by Alyssa Day
With that, Ven twisted so that he was under Conlan’s arm, and he forced Conlan’s hand up until the dagger, still clenched in Conlan’s fist, cut into Ven’s throat. A line of vividly scarlet blood oozed from underneath the blade, mesmerizing Justice with its vibrant color.
Vibrancy. Life. The lives that both of his brothers were willing to sacrifice for him. The realization knocked him out of the strange trance caused by the sight of the dripping blood. “No. No! You cannot. I will not have it. I will not have your lives upon my conscience. I am not, and never have been, worthy of your sacrifice.”
But either they didn’t hear him, or they ignored him, because they were fighting over the dagger. Fighting each other over who would die so that he could return home.
Agony wrenched like cold steel through his chest at the thought of either of them dying on his behalf. “No,” he shouted again. “I will not have it. I am returning to the Void, so any sacrifice you make would be in vain. Lower your blade, and do not continue with this course of stupidity.”
He forced a mocking sarcasm that he did not feel into his voice. “You are such fools, the both of you. I am almost ashamed to call you my brothers. Leave off this madness now. I gladly return to the Void to escape your maudlin sacrificial tendencies.”
And then, in an act of courage beyond any he’d known in all of his centuries, he raised his head to take one last look at Keely. He drank in the sight of her—the glorious red hair he would never touch, the lush body he would never feel next to his own. “Remember me, my lady. That is all I ask of you for this or any lifetime. Remember me, although you never knew me, for I feel that I have known you for all eternity and hungered for you for even longer, still.”
With that, he turned to walk away, fighting every instinct that he possessed. His mind and heart and soul screamed at him that he could not leave her. And yet his honor knew that he could not allow his brothers to make the ultimate sacrifice for him.
As he turned, sword still held out in front of him, forgotten, Pharnatus blocked his way. “No ‘cast-off bastard’ would occasion such loyalty on the part of his brothers,” he said, a simple dignity shining on his twisted features. “You are a messenger of the gods, although you do not know the truth of yourself. You are the emissary of my deliverance from darkness, from Anubisa, and from meaningless death.”
At that moment, Pharnatus gasped and lifted his head to stare in wide-eyed terror at something over Justice’s shoulder. Justice whirled around to see what new threat had arrived, but before he’d even begun to turn his body toward Anubisa’s damnable portal, a sudden and ominous weight shoved itself onto him.
Reflexively, he bent his knees to catch Pharnatus as the man fell into his arms. But, looking down, Justice realized that his sword was buried to the hilt in Pharnatus’s abdomen, and he threw his head back and howled his despair to the throbbing red sky.
“To any gods who are listening, know this,” the Greek said, straining to shape each word, his face contorted in a shining combination of agony and exultation. “I do this of my own free will, and my sacrifice must release Lord Justice from his imprisonment.”
Justice screamed and pulled the sword out of Pharnatus, as the man collapsed into his grasp. “No! Not for me! Never for me! I don’t deserve your sacrifice,” he cried out, his own tears pouring down his face. “You cannot do this.”
“I have done it,” Pharnatus said, voice fading. “And it is now for you to live your life with the knowledge of it. The knowledge that you are worthy, and the gods have chosen you for a reason.”
With that, a joy suffused the Greek’s face, and he held up his arms as though to an unseen herald. “Alexander, my lord, you have come for me,” he cried.
With one last shuddering breath, Pharnatus closed his eyes and died.
A giant booming noise slammed through the Void like a shock wave, and Justice looked up to see that the distorted surface of the entryway had turned transparent.
High Priest Alaric leaned through the opening and held out one arm. “His sacrifice has opened the way, but only one living being may pass. I cannot come to you, Justice. You must walk through to us.”
“I will not leave him,” Justice rasped. “I did not deserve him, and I will not leave him.”
“You may bring his body,” Alaric said. “He is no longer alive, and thus is not subject to the strictures of the Void. But come now, before the gate closes.”
Justice looked down at his sword and noted, with some corner of his mind, that it no longer glowed. In fact, the blade itself had turned black. “Black to match my soul, which was so unworthy of his sacrifice,” he said bitterly. Through habit borne of centuries, though, he wiped it on his sleeve and sheathed it on his back instead of hurling it out into the waste-land of the Void.
“Now, you must hurry,” Alaric urged. “We do not know how long the gate will remain open.”
There was nothing else for it. If he remained in the Void, he would render Pharnatus’s sacrifice irrelevant. He could not—would not—do that. He gathered the fallen man in his arms and stood. Then, in a single leap, he passed through the gates of the Void and into Atlantis.
As he crossed into the air of his native land, the fragile peace between his two natures shattered. The Nereid half of his soul screamed defiance, and his Atlantean side bowed its head in shame that the fallen man had sacrificed himself for such a worthless being as himself. His skull pounded with the raging fury of his divided psyche’s battle for control.
But what matter was more pain after so long of nothing else?
He thrust his pitiful burden into Alaric’s arms. “I would ask that you honor this man with the ancient burial rites. He was a Greek foot soldier in Alexander’s army and survived two millennia in the Void.”
Alaric inclined his head. “So it will be done, as honor and testament to his survival and for his sacrifice.”
Justice threw his head back and shouted out a harsh bark of laughter that had no humor in it. “There was no reason behind his misguided act, although the selflessness is of itself worth honoring. But he should not have done it for me. Never for me.”
Behind him, Ven and Conlan stepped closer. As one, they put their arms around him in a fierce embrace. In that instant, they were finally more than comrades or fellow warriors. They were brothers—family. For an instant, Justice allowed himself to experience what others had known. The warmth of belonging. But then he pushed them away.
“Do not think to include me in your royal lineage through a mere accident of birth,” he sneered. “We are brothers in name only, and I would not have it any other way. I seek nothing now but to release myself from the burden of this man’s unwanted sacrifice.”
A soft noise caught his attention, the sound of denial made without words. It was her. It was Keely. The pain had nearly washed away his awareness of her presence. He looked up and directly into her eyes, greener than emeralds and deeper than the ocean currents that surrounded them. She was clutching one hand at her throat, and the silky warm skin of her neck entranced him. He wanted to hold her, to bury his face in the curve where her neck met her shoulder and never let her go.
When she spoke, the liquid cadence of her voice caught at something deep in his soul. In both of his souls.
“Don’t do that,” she said, in a husky voice that sang heat and fire down his spine. “Don’t belittle his gift to you. In all of history, there’s no honor greater than self-sacrifice, and this poor man gave his life for you.”
He froze, both halves of his soul trapped by the sorrow in her voice. Every fiber of his being yearned toward her, desperate to know her. Desperate to hold her. Desperate to have her.
He would never, ever be worthy of her. But he was past caring.
“You wish me to honor him? Your wish is my command, lady,” he snarled, losing all control—only able to focus on her. On taking her. “I honor his sacrifice with that of yours to me.”
With those words, and nothing else beyond some vagu
e knowledge of a Nereid power he’d never wielded, he sprang toward Keely, caught her up in his arms, and willed that they would be elsewhere. Just the two of them. Willed them to a sanctuary he had not visited in more than two centuries.
As a deep, blue-green mist swirled from nothingness to surround him, his last sight was of the shocked faces of Alaric and his brothers. Then, before she had a chance to protest, he tightened his hold on Keely and closed his eyes as the darkness claimed them.
Chapter 14
Atlantis,
a cavern underneath the Temple of the Nereids
Keely’s consciousness shattered and re-formed, over and over, brilliantly colored particles of matter swirling around her like a sandstorm conceived by an insane artist. It lasted for mere seconds—somehow she knew that—even though her sense of time and space was thrown off-kilter. She existed and did not exist simultaneously in several different realities, but in every one of them, she was held by arms like steel bands against a rock-hard chest.
If steel and rock were to throw off heat like a furnace and smell like blood and dirt.
Suddenly, the vortex disappeared and she landed on her feet, hard, on a stone floor. Only Justice’s strength and balance kept her from falling. She waited, eyes clenched shut, taking rapid, shallow breaths, until she could trust herself to talk or move without danger of losing the contents of her roiling stomach.
The arms around her tightened, pressing her closer into his embrace, and fear overruled nausea. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed against his chest with all the strength she could muster. She may as well have saved herself the effort for as much effect as she had on him. It was like pushing against boulders in a cave-in; the same sense of sheer immovable weight.
Fear turned into frustration and an overwhelming feeling of having had way, way more than enough pulsed through her head with the beginning of a whiz-banger of a headache.
“Let. Me. Go,” she gritted out from between clenched teeth, staring determinedly at his chest. Although she was above-average height for a woman at five-eight, he was considerably taller, probably at least six-four. Somehow she knew she didn’t want to look into his eyes. Not now. Not when he still held her trapped in his arms.
He finally spoke, still with that rusty hoarseness to his voice. “We are not sure that we wish to let you go, our Keely.”
Her mind stuttered over his odd use of the plural, but before she could figure out a response, his arms loosened and, in spite of his words to the contrary, he released her. She immediately stumbled back and away from him, refusing to look down at her own shirt and pants, now also streaked with the blood from his body. Nausea was winning, and she didn’t need to give it a boost. Instead, she scanned her surroundings to try to figure out where she was.
Figuring out how she’d gotten there could wait till later.
The dark space was enormous, with the roof so high overhead that she couldn’t see it. The floor was an intricately patterned mosaic that reminded her of the floor she’d seen in her vision of Nereus. The faint, not unpleasant scent of minerals hung in the slightly humid air. It reminded her of the hot springs in California.
“Where are we?” She’d start with the simple questions, since she wasn’t at all sure how sane the wild man who’d abducted her really was. Simply because he was the man from her vision—or his evil twin—didn’t mean that she was safe with him.
She involuntarily touched the carving through her shirt. The man she’d seen, sitting next to the fire, carving her fish . . . he was like an oddly distorted photographic image of this warrior. It made her doubt her visions.
It made her doubt herself.
Maybe this man, Justice, was a descendant of the warrior from her vision? Maybe.
“A cavern deep beneath the Temple of the Nereids,” he said. “Fitting, isn’t it, since our Nereid half has finally assumed dominion over us?”
Okay. Time to tackle the obvious question. “Us? Who is us? Do you always talk about yourself in the plural?” Maybe not the best idea, to confront his psychosis head-on, but she was an archaeologist, not a shrink. After an entire childhood spent being dragged from one psychiatrist to another, she was uniquely qualified to know the difference.
Manic-depressive. Borderline sociopathy. Complete lack of any sense of reality.
The diagnoses, professional sounding or not, burned through her mind like acid. Had she spent all those years trying to convince her parents she really was normal—really was sane—only to lose her grip on reality now?
She pushed the doubts aside and drew in a deep, shaky breath. Gathering up what remained of her battered courage, she finally looked directly at him. Up close, he was even more terrifyingly feral and—though it made no sense at all—even more compelling. Although he stood straight and tall before her, he gave the impression of a predator crouched to spring.
Which brought her back to the uncomfortable sensation of being his prey.
All those years of studying the past, and now she was confronted with primitive savagery in all of its raging glory. The man was an ancient warrior come to life, not one buried in the sands of history, as she’d always assumed.
The rags he wore seemed to be the remains of a simple shirt and pants that either had seen battle or else had been run through a shredder. His thickly muscled chest was clearly visible under the tattered fabric, although both were streaked with blood and dirt. Her stomach flipped threateningly and she quickly looked away from the blood.
She was tough; she’d always had to be tough. But right now her equilibrium was not happy with anything about her situation. It didn’t make her a coward not to want to stare at that poor man’s blood.
A leather strap crossed his chest and attached to the top of the sheath on his back. He’d wielded the sword as though it were an extension of his arm, and it was evident that he’d used it many, many times before.
The strands of hair falling around his face and the ragged braid that hung to his waist were blue, as she’d known. But no simple blue, this. The hues of his hair ranged across the entire spectrum—from deepest midnight to the pale blue of a summer sky. At least from what she could tell, underneath the dirt and blood that covered almost every inch of him.
The taut lines of his face were classically perfect. She’d seen Roman statuary that would have suffered in comparison. And his eyes were either black or so darkly blue that light didn’t touch them at all. His lips curved in the merest suggestion of a mocking smile, and she realized that she’d been staring at him like some starstruck coed for longer than she wanted to admit.
Or like someone in fear for her life.
“I can provide more light, if you would examine me further, my lady,” he said, voice husky. “However, I find that my control is not what I might wish after the events of today, and your perusal is not helping me refrain from acting upon my baser impulses.”
“You don’t sound insane,” she blurted out, then groaned. “I’m sorry. Really. I’m not trying to antagonize or upset you in any way,” she said, trying for a calm and level tone, even as she stepped back a few more paces. “Although, you’ve gotta admit that you have some explaining to do. But let’s start with how we got here and how we can get out, okay? Then we can move on to more complex questions, like how it is that you know me.”
She considered showing him the carving and asking him about it, but decided against it. Not yet. Establishing some connection between them, no matter how tenuous, didn’t seem wise considering his present state of mind.
Reason with the crazy man now; break down in hysterical panic later. Check. All those times she’d stayed up alone at night to guard against potential tomb robbers, she hadn’t been scared then. Well, okay, she’d been scared spitless. But the experiences now allowed her to pretend a calm she was miles away from feeling.
He waved a hand, and a row of lanterns that circled the cavern lit up with softly glowing blue-green light. She gasped a little, not at the parlor trick with the lights, but at
the vast expanse of space revealed, including a large pond-like body of water that must be the mineral spring she’d smelled earlier. Turning slowly in a circle, she studied the cavern and the sparkling gemstones built into the walls all the way around them, scientific curiosity almost overcoming her very sensible fear of what he might be planning to do with her. Or to her.
“Is it some kind of geode?” she murmured, mostly to herself, but he answered.
“Yes. Partially. The chamber directly above us is a geode and used in the healing rituals of the Temple. But this is a simple cavern, although the walls themselves are embedded with, as far as I remember, examples of every gemstone ever known to Atlantis,” he said, slowly moving toward her. “You are more beautiful than I’d imagined.”
The abrupt change of subject caught her off guard, and she snapped back into alert mode. “What? Why? Why did you imagine me? And why are we here, and who the hell are you? I heard the prince and his brother—the other prince?—say that you were their long-lost brother. So why aren’t you at the big royal family reunion right now? Prodigal son and all that?”
His eyes narrowed. “You heard a lot. How long have you been in Atlantis? Long enough for one of them to claim you?” His words came out in a low, growling tone, and he visibly tensed, as if restraining himself from pouncing on her.
She backed up again, holding up her hands in an attempt to placate him and steer him away from whatever crazed ideas he was formulating. “Look, Mr. Justice, or Prince Justice if you prefer, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody claims me. This is not the twelfth century. Your buddy Liam came to my office to offer me the chance to study Atlantis. I’m an archaeologist, and I—” She stopped, not really knowing how to explain.