by Alyssa Day
“I am a Warrior of Poseidon,” he declared, but even to himself he had to admit the claim feeble, considering his present circumstances.
YOU ARE MY WARRIOR, YES, THOUGH I WOULD BE MOCKED AMONGST ALL OF THE OTHER GODS WERE THIS TRUTH TO BECOME KNOWN.
Oh, miertus. This was one tsunami of a wine-induced hallucination, if Brennan suddenly thought he was hearing the sea god himself. He struggled with the limp weight of the wench, trying to move her to one side so he could rise and at least face this . . . whatever this was . . . on his feet.
A flash of silvery blue light shot through the dark room, and suddenly the woman was gone—vanished as if she’d never been there. Brennan leapt to his feet and whirled around and around, nearly falling down again as vertigo overtook him.
“What? Where did she—”
THE WOMAN HAD NO PLACE IN OUR DISCUSSION. SHE IS NOW AT HOME IN HER BED, ALONE FOR A CHANGE, came the dry response.
“But why are you here—” Brennan belatedly realized that he was in no way showing appropriate deference to the sea god and dropped heavily to his knees. “My lord, accept my profuse apologies. Do you have need of me?”
WHAT SAD EXAMPLE OF GODHOOD WOULD HAVE NEED OF SUCH AS YOU? the voice thundered. YOU HAVE TRIED MY PATIENCE WITH YOUR CONSTANT DRUNKEN DEBAUCHERY AND EXCESS. HADES HIMSELF, RULER OF THE NINE HELLS, ASKED ME TO GIFT YOU TO HIM.
“Hades?” Brennan struggled to follow the sea god’s logic. His knees hurt from dropping on the stone floor and his head was thumping from the booming sound of Poseidon’s voice. In fact, he was feeling quite sorry for himself and not a little beleaguered by his severe misfortune. “What would Hades want with me?”
PRECISELY. A MATTER OF A SENATOR’S DAUGHTER, PERHAPS? BUT THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE FALLEN SO FAR, DRIVEN BY YOUR LUSTS AND EMOTIONS, THAT THE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD WOULD DESIRE YOUR PRESENCE, SADDENS ME GREATLY.
“But—”
SILENCE! BE ADVISED THAT I AM NOT A GOD TO ENDURE SADNESS. EVER. I AM AT AN END OF MY PATIENCE. NOW THAT YOUR EMOTIONS AND HUNGERS HAVE DRIVEN YOU INTO THE ABYSS, I WILL REMOVE ALL SUCH FROM YOUR LIFE FOR ALL ETERNITY.
Brennan shifted on the floor, daring to raise his head and search yet again, but the sea god had manifested only his voice. “Not to be impertinent, but when you say eternity—”
Lightning and thunder crashed through the room, the percussive force smashing Brennan, facedown, into the oil-and-dirt-soaked stone.
QUESTION ME AGAIN, AND YOU WILL SPEND SEVERAL LIFETIMES CLEANING THAT FILTH WITH YOUR TONGUE.
Brennan nodded, not daring to say another word, as the hot, slow trickle of blood from his battered head spread under the side of his face. Silence. Understood.
I CURSE YOU THUS: FOR ALL ETERNITY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS YOU MEET YOUR ONE TRUE MATE, YOU WILL FEEL NO EMOTION. NEITHER SADNESS NOR JOY; NEITHER RAGE NOR DELIGHT.
Thunder crashed through the room again, and Brennan belatedly wondered why none from the tavern had come back to investigate the storm taking place in their storeroom, before the sea god continued.
WHEN YOU DO MEET HER, YOU WILL EXPERIENCE A RESURGENCE OF ALL OF THE EMOTIONS YOU HAVE REPRESSED OVER THE YEARS AND CENTURIES AND EVEN MILLENNIA.
Poseidon laughed, and his laughter contained the sound and fury of tidal waves that could destroy civilizations.
IF THAT ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH TO DESTROY YOU, YOU WILL ALSO BE CURSED TO FORGET YOUR MATE WHENEVER SHE IS OUT OF YOUR SIGHT. ONLY WHEN SHE IS DEAD—HER HEART STOPPED AND HER SOUL FLOWN—WILL YOUR MEMORY OF HER FULLY RETURN TO YOU, THUS ALLOWING YOU UNTIL THE END OF YOUR DAYS TO REPENT BRINGING DISHONOR UPON THE NAME OF THE WARRIORS OF POSEIDON.
Brennan, robbed of any coherent response as the enormity of Poseidon’s curse sank in, just lay on the floor, stinking of blood and wine, still too drunk to comprehend the full extent of what was happening to him. “Bit harsh, don’t you think?” he managed.
SHE TOOK HER OWN LIFE, FOOL, AND THAT OF YOUR CHILD SHE CARRIED; A CHILD THE ORACLES HAD DECREED WOULD BE OF GREAT USE TO ME.
With a final crack of thunder, the sea god disappeared with a booming admonition. REMEMBER.
The peculiar feeling of heaviness that always accompanied great power disappeared, and Brennan’s ears popped with a sizzling burst of pain as they adjusted to its absence. Warmth pooled in his ear canals and he wondered what had burst in his head and whether the healers would be able to repair what Poseidon himself had wrought, but the self-indulgent thought immediately vanished, crushed under the weight of Poseidon’s words. Corelia had taken her life?
Denial burned through the alcoholic haze in his brain. Surely not. He would have heard. Wouldn’t he?
A child? His child? Pain beyond the imagining of it ripped through him at the thought, and he clutched his roiling gut and rolled back and forth on the filthy floor. She had killed herself and taken his child with her? Because of what he, Brennan, had done? No. No.
No. It must not be true. He had offered to wed her and been ridiculed for his trouble. She’d made no mention of a child . . . But a god had said it. Poseidon himself.
As the realization of truth seared through Brennan’s consciousness, he threw back his head and roared out his agony, slamming his fists on the stone, over and over. No. What had he done? What—what—
What was happening to him? The pain was vanishing, slipping from his soul as easily as the clothing had fallen from Corelia’s body during their trysts. A bland numbness, hideous in its emptiness, settled over his senses. Suffocating him. A brief flash of terror at the alien feeling and then that, too, was gone. A vast nothingness established itself in its place.
Dragging himself up off the ground, nearly insensible to the blood running freely from so many gashes on his arms, face, and body, Brennan sent his thoughts and focus deep, deep inside of himself to discover just how far the void had burrowed into his mind and soul.
He stood there, alone, for minutes or perhaps hours, seeking some fragment of the anguish he’d suffered for Corelia and the babe. Searching for some remnant of his terror at Poseidon’s curse.
Nothing. There was nothing. He did not feel pain, and he could not sense the terror. He felt precisely nothing, save for a vast, bleak emptiness in the wasteland of his soul, where—just moments ago—his emotions had resided. He slowly picked up his dagger from where it had fallen into the filth and made his way to the door. He must return to Atlantis and face the punishment for this transgression. He realized that he neither feared nor dreaded the outcome.
Dread, then, was also an emotion. He dispassionately began a mental category of what he had lost, although he was unable to feel the loss itself. The irony was not lost on him, leaving him to believe that irony itself was merely an intellectual construct. Finding his dagger on the floor and shoving it into its sheath, he shouldered his way out of the door and through the tavern, intent on the journey to find seawater and thus the portal. The tavern fell silent as he made his way through it, and even the most foolhardy refrained from calling out to him, as if they could read his shame and dishonor on his face.
But of course they could not, since he could feel neither except as distant realities. To Atlantis, then, although the better, easier course would be to shove his own blade through his heart now. It would be an easy death, though, and more merciful than he deserved for causing the death of an innocent and her child.
His child.
An eternity of punishment could not be long enough for what he had caused.
Chapter 1
Present day: Atlantis, the palace war room
Even those cursed to feel no emotion could experience its paler cousin, curiosity. Brennan had always assumed it was a more intellectual state. He tapped a finger on the photo of the woman staring up at him from the folded newspaper. “This is she?”
Something tugged at him; some flash of, what? Recognition? Admiration? The reporter’s face, even in the grainy black-and-white of the newsprint, was beautiful. But it was a quality in the look of her eyes that had captur
ed his attention. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but it was almost as if he could read the sadness haunting them.
Or perhaps more than two thousands of years without emotion had destroyed his ability to discern it in others. Especially through such an inaccurate prism as that of a newspaper photograph.
High Prince Conlan nodded and resumed his pacing. “That’s her. She’s our reporter contact, and she has news of who—or what—might be behind the shifter attacks in Yellowstone.” Conlan shot a wary glance at his brother Ven, then at Brennan. “She’s also the one you, ah, the one—”
“The one you went miertus over and had some kind of convulsions about back in Boston,” Alexios added dryly.
As members of Conlan’s elite guard, the Seven, hand-picked from among the best of the best of the Warriors of Poseidon, Alexios and Brennan had trained and fought together for centuries in the continuing battle to protect humanity from the dark forces that sought to destroy and enslave it. Both were masters at remaining calm and in control under pressure; Brennan through a god’s dictate, Alexios through decades of training.
Except, from what Alexios and Christophe had told him, Brennan had failed spectacularly during one crucial mission, going so far as to kill a vampire they’d needed to question. Also, even more unbelievably, he’d then threatened his own friends and fellow warriors—all over a human f emale.
Tiernan Butler.
He almost could not—would not—believe it. If it had been only Christophe who recounted the tale, he most certainly would not have believed it. Christophe’s sly sense of humor often caused him to find sport in mocking Brennan’s emotionless existence. But Alexios was a different matter. Alexios would never, ever lie to him.
And there was the small matter of the dreams. Flashes of what he now believed to be memories, persistent in spite of the curse. Holding the soft warmth of her body in his arms. Looking down into the bottomless depths of her dark, dark eyes.
“Thus, it must be true,” he murmured, coming to the unpleasant conclusion he’d refused previously to accept. Some of his control was finally cracking. After so many years, perhaps even the strongest of steel became brittle. Or—worse—the curse was coming to its fulfillment. Would that be worse or better? He dismissed the question as irrelevant; worse or better, what would be, would be.
Alexios leaned against the battered wooden table that had seen so many of their planning sessions, and stared off into the distance, studying the ancient tapestries that lined the walls. Or simply trying to avoid meeting Brennan’s gaze.
Ven, slouched in an overstuffed chair, one long leg thrown over the side, finally spoke up. “Look, we need to quit dancing around this. We’ve got to send somebody, preferably a team, to Yellowstone to help Lucas and his wolf shifters defend themselves against the attacks from outside and, even more important, I think, attacks from inside the pack. The threat of vampire enthrallment is growing every day. Tiernan is our contact, and she’s undercover doing the story on the science conference and the vamp regional leader there, so we need to work with her. So, major problem: can Brennan work with her or not?”
Brennan straightened and inclined his head toward Ven, then put a touch of frost in his voice. “If the vampires are truly able to enthrall shape-shifters now, which they have never been able to do in all the millennia of their existence, this matter is of crucial importance to our mission.” He flashed a glance at Alexios and then returned his gaze to Ven, whose relaxed pose could not quite hide the lethal danger of one named the King’s Vengeance. “I am perfectly capable, Your Highness. I am sure that whatever happened in Boston was a one-time aberration.”
Ven rolled his eyes and repeated his familiar threat. “Call me ‘Highness’ again, and I’ll kick your ass. I’m just Conlan’s brother, my friend. Leader of the Seven and uncle to one very adorable little baby boy. If we’re going to give young Prince Aidan an Atlantis that can rise to the surface, and a surface worth rising to, we need to solve the puzzle behind how these vamps are suddenly able to enthrall shifters when they never could before.”
“Tiernan says that whatever they’re doing to the humans is different, too,” Conlan pointed out. “She and her contacts have proof. Brain scans and the like. This isn’t just temporary anymore. The vamps are changing the humans’ entire brain-wave patterns to keep them permanently in thrall.”
“At this rate, the bloodsuckers will turn all of humanity into nothing but herds of sheep for their dining pleasure in a matter of years—or maybe even months,” Alexios added. “I volunteer to go. Lucas, the alpha of the Yellowstone wolf pack, is an old friend. He even gave me the honor of naming me second pack-father to his new twin boys, and I have yet to see them or bring a birth gift.”
Ven grinned. “And I’m sure the lovely Grace will bring along her bow and arrows and keep your ugly butt in line.”
Brennan was intrigued to see the dark red flush that rose in Alexios’s scarred face, partially hidden by the long waves of golden hair that had once so intrigued the women of Atlantis. Of course, that was before Alexios had returned from one of the darker levels of the nine hells, with his face and his soul scarred beyond—or so they’d feared—any hope of redemption. To be precise, only the left side of his face was scarred, a going-away present of sorts from the vampire goddess Anubisa after two long years of torture.
Grace had brought Alexios back into the light. Brennan wished he had the capacity to feel the joy for his friend that he knew everyone else shared. Alexios’s new lady love, who was both human and more, as a descendant of the goddess Diana, was indeed a formidable warrior in her own right.
“Grace doesn’t need to put herself in any more danger, especially now,” Alexios muttered, a look of grim resignation on his face. “But I may as well spit into the wind as tell her that.”
Almost as if on cue, the door opened and Grace walked in, accompanied by Conlan’s new bride and infant son, High Princess Riley and Prince Aidan.
Ven started laughing. “Busted! It’s like they have radar.”
Conlan swiftly crossed to his wife, who handed him the baby. The intense emotion on Conlan and Riley’s faces as they gazed at each other and then at the child stirred something dry and barren deep inside Brennan. He filed the sensation away to consider later. A curiosity, no more.
Riley suddenly looked up and cast a startled glance at Brennan. “Brennan? Was that you?”
He bowed. “I beg your pardon, my lady?”
She shook her head, sunshine-gold hair flying. “No . . . It’s nothing, I guess,” she said, her brows drawing together. “I thought . . . No. Nothing.” She laughed. “Being aknasha and a new mother certainly is interesting. Not only can I pick up emotions from everyone around me, but I’ve got an overload of my own to deal with. It makes my mind play tricks on me.”
Brennan raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t elaborate. He briefly wondered if her emotional empathy had sensed some emotion hidden deep down in his psyche, but he had to discard the idea as impossible. Although there had been that one time when Riley’s sister Quinn, an even more powerful aknasha, had claimed to feel buried emotion from him . . . But he’d doubted Quinn’s claim then, and he doubted it now. Poseidon’s curses were not so easily broken. He’d spent many lifetimes coming to that realization.
Grace, a study in lean elegance with her swimmer’s body, honey-gold skin, and long, dark hair, crossed the room to Alexios, whose entire face lit up at the sight of her. She leaned into him for a moment, then took a position against the wall next to him and flashed a saucy grin at Conlan and Ven. “So, boys. What’s up?”
Alexios looked simultaneously chagrined and amused. “You probably shouldn’t call the high prince and his brother ‘boys,’” he muttered.
Ven laughed. “Please. She’s fine. Great, even. Trust me, it’s way better than ‘pigheaded fool,’ which is what I got from Erin this morning before I’d even gotten out of bed. Seems like my suggestion I go along on her trip to Seattle to visit her friends was
‘being overprotective.’ It’s not like she nearly got killed by a traitor in that witch’s coven or anything.” His tone was light, but Brennan noticed that Ven’s hands clenched into fists at his sides at the memory of Erin’s brushes with death.
Riley shook her head at Ven. “You should know better by now. She is a very powerful witch and needs to work with others in her circle to refine her control over the Wilding magic. If you want to go along as the man she loves, that’s one thing. But as the big, tough guy who can protect the helpless little woman? Not so much.”
Ven snorted. “Women.” But then his eyes widened, and he jumped up out of his chair. “Maybe I’ll just go help her pack. Do we have this mission resolved? Alexios and Grace are heading to Yellowstone to see what they can find out, protect the wolves, so on and so forth?”
“Yes, it is resolved. Alexios and Grace and I will go to Yellowstone,” Brennan said firmly, leaving no room for them to doubt his resolve. “There is also the matter of the final missing gems from the Trident. We must discover where the tourmaline, aquamarine, and amethyst have been hidden and retrieve them, or Atlantis cannot rise.”
“I love the gem names,” Riley said. “Poseidon’s Pride, the Emperor, and the Siren. Has Alaric figured out which is which yet?”
“Not yet,” Conlan said, holding his son to his shoulder and patting the infant’s back. A resounding burp sounded in the room, and everyone laughed.
“He takes after his uncle Ven,” Conlan said, grinning. Then his expression turned serious and he aimed a measuring stare at Brennan. “Are you sure? We can’t afford an incident if you react to the reporter as you did before. I am inclined to trust you, of course, as my father and those before him have trusted you for two millennia. But something is off about your reaction to her.”
Brennan, who had never disclosed the full terms of the curse to anyone, not even the kings and princes he’d served, nodded slowly. He was quite aware of the wrongness of his reaction to Tiernan Butler. The sea god’s proclamation rang in his mind: only when Brennan met his destined mate would his emotions return to him. But then he would forget her when she was out of his sight.