
October 1776,
the former British colonies in North America
Justice stood, silently watching, until the trail of dust kicked up by the horse’s hooves had long since settled back onto the rocky ground. The last rays of the set
ting sun shimmered over the faint path like a benediction, Nature herself approving of the rider’s news.
Independence.
Since early July, evidently, when these foolhardy and insanely courageous humans had declared themselves free from British rule. Free from the oppressions of a distant monarchy. Free to wrestle their existence from a land filled with both known and unknown dangers. Of course, then they’d go too far and try to conquer those who had resided in these lands long before the newcomers had landed from distant shores.
The pattern never changed. Battle and conquest. Triumph or surrender. Peace an illusory fantasy dreamed by a madman.
“We knew it was coming,” Ven said, walking up beside him. “Damned if I don’t like these colonists. All guts and grit. But the locals may have a word or two to say. Especially the Illini chief. He’s a good man, a temperate man, but he won’t be backed into a corner without a fight.”
Justice sighed. “You’re not wrong. I wish it could be different.” Then he turned to confront the unlikely sight of a prince of Atlantis wearing a coonskin hat. “Guts and grits?”
Ven snorted. “Grit, not grits. Try to keep up.” He liked to fit in with the local populace; now he was masquerading as a fur trapper. Justice grinned, remembering Ven’s disappointment that nobody in Rome wore togas these days.
“Grit: another word for courage. Many of these men would make good warriors, should they decide to oppose the shifters and vampires.”
“Grit or no, a gun and a bellyful of beans won’t help them in a fight with that nest of vamps,” Justice replied. “And no, I still won’t wear a hat made out of a dead animal, so don’t ask again.”
“Fine, continue on with your tragically dull existence. You look more like a native than a French trapper, anyway.”
It was true. The waist-length braid branded him as a native or—worse, to some bigoted minds—a half-breed. This had been kindly pointed out to him by the reactions of many of the more . . . aromatic denizens of the few villages they’d bothered to stop by on this mission.
One or two of the bolder ones had ventured a comment along those lines. Then they’d caught sight of the well-worn hilt of the sword sheathed diagonally across his back. Or maybe they’d simply seen the promise of an unmourned death in his eyes.
Either way, not one of them had ever dared a second comment.
Justice understood the inherent hypocrisy in his naming another a predator. But, then again, self-awareness was simply a more enlightened kind of freedom. If freedom could be claimed by one promised—sword, sweat, and soul—to the sea god.
“Imagine Poseidon’s reaction if Atlanteans signed a Declaration of Independence,” he said dryly.
Ven’s mouth dropped open, and then he threw back his head and let loose with a belly laugh so loud and long that it made the horses restless.
“Why horses, again? When we can travel by mist with far less struggle?” Justice deliberately stepped a few paces away. “Not to mention with far less stench.”
“Vamps don’t expect much resistance from a group of fur trappers,” Ven said. “Be a lot different if a group of supes materialize in their midst.”
“At least we’d have the element of surprise,” Justice said, again. Knew he’d lose the argument. Again.
“Oh, they’ll be surprised. Anybody would be surprised to find out a pretty boy like you actually knows how to use that sword.” Parting shot delivered, Ven walked, still chuckling, back toward the campfire to join the others.
Justice couldn’t help the smile twitching the corners of his lips. Ven was everything an older brother should be. Too bad they’d all be rotting in the lowest of the nine hells before anybody would learn he really was Justice’s brother.
His smile died before it had had a chance to form. Much like any hope he might have harbored that he’d ever have a family.
Dinner caught, cooked, and mostly eaten, except for Bastien and his sixth or seventh helping, Justice settled in next to the fire to await full dark. Not knowing where the vamps nested, the best recourse was to wait for them to rise and go on the blood hunt. The small town that had served as the vamp feeding ground for far too long lay nearby.
This vampire’s blood pride was strange enough to draw Atlantean attention, even more so than the usual type. Unlike most vamp groups that stayed small due to the natural disinclination of the bloodsuckers to form any kind of allegiance or bow to any authority, this nest was rumored to be enormous. Maybe hundreds of vampires, all in one spot.
The stories held that the vampire leader had a special weapon. A jewel that could destroy his own kind and worked as a great deterrent to any of them bold enough to want to leave him. Stories and gossip had a tendency to spread like wildfire out here on the frontier, but Conlan had wanted them to investigate. So here they were, camped out like real fron tiersmen.
Or so Ven would have it, spurs, grit, and all. Justice shook his head, smiling, and looked around at the small, unobtrusive camp. They’d set it up as camouflage. Close enough to hear the prearranged church bell signal; far enough away to seem harmless to any vampire sentinel.
So now they waited. Seemed like more of a warrior’s life was waiting than Justice had ever expected. It’s why he’d started carving in the first place. A way to focus the mind before the clashing sound and fury of battle.
He turned the block of wood over and over in his hands, wondering what shape he’d discover in its smooth grain. The small wagon, the fat, round apple, and the horse he’d already finished lay on a square of Atlantean silk on top of his folded saddle blanket.
Bastien crouched down beside him, a plate of roasted meat and the ever-present beans in one giant paw and nodded his head at the block of wood, plastering an exaggerated leer on his face. “How about a nice, full-figured woman?”
Justice laughed and shook his head. None of the settlers who tended to run from the sight of Bastien would believe his penchant for joking around with his fellow warriors. The mere sight of the nearly seven-foot-tall warrior was often enough to stop any trouble before it began. At least any human trouble. It took more than the sight of a few Atlantean warriors to make any of the native shifter folk raise so much as an eyebrow.
And the vampires? They were already dead, and probably figured they didn’t have much to lose.
Ven tossed another branch into the fire. “Are you saying the only way Justice can get a woman is if he carves his own?” he called out.
Justice ignored them, letting the ebb and flow of their banter wash over him as he tried to see inside the wood. Tried to feel and hear what it was telling him.
He wasn’t carving a woman. It was something far more basic.
Simple.
Something that felt like home and resonated with the cool depths of the sea. A memory of belonging, held captive in the mind of a warrior bound by duty to patrol this dusty, rocky barrenness.
He closed his eyes and traced the outline of the chunk of wood with his fingers. Suddenly, he knew, like he always did.
A fish. It was a fish.
He could almost feel his ears turning red. Poseidon’s balls, they’d mock him to death for this one. A godsdamned fish, of all the ordinary things.
But it was what it was; he’d learned long ago not to try to force a carving into a shape different from the one shown to him by the wood itself. This fish was different, in any event. One that traveled the deep vastness of the trench where Atlantis lay, hidden and waiting.
Waiting these long millennia for a day that might never come.
He’d focus on the fish, though. Not politics. Not now. This fish had never seen even the barest sea-filtered glimpse of sunlight. Schools of them swam near the dome, and children loved to watch them swirl into view. When the lights from the Seven Isles touched them, they glowed a rich, translucent green.
Emeralds infused with moonlight.
As if summoned by his thoughts, a face appeared in his mind. A woman. Laughing, but carrying a weight of sadness in her
eyes.
Her emerald-colored eyes.
Bastien nudged his shoulder, jolting him from the vision. Justice didn’t know whether to feel relief or regret. Settled on neither.
“Dreaming about that wooden woman, my friend?”
“Not a woman. Just a fish.”
Tuning out their laughter, he bent his head to the wood. He could see it now. See the elegant curves and angles of her face.
No. Not her face. The fish. Just a fish.
And yet . . .
And yet somehow far more. Somehow, something—someone—who gleamed like emeralds in the corner of his mind.
He’d finish it in the next several days and then perhaps gift it to one of the native children. No point to keep it. No reason to carry it back to Atlantis.
After all, fancies of emeralds aside, it was just a fish.
Chapter 6
Present day, the Void
Sound grated through darkness to ears grown unused to listening. A distant bellow, a nearness of shambling sighs. Something large stirring in the dark.
The Void. Justice knew those words held meaning, meaning he could not decipher. He was Justice of . . . of Atlantis.
But what Atlantis might be crouched slyly under the mist inside his mind.
The geas was broken—he had broken it. Centuries of being bound by a curse never to reveal the circumstances of his birth unless he immediately killed anyone who had heard him do so. Cursed forever to be separated from his two half brothers. He’d shattered that curse in those final moments when . . . when . . .
But the memory was lost in shadowed histories of pain. Sanity had waved its final farewell so long ago. Now duty and revenge beckoned to his consciousness, called out to what was left of Self. Isolated Names that carried weight and resonated with ravaged emotion, both light . . .
Ven.
Conlan.