Atlantis Unmasked Read online

  Grace nodded, trying desperately to think. To focus on what still needed to be done. “He’s still unconscious,” she said, gesturing toward the fallen panther. “We’re going to have to carry him.”

  “I’ll do it,” Alexios said. “It’s the least I can do.” He bent down and scooped the injured man, now fully human, up off the ground.

  Sam stopped him with a hand on his arm and a look. “It doesn’t have to be only you, son. We may not be from Atlantis, but we do the best we can, and we’re on your side.”

  Alexios stopped, and a trace of a smile crossed his face, perhaps at being called “son” by a man centuries younger than he. “Trust me, my friend. If I were able to bestow honorary Atlantean citizenship, your name would be very high on my list. You’re a magician with that Glock. But this thug’s weight is nothing to me. If you’d show me to the cell you think would best hold him, I would appreciate that. And then we need to get you and the wounded to your doctor friend’s place.”

  Grace started walking, proud that she could stand mostly upright, despite the jagged tear still seeping blood from her side. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  With that, she headed down the stairs in front of them, her heart in her throat as she saw how many of her people were wounded—and how badly. Michelle knelt on the ground near Smith, weeping. Shame tasted like bile in Grace’s mouth as she realized she’d never even known Smith’s first name.

  She trudged over to Michelle, but stopped when she reached Reynolds’s broken and bloody body. His neck tilted his head at an unnatural angle to his shoulders, and his arms and legs sprawled like a discarded child’s toy. She knelt down next to him and gently, so gently, moved his shoulders and limbs and repositioned his head so that it lined up with his body. Although it was an observation she’d made before, it surprised her again how very heavy it was, a dead body. Or perhaps the weight was some extra burden that death conveyed when the lightness and buoyancy of the soul fled for what she still believed to be heaven.

  A place she would never see. She could never expunge the stains on her soul. Her tears dripped steadily down her face, falling on the dead man’s shirt, until Michelle knelt down beside her and gathered Grace into her arms for a hug.

  “I know,” Michelle said brokenly. “I know. They didn’t know enough to face this—”

  Epiphany struck. Grace pulled away from the offered comfort and climbed slowly and painfully to her feet, trying not to grimace or actually shout the word ouch like an idiot. “That’s it. That’s what has been biting at the back of my lizard brain. How did they know?”

  Michelle looked up, tilting her head. “How did they know? They didn’t—”

  “No. Not the recruits. How did the shifters know to come after us? We’ve done everything possible to make everybody believe we’re actors and battle reenactors. We even spent a day last week putting fliers up all over town for our debut performance in two months. Why would they come after us?”

  Alexios and Sam walked out of the cell block just then, minus their prisoner. Sam had his dog on a leash. Blue. She’d forgotten all about him.

  “Where was he?”

  “I’d shut him in my room while we were at dinner and hadn’t let him out yet,” Sam said. “He damn near tore my room apart, probably trying to get out here when he heard those cats.”

  Blue started baying, a deep bass boom of a bark, and straining at his leash to get away from Sam and explore.

  “Blue. Down.” Sam rapped out the command and the dog instantly sat, then lay down at Sam’s feet.

  “I’m glad he’s okay,” Grace said, a tiny thread of relief winding its way through the crushing sorrow. “And I know it doesn’t make sense to be so happy about a dog when humans are dead, but there it is. Nothing tonight makes sense. I was just asking how they knew we were here.”

  “That’s a damned good question,” Sam said. “Somebody knows something they shouldn’t, or somebody talked.”

  Alexios lifted his shoulders and let them fall in apparent nonchalance, but the expression on his face promised a slow and painful death to whoever had betrayed them. “There are always traitors in war. We find them. We deal with them.”

  Michelle scrubbed tears from her face. “Perhaps it was a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Grace and Alexios replied simultaneously. They shared a glance filled with understanding and something more.

  Implacable determination, maybe.

  “I set a guard,” Sam said. “Donaldson is watching over the prisoner, but we’ve got him locked in real tight. Neither man nor panther can get out of that stone cell. One thing those Spaniards were good at was building a fort.”

  Grace nodded. “Okay then. You need to get going.”

  She moved forward, helping Sam and Michelle escort the injured through the door built into the portcullis and out of the fort to the two Jeeps. Alexios brought up the rear, hands on his daggers and eyes constantly scanning the area for further threat.

  Once everyone was loaded in the vehicles, Sam pulled her aside. “We’re going to need to do something about Smith and Reynolds, and I’m thinking we don’t want to bring any of this to the attention of the police just yet.”

  “It would probably horrify you to know this, Sam, but it never even occurred to me to bring the police into this. We need to figure something out, though, because we need to notify their families. We can’t just cover this up and leave them wondering forever what happened.” Grace felt the weight of command pushing down on her, driving her further and further into a black pit of self-justification and moral ambiguity. Perhaps death was already nudging at her.

  Perhaps her soul, too, had flown away, even though her body didn’t know it yet.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I know some people who know some people. A man named Tiny will be in charge.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Oh, trust me. You’ll know him.”

  He hugged her fiercely and unexpectedly, releasing her with a muttered apology and curse at his own foolishness when she winced from the pressure on her injured side. Then he told Blue to jump up into the Jeep, and Sam climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key. Behind him, Michelle started the ignition of the second Jeep. Sam nodded at Grace, turned on his headlights, and started out onto the street.

  As Michelle slowly pulled forward, Grace slapped her hand on the driver’s side door. Michelle braked and looked a question at her.

  “Be careful,” Grace said, trying to force words past the boulder suddenly caught in her throat. “You and Jeeps and trips to doctors—I don’t know. It’s a weird déjà vu climbing up my spine, leaving chills clear down to my backside.”

  Michelle patted the very deadly-looking Glock on the seat next to her. “We’ll be fine. I’ll call you as soon as we have news. You get that scratch looked at, do you hear me?”

  Grace nodded, glad she hadn’t let on to Michelle that it was more than a scratch. Her friend never would have left, and Grace needed everyone to be gone.

  The second wave of attackers could be on its way.

  Every nerve in Alexios’s body was on fire with his urgency to get Grace back into the fort and out of the open. Not knowing who or what was behind the attack was eating at him, and every attempt he’d made to reach out to Alaric on the shared Atlantean mental pathway met with a vast emptiness. It was unfortunate that human technology like cell phones wouldn’t travel through the portal or succumb to the magic that allowed them to transform themselves and any weapons made of Atlantean metal to mist. He rather liked the idea of dialing 911. At least someone was always available to answer that call.

  Grace waved Michelle off, and he gave her almost two entire seconds to watch them drive away before he was across the parking lot, gently grasping her arm on her uninjured side, and herding her back into the fort.

  “They must have known,” she said. “They must have known that we were training here. But there are two distinct patterns
of attacks, and this one doesn’t fit either.”

  “I agree,” he said grimly, pulling the heavy wooden door shut and barring it. “We’re clearly not drug lords or a criminal gang, that they would be so open.”

  “And they made no attempt to stage this attack as a gas leak or other so-called ‘accidental’ disaster,” she said, bending forward a little and clutching her side more tightly.

  “That’s it.” He lifted her into his arms, ignoring her protests. “You need to be cleaned up and bandaged now, and since I’m the only one here to do it, you’re going to have to bear with my limited first-aid skills.”

  “I can manage.” But her sharply indrawn breath gave the lie to her words. “Well, maybe you could help me a little,” she admitted, leaning her against his chest. “But we should wait until Sam’s friends get here.”

  He strode down the corridor with her in his arms, making sure not to slow down as he passed the entrance to the courtyard. She didn’t need to see the grisly sight again in order to have it burned into her mind. He should know. He had many such scenes burned into his own.

  “Kitchen,” she said. “We keep the first-aid kit in the kitchen.”

  He made a sharp left toward the space Grace’s crew had set up as a temporary kitchen. Sam had told him earlier about how much work it had taken to refit the space so that it was usable but still complied with historical society regulations. Basically, there was a temporary shell fitted into the room that would be removed when the ‘theater troupe’ vacated the premises.

  There was almost no way such a thing would have been allowed before. BV, as Sam called it. Before Vamps. But since the vampires hated the fort and its anti-vampire history, they cared nothing for activities that might damage the historical site.

  He gently lowered Grace to sit on the sturdy wooden table and started to peel her blood-soaked shirt up from the hem. She caught his hands in hers and stopped him. “I can do that,” she said, her voice husky.

  “I know you can do it. But I’m going to do it. You’re pale, and your skin is cold and a little clammy. You’re probably going into shock, and I can’t reach Alaric. You won’t let me take you to see the doctor or to the hospital, so unless I throw you over my shoulder and drag you out of here, which seems counterproductive, you’re going to let me help you.” He hadn’t meant to make a speech, and from the surprised expression on her face, she hadn’t expected one. But, by Poseidon’s balls, he was going to take care of her. Right now.

  “I wasn’t careful enough, or watchful enough, or wary enough. You got hurt and it was my fault. So I am, by all the gods, going to see how bad it is.” By the time he finished speaking, his jaw was clenched so tightly that it ached.

  Grace narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin, defiance in every line of her pale, strained face. But then, because she was Grace, she did the unexpected. She laughed and raised her arms, wincing a little as she did. “There are so many things wrong with what you just said that I don’t have the energy to even begin to deal with it,” she said. “So how about you just help me out of this shirt and let’s get the scratch cleaned up?”

  Alexios unsheathed one of his daggers and shook his head. “Put your arms down. I don’t want to hurt you any more by wrestling this T-shirt over your head. It’s not like you’re ever going to want to wear it again.”

  As she slowly lowered her arms, grimacing with the pain from her side, he pulled the bottom of her shirt a little ways out from her body and sliced the fabric right up the middle and then pulled the two sides apart, exposing the best and worst things he’d seen all night. Her lovely breasts, curved in white lace, and an ugly gouge that ran a jagged eight inches or so down her side.

  The drums tried to open their persistent percussion in his skull again, but he pushed them away. Slammed an internal door on the berserker rage. He had no time to lose control. He had to clench his hands into fists for a moment, though, to stop them from trembling. A few inches’ difference in where those claws had landed, and Grace wouldn’t be sitting on the table in front of him.

  She’d be lying on the cold, hard ground of the courtyard with the other two who had lost their lives for no good reason at all this night.

  “It’s clotted. That’s good. If it were deeper, it would still be bleeding. We just need to keep this cleaned up and bandaged,” he finally managed to say with some measure of calm.

  “At least I don’t need rabies shots,” she said, attempting a smile. “The New England Journal of Medicine ran a report of a study where it was definitively proved that shifters cannot carry rabies.”

  He turned to the sink, yanking drawers open and pulling out clean dishtowels. Then he ran the water until it was hot, and wet two of the towels, leaving the others dry for the moment.

  “The New England Journal of Medicine? Is that required reading, then, for rebel commanders? Take a deep breath. This is going to sting a little bit.” He placed the hot, wet towel against her wound and held it in place.

  She gasped but didn’t pull away from him. “Oh, you know. Medical journals, Shifter Monthly, Vampire Quarterly , all the usual.”

  He raised an eyebrow, sure that she was teasing him. Almost sure. Her strained smile gave nothing away, though. He gently wiped her side, trying to catch all of the bright red mixed blood and water that ran freely from the heated cloth. Then he threw that cloth away and warmed a second. “You hold this one in place,” he told her, putting her hands over the cloth. “I need to go do a quick patrol and make sure there aren’t any more of them, and check on Donaldson and our prisoner.”

  “If they come, you yell for me,” she said fiercely. “This scratch won’t stop me. Promise.”

  He looked her in the eyes and promised. Then he headed for the armory, so he could load up. He’d feel a lot better with a sword in his hand and a couple of the humans’ guns at the ready. Whatever resource it took to protect her, Atlantean or human, he would use. If there were more attackers coming, they would all die. But he’d kill them all and die in the doing of it before he’d ever call for Grace to help.

  He’d never before felt such a complete lack of guilt at breaking a promise.

  Chapter 16

  Grace waited until the sound of his footsteps had faded before she released the moan she’d been holding in for what felt like hours. She gingerly scooted down and off the table, holding the wet towel to her side, afraid to actually look at the damage. She’d managed to keep her eyes on Alexios the entire time he was cleaning her side, almost mesmerized by the combination of fury and concern in his expression. The ferocious warrior treating her with such care and gentleness that she’d nearly cried from the tenderness of it.

  But now she needed to man up. Woman up? Whatever. It was time to be brave and look at the damage. She’d been clawed before, but something about her heritage helped her to heal a little faster. A little better. So her skin remained relatively scar free. But this time the injury burned like somebody had taken a blowtorch to her side, and she had a feeling it was bad.

  At the sink, she ran the hot water again and finally pulled the cloth away from the wound, wincing a little when the edges of her skin tried to stick to the fabric. Oh, damn. It was bad. No, bad was an understatement.

  Just a scratch, she’d told Michelle. But a scratch deep enough that his claws had hooked on her ribs, scraping bone, on their way down her right side. Jagged enough that the skin would never heal properly. She’d have her first scar, all right.

  And it was going to be a doozy. Great. Just when she finally had somebody she wanted to see her naked.

  She laughed at her oh-holy-bat-shit-inappropriate flash of vanity and the laugh came out shaky and oddly high-pitched. The sound of someone verging on hysterics. There was no way she’d give in to that.

  Focus.

  She lifted her left arm to reach for the first-aid kit on the shelf, then fumbled with the catch and opened the lid. Maybe she didn’t have to worry about rabies, but infection was always an issue. She pulled out a
jumbo-sized box of Neosporin and opened it to get to the tube inside. Squeezing a hefty-sized dollop of the ointment onto her fingers, she took a deep breath and held it in her lungs, and then smoothed the ointment over the jagged but now clean edges of the wound.

  In spite of the chill air, sweat broke out on her face from the pain of even that gentle pressure, and the room went swirly for a minute. She grabbed the edge of the counter and hung on until the dizziness passed. Some commander. Trying to faint from a little scratch.

  She dropped the tube back in the first-aid kit and then washed her hands. Her sodden shirt was suddenly too clammy and nasty, and she couldn’t bear to feel it touching her skin. She pulled the remains of it off her shoulders and arms and then wadded it up and threw it in the wastebasket with the used and bloody towels. For a moment, she stared, entranced at the sight. The vivid scarlet of the bloody cloth lay in stark relief against the white plastic garbage bag.