Atlantis Betrayed wop-8 Page 16

  “But Hopkins—”

  “Let Hopkins get his own date.” He pulled her over and on top of him and proceeded to make love to her thoroughly for the next couple of hours, until they were lying in a tangle of rumpled sheets and bliss.

  She traced a finger around the curves and lines of the tattoo on the upper left side of his back. “What does this mean?”

  “That’s the mark signifying my oath as a warrior. Poseidon brands us with it when we’ve completed our training to be a Warrior of Poseidon. A sort of graduation gift.”

  She caught the bitterness underneath the sarcasm. “You don’t like it?”

  “Would you want to be branded?” He sat up, pushing his dark hair away from his face. “It implies ownership. I have never wanted to be owned.”

  “What does it mean? The circle and the triangle and this symbol?”

  * * *

  “It’s a symbol representing our duty. Poseidon’s Trident bisects the circle representing all the peoples of the world. The triangle is for the pyramid of knowledge. All of Poseidon’s warriors wear this mark as a sort of proof of service. It means we’ve sworn an oath to serve Poseidon and accepted the responsibility of protecting humanity.”

  “But you don’t? Want the responsibility of protecting us from our own stupidity, I’m guessing?”

  He glanced at her, clearly surprised. “You are very perceptive for a ninja, Princess. Let’s just say I never did, before I met you. Now I’m starting to enjoy the job.”

  She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m not a job.”

  “No, you, my beauty, are a privilege and a fantasy. I fear I might wake up from this dream and be bereft of your presence.”

  “Bereft. Nice. Poetic, even,” she said. “Did you know an eft is a kind of salamander, like a newt? Witches in the old days—or the poor women who were accused of being witches, at least—used to boil their tails in potions.”

  He started laughing. “Wonderful. I try to be romantic for the first time in my life, and you start talking about lizards. My poor ego may die a hideous death.”

  “But you’re not,” she said, serious now. “You’re not a romantic. You’re a warrior.”

  “Does that bother you?” His eyes cooled to green ice, but she recognized it for one of his many self-protective techniques.

  “No. I’m still dealing with the fact that I killed those two vampires. I used blessed water to deliberately harm them and it caused their death. That was me. I am now a murderer.” Her hands started to shake and she clenched them together.

  “They were vampires.”

  “Vampires have rights as citizens now.”

  “They were trying to murder you. All of us. Self-defense and defense of others is still permitted, even in the screwed up new world you landwalkers are creating,” he said, rolling over to sit up and stare down at her. “Don’t ever think that you are bad or wrong for preventing them from killing Sean or yourself.”

  “You scared me a little,” she admitted. “I’d heard you say the word—warrior. But I didn’t have context. I didn’t know how to believe it. Out there you were deadly beyond anything I’ve ever seen. So many of them and you were everywhere with your blades and your magic.”

  “Are you still afraid of me?” His eyes were shuttered again, and his jaw clenched as if against her response.

  “Did I just act like I was afraid of you? When I had my lips around your penis, for example?” He stretched blissfully in reaction to her question, and she laughed but then grew serious again. “No, oddly enough, you make me feel safe. You have so much danger inside you, but you put your own life on the line for me and Sean. There’s no way he killed six vampires, either, is there?”

  “Let him think it, Fiona. He needs to be a white knight, especially after you threw yourself into the fray to save him.” Christophe lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a lingering kiss into her palm. “He’s not the one who swore an oath, after all, which makes his courage all the more impressive.”

  “Do you want to tell me the words? The oath. I’d like to hear it, if it’s not too private.”

  “The language is archaic. If you didn’t like me being romantic, you probably won’t like this, either.”

  “Please? But only if you want to.” She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she wanted to hear it. She only knew that she did. Knew that if this man were capable of swearing an oath of one sort and following through on it, he was also capable of another kind of commitment. The personal kind.

  The kind that suddenly mattered to her a very great deal.

  He shrugged. “If you like. It goes like this: We will wait. And watch. And protect. And serve as first warning on the eve of humanity’s destruction. Then, and only then, Atlantis will rise. For we are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the mark of the Trident we bear serves as witness to our sacred duty to safeguard mankind.”

  A thrumming sense of power rang through the room, resonating in the air and in her bones, under her skin and blood and individual nerve endings.

  “That’s beautiful,” she whispered. Even she, with so little magic, felt the magic in the words. “But you don’t like it?”

  “It’s not the words I don’t care for, it’s their meaning. Why should I care anything about safeguarding mankind?” His face twisted with a rage so intense she flinched away from him. “Humanity murdered my parents.”

  Chapter 22

  Christophe leapt out of the bed and called to magic to clothe himself in pants and a shirt as he paced the room, suddenly feeling like a caged animal.

  Like that little boy in the box, so many years ago.

  “What happened?” Fiona sat curled up in the bed, her knees to her chest, classic protective body posture. She was probably afraid of him now.

  He deserved it. He may as well tell her all of it now. Let her see how pathetic he’d been. How humans had destroyed his childhood.

  “We used to walk the land, did I tell you that? Not just the warriors among us but the normal citizens. Scholars who wanted to learn about humanity, for example. People like my mother and father. They could travel through the portal and, maintaining anonymity, travel among humans and even live in one place for a little while. Studying and learning, gathering anthropologic data about different cultures, much like your own anthropologists who travel to different lands.”

  She nodded. “Of course. If you have all this magic, we must seem fairly uncivilized to you.”

  He laughed. “It’s not just the magic. The magic is maybe the least of it. We had technology and books and treasures beyond all imagining. That’s why humans tried to conquer the Seven Isles in the first place, more than eleven thousand years ago. That’s when we knew we had to escape. Well, that and the cataclysm.”

  “Cataclysm?”

  “The Ragnarok. The Doom of the Gods,” he recounted. “The gods decided to take their petty squabbles to a world-ending level, and it happened to coincide with an attack upon Atlantis. The king and elders at that time decided we needed to remove ourselves from the battlefield before we were destroyed. So we went for a little swim, shall we say.”

  “Okay. Okay. Let me catch up here,” she said, climbing out of bed and pulling on a cerulean silk robe. “You realize that Ragnarok is Norse mythology. Atlantis is Greek mythology. Your stories are becoming a little confused.”

  He whirled around to face her. “Do you think the gods care about how humans have classified them? Norse, Greek, Roman, whatever? Gods fight each other, fuck each other—and who or whatever they can catch, actually—and play games with human lives like you’re all chess pieces on a giant board. No, not even as important as chess pieces to them. More like bugs underfoot. My ancestors didn’t want Atlantis to suffer the same fate.”

  “But—” She shook her head, more to herself than at him. “No. That’s not important now. Tell me how your parents died.”

  She walked toward him, hands outstretched, but he didn’t want to touch her. Couldn’t bear for her
to touch him; not now. Not while he told this story that he’d never told anyone before. She was too pure, too perfect. Too good to hear his story of betrayal, torture, and death.

  Oh, they’d known. The warriors who’d rescued him had certainly known some of it, suspected more. But he had never spoken a word of it in more than three hundred years.

  She touched his arm and looked up at him with those blue, blue eyes. “Please.”

  And he was undone.

  “My parents were among the lucky ones, in their minds. They were societal anthropologists, content to study farming villages in rural Ireland. Of course I didn’t know that then, I learned about their study later. We lived on the outskirts of a tiny place, I don’t even remember the name, if I ever knew it. We had a view of the sea. I spent most of the first four years of my life there.”

  Memories he’d buried for far too long surfaced: of playing in a field with his father, a man who always made time for a boisterous son. His mother telling him stories by the fire. He couldn’t remember their faces. It had been too long. It was more of an impression of warmth and safety.

  A feeling of home.

  His eyes burned, and he turned away from Fiona, ashamed to let her see his weakness. “They only returned to Atlantis maybe once every few weeks or couple of months. I don’t know. Time moves differently to a child, of course. We’d wait until the village was asleep and then my father or mother would call to the portal.”

  He laughed bitterly and ran a hand through his hair. “It always came for them. Maybe even the portal finds me tainted.”

  She put her arms around him and rested her cheek on his back. “No. Never. Not the man I’ve grown to know so well in such a short time. You’re amazing. I can’t believe you’ve done your job, protecting us for so long, even with so much anguish in your heart.”

  He caressed the back of her hand, but only for an instant; he still couldn’t take her touch. Not now. Not during this story. He walked away from her.

  “It was bound to happen. One morning one of the village women stopped by to talk to my mother about something. Some sewing circle, probably. I remember that she always loved the sewing circles.” He smiled a little at the faded and out-of-focus memory of falling asleep at his mother’s feet, tugging on her skirt, as she worked on some garment for him or for his father. She’d liked to sing as she sewed. He remembered that.

  Perhaps it was why he never, ever sang.

  “This stupid woman walked in as we were coming back to the cottage through the portal. She ran, screaming as if the devil himself were after her. My parents knew it was over, so they hurriedly gathered their few possessions, but—” He doubled over, the pain of it fresh after so very many years.

  “Christophe? What is it?”

  “It was my fault. I killed them.”

  * * *

  Fiona put her arms around him, tightening them when he tried to get away. “No. Shh. It’s my turn. Let me comfort you.”

  He shook his head violently, his big body shaking in her embrace. “I can’t—”

  “Let me be the strong one this time? Yes. You can. I owe you.” She stroked his back and murmured soothing words of comfort, much as he’d done for her in the shower. When his breathing slowed to normal, she let him escape her hug, but she kissed his cheek before he managed to pace away from her again.

  “I ran away. Off to the fields to play or something. They called me and I thought it was a game, so I stayed hidden around the side of the barn. I remember the warmth of the sun on my head, and then nothing until a great shouting woke me up.”

  “Your parents?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer anymore; in fact, she was desperately sure she did not. But she knew he needed to tell his story, so the least she could do was muster the courage to hear it.

  “They brought the sheriff. Or magistrate. Or what the hells ever he was called back then. But he was none of those things. He was Fae. Unseelie Court Fae. The murdering bastard killed my parents.” He smashed his fist into his palm and the dark drive to seek vengeance was in every line of his face and clenched muscle in his body. He suddenly seemed taller and wider, and he was glowing again. Not the gentle blue-green of the energy spheres but the scarlet of fire and retribution.

  She knew a little bit about retribution herself.

  “He and his deputies dragged my parents out of the house. Then they sent the villagers away. I remember watching them go. It was so strange, how they’d come shouting and yelling down the lane to our house, but they ran away in total silence. They knew, you see. I figured that out later. They knew.”

  She didn’t want to ask; more than she wanted to draw her next breath she so didn’t want to ask, but she knew she must. “They knew what?”

  “They knew the murderers were Fae and that they’d kill my parents. They didn’t want to know, so they ran, but they knew.”

  He fell heavily onto her bed and the crimson flame vanished. “I could see, you know. I never told anybody, but I saw it all. They told me—the warriors who came for me, later, more than a year later when they finally found me—they told me that my parents had gone away to the Summer Lands. Silverglen, where Fae danced and animals talked and all manner of beings lived in peace and harmony forevermore.”

  “They lied? How could they do that? Who was it? I want to have a stern talking to with those men,” she said, fisting her hands on her hips.

  He smiled up at her, just a hint of a smile, but it was encouraging in the midst of this horrible story. “So fierce, mi amara. So fierce on my behalf. I truly am blessed among men.”

  “They told you, in effect, that your parents had abandoned you,” she said gently. “That’s a horrible thing to do to a child. Trust me, I know.”

  “No, it didn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “I knew what had happened. The Fae sucked the life force out of them until my mother and father were nothing but dust on the dirt floor of our barn. Dust mingling with dust. Of course, the symbolism was lost on a four-year-old child.”

  “What did you do?” She came to kneel at his feet and covered his clenched fists with her hands.

  “What could I do? I was a terrified little boy. I lost control of my bladder—still to this day I remember how ashamed I was that my father would know I’d wet my trousers. Then I curled up in a ball and closed my eyes, wishing as hard as I could that it was all a nightmare and we were still in Atlantis with my grandparents.”

  Hot tears traced lines down her face and he followed their path with one finger. “Don’t cry for me, Princess. It was long, long ago, before even your grandfather’s grandfather’s day, more than likely.”

  “If not me, then who?” She leaned forward and put her arms around his waist, resting her head in his lap. “I think I’ve earned the right to cry for that little boy.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to add sorrow to your heart,” he said, and he found that he meant it. He cared more for what pain he was causing her than for what relief the telling might bring him.

  Possibly his first selfless thought in centuries.

  The gods were definitely laughing at him now.

  “What happened to you next?”

  He sucked in a long breath. “I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, the woman who’d discovered us that morning was staring down at me, and her face was twisted up like a monster. When I opened my eyes, she screamed.”

  “At a tiny child? What did she do?”

  “She spent the next year of my life trying to beat, starve, and torture Satan out of me. She came close to killing me, but even then, even so young, I knew I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. She would never break me.”

  Fiona made a sound, and he realized he’d clenched his hands around hers so tightly he must be hurting her. He released her hands, pulsing a bit of magic into them to soothe any small pain.

  “You were incredibly brave,” she said, rising to sit next to him on the bed.

  “I was a fool,” he said, even now shudd
ering at the memory. “She broke me the first time she put me in the box.”

  Chapter 23

  A discreet knock sounded at the door.

  “Not now, please,” Fiona called out, her arms wrapped around Christophe. He wasn’t making a sound, but his body was shuddering so hard the bed was shaking underneath them.

  “I’m afraid the lady insists,” Hopkins said. “Lady Maeve Fairsby is here to see you and claims it is quite urgent.”

  Christophe’s head snapped up, and all sign of the pain he’d been reliving had vanished, replaced by cold, deadly contemplation. “She may have news of why we were attacked. We need to see her. If nothing else, we can hold her hostage against her cousin.”

  He jumped up and began attaching daggers to his sheaths.

  “We can’t take my friend as a hostage, even if she is Fae.” Fiona stood up, wondering which of him was the real Christophe—the terrified boy who’d seen his parents murdered or the lethal warrior who so calmly spoke of abducting her friend.

  Both, of course, the answer sounded in her heart. What he’d endured as a boy had forced him to develop the cold shell over his emotions. His warrior training had completed the job. She felt a moment’s despair that she would ever be able to break through to the man inside those barriers.

  “Lady Fiona?” Hopkins never sounded impatient, but this was edging close. “Your response?”

  “Please tell her we’ll be down soon and offer some refreshments or something, Hopkins.”

  “I have already provided tea and cakes, of course,” Hopkins said, and she could have sworn he sounded offended.

  The world might be in jeopardy, but nobody insulted Hopkins’s hospitality or service. She smiled a little at the few constants she’d known in her life: the sun, the moon, and Hopkins.

  “Thank you, Hopkins,” she called out, but all she heard was a hmph sort of sound.

  She and Christophe showered and dressed quickly, and in fewer than twenty minutes they were heading down the hallway to the stairs. The door to one of the guest rooms opened, and Denal stepped out.