by Alyssa Day
And the world shattered.
Heat that surely would melt his flesh from his bones shot through him, and he tightened his arms around her until she could never escape. She kissed him back—at first an innocent brush of her lips and then an ardent and enthusiastic return of his passion. When her tongue hesitantly touched his own, he groaned deep in his throat and was lost. She twined her arms around his neck and tangled her hands in his hair, just as he wanted to do to hers, but he contented himself with wrapping her braid in his fist, another way to hold her, capture her, claim her. She made a tiny sound, a moan or a purr, and his cock hardened to a degree that shamed the rock surrounding them.
He pulled away for an unbearable moment, long enough to tell her, to explain his aggression. “I need you, my beautiful one. By all the gods, I need you.”
She blinked, her eyes enormous in her pale face, and tried to talk, but nothing but a whisper of sound emerged from her perfect lips. Not a protest, surely not, anything but that. Acceptance, agreement, acquiescence; he would brook nothing else.
She tried again. “Jack,” she managed to say.
Jack. Jack? Another man’s name was not what he wanted to hear from his woman. A red haze of fury washed over his vision, and he contemplated how much joy he would gain from ripping the tiger to tiny shreds. Or using his skin for a rug.
“Jack,” she repeated, but this time she was pointing. “He’s calling us, and he’s right there.”
The meaning behind her words finally sank in, and the berserker rage subsided. She didn’t want Jack. Jack was calling them. From right behind Daniel. Serai’s hands, he suddenly realized, were still twined in his hair.
His lips curved in a slow, dangerous smile, and she gasped a little. “If ever a kiss were worth waiting eleven thousand years for, that was it, my lady,” he murmured in her perfect, shell-like ear. “I will make sure it is not nearly so long a period until the next one.”
Even in the dim light from the lanterns, he could see her face flush a hot red, and she pushed against his chest until he let her go.
“You presume too much,” she said, but her haughty words were ruined a little by her breathlessness.
“Yep.” He took her hand again and headed toward the damn grinning tiger shifter and his lantern. He was almost to the cave when he realized he was whistling.
Life was suddenly looking up.
When they entered the cave, the atmosphere was noticeably chilly, and it had nothing to do with the weather. The positioning of the inhabitants told the whole story in a glance. Alaric leaned against a wall, scowling at Reisen, who stood as far as possible from the priest. Quinn stood, seemingly relaxed, in the center of the space. Only the stress in her eyes and her slightly increased heartbeat told Daniel that she wasn’t nearly as calm as she liked to project. A slender, not very tall human woman with blond-and-blue hair and a wicked grin sat on the floor near Quinn, a computer on her lap. She kept shooting glances at Reisen, who pretended not to notice, or perhaps really didn’t notice, since he was practically inhaling Serai with his eyes.
But Serai ignored him, her gaze fixed on Alaric, her face becomimg pale and bloodless. “You.”
Alaric took a step forward. “Princess. How are you here? What—”
“Stay away from me, or I will hurt you,” she said, her voice only trembling a little.
Daniel stepped between them at the same time that Quinn caught Alaric’s arm with her hand.
“She must return to Atlantis,” the priest said, flinching a little at the contact but not pulling away.
“I will never again listen to an Atlantean who tells me what I must do,” Serai said, raising her chin.
Daniel aimed a flat stare at the priest. “Alaric. You’ll need to go through me to get to her, so please choose which part of your pretty face you want to get smashed in first.”
Quinn glared at Daniel. “That’s not really helping. You either, Alaric. Can we discuss what we’re here for and then you can have a private meeting about Atlantean issues? I really don’t have time for this right now.”
She twined her fingers through Alaric’s, pulling him back, and the dark look the priest shot at her would have stopped most people in their tracks. Quinn only smiled and shook her head.
“You know better than that,” she whispered so softly that Daniel was sure most of the people in the room couldn’t hear her. “The only thing about you that scares me is your absence, Alaric.”
The priest stood frozen for a long moment and then inclined his head and moved back to his place by the wall. “We will have this talk, though, Princess Serai, vampire or no.”
“I’m no princess, Alaric, but yes, we will talk. You don’t scare me, however, so you can stop trying.”
She was lying; Daniel could hear her heartbeat racing. The priest scared her, and Daniel had to fight hard against the rising red tide of fury demanding that he attack Alaric. Neutralize the threat to Serai.
Reisen surprised everyone by stepping into the silence. “I need to talk to you, too, Lady Serai.”
“I think not,” Daniel said, baring his fangs at the Atlantean, who showed no signs of being intimidated. Maybe once you’d had your hand torn off by a vampire, you didn’t much fear the one who’d saved your miserable life.
“Daniel,” Reisen said, nodding stiffly.
“Reisen. Long time, no have-to-save-your-ass. Or is that long time, no see? I always get these human sayings confused.”
Quinn rolled her eyes. “Really? We’re going to do this now?”
“I believe it is an imbalance in the male brain,” Serai said regally. “They name it testosterone in this time. In mine, we merely called it stupidity.”
Quinn burst out laughing, and even Alaric cracked a smile, which made Daniel almost fall over.
“Either works,” Jack said as he entered the cave behind Daniel and Serai. He touched Serai on the arm. “You okay, kitten?”
“Tiger-skin rug. On my floor,” Daniel said, but with no heat. He couldn’t resent Jack’s concern. Beneath all that tiger fur, Jack was a warrior who took his job of protecting others seriously. Daniel inclined his head to Jack in thanks for being with Serai during the afternoon hours when he could not, and Jack punched him in the shoulder.
Serai stared at them both like they were lunatics.
“It’s a guy thing,” Jack said, shrugging. “He knows now that I’m pissed off about Quinn; I know he’s pissed off about you. It’s all good.”
“Certainly that would make perfect sense, if the world were upside down. However, I choose to ignore rather than debate your logic and simply respond that I am well,” Serai said. “Thank you for your assistance today.”
Jack grinned. “Tigers love nothing more than a nap in the sun. Throw in a beautiful woman for company, and it’s the cherry on the cake.”
Daniel narrowed his eyes, but Jack just laughed and walked farther into the cave and leaned against the wall between Reisen and Alaric.
“If we’re done posturing, maybe we could get this meeting started so we can move on,” Quinn said. “Jack?”
Jack nodded. “Okay, here’s what we’ve found out so far. Banker named Smithson seems to be the head of a massive consortium of investment bankers throughout the world. They’re bored with playing with their money, stepping on Third World countries, draining old people’s pensions, and the like. They want to dance with the big boys and never worry about trifling little things like banking laws or international monetary regulations.”
“Smithson is here?” Quinn asked.
“Right here at Sedona National Bank, which is apparently a front for all kinds of bad and wrong.”
The woman with the computer raised her hand.
“Melody, you don’t have to raise your hand,” Quinn said patiently, as if she’d said it many times before.
“Oh, sure, I’m sitting in on a meeting with the rebel leader, scary tiger man, and possible Area 51 man in black over in the corner,” Melody said, indicating Q
uinn, Jack, and Alaric in turn, before pointing at Daniel. “Plus let’s not forget terrifying vampire dude who blows up defenseless chocolate cakes. You think I’m not going to be a little extra polite?”
Serai looked at Daniel. “You destroyed the cake? I loved that cake.”
Daniel glared at Melody. “Can we move on?”
Her black-rimmed eyes widened. “Um, sure. We found out that the records of all the consortium dudes are on an encrypted laptop that Smithson keeps in a safe-deposit box in his own bank, because, duh, he, like, runs the place.”
Serai tilted her head, clearly fascinated by Melody’s outrageous appearance and manner of speaking. “Duh?”
“It’s goth chick for ‘of course, as you all realize,’” Melody said, grinning. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“You have no idea,” Serai said, flashing a genuine smile that made something in Daniel’s chest tighten.
Alaric straightened and pinned Serai with a flat gaze. “Yes. About that. You need to go back.”
Serai raised her chin. “I think you are the last person to tell me what I need to be doing, youngling.”
Reisen made a choking sound, and Daniel tried not to laugh. He wondered when the last time was that somebody had dared to defy the high priest of Atlantis—or call him youngling, which, as far as Daniel understood, meant something like “wet behind the ears child.”
Alaric stood frozen for a long moment, and then he covered his eyes with one hand and shook his head, muttering to himself. Finally the priest took a deep breath and tried again. “You don’t understand. The Emperor is operating incorrectly. You may be in danger.”
Serai put her hands on her hips. “Really? I might be in danger? You mean, apart from the bit where the fluctuation in the Emperor’s power nearly killed me in the stasis pod, so I had to escape? Or the part where someone is trying to wield the gem’s magic and sent me into seizures as I came through the portal? No, wait—maybe the fact that if I can’t find the Emperor and retrieve it before whoever has it tries again, the power fluctuations that already almost killed me could kill all of us?”
She was shouting by the time she reached the end, and everyone stared at her in shock.
Finally, Melody raised her hand again. “So, Atlantis has an emperor? That’s cool. I always thought Napoleon was the bomb. Who has him? Can I meet him?”
Quinn sighed. “You’d never know she was the smartest hacker ever to turn down an offer from the CIA’s elite computer squad, would you?”
Before anybody could respond, June came running in, out of breath and holding her arm, which was bent at an impossible angle. Tears ran freely down the woman’s face, but her voice was perfectly steady. “We’re under attack, Quinn. Vampires. A lot of them. Three of us are already dead.”
Daniel yanked Serai out of range of the entrance and placed her, back to the wall, in the farthest corner from danger, as the others rushed out of the cave.
“Stay here,” he commanded.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, either, Nightwalker,” she snapped.
“I can’t protect you if—”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” she said, cutting him off. Then with a rush of power that smashed through the space between them, in a few short seconds she again shimmered into the shape of a saber-toothed tiger. When he started to speak, she snarled at him and shouldered him out of her way before springing across the floor to follow the others.
Daniel swore steadily in a long-dead language as he raced after her. He was going to slaughter anyone—vampire or otherwise—who dared to get anywhere near her. And when this was over, he was going to throw her over his shoulder, take her somewhere safe, lock her up, and maybe invest in some catnip.
Serai stumbled a little as she bounded across the floor, and hoped Daniel hadn’t seen it. If he realized that the loss of connection with the Emperor was making her as weak as she felt, he’d probably spirit her away and bundle her up in a bubble of safety somewhere. Rather exactly like how she’d spent the past eleven thousand years.
She thought not.
The tiger’s night vision gave her a clear picture of the area and the dark forms attacking Quinn’s group. Jack was already in tiger form himself and launching his body through the night air toward a vampire rushing toward him. They collided with a thud, and seconds later the vampire’s head rolled off its body. Serai felt nauseous, exhilarated, and terrified all at once—a far cry from any of the feelings or emotions she’d known in the pod. Daniel snarled something at her about staying down, and then he shot up into the air, daggers extended, and decapitated two more vampires in midair. They immediately began decomposing into an acidic slime that her sensitive tiger nose despised. She backed away from the mess, so it didn’t get on her paws, and looked around, stunned at the noise and fury of the battle.
Daniel was a whirlwind of berserker rage, slicing through the attackers like an avenging god. She’d never seen him in battle mode, and she caught her breath at the stark deadliness of his every move. His entire body was an extension of his weapons, and he smashed through a wave of the enemy in a brutal dance of death and destruction.
She shook her massive tiger head and looked around, realizing she’d been spellbound by Daniel for almost long enough that someone could have attacked her from behind. She was lucky; the battle raged on all around her, but none of it approached her yet. Her companions were not so fortunate. Alaric was right in the middle of it, flinging energy spheres from both hands, standing back-to-back with Quinn, who wielded a deadly looking gun in each hand. The rebels were outnumbered, but they apparently didn’t think so, or didn’t care, because they were steadily evening the odds. Daniel made a joke out of odds anyway. None could stand up to him.
A shout rang out somewhat ahead and to the left of where Serai stood, and she jerked her gaze away from Daniel again.
“A Mycenae!” Reisen shouted, pledging his part in the battle to his royal house in Atlantis, as he plunged a sword into one vampire’s heart and then withdrew it to remove the fallen foe’s head.
Serai snapped out of her mental paralysis at the sight. Daniel was destroying the attackers, Jack was doing the same, even the humans were fighting hard, and Reisen was dispatching enemies with only one hand. While, she, a princess of Poseidon turned into a fearsome beast of old, had four good paws and a mouthful of sharp saberlike teeth, and yet she stood there helplessly, like the foolish girl she’d promised herself she’d no longer be.
She took a moment to find the nearest threat and identified one of the vampires trying to sneak up on Reisen from behind. She roared a challenge and a warning and sprang across the dozen or so paces to where the vampire had frozen, staring stupidly at the oncoming tiger.
Seeing an extinct animal charging him might have thrown him off his game.
She would have laughed if she’d had human vocal cords, but instead she roared again and then swiped one massive claw across the vampire’s throat and jumped aside as the fiend’s head dropped from its body.
Guess her claws were pretty sharp.
Reisen stared at her in openmouthed disbelief. She tried to smile at him, but when he stepped back a pace, she realized a smile full of teeth like sabers wasn’t all that reassuring. She bounded off to find more enemies, instead of worrying about it, and then fell heavily to the ground, mid-bound, when every ounce of her energy and magic suddenly drained completely out of her body and left her nearly unconscious. There was nothing gradual about it; one moment she’d been ferociously killing that vampire and then she was on the ground as if smashed by a giant hand.
She lay on her side, panting, a stupendously large tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, and then the magic sustaining her shape-change vanished and she lay, limp, one helpless Atlantean maiden in the center of a massive battle.
Out of the stasis pod, into the grave. Perhaps that would become a new popular expression after she died. At least she’d retained her clothing during the shift and
wouldn’t die naked. There was something for her memorial service. Didn’t die naked.
Daniel flew through the air toward her—actually flew; her muddled mind told her that if she survived this she had to ask him how he did that—and landed on the ground with one foot on each side of her waist, standing over her prone body.
“If you die, I’m going to haunt you,” he growled at her, his fangs fully bared, and then another of the attackers came at him, screaming something about points for killing the Primator. Daniel met the attack with crossed daggers and then he sliced downward, and another head rolled across the ground.
Serai’s thoughts tumbled crazily; she realized she was near hysteria when she started to hum “vampire heads are falling down” to the tune of some song buried in her memory about a London bridge, and then when everything went suddenly, eerily quiet, she wondered if she’d lost her hearing or her mind.
Or both.
But then a woman—it sounded like June, maybe, but Serai wasn’t sure—screamed, “The tiger is down.” Serai had just enough time to be touched that the landwalkers cared about her even though they’d just met her, before Quinn raced past. A moment later, Quinn started screaming, too, and even Serai’s exhausted mind began to realize that it wasn’t her they were talking about.
She wasn’t the tiger who was down.
“Jack!” Quinn screamed, over and over. Just his name, again and again and again.
Then Serai heard Alaric’s unmistakable voice. “I’m sorry, Quinn. He’s dead.”
Chapter 11
Daniel stared down at the limp, blood-soaked form of the tiger who’d been Quinn’s best friend in the world, and a bleak sense of futility washed over him. Why? Why was it always the good guys—the best of them—who paid the highest price? He tightened his hold on Serai, who had insisted on standing on her own two feet when he’d picked her up from the ground. When he’d seen her fall, he’d almost faced death for the second time that day. If he lost her now . . . but no. Better to focus on the immediate reality.