Heart of Atlantis Page 15

  Instead, he crashed into an invisible shield of magic and bounced back through the air. The force of his collision with the shield pushed him out of his mist shape again and smashed him down to the ground. He lay there for a minute or so, shaking his head at the offers of hands up or any other help, simply trying to force air back into his abused body and snarling at the humans until they all gave up and left him alone. Ptolemy’s press conference was bigger news than a man falling from midair, evidently. As he climbed to his feet, a sharp ache alerted him to the presence of at least one cracked or broken rib.

  “This day just keeps getting better and better,” he growled, and a woman standing nearby pulled her child closer to her.

  He almost laughed. Even the humans he’d spent hundreds of years protecting thought he was a monster. So be it. He’d be monster enough for any of them.

  He spared a moment and the smallest touch of energy to heal his ribs so he’d be ready to fight, and headed for the stairs to the ornate building, but a truck with antennas bristling all over it drove up and parked, blocking his way.

  “Move, man, don’t get in the way of the TV crew,” somebody said, and shoved him.

  If he’d had the energy to spare, Alaric would have blasted the fool with an energy sphere just on the principle of the thing. Luckily for the human, Quinn’s welfare was far more important than minor annoyances, so today he got to live. Alaric took another few steps before he realized he had yet another big problem. The magical wards shielding the building were far too powerful for him to take down without draining himself of the reserves he needed to continue to shield Atlantis. He’d either have to trust Quinn to take care of herself for a little while, or sacrifice all of his people to save her.

  Today was turning out to be his day for bad fucking options.

  Chapter 18

  Quinn stared at herself in the mirror. Ptolemy had handed her a red dress and heels and the choice to either wear them or watch him tear the head off one of the office workers. Like so much in her life lately, it wasn’t really much of a choice.

  Now the image looking back at her in the mirror was a caricature of herself. Pale, with styled hair and skillfully applied makeup that seemed to float above the surface of her face. The TV people had done it. She didn’t even know how to put on eyeliner, let alone all the other goop. One overly zealous woman had tried to spray her with perfume, but Quinn’s expression had stopped that in its tracks, at least.

  She looked like a little porcelain doll, they’d told her. As if that were a good thing. Didn’t they understand that porcelain was fragile and easily shattered?

  The door opened on silent hinges, and Ptolemy walked into the ladies’ room. Quinn didn’t bother to act surprised. She could already tell the man was a control freak.

  “You’re as beautiful as I knew you would be, underneath that scruff and grime,” he said, and she suddenly, desperately, wanted her guns.

  “You’re a bullying piece of shit who needs to be put down like a rabid dog,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Who are you, and what is this about?”

  “I’m not going to fill you in on all my plans just yet. I’m not some comic book villain with a need to impress,” he said, walking closer.

  The stench of evil nearly suffocated her as he drew near, and she started choking on the intangible emotion that nobody else would be able to perceive. “What are you? The only thing I can think of is demon, but it’s not exactly that, either. Unseelie Court Fae?”

  He sneered. “As if I’d associate with them. No, my darling queen-to-be, you have never encountered anyone like me. Or, rather, you’ve encountered many like my dear, dead mother, but my father? No. He was in a class by himself.”

  He bowed and motioned to the door. “Shall we do this? We have a press conference to give.”

  She headed for the door, bracing her shoulders against attack from behind, but he only sniffed her hair as she passed. She didn’t manage to contain her shiver of revulsion, and he started laughing. His laughter was rich and deep as it surrounded her—invaded her—tasting like burning acid in the back of her throat. She fought her gag reflex. She would not let them see her be weak.

  At the end of the hall, a man wearing headphones ushered them into another large room, and this one was set up for the press conference. Huge cameras, large, square light boxes on poles, and more wires and electrical apparatuses than she’d ever seen in one place fought for space. Two men she pegged immediately as vampires stood at the back of the room, near the podium, and another she thought was human hovered ten feet or so away from them. A flurry of people with press passes hanging around their necks swarmed everywhere, and Quinn’s fingers itched for her knives.

  She took a small step toward the door, but Ptolemy grabbed her arm. He shook his head slowly, mocking her, and she wrenched her arm away from him and tried not to vomit. Whatever dark magic he had, the sensation of it had intensified a hundredfold when he touched her, even through the sleeve of her dress. If he ever touched her bare skin, she thought she would go mad.

  “Everyone who isn’t absolutely essential, get out,” Ptolemy said, never raising his voice.

  Instantly, the swarm thinned to only a manageable few, as most of the people in the room all but fell over themselves trying to escape. Now that she could get a better look at the men near the podium, she realized something highly troubling. One of them was the first vampire mayor of New York, and the other was the first vampire secretary-general of the United Nations. The man lurking a distance away she didn’t recognize.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked, sure that Ptolemy wouldn’t tell her anything, but unwilling to meekly become a part of whatever evil strategy he had in motion.

  “The secretary-general will either officially recognize me as the king of Atlantis, right here and now, or I will kill him on international TV,” he said, as casually as if he were discussing what to have for lunch.

  Her hand was partway to her gun before she remembered it was gone. Ptolemy dragged her to the front of the room, and the surge of nausea she’d been fighting burned through her. She was barely able to contain her stomach’s urgent need to empty its contents all over him.

  “Your magic and I are definitely not compatible,” she said, taking in shallow breaths. “What makes you think I’d let you close enough to me to . . . to . . .”

  “To have my baby?” He leaned closer and whispered. “You won’t have a choice. Nobody said you had to be conscious during the begetting.”

  Ptolemy took advantage of her shock-induced paralysis to drag her in front of the cameras.

  “This is my consort, Quinn Dawson, the only human worthy to be queen of Atlantis,” he said, smiling for the international audience. “We are here this morning to accept Secretary-General Filberson’s acknowledgment of our sovereignty.”

  The secretary-general was made of sterner stuff than she was, Quinn thought, or else he didn’t have the ability to sense Ptolemy’s twisted magic at all, because he stepped right up, displaying no hint of fear or revulsion.

  “Since the secret is out, we do acknowledge that Atlantis exists and has been preparing to rise from the bottom of the ocean and rejoin the international community. However, I have been dealing with High Prince Conlan for more than a year now. This man is a pretender, and the United Nations does not recognize or support him.”

  The mayor backed away from Filberson, clearly anticipating the worst. It didn’t take very long for him to get it. Ptolemy reached out a hand that had transformed into that of a beast. His fingers now terminated in five-inch-long claws, and he slashed Filberson in the face. Then, before the secretary-general even hit the floor, Ptolemy kicked him so hard it caved in the side of his head.

  Quinn gasped as the secretary-general’s emotions swung violently from calm determination to pain, rage, and terror, and then she slammed her mental shield int
o place. She knew from previous experience that she couldn’t feel all of his emotions as he died and still remain conscious, and if she passed out she might wake up dead.

  “This is unfortunate,” Ptolemy said calmly, wiping his bloody hand on the side of Quinn’s dress.

  She silently vowed to kill him. Slowly. She wanted him to suffer for what he’d done to Filberson. For what he’d done to her.

  Ptolemy pointed to the mayor with his hand, which was still smeared with blood despite his use of Quinn’s dress. “Do you have something to say?”

  The mayor stepped over the moaning secretary-general and faced the cameras. “Yes, we agree,” he said hastily. “The city of New York recognizes you as King Ptolemy of Atlantis. No problem. No problem at all.”

  “And you?” Ptolemy pointed again, this time to the man who still lurked a dozen or so paces away.

  Quinn didn’t know who he was, but he looked familiar. He walked slowly to the podium and stepped carefully around the dying vampire on the floor before facing the cameras.

  “I will absolutely recognize you as king of Atlantis or any other damn continent you want to rule,” he said slowly. “I have a family and grandchildren, so I don’t want to die. And this will be my last official act as governor of New York.”

  The governor walked carefully away, down the long conference room and out of the door, undeterred by anyone in the room. Quinn looked at Ptolemy, surprised that he’d let the man escape, but he shocked her by laughing.

  “And so it begins,” he said. “Now, my beautiful wife-to-be, to prove your loyalty I only have one request. I need for you to end what’s left of the life of this miserable worm on the floor. If you disobey me, I will kill every human in this building, slowly and painfully—”

  “Done,” Quinn snapped. She whirled around to grab a rather flimsy-looking wooden side table and snapped one leg off over her knee. Then she knelt down next to the secretary-general.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, before she plunged the makeshift stake into his heart.

  She’d just committed murder on live TV. Another act for which she could never, ever forgive herself. She opened her mental shield, just a crack, for just a moment.

  Good-bye, Alaric.

  The blast of Quinn’s pain and remorse swept through Alaric with the force of a tidal wave, before she shut it down hard. She was trying to tell him good-bye.

  Alaric needed to kill something.

  Bad.

  “Oh, my god, she really did it,” shouted the man with the portable viewing device. It had been Alaric’s only window to Quinn and Ptolemy for the past several minutes.

  She’d had no choice. Yet again he had the thought that they were all ultimately helpless pawns in a chess game played by gods. Another stain on her soul, and Quinn had already been sure that she could never atone for the dark deeds she’d performed in her short life.

  He, of all people, knew what it had cost her to kill that man. Even though the secretary-general had been a vampire, he also had been a man working for good in the world, not trying to conquer and enslave humanity. Even though she’d been forced to it—even though she’d clearly given him a quick end when his alternative was a long and agonizing death—and in spite of the threat that Ptolemy would kill humans if she did not comply.

  It didn’t matter. She’d killed, again, and this time not in direct self-defense, or at least so she would believe. Alaric’s skin heated up as his very bones vibrated with fury. If he did not find an outlet for his rage, he might very well set off an explosion. The humans closest to him backed away as Alaric’s body began to glow with hot, silver-blue energy.

  “Ah, hey, man, are you all right?” one of them, braver than the others, dared to ask.

  “No,” he managed to say. “No, I am very far from all right. You should leave now. Leave and take all of your friends. This area is about to become very dangerous.”

  “Oh, wow,” the man with the viewing device yelled. “The king of Atlantis is getting ready to do something bad, again. He has that woman he called his consort by the hair—”

  “Move, fool.” Alaric snatched the device from the man, just in time to see Ptolemy pull Quinn up into his arms.

  “Now I’ll be a little busy for a while,” Ptolemy said, smirking directly into the camera. Quinn’s eyes were wide and blank, staring at nothing, like she’d reached and then moved past the end of her endurance. Alaric’s mind stuttered at the thought of what else Ptolemy might have done to her in that building.

  He wondered how long he could make it take for Ptolemy to die.

  Ptolemy’s next words smashed through Alaric’s plans of blood and death.

  “I have to impregnate my future queen.” Then, in a flash of light, he pulled another of his vanishing tricks, and this time he took Quinn with him. When the ugly smoke cleared, there was nobody left in view on the small screen but the mayor, who picked up a chair and smashed it into the camera that was transmitting the scene. The news feed went black.

  “Give me my iPad, man,” the human whined, grabbing for it, and Alaric hit him in the face with his precious toy.

  Alaric tried for several seconds—that lasted for an eternity—to sense Quinn anywhere within the range of his power. Nothing. She was gone. She’d disappeared as surely as if she’d died. Alaric stood silently as the prospect of his future without Quinn washed through him in waves of bleak, desolate despair.

  Then he called to his power and began to destroy the world.

  He destroyed the news vehicle in front of him with a single blow, and it disintegrated in a satisfying explosion that blew pieces of shrapnel thirty feet in the air. The columns in front of the building went next, one by one. He smashed every one of them into rubble.

  Humans ran wildly in every direction away from him, and Alaric laughed. Madness and murder and death swirled through him, and he laughed as he hurled it outward, destroying everything in sight. He shot ropes of pure magic at a car, lifted it into the air, and threw it against the side of a building, taking out half of the wall. He levitated into the air, dimly sensing Christophe calling to him, trying to stop him, demanding to know what in the nine hells was going on. Alaric slammed shut the door to their mental communication and shot a blast of energy at the park, taking out six trees at once and leaving a giant fireball in their place.

  It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. If that monster touched one hair on Quinn’s head, Alaric would drown the entire world and laugh as every human on the planet died. He froze, mid-thought, his hands encircled by glowing spheres of destructive power.

  Drowning.

  That was it.

  He’d drown them all, city by city, nation by nation, until he found Quinn. If that didn’t give them incentive to cooperate, nothing would. He centered himself and reached deep into the reservoir of his power for every last ounce of magical reserves he might have, and then he ruthlessly stripped power from every human witch in a hundred-mile radius. All sorcerers, wizards, and magic practitioners of every kind suddenly found themselves bereft of power, as one of the most powerful high priests Atlantis had ever known tore their magic from them.

  It was fast, dirty, and painful—and he didn’t care.

  It left some of them screaming and some of them in comas—and he didn’t care.

  He threw all of it into the ocean, where he drove the power with a towering fury, twisting and turning, breaking and battering, until he got exactly the result he wanted. A tsunami larger than any ever seen on the surface of the planet formed in the Atlantic Ocean and headed straight for New York City.

  It was two thousand feet high and still growing when it was a mile out from shore, and nothing—nothing—on the eastern seaboard would survive it.

  He stared down at the fools with news cameras who’d been stupid enough to remain in the area, filming his
actions.

  “If he harms Quinn Dawson, you will all die.”

  Chapter 19

  Quinn lay on her side on a couch, its rough fabric scratching her face and the smell of years of dust and mildew clogging her nose. Ptolemy had bound her hands behind her back and tied a rag over her eyes. She didn’t bother to struggle. She had nothing left to fight for. She’d failed to retrieve Poseidon’s Pride in time, so Atlantis was probably lost by now, with everyone she loved in it, except for Jack, who had been lost to her for days. And Riley . . . Quinn’s heart shattered into tiny, broken pieces at the thought of her sister and nephew. She’d wanted to save them all, and now she couldn’t even save herself.

  Even if she wanted to continue the fight—even if she could find some way to care enough to keep on keeping on—she’d been outed as the rebel leader and shown to be a cold-blooded murderer on international TV.

  There was nothing left. She’d find a way to kill herself and take Ptolemy down with her. That was her one final mission. Her one final goal.

  She’d tried to reach out to find Alaric with her mind, the way he always seemed to be able to find her, but the obstacle there was that he was a powerful magic-wielding Atlantean and she was a human with only a single talent. Even that was useless; Ptolemy’s tainted, foul magic clouded her senses so badly that she was sure she’d go insane if she didn’t keep her shields up, so even if Alaric were trying to reach her, she wouldn’t hear him.

  Anyway, what good was a final good-bye? Alaric knew how she felt.

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  She didn’t bother to try to nudge the mask from over her eyes, because she could see enough to know the room was pitch-black. Ptolemy had dumped her there after they’d gone through a vortex not unlike a fun house–mirror version of the portal. He’d quickly and expertly bound her and tossed her on the couch, with orders not to move. Apparently they were someplace where he didn’t have to worry about her screaming for help. She’d tried for a while, but nobody had come running to her assistance.