by Alyssa Day
She’d waited for a long time but then finally, in spite of everything, she’d dozed off. Her body had been exhausted, and her mind had shut down to protect her from the hopeless despair of knowing she was all alone in the world. Always before, she’d had someone to fight for. She’d known she was making the world safe for her sister and her sister’s children to come. But now? The world could take care of itself.
She passed some time in fitful sleep, waking and then dozing again, she didn’t know for how long, before she heard voices. Ptolemy and someone else, a woman, but the voice was familiar in a horrible way. She hadn’t heard it in a long time, but it wasn’t another rebel, it was too . . .
Oh.
Oh, no.
She curled her legs into her chest, praying desperately for a wooden stake, a gun loaded with silver bullets, or divine intervention from God or, in fact, any of the gods. Unfortunately, she didn’t exactly believe in any of them. What kind of supreme beings would allow so much pain and suffering in the world?
Her mind was set to full-on babble now, as the one creature alive that she feared even more than Ptolemy and his demonic raping agenda entered the room where Quinn lay helpless, blind, and bound.
Anubisa. The vampire goddess.
This was going to be bad. She’d been ready to die, but her mind rebelled at the thought of meeting her end by slow torture.
“What do you have for me, my ally?” Anubisa crooned in her sickeningly sweet lilt. Her voice carried the tone and feel of rusty daggers and bashed-in skulls. Quinn winced in real pain, her eardrums aching from the sound.
“She is not for you,” Ptolemy said harshly. “Quinn Dawson is mine.”
“Quinn? I know that name,” Anubisa hissed. “She is mine. I must have my revenge against this one.”
Quinn rolled over onto her stomach with her legs underneath her, ready to piston her way back and hopefully smash somebody’s face with her head before she died. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had for a plan. Bound human versus demon and vampire goddess didn’t bode well for the human.
She heard tentative footsteps, and a new voice entered the mix. This one sounded like a girl, so Quinn put a pause on her head-bashing plan, as gentle hands lifted her and removed the scarf from her eyes. A scared-looking girl, probably in her late teens, stood in front of her, holding the cloth in shaking hands.
“Don’t fight him,” the girl whispered. “It’s even worse when you fight.”
Quinn studied the bruises that covered one side of the girl’s face, and any trace of fear in her own heart seeped away, to be replaced with cold, hard, welcome rage. Not the berserker kind of rage; no, not Quinn. She fueled her spirit with the kind of anger that knew how to plot, and scheme, and bide its time until she could find the best way to kill anyone and everyone who had hurt the innocents Quinn considered to be under her protection.
Like this girl.
“I’ll help you,” Quinn said. “Don’t be afraid.”
The girl clearly didn’t believe her, but Quinn couldn’t blame her for that. The circumstances didn’t really support her claim.
“Get out of the way,” Anubisa said, backhanding the girl with one small, slender white hand. The girl flew at least ten feet through the room and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, where she lay still, quietly sobbing.
Quinn looked up at Anubisa and smiled, careful not to look into the vampire’s eyes. “That’s one,” she said calmly.
“One what, stupid human?” Anubisa drew her hand back to strike Quinn, too, but Ptolemy stopped her by the simple virtue of pointing a stick at her and blasting. Anubisa fell to the floor, apparently unconscious or dead. She didn’t breathe, so Quinn couldn’t tell.
Quinn stared at Ptolemy and his stick of death, wondering if she were next. On closer examination, however, she realized it wasn’t a stick at all but the scepter with Poseidon’s Pride inset at the tip.
“You’re pretty brave, using one god’s possession to kill another,” she said, hoping to taunt him into making a mistake. Petty tyrants could often be trapped by the gilded ropes of their own vanity.
“She’s not dead, more’s the pity,” he said. “But, yes, it was rather fun. I wonder what I’ll do next. Maybe destroy your White House and turn the area into a parking lot for my new fleet of automobiles. Wonderful things, your cars. You actually pay money to move from place to place in vehicles that destroy your environment while you use them.”
He shook his head in apparent wonder, and she realized something she’d only guessed at before.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
He tilted his head, and for one brief second, his eyes flickered and changed from normal, dark brown human eyes to something different. Alien. There were no pupils at all; only swirling traces of color on a pitch-black background. No whites at all. His eyes weren’t the demon red she’d been halfway expecting. They were far 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. But it wasn’t even a man—it was a mere boy.
It was Faust.
Alaric managed to keep from slamming into the boy, but only barely. He landed on the rubble of destroyed pavement next to Faust, grabbed the kid by the throat, lifted him off his feet, and spoke very, very softly.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing, you stupid boy? Do you have a death wish? Did I save you for no discernible reason?”
Faust made a choking sound, and Alaric realized he had to loosen his grip so the boy could talk. He dropped him on his ass, and Faust rubbed his throat while he glared up at Alaric.
“You can’t do this, man,” the boy finally choked out. “I saw the news. That wave is going to kill millions of people.”
Alaric shrugged. “This means nothing to me. Leave if you want to live.”
“It’s too late,” the boy shouted. “Nobody can get out in time. You’re going to kill us all. Children and babies and old people—what have we ever done to you?”
“You let Quinn be taken,” Alaric said implacably, barely managing to keep the rage boiling inside him from overflowing and incinerating the youngling. “You will all die. Get out if you can. Take the children.”
“With what? I can’t do it, man,” Faust said, all but crying. “I don’t have a helicopter. Only the rich people are getting out, and some of them are being beat to death for their choppers. You gotta stop it, man. This just isn’t right.”
“Find Quinn. Then I’ll stop it,” Alaric responded. He turned away and leapt back into the air, ignoring the boy’s shouts, until another bolt of flame hit him in the other leg. This one was a direct hit, not a graze, and he had to waste energy healing himself. He flew back down at Faust and yanked him up into the air by the front of his shirt.
“Where is the gun you are shooting at me? Do you want to die right here and now?”
The boy’s bravado was betrayed by the slight quaver in his lips, but Alaric had to respect his courage.
Faust held up empty hands. “I’m not shooting a gun, you lunatic. I’m a flame starter. It’s a curse or a gift or a talent, I don’t know what, but if you don’t make that tsunami go away, I’m going to set your damn ass on fire.”
Alaric nearly dropped the boy. A flame starter? He hadn’t heard of that gift since before Atlantis sank beneath the waves. All the old abilities really were coming back, just in time for Atlantis to be destroyed. The irony was not lost on him.
Which meant nothing, since Atlantis was surely drowned by now, and Quinn was gone.
“Give it your best shot, kid,” he advised. Ven would be proud of him for using slang.
If Ven and Erin weren’t dead.
He dropped the boy, who fell the half dozen feet to the pavement, but this time he landed on his feet.
“Try to burn me again, and I’ll kill you now, so those children you care for will die alone,” he told Faust, and then a voice he hadn’t heard in far too long crashed through the air and buffeted him, nearly knocking him out of the sky.
YOU MORTALS ALL DIE ALONE. IT IS SAD THAT MY HIGH PRIEST HAS BECOME A DERANGED FOOL.
The sea god, Poseidon himself, appeared in the clouds above Alaric’s head.
Shockingly, Poseidon bellowed a booming thunder strike of a laugh.
WHY DO YOU DO THIS? YOU MAY NOT TAMPER WITH MY SEAS IN THIS MANNER. YOU WOULD DESTROY MILLIONS OF LIVES, AND YOU ARE NOT A GOD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH FOR SO MANY.
“I am tired of gods choosing between life and death. Why aren’t you helping in Atlantis when the dome is in danger of failing? All of your children will die. Why didn’t you answer my call about the Trident? What good is a god who doesn’t even answer his own high priest in the times of dire need?”
I HAVE BEEN BUSY. THE SECOND DOOM OF THE GODS—A NEW RAGNAROK—IS UPON US, AND I HAVE BEEN LOCKED IN BATTLE WITH ARES AND A FEW OF THE NORSE AND EGYPTIAN GODS OVER HOW TO SAVE MY ATLANTEANS AND AS MANY OF THE HUMANS AS POSSIBLE FROM ANOTHER CATACLYSM.
“Well guess what? You’re too late!” Alaric threw even more power toward his tsunami, only to find that Poseidon was in the process of dispersing it into gentle swells of manageable waves.
Alaric’s grief, rage, and helplessness overpowered him, and he gathered everything he had and poured every ounce of that energy into the blast—and he aimed it at Poseidon.
“You’re going down,” he shouted, knowing it would mean his own death, but not caring.
I said, cut it out, you idiot, Quinn screamed inside his head, and this time he knew it wasn’t an illusion, because she proceeded to call him every inventive name she could think of, and his own subconscious wasn’t nearly that creative.
The shock drove him down out of the sky, and he almost fell on top of Faust, who was staring up at Poseidon with his mouth hanging open.