by Alyssa Day
“Then we need to call on the vortex magic,” she said, walking to the front of the cave and into the afternoon sun. “You’re going to have to trust me, because I think we’ll need to be in the sunlight to do it.”
Chapter 30
Secret underground base, P-Ops Division, Federal Bureau Southwest
Colonel Brig St. Ives had been a full-bird colonel in the U.S. Air Force back in the days before vampires and werewolves and all the other beasties from the especially ugly bedtime stories and campfire tales decided to make his life a living hell. Now he was forced to work with a bunch of jarheads, squids, coasties, and FBI suits in a joint paranormal operations task force, and frankly he’d rather have been doing something more fun—anything more fun—like sitting on a beach drinking beer, or, hey, maybe picking porcupine quills out of his ass with a crowbar.
Had to be more fun than this. He hadn’t seen daylight in three days. Missed his wife. Was going to miss the birth of his first grandkid in the next day or so if he didn’t get the fuck out of this hole. So when the call came, he was more relieved than anything else.
“Time to go, sir. We’ve had radio silence from Smithson for seven minutes past his designated check-in time.” The fresh-faced lieutenant standing at attention in front of Brig’s battered steel desk made him tired.
Had he ever been that young?
Surely not.
“Sir?”
“Seven minutes, Lieutenant? He’s a banker, not a marine. Seven minutes just means he spilled his latte on his candyassed suit, or took a shit and lost track of time. We don’t call a go on seven civilian minutes late.”
“Sir, yes sir, but you said—”
“At ease, Lieutenant. I know what I said. I also know that we’re going to wait until sixteen thirty, and then if we don’t hear, we’re going to call him, and then and only then will we proceed with Operation Tombstone.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” The former sailor turned P-Ops flunky saluted sharply and executed a precision turn to leave the office.
Brig just sighed. Operation Tombstone. What the hell these jokers in Washington were thinking, he didn’t know. Just because the banker running this scam on the region’s head vamp happened to live in the same state as the legendary gunfight, didn’t mean it had fuck-all to do with this op. Whatever asswipe had decided the men needed to salute indoors was another paper-pushing moron, too.
But nobody’d asked him. He was just an old pilot, stuck behind a desk, ready to hand off the reins. Ready to meet his grandkid. Ready to make love to his wife again.
He pushed a button on his phone, and the lieutenant’s crisp voice sounded through the line. “Sir?”
“Better get them ready to go, son. Just in case.”
Never hurt to be prepared.
Chapter 31
Daniel had taken a step back before he even realized he’d done it. “Sunlight? Serai, you know that the sun and I don’t exactly get along.”
“Trust me,” she repeated, as if saying it again made it more sensible.
“Look, you know I trust you, but telling the flammable vampire to walk into the sun with you might sound romantic, but it’s actually a little bit nuts.” He leaned down to retrieve his boot and pull it on, and then revised his statement.
“Okay, a lot nuts.”
“Nuts means ill-conceived, correct?” She put her hands on her hips, and he steeled himself to get blasted.
“Ill-conceived is a polite way to put it. Crazy, lunatic, bat-shit insane.”
Serai narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think I appreciate that very much.”
“So what you’re saying is that soul-meld or no soul-meld, I still have the capacity to royally piss you off?” He grinned at her in spite of the crazy-ass conversation. She was just so damn beautiful. Especially with her freshly dry waves of hair curling down to her hips, instead of trapped in that braid.
She pulled out the bit of cord from her pocket and started to tie her hair back, and he groaned. “Okay, okay. I give in. If you promise to leave your hair loose, I’ll take a chance on getting my ass fried.”
She blinked and then stuffed the cord back in her pocket. “You are truly mad, aren’t you? You don’t really trust that I can keep you safe, but you’re willing to risk burning to death over how I wear my hair?”
“It’s a guy thing.”
She rolled her eyes. “Somehow I knew you’d say that.”
She stepped back into the shadows and held out her hands. “What if we stand here, just out of reach of the sun, and I call to the vortex energy from here? I’ll leave my hair down and you’ll feel safe from getting your bottom fried, as you put it.”
“Ass,” he said, grinning at her like the wild, wicked man he was.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said getting my ass fried. If I said getting my bottom fried, my guy card would be revoked, probably permanently. Then we could sit around and braid each other’s hair.”
He strode forward, all long, lean, elegant muscle, a predator in motion, and her mouth dried out a little. She loved him so much, and had for so long, that sometimes she forgot just how deadly he really was.
This was not one of those times.
He held out his hands and clasped hers. “Okay, Princess, you’re up. What now?”
She took a deep breath. “Now we call the vortex energy and hope it answers a vampire and an Atlantean.”
He nodded, serious now that it mattered, and she realized he’d been trying to help calm her nervousness with his teasing. It had worked, too, she had to admit.
“The vortex energy in this area is deep earth magic. Elemental magic. I learned about the power of the elements as a girl, but have never experienced it directly, at least not nearly as strong as it is here. The magic is so strong, but subtle enough that I almost didn’t notice it running counter to the Emperor’s pull.”
“What do we do?” Daniel leaned forward and kissed her, a quick but firm pressure of his lips on hers, more for reassurance than passion, she suspected.
“We call to the elements, and hope they answer, and then we use the power of the soul-meld to join our magics into a whole much stronger than the individual halves.”
“Kind of like us,” Daniel said, and she smiled.
“Yes, exactly like us. Here goes. And don’t be alarmed, but part of the ritual involves offering my blood.”
“I’ll offer my blood,” he said firmly, and she didn’t bother to argue. His blood would serve as well.
Still holding his hands, she moved as far into the sunlight as she could without allowing the deadly rays to fall on Daniel’s exposed wrists, and then she raised her face to the sky.
“Element of air, we offer you our breath and ask that you heed our call.” She blew out a long, soft breath, and was pleased when Daniel immediately did the same.
“Element of water, we offer our own, and ask that you heed our call.” She closed her eyes and thought of the sisters she had lost, and her tears fell freely to the ground.
“Element of fire, we offer you the heat from our bodies, and ask that you heed our call.” She shivered as a chill wind wrapped around them, soaking up their body heat and then whisking it away.
Shivering hard, she was barely able to speak the last sentence without her teeth chattering. “Element of earth, we offer you the life force of our own bodies, and ask that you heed our call.” She nodded, and Daniel bit his wrist and turned his hand, still holding hers, so that a few drops of blood fell onto the ground.
A profound silence fell, as if even nature herself were holding her breath, and then a spiraling wave of pure golden light danced through the opening of the cave and surrounded them, at first wrapping itself around their bodies in a gentle caress and then clamping on to them like a giant’s grip. The world expanded and contracted in time with Serai’s pulse, and she closed her eyes, only to see that the vortex had entered her mind.
Daniel was working hard at remaining calm, but the vortex magic was more
powerful than anything he’d ever encountered, and it seemed to be trying to swallow them whole. He fought against it as it tried to consume him, tried to swallow his mage powers whole and spit him back out as a hollow shell of a man. Serai’s grip on his hands was unbreakable and he didn’t know what she’d done or how to save her.
He’d promised to save her, and now he was already failing. No. Not again.
“Not again,” he shouted, and her eyes flew open.
She stared at him from eyes gone fully dark blue, again, and he was afraid the magic had already swallowed hers, but her voice, when she spoke, was still her own.
“Daniel, it’s fine. Trust me. Open yourself to the magic, and to me. Open yourself to the power of the soul-meld and we will be stronger than even this ancient vortex magic. You have to trust me.”
He looked into her incredibly dangerous, insanely beautiful eyes, and he realized he did.
He trusted her.
He’d gladly and willingly step into the sun for her and with her.
“Yes,” he said, and he opened his soul to the magic.
It took him down with a knockout punch, funneling into him like a whirlpool of hot, bright, old—so very old—power.
“Daniel, trust me,” she said again, and he leaned forward to kiss her, because she was the only thing that had ever made sense in his entire long, hideous, immortal life. He kissed her because he had to kiss her; because kissing her was his only reason for living.
She kissed him back, and the power exploded through them, between them, roared its way into every dark place in his heart and soul and purified them as it bound them together even more tightly than they had been before. He laughed and she cried and then they both laughed while the power soared through them, amplifying their emotions, intensifying their magics, and expanding their understanding of the universe.
When she finally nodded, he closed his mind to the onslaught, and the vortex energy gracefully surrendered, not a ravaging conqueror after all, but a healer, a magician, a wizard come to play and depart. A lifetime encapsulated into a handful of minutes, and he would never, ever be the same.
He looked at Serai, and her eyes were pure, glowing blue fire.
“Your eyes,” they said simultaneously, and she laughed and touched his face with her hand.
“Your eyes are glowing like sea sapphires,” she said, awed. “But where did the red go?”
“Yours are glowing, too, mi amara, and I am in awe of your beauty.”
She kissed him again, and this time the kiss was more than just a kiss, since the magic in each of them resonated, one with the other, and he could feel what she felt, even as the Emperor itself decided to join in the fun and send a bolt of its power driving through Serai.
“The women—your sisters,” he said. “I can feel them.”
“Yes. Yes!” She tightened her grasp on his hands and concentrated, hard. He could feel her focus, and together they somehow channeled a beam of pure energy across the land, down through the ocean’s depths, and into the three maidens waiting in their crystal cases in Atlantis.
Serai cried out, but it was a joyous cry, and she threw her arms around him. “We did it! Did you feel that? We strengthened them! They’re better, Daniel, oh, they’re stronger now, and we did it. They’ll be safe for a little while longer, until we find the Emperor. We are better together than apart. There will be no more talk, ever, of us leaving each other or being better off without the other. Agreed?”
He hugged her back and started to answer, but an unexpected sound, a harsh grinding noise, scraped across his eardrums, and instead he held a finger to her lips and listened with his vampire senses on high alert.
It was—It couldn’t be. He listened harder, instinctively pushing Serai behind him.
It was the sound of tramping feet and the roar of helicopters. He had a crazy flashback to another invading army, eleven thousand years ago, and then shook his head to clear it of those images.
“It sounds like the army is on its way, and we’re still trapped in here by the sun for a little while longer,” he told Serai. “This isn’t good.”
Her face drained of color, but she squared her shoulders and nodded. “It wouldn’t be fun if it were easy,” she said, and he started laughing.
“Oh, Princess. You are absolutely the right woman for me.”
Chapter 32
Nicholas heard them first, long before Ivy’s human ears picked up any disturbance. It was barely dusk, and the apprentice had finally arrived, dragged by his ears all the way, one would think from the way he was sniveling. Ivy had tried to comfort him at first, promising him he wouldn’t be hurt, but she’d finally given up in disgust.
Even Ian had rolled his eyes after the first ten minutes or so and told the witch to “man up, dude.”
“We’re in trouble,” Nicholas said. He pointed to the man, Phillips or Phelps or whatever. “Shut up, now, or I’ll kill you myself.”
Phillips shut up, cramming his fist in his mouth to do it.
Ian shot Nicholas a hard look. “He’s a clerk in the New Age shop down by Tuzigoot, not exactly a hard-ass. Scaring him even more isn’t going to help.”
“Shut up and listen.”
Ian, astonishingly enough for a thirteen-year-old boy, actually shut up and listened. Five seconds later, he ran to his mother and took her arm.
“Mom, it’s gotta be the army. Holy crap, it really is the army coming to rescue us!”
Ivy and Nicholas shared a grim look over Ian’s head. If the army were on its way, the last thing they’d have in mind would be rescuing a witch from a vampire. More likely, they were after the power source of the King stone and would kill all of them to get it. Nicholas had heard rumors that the P-Ops Division was corrupt all the way to the top, and now he might be soon to gain confirmation firsthand.
“Hey, I lied, Phil,” Ivy said tiredly. “You’re probably going to get hurt.”
The man started wailing again, so Nicholas strode across the cave and casually backhanded him to shut him up. Phil’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped to the ground.
“That’s better. Now maybe I can think.” Nicholas walked over to the box that held the gem and stared down at it as if the amethyst itself would give him a clue as to what to do next. They’d been on the verge of trying one final experiment to see if they could learn what the King stone really could do, when the stone had begun glowing on its own, shooting out a beam of light so strong that Nicholas was surprised it hadn’t cut straight through the stone cavern wall. Ivy told him that it wasn’t just light, either; the stone had been projecting magical energy at a level far more intense than anything she’d seen from it thus far.
“What can we do?” Ivy asked now, holding tight to Ian’s arm. “You promised to keep my son safe, vampire, and it’s dark enough that you can escape with him in a few minutes. I’ll stay here and deal with the army.”
“I won’t leave you, Mom,” Ian protested, and she ignored him as if he’d never even spoken, still staring steadily at Nicholas.
“I won’t leave you, either,” Nicholas said, leaving her to interpret it as she would. “We’ll all get out of here. The members of my blood pride should be here any minute to assist us.”
“Why did you send the guy away who brought Phil? He was human. The sunlight wouldn’t have bothered him.”
“More witnesses I didn’t need. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
The voice that shattered the silence, transmitted by some kind of electronic device, carried a weight of authority and command that didn’t bode well for their plans.
“This is Colonel Brig St. Ives of the federal P-Ops Division speaking. We have you surrounded, and we have captured your vampire associates, twelve in total. Please come out, sending Mr. Smithson out first, and nobody will get hurt.”
An even dozen had been all the members of his blood pride on this mission with him. This could be a slight problem.
“Whoops,” Ian said, grinning and a
lmost jumping out of his skin with adrenaline and a sick kind of excitement. “Wonder if they’d accept parts of him? His spleen might be around here somewhere.”
Ivy pulled her son closer, her wild eyes fixed on Nicholas as if he were her savior instead of her killer. In spite of everything, he wanted to do just that. Save her. Protect her. Try again later. Forget the damn King stone and everything it might be able to do.
He focused on Ivy so intently that he missed it when Phil, who’d apparently been feigning unconsciousness, made his break, and by the time he realized the man was running out the entrance, it was too late to bother.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” Phil screamed. “I’m a hostage, I’m here, help me, help me—”
An explosion of gunfire cut off the rest of Phil’s plea for help, and Ivy screamed. Nicholas flashed over to the cave entrance and peered out into the gathering dusk, only to see Phil’s nearly disintegrated body.
“Interesting interpretation of ‘nobody will get hurt,’” Nicholas said. “Maybe we should rethink our options.”
Ivy picked up the Emperor and smiled, a wild glee darkening her eyes. “They’re wrong if they think nobody will get hurt. They’re a danger to my son. I’m going to bring them a world of hurt.”
Nicholas bared his fangs and snarled his agreement, and then he smiled. “You, beautiful witch, are my kind of woman.”
Chapter 33
Daniel shot out of the cave like a bat out of the worst of the nine hells the second the sun finally hid behind the horizon. Now that he and Serai were connected by the soul-meld and the vortex magic, he could feel the Emperor almost as intensely as she could.
Which meant he could leave her safely behind while he went after it.
Unfortunately, she had no intention of letting him do anything of the kind. By the time he turned around, she was already down the carved stone side of the cliff and standing on the ground, hands on her hips, staring up at him.