Vampire in Atlantis wop-7

by Alyssa Day

  “You can forget that idea right now,” she informed him.

  “Did the soul-meld give you psychic powers? And if so, can you snoop in everybody’s brain or just mine?” He landed next to her and stared her down with his fiercest glare.

  Also unfortunately, she wasn’t intimidated in the least.

  “You know, you’re kind of sexy when you scowl like that,” she said, flashing a seductive smile, and then blinking innocently when he growled at her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Was that meant to frighten me into staying here, cowering in the corner like a good little princess?”

  He shook his head and gave it up as a lost cause. “I’ve been around long enough to know defeat when it smacks me in the face. Let’s go. We need to find out why the army or P-Ops or who-the-hells-ever is heading in the same direction as the Emperor.”

  “I have never believed in coincidence,” she said, braiding her hair back from her face.

  “Neither have I.”

  She bent to retrieve the backpack and he stopped her. “No need for it now. If we succeed, we can stop back and retrieve it if we need to hike out of here. Do you think you could be up for flying—no pun intended—if we have to do it to escape?”

  She frowned but then nodded slowly. “You know, I have your magic inside me now, as well as my own. That should surely sustain me long enough to fly away from danger with the Emperor. And I have no time to harbor childish fears.”

  “It’s not childish, mi amara, but I respect your courage,” he said. “It’s time to go, and we need to go fast.”

  She threw her arms around him and kissed him, and then the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked shattered the early evening stillness.

  “Going fast shouldn’t be a problem, sir,” a voice said. “Stand down and be prepared to surrender, or it will go very badly for you.”

  Daniel cast a quick, reassuring glance at Serai, but he needn’t have bothered. She was perfectly calm, smiling out into the velvety blue darkness of twilight.

  “We’re willing to come with you peacefully,” she said. “We’d certainly hate for things to go badly.”

  Daniel held up his hands in the universal sign for “I surrender,” but he started laughing. He just couldn’t help it. He was still laughing as the very polite soldier—P-Ops according to the insignia on his black uniform—held a scanner up to Serai and then to him. As soon as he realized Daniel was a vampire, the soldier stepped quickly back and then motioned to one of his underlings to bring the silver stripcuffs. The silver was on the outside of the hard plastic cuffs so it wouldn’t burn him but would keep him restrained and helpless to break free of them.

  Or so it would have been, under usual circumstances. He had soul-melded with Serai, and he had tasted her Atlantean blood. Twice. For the first time since he’d been turned, the proximity to silver wasn’t hurting him.

  Not the slightest bit.

  Things weren’t going to go badly at all.

  * * *

  Serai remained silent while the soldiers took her and Daniel to a large vehicle and politely escorted them inside. But when the men conferred outside the vehicle’s closed windows, evidently to gain privacy for their conversation, she took the opportunity to do the same.

  “They are far more civilized than I expected,” she said. “More like the king’s personal guard than invading soldiers. What is this force? What does the lettering ‘P-Ops’ on their jackets mean?”

  “Paranormal Operations. They’re a federal police force that deals with all things supernatural. That’s why they’re so nice to you. They must think you’re a plain vanilla human.”

  She tried on her most seductive smile and glanced at him through her lashes. “Plain vanilla? Really?”

  He blew out a long, slow breath and his eyes darkened. “Only you could get me hot when I’m handcuffed in a P-Ops transport. Let’s talk about what we do next, instead, maybe, sex kitten.”

  A thrill of pleasure tingled through her at his reaction, but she quickly stifled it for more urgent matters. “They want to take us to the center of the action, I would anticipate. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” He stared out the window at the men, whose conversation seemed to be wrapping up. The one in charge was heading to the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  “That’s where we want to be, also agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Then this is perfect. Saves wear on our boots.” She leaned back in the seat and folded her hands demurely in her lap, the picture of civility, prepared to unleash the full extent of her beautiful court manners on the young soldier.

  Gun or no gun, the poor man didn’t stand a chance.

  Chapter 34

  Daniel watched the scenery fly by at five times the speed he and Serai had been traveling on foot, and tried not to laugh out loud as Serai, sitting up front in the passenger seat, charmed the soldier. He was a young guy, not that it mattered, with short hair, freckles that he probably hated, and ears that stuck out just a little bit. Daniel couldn’t imagine there was a straight human male alive, old or young, who could resist Serai when she was being enchanting. She’d already elicited the guy’s family details (mom and dad still alive, very proud of their boy Rob), pet’s name (Izzy the cat), and favorite hobby (an obscure sport by the unlikely name of cornhole).

  “You toss the small bags into holes in the wood, while drinking ale?” Serai tilted her head and smiled encouragingly at Rob, whose head almost visibly swelled.

  Daniel would have been a little annoyed by the whole thing if it weren’t so damn funny. At least, it was funny until he remembered the day he’d first met Serai, and she’d asked him a similar set of questions, with the exact same smile on her face.

  He, too, had been dazed that such a beauty was so interested in him.

  Hmmm. He scowled at the driver in the rearview mirror, in spite of the armed guard sitting next to him in the backseat. Rob continued on, blithely ignoring the angry vampire sitting behind him.

  Foolish young man. Very foolish.

  “Are you from England? Your accent is beautiful,” Rob stammered.

  “Thank you. I’m from all over Europe,” she replied, smiling shyly at him. “Do you enjoy traveling there?”

  “I’ve never been out of the country, except to Mexico—well, and Canada, ma’am,” he said, abjectly sorrowful that he’d never been to Europe, just because Serai claimed to be from there.

  Damn, but she was good.

  “Please, call me Serai,” she said, daring to lightly touch his sleeve, just for the briefest of seconds, nothing to alert the guard in the back with Daniel who was actually paying attention to his job instead of to the beautiful woman in the front seat.

  The driver actually blushed, if the way the tips of his ears turned red in the lights from the dashboard was any indication, and Daniel had to stifle a groan. If they didn’t get there soon, he was going to have to step in and put loverboy out of his misery.

  It would be a public service.

  The guard next to him said something into his radio and then leaned forward. “The colonel wants us to stop around the next ridge.”

  “Roger that,” the driver said, suddenly snapping to attention. The colonel must be someone with enough authority to make a young soldier remember his duty, even in the presence of his dream girl.

  They slowly rounded a corner and pulled to a stop in front of a barrage of lights and a large vehicle like a trailer on wheels. The front door of the trailer slammed open, and an older man stepped out. He was dressed simply in the same black uniform as Rob’s, with no special insignia to indicate rank, but the way the two soldiers in the truck snapped to attention told Daniel that this must be the colonel.

  Rob jumped out of the truck and saluted. He’d left the door open, so Daniel and Serai could hear everything he said. “Reporting with the prisoners, um, witnesses, as ordered, Colonel St. Ives, sir. One of them is a vampire.”

  Serai glanced back at Daniel, her eyes full of conce
rn and something else. Something worse. She was fading again; her strength draining out of her as he watched. The soul-meld and the vortex either hadn’t been enough, or the Emperor was sucking the magic out of her faster than she could keep up. Either way, this wasn’t good.

  The colonel walked over to the car, opened the back door, and motioned to Daniel. A hands-on kind of man who didn’t stand on ceremony or wait for his minion to do things, then. Daniel admired that, so he didn’t immediately rip the man’s throat out.

  While he stepped out of the car, St. Ives stared at him, his dark eyes assessing. “Why are you here, son?”

  “I’m not your son,” Daniel said, reasonably enough, he thought.

  “No need for rudeness. I’m sure you’re probably a few years older than me, in vampire years, but I’m an old country boy with a lot of bad habits. So perhaps you will give me your name and we’ll start over, but be warned, I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Daniel.”

  St. Ives waited, but Daniel added nothing further.

  “That’s it? Daniel? Mr. Daniel? Just Daniel? Okay, let me clarify my question. What the fuck are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere with that woman who looks like she needs a doctor, only two short miles from the hiding spot of the worst vampire in the Southwest?”

  Daniel took a minute to untangle that question. “My companion is ill, and we’d appreciate if you would escort us to a hospital. We were on our way back from our hike, to do just that, when your soldiers rudely abducted us. You can understand why I don’t feel all that friendly or like answering your interrogation. As to the rest, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The colonel eyed him skeptically. “Right. No idea why I would be suspicious of a vampire lurking around, not far from where I found a dozen other vamps hiding in various bushes.”

  Daniel raised an eyebrow. “That sounds uncomfortable. Was there poison ivy? Vampires can get poison ivy, too, you know.”

  St. Ives abruptly lost patience with Daniel. “Hold him here,” he ordered Rob, and he strode around to the other side of the truck and opened Serai’s door.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to need to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  Daniel didn’t hear what Serai replied, but it didn’t matter, since she stepped out of the car and collapsed into a dead faint in the colonel’s arms.

  St. Ives cast a long-suffering glance up at the sky. “Son of a bitch. I’m never going to get home, am I?”

  Chapter 35

  Serai woke up, groggy and dazed, to find that she was lying on a hard bed in the large mobile vehicle from which the colonel had exited when they arrived. She glanced around from under her lashes, not moving, assessing the situation before giving away that she was awake.

  St. Ives was nowhere to be seen, and only two humans were in the vehicle with her, unless there were more hiding in cupboards. She took a moment to send her senses out to explore just such a possibility and found that she’d been right; there were only two of them.

  And, for whatever reason, they weren’t very concerned about her.

  “She okay? Think we should cuff her?” one of them asked, jerking his head in Serai’s direction. She quickly lowered her eyelids all the way and feigned unconsciousness.

  The other one, a short and oddly square woman, snorted out a braying laugh. “Why bother? What can she do, bat her eyelashes at us?”

  Perhaps just a little bit more than that. Serai refrained from glaring at the woman, or at the man when he laughed, and instead she reached inside herself to see if she could find enough power left for a few small tasks.

  Yes. The magic came quickly to her call. It was less powerful than it had been, and she was exhausted just thinking about wielding it, but it came, blurred in form and shape and resonance. Some residue of her own Atlantean power, mixed with the vortex magic and the Emperor’s clarion call, all combined with what she’d gained from Daniel in the soul-meld and strengthened her until she thought she could move on to step two.

  Sing the nice soldiers to sleep. She began to hum a little tune, all but under her breath, and by the time the woman finished realizing Serai was awake, both of the soldiers were asleep.

  “Lovely trick, if you do say so yourself,” Serai said out loud, and then she immediately felt like a fool.

  Find the Emperor now, pat yourself on the back for magic tricks later.

  Okay, on to step three: Find the Emperor. Find Daniel. Save the day.

  Actually, that was steps three through five, but she had the feeling that counting steps was very, very far down her list of upcoming priorities.

  She called to her Atlantean magic and transformed into mist mere seconds before the door opened and Rob the polite driver entered the vehicle. She soared out above and past him so fast that he never noticed the nearly transparent cloud of water vapor as she departed.

  Good-bye, Rob. Good luck with your future. May you have many fat babies.

  The giddiness served as a warning. She was losing strength fast, and she had no time to spare. Her destination was easy enough to find, though. She headed in the direction in which all the soldiers were pointing their guns. She could find Daniel later, if he didn’t find her first. She had no worries about Daniel rescuing himself.

  For now, the urgent mission was to find the Emperor. And since it was screaming at her, inside her head, reverberating through her skull, that wasn’t going to be too hard. She arrowed toward the entrance to yet another cave, which glowed with a powerful, pulsing beam of purple light.

  Another cave. If she survived this, she would be happy to never, ever set foot in a cave again, no matter how long she lived.

  She soared over the heads of the soldiers, marveling at how desperation and magic had overcome her fear of heights, at least while in mist form, and then she entered the cave and shot across the space, through empty air, around the vampire and the human woman and boy, until she reached the Emperor. Its call sounded in her head, in her blood, in her very bones, and she reached out to it, forgetting that it was the sea god’s toy, forgetting its enormous and terrifying power, forgetting that its fluctuations had already killed two of her sisters.

  None of it mattered—all that was important was the magic, the power, the Emperor’s commanding call. Still in mist form, she reached out to touch the Emperor, and it responded by smashing her out of the air and into her physical body, which hit the stone floor of the cave so hard that she actually bounced back up and rebounded.

  As she stared up at the ceiling, dazed, the boy’s face appeared over her in her line of sight.

  “That had to hurt.”

  She blinked up at him, probably looking like a deranged owl, and then started laughing. She was almost certainly going to die now, but at least she still had a sense of humor.

  The woman she’d seen in her vision leaned over her next, hard suspicion in her eyes, and she pulled the boy, clearly her son, back and away from Serai.

  “Why are you here and what do you want?”

  Serai slowly sat up, making sure her head wouldn’t fall off her neck on the way. “I am Serai of Atlantis, and this gem belongs to me.”

  The vampire bared his fangs at her. “Bold claim for a woman who was just knocked on her ass by the jewel she claims is hers. The King stone doesn’t seem to agree.”

  Serai looked at him, feeling stupid and wishing there were a healer nearby for the pounding headache starting up in her brain. “What? Oh, the Emperor. Where did you get ‘King stone’? Although it’s certainly close, considering the true name was lost to you landwalkers eleven thousand years ago.”

  His eyes widened. “Landwalkers? And you flew in here as mist? Are you really Atlantean?”

  The boy rolled his eyes, and Serai felt an instant kinship with him.

  “Of course not. Do you see a mermaid tail?” he asked the adults.

  Bizarrely, all three of them stared at her legs. Serai could feel the hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her, and she forced it
back down. “No tail, no fins, no gills. No mermaids. Atlanteans are ordinary people, quite like you, except we live underneath the ocean. For now,” she amended.

  “That’s wicked cool,” the boy said, dropping down to sit cross-legged beside her. “Can I visit? I would get awesome extra credit for a report on Atlantis. Also, are all the girls as pretty as you? He ducked his head and blushed. “Um, ignore that last part. It was totally random.”

  “Ian.” The woman scolded him. “What have I told you?”

  Ian shrugged and grinned, unrepentant, at his mother. “Nothing about hot chicks from Atlantis, that’s for sure. I would have remembered.”

  Serai smiled at him, delighted. “I’m a ‘hot chick’ ? Is that like the bee’s knees?”

  He stared at her, clearly mystified. “What the heck does that mean? Do bees even have knees? How would you know? Who’d want to get close enough to find out?”

  The vampire cleared his throat, although Serai could tell he was fighting not to smile. The entire situation was so impossibly strange and surreal that Serai was almost sure she’d wake up any minute, secure in the crystal pod, having simply been the victim of another stasis dream.

  Hot chick, though—she couldn’t have made that one up.

  She held her hand out to the boy, and he chivalrously helped her up, in spite of his mother’s not so subtle urgings to stay away from Serai.

  “I am Serai of Atlantis,” she tried again. “And you are?”

  “Ian Khetta. Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand and blushing furiously. “Sorry about the hot chick thing. That’s my mom, Ivy Khetta. She’s a smoking powerful witch. And he’s Mr. Nicholas, a vampire who says he eats people and uses their bones for toothpicks, but we haven’t seen that. He did pull a guy’s intestines out, but the guy had hit me and hurt my mom, so we weren’t too broken up about it.”

  Serai tilted her head, fascinated by the boy’s candor and phrasing, and was trying to think of how to respond to that flow of information when the vampire did so first.