Atlantis Redeemed Page 18

  That’s not fair and you know it, her conscience accused her. You told him never. That you could never, ever be with him. What would you have had him do? Abduct you?

  Yes. Maybe.

  No.

  She would do anything—anything—to keep that hideous vision from coming true. Even staying away from the one man who’d ever made her feel safe, even just for a little while. They’d succeed on this mission, and then they’d part. Brennan could figure his future out without her.

  And if she could ever figure out a way, she was going to kick Poseidon’s ass for him.

  Brennan made a sharp turn and knocked on a door on the right side of the corridor. It wasn’t a particularly elegant or ornate door, but it did look sturdy. So did the two warriors standing guard outside.

  Tiernan raised an eyebrow. “Guards? Inside the palace? Inside Atlantis?” Her journalist’s nose was smelling news, but she didn’t like the implications at all. If the princes thought they needed guards here, then the threat of violence must be high. Brennan’s mouth flattened, but he said nothing, and the guards remained silent, too. Maybe they had to; maybe there was some kind of silence required while on guard duty, like in London.

  The threat, then. Would they call it treason? Or sedition? She was uncomfortably reminded that she knew next to nothing about monarchies, beyond what she’d read in Margaret George or Philippa Gregory novels. History had never been her thing.

  She was more a current-events girl.

  Woo, boy, was she going to help put some current events on the map. The thought of it—the challenge—helped lift her out of the dark pit of gloom she’d sunken into after the visions in the soul-meld. She was Tiernan freaking Butler, and she would figure it out on her own.

  She always did.

  Alone again. She tried very hard to ignore the pain that kept wrenching her chest at the thought of it.

  The door swung open and she sighed with relief. Better to worry about treason now, and a lifetime of loneliness later.

  It was Conlan himself who had opened the door, something she wouldn’t have expected from the high prince of Atlantis, but then again, it wasn’t the first time he’d surprised her.

  “Tiernan, be welcome,” he said now, all black hair and great cheekbones; tall, dark, and princely. Nearly as gorgeous as Brennan, definitely imposing in his physical presence. Like Brennan.

  Surely she’d get over comparing every man she met to Brennan sometime soon. Right?

  Brennan did that mysterious single-eyebrow lift again, but not even a hint of warmth cut through the ice in his expression. “Tiernan?”

  “I’m coming,” she muttered to him, wondering how or even if she should explain what had happened to her during the vision. “Hold your seahorses.”

  Conlan laughed and bowed to her. “Oh, Tiernan Butler. You are indeed very welcome to Atlantis.”

  They followed Conlan into the room, and Tiernan’s stomach let loose with a very unladylike growl of happiness to see the spread of lunch laid out on the long wooden table. She was starving, suddenly, in spite of the circumstances. Or maybe because of them.

  “Lunch looks great,” she said, forcing a cheerful tone to her voice. She smiled at the room in general, encompassing High Prince Conlan and his wife, Riley. Her smile only dimmed a little when she caught sight of the high priest, Alaric, in the far corner, doing his usual brooding, menacing thing. For some reason she didn’t want to explore too deeply, the theme music from Phantom of the Opera always started playing in her head when she saw Alaric.

  Riley grinned at her. “Welcome back. Want to see the somewhat drooly center of my existence?” The princess held up a small baby and Tiernan stumbled to a stop, the memory of the baby in her vision—of herself holding up the baby in such a similar way—freezing her in her tracks. Something deep inside Tiernan cried out, but she kept the pleasant smile on her face. All that undercover work was finally paying off in terms of her acting skills. She’d be up for an Oscar any day now, at this rate.

  Riley’s smile faded, though, and her eyes widened. “You—you and Brennan—”

  Brennan, who was leaning against the wall, stood up and bowed to Riley. “I am here, my lady.”

  The “my lady” threw Tiernan off, and her guard slipped, just a little. Riley suddenly cried out.

  “What happened?” she said, her voice shaking. “Between the two of you? So strong—but so wrong, so very, very wrong.”

  “I would prefer that you refrain from using your aknasha powers on me, with all respect, Your Highness,” Brennan said, a muscle in his jaw jumping. Clearly he was controlling his anger out of respect for the princess. “Emotional empathy is not—”

  “Not applicable to you, yes, I know,” said Riley. “Never before, at least, although there was that one time with Quinn.” Her face had gone as white as those fluffy towels in Brennan’s shower, Tiernan noted with interest and dismay.

  “But now . . .” Riley’s voice trailed off and then she handed the baby to Conlan and crossed to Brennan. “You’re running flat out on sheer adrenaline and pain,” she murmured, lightly touching his arm.

  Brennan’s jaw tightened, but he held still under her touch, which, out of pure contrariness, made Tiernan want to rip the woman’s hand off and stuff it down her skinny throat.

  Riley’s head whipped around, and she pinned Tiernan in place with the weight of her penetrating stare. “You, too? You and Brennan? But how is this possible?”

  Conlan, cradling his child in one arm, put the other around his wife. “Maybe you could tell the rest of us what’s going on here?”

  The color drained out of Riley’s face until she turned white and stumbled toward the comfortable chair she’d been sitting in a few minutes earlier. “I think they need to explain it,” she said, waving a hand in the general direction of Brennan and Tiernan. “Because the thing where Brennan hasn’t had any emotion for centuries?” Riley whistled, a long, slow sound. “That’s so over.”

  Alaric stepped forward, gliding through the room so elegantly and effortlessly that Tiernan almost wanted to check him for a pulse, in case he really was a soulless vampire.

  The thought of Alaric’s reaction if she did made her grin a little bit, but she stepped back and gave him a wide berth as he headed straight for Brennan.

  “The curse?” the priest demanded, getting right up in Brennan’s face. “Did the curse finally come to fruition and you have not informed me of it?”

  Brennan’s icy stare would have intimidated most people enough that they’d back off, but either Alaric was brave or he was stupid, because he poked Brennan in the chest. “Too busy playing with your human?” he said, sneering. “Did I not command you to tell me the instant you felt any—”

  The rest of them didn’t find out what Alaric had been about to say, because Brennan hauled off and punched him in the stomach. Hard. Alaric flew backward from the force of it and ended up tripping over a cushioned chair and sprawling into it. Then he just sat there, shock and murder fighting for control over his expression, his eyes glowing hotter and hotter with power.

  “I should kill you for that,” Alaric finally said, and it was all the more terrifying because of the utterly calm way he said it.

  “You can try,” Brennan replied, baring his teeth. “I would welcome the chance to kick your pompous, overbearing ass after all these centuries, youngling, so be prepared to bring your best.”

  “Youngling?” Alaric’s eyes were popping out of his head, and it wasn’t a good look for him. “Did you call me a youngling?”

  “I was one of Poseidon’s elite when you were still suckling your mother’s tit, youngling,” Brennan taunted. “Show some respect for your elders.”

  Tiernan and Riley both gasped at the same time and shared a glance of utter shock.

  “So,” Conlan said mildly. “I see that Brennan has his emotions back.”

  “Oh, I will show you some respect, warrior,” Alaric snarled, flying up out of the chair. Literally flyin
g. He sprang at Brennan, but Tiernan had been ready for him, and she ran to put herself between the two of them, realizing even as she did it that it was one of the stupidest things she’d ever done in her life.

  “Stop!” She held up her hands, knowing she couldn’t in a million years hold off Alaric. He stopped in midair, though, at her command, almost as though she had some kind of magical power. She blinked at him, then down at her hands.

  “Um, did I just do that?”

  A low rumbling started behind her, sort of like a freight train picking up speed, and it took her a couple of seconds to realize it was Brennan, swearing a blue streak from the sound of it, in ancient Atlantean.

  “You are an idiot,” he yelled at her. Well, he’d been yelling at her for a while by then, but those were the first words in English.

  “I was just trying to protect you, you lunkhead,” she shouted back. “He wanted to kill you and no wonder. You can’t just go around punching people like that.”

  She was so furious that her mind didn’t know what to do with her anger, so her body took over and did the stupidest thing possible.

  She punched Brennan.

  Right in the stomach, which only hurt her hand on the steel bars he evidently called muscles. He didn’t even flinch, just looked down at her, every line and angle of his face hardening in utter fury.

  “You could have been killed,” he said, still shouting, even though she was standing right in front of him.

  “Better that than have you forget me and our baby, over and over, for the rest of my life,” she shouted right back in his face, without thinking, without considering, without any care for how it would sound. All she knew was that the words came boiling up from deep inside and wouldn’t be stopped.

  Everything else, however, stopped. All sound, all talking, even all breathing seemed to go silent around the two of them. The silence made Tiernan painfully aware of their audience.

  Suddenly, shockingly, Alaric started laughing. He punched Brennan in the arm, but it was a friendly, guy sort of punch, and there was no sign of the violence he’d intended only minutes before. “Oh, this is priceless. The baby? She’s pregnant, too? And Alexios and Grace haven’t had a chance to make their big announcement?”

  The priest started laughing again. “Atlantis is turning into a giant nursery. This is how the humans will finally defeat us. They’re turning our most prized warriors, one by one, into diaper-changing weaklings.”

  Brennan’s eyes widened and he got a panicked look on his face, but before he or Tiernan could say anything, Alaric shook his head and vanished. Just poof and gone. No mist, no special effects—he was just gone.

  Tiernan whirled around, searching for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Did he just—”

  “He does that,” Riley said. “It’s one of his many annoying habits. Deep down he’s a good guy.”

  “Really, really deep, I’m guessing,” Tiernan muttered.

  “So, you’re pregnant? Um, not to be analytical, but didn’t you and Brennan just meet each other again yesterday?” Riley tried to be subtle about the way she was checking out Tiernan’s flat stomach.

  “No, I’m not pregnant. It was a vision, that’s all. Of the future. A future that’s not going to happen now, okay?”

  “I think maybe you have a few things to tell us,” Conlan said, his voice still mild, but it wasn’t a request, and they all knew it. It was definitely a royal command.

  Brennan ignored his prince, though. He had eyes only for Tiernan, and the ice that had chilled them was gone. Melted. Now his green gaze was burning right through her and he was looking at her like he wanted nothing more than to strip her bare right there and then and take her up against the wall.

  She swallowed and then took a deep, shaky breath and looked at Conlan. At Riley. Anywhere but at Brennan. “Once upon a time, a god cursed a warrior,” she began, not quite knowing how to go on past that.

  Everyone was silent for so long she started to panic, but then help came from an unexpected source.

  “The curse was also a blessing, had the warrior but known it,” Brennan said.

  Her shoulders slumped with relief, but before she could think of the next line, Brennan grabbed her by the shoulders, lifted her up off her feet, and kissed her in a hard, passionate, take-no-prisoners kind of kiss. The kind of kiss that told her and everyone else in the room that he was damn well going to get her naked later and she was going to love every minute of it.

  After he released her, and her knees stopped wobbling, she just stood there, stunned, for a bit. “Well,” she finally managed. “Maybe we’ll be able to figure something out.”

  Brennan’s smile was more wolflike than Lucas’s had ever been, and he clasped her hand firmly before he turned to face Conlan again.

  “Let me tell you about a very old curse, and the woman with the power to save me from it,” Brennan said.

  Riley took Aidan back from Conlan and walked over to the table, still covered with as-yet-untouched food. “Let’s eat while you talk,” she said. “I have a feeling this is going to be a long story.”

  “All the best stories are,” Tiernan said, finally daring to feel like they could figure this out. “I have a story to tell you, too, about a fox shifter named Susannah, the scientists who killed her, and how Brennan is going to help me stop them.”

  “He is?” Conlan asked, aiming a long, measuring stare at her.

  “Yes,” Brennan said, still holding her hand. “I am.”

  Chapter 21

  It took an hour, but Brennan finally finished telling them every bit of it. The full nature of the curse, much of what had happened in Yellowstone, and his reaction to Tiernan. He’d left out certain parts of the tale that were nobody’s business but his own, but he’d noticed the way Tiernan watched him. She knew what he was leaving out and certainly could guess at why. In fact, she’d done some creative editing of her own as Brennan, believing himself honor-bound to do so, began to confess to his attack on Tiernan in the hotel room.

  “Everything got a little crazy then,” she’d said, interrupting him. “Then when Litton’s flunky, Wesley, showed up . . .”

  Without missing a beat, she’d filled in the gaps of his story, her keen journalistic observations contributing quite a lot that he’d missed. But never, not once, had she returned to that particular part of the story, and she cut him off a couple of times when he edged close to the subject.

  “You do not have to protect me,” he’d snapped at one point.

  She’d planted her hands on those luscious hips and stared him down. “Tell that to Alaric,” she’d sweetly suggested, and rage burned through him again at the thought that Alaric could have hurt her.

  Rage and something deeper. More possessive. She had hurled herself in harm’s way—in Alaric’s way—for him. Even after telling him they had no future together.

  It was clear proof that she cared for him, too. Now he only had to find out what had happened during the soul-meld and somehow fix it. Break the curse. Persuade Poseidon to allow him to keep her, forever. To take her as his wife.

  “You can’t go back,” Conlan said. “To Yellowstone, I mean, although of course I don’t see how you can go back to the time before Tiernan broke the curse either, but let’s leave the metaphysical discussion for later.”

  Riley nodded, though she looked troubled. “You can’t even be sure you’d learn anything of value, Tiernan. They’re going to lie to you, at the very least. More likely they’ll just try to kill you.”

  Tiernan glanced at Brennan, a question in her eyes, and he nodded. It was time to tell all of it. “Tiernan is a truth teller,” he said. “She possesses the lost Atlantean Gift of divining falsehood whenever it’s spoken.”

  “Almost whenever it’s spoken,” she corrected him. “Sociopaths, pure narcissists, and vampires don’t register with my . . . talent.”

  “Atlantis has always put truth tellers immediately to death,” Conlan said, and suddenly he loomed over her,
his eyes shuttered and the threat of her immediate murder in every line of his face. “I see no reason why that tradition should not continue.”

  Brennan instantly threw himself between Tiernan and Conlan, his hands going for the daggers he’d left in his rooms. To kill a prince was treason, punishable by death. He’d willingly pay that price.

  “Conlan,” Riley said, rising from her chair. “No!”

  Tiernan caught her breath, but then she laughed and put her hand on Brennan’s arm. An instant wave of peace swept through him, taking his rage with it. “It’s the tuba. You’re the tuba when you lie, Prince Conlan.”

  The menacing expression vanished from Conlan’s face as though it had never been there, replaced by one of quizzical interest. “Tuba?”

  “Lies resonate with me on a sort of sound-wave frequency, if that makes any sense. Some lies are like fingernails on a chalkboard, or a petulant rooster screeching at dawn. Your lie sounded like the tuba, but played very badly by a beginning student.” She grinned. “Sorry if that was insulting, Your Highness.”

  Conlan grinned right back at her. “It’s only insulting if you ever call me ‘Your Highness’ again.”

  Brennan tried to keep up, but the adrenaline shooting through his body was muddling his mind. “It was a test?”

  “It was a test,” Conlan confirmed. “I’d heard stories that the ancient truth tellers used a musical analogy to describe their Gift. I find it interesting that the old ways still ring true.”

  “Ring true? No pun intended?” Tiernan laughed and squeezed Brennan’s arm. “It’s okay to stand down now, but thank you for protecting me.”

  Riley blew out a breath. It was not a happy sound. “We shall talk, my darling husband,” she told Conlan. The baby started to cry, either alert to the tension in the room or waking from his nap.

  “I think Prince Aidan has had enough of war-room talk,” Brennan said.

  “I hope he never has to face war-room talk on his own,” Riley said, a cloud passing over her face as she cuddled her fussy son close.