Atlantis Redeemed Read online

  “Brennan,” she called out. “Do you see it?”

  “Shut up,” one of the guards snarled at her, shoving her into the bars of the cage. Brennan roared out a threat in Atlantean that ripped up from his soul and forced its way out from between his clenched teeth.

  “Shut up, you,” the guard behind him snarled, before smashing his gun into the side of Brennan’s head so hard it knocked him down to the floor.

  “The wiring, Brennan. Look at the wiring,” Tiernan said, ignoring the guard who threatened her again. “It’s the equivalent of an electric fence. Didn’t you say—”

  She cried out—one of the guards must have struck her—and Brennan, driven beyond endurance, lunged up from the floor, only to meet the butt of another guard’s gun on its way down to slam into his face. The world went hazy and he fought for consciousness. If he passed out now, he’d wake up not knowing Tiernan, with both of them trapped here. His one and only goal was to stay awake, stay alive, rescue his mate.

  No matter how many had to die for him to do it.

  Chapter 25

  Yellowstone National Park, Pack Headquarters

  Alexios paced back and forth in the spacious living area of Lucas’s HQ, stopping every few minutes to shut his eyes and try to establish a mental pathway to Brennan.

  “Nothing. Gods damn it, nothing. It’s wrong, somehow. Not silence or an emptiness, which would happen if he were out of range, but more an odd static and a—” He broke off. He trusted Lucas completely, but there were several other Pack members in the large wood-and-brick room, and he didn’t want to give away what he’d felt from Brennan. There were too many variables, too many chances that one of them might be compromised.

  It had happened before. The very night before, in fact.

  Lucas gave him a narrow-eyed stare and then nodded almost imperceptibly. “Let’s set up a perimeter watch,” he ordered his second. “I want everybody out there, keeping us safe.”

  The shifter jumped up, not quite meeting Lucas’s eyes. Alexios did not fully understand Pack politics and hierarchy and believed none but shifters really could, but he knew enough about dominance and shifters to realize that Lucas was one of the most powerful alphas he’d ever encountered, on the level, power-wise, of Ethan of the Florida panther shifters.

  Thinking of Ethan led his tumbling thoughts to Marie, sister of Bastien, one of his closest friends and a very powerful warrior. He still couldn’t believe Bastien’s sister, Marie, leader of the Temple of the Nereids, had fallen in love with Ethan during such a brief trip to Florida. They were trying to work it out, but as Grace had said once, Ethan and Marie gave a whole new meaning to the long-distance in the term “long-distance relationship.” Atlantis-to-Miami trips took quite a bit of planning. For Ethan to travel to Atlantis was, as yet, forbidden.

  “Deep thoughts?” Lucas said, and Alexios looked up from his mental ramblings to realize the room had emptied out and they were alone.

  “It’s something bad, Lucas,” Alexios said, suddenly whirling around to smash his fists down on the pile of wood near the fireplace. He watched, almost unseeing, as the pile collapsed with a crash and logs rolled across the floor.

  “Honey will love that,” Lucas said dryly. He crossed to a side table and poured them both glasses of a clear brown liquid, then handed one to Alexios. “What is it?”

  Alexios took a deep sniff of fine Scotch whiskey, then drained his glass in two gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and Lucas snatched the glass out of his hand, pointedly looking down at the logs. “I like these glasses,” he said, holding up the bottle and raising an eyebrow.

  Alexios shook his head. “No more. I need a clear head. Brennan isn’t gone, exactly, but he isn’t there, either. When I open a pathway, I get a flooding sensation of rage and violence, almost animalistic in nature.”

  Lucas’s face went hard. “Don’t give me that bigoted bullshit. It’s not the animals who kill each other for no reason.”

  “I didn’t mean that, and you know it. It was more fury and unreasoning pain, like an animal caught in a trap. Does that make more sense?”

  Lucas drained his own glass and put it down on the table, considering. “Would pain alone block the pathway?”

  “No. That’s the problem. Something else, some kind of magical or psychic interference or—” His gaze went to the lamps, and another connection formed. “Electricity. If he’s somehow bound with electricity or held in one of their science labs, which we have to assume is filled with electrical equipment—” The obvious conclusion hit him with the force of a tsunami. “Oh, by all the gods, Lucas. What if they’re messing with Brennan’s brain? If their science conflicts with Poseidon’s curse, it may destroy Brennan in the process.”

  “Stop. Stop thinking that way, it achieves nothing,” Lucas said. “First of all, they haven’t been missing that long, right? So it’s unlikely that the scientists have had time to experiment on anybody. Plus they think he’s Mr. Money-bags. They’ll want to play nice with him, at least until they can figure out how to get their murdering hands on that money.”

  “If they haven’t broken through his cover story,” Alexios said grimly. “We don’t know what they know or what resources they have. You of all people know that.”

  Two more of Lucas’s wolves had gone insane during the night, one slaughtering his wife in their bed and then killing himself with knives. He’d gotten quite a lot of carving done before he finally died of the blood loss, apparently. Lucas, who had seen a great deal of violence in his life, had gone a little pale around the edges when telling Alexios about it. The second to succumb to the madness, convinced he was a were-hawk, had climbed very high up in one of the tallest trees near Pack headquarters and tried to fly. Even wolf shifters couldn’t survive some things. The man was dead, every bone in his body shattered.

  Lucas’s face hardened. “When I get my hands on this Litton—”

  “If it really is Litton. We don’t have proof yet,” Alexios reminded him. “That’s why Tiernan convinced Brennan that they had to go back. We all knew it was dangerous, we just thought they had a little bit of time before the noose tightened, since the scientists clearly believed Brennan to be who he claimed to be. Litton is desperate for funding.”

  “He can’t get any from normal sources, since he’s doing the mad science. No ethical companies, hospitals, or government organizations would fund him.”

  Alexios shot him a look. “The unethical ones are still a pretty deep pool. Especially with all the radical shifter hate groups springing up in the past few years.”

  “But he went for Brennan’s bait. My best computer guy set up that billionaire businessman cover story,” Lucas insisted. “It would take CIA-level access and knowledge to hack past it. I still think the cover story held.”

  Alexios crossed to the window and stared out into deepening shadows of dusk. “Then maybe that didn’t matter anymore. If you can control the mind of a billionaire, you can have all of his money. Why take a mere ten million when you can have everything?”

  “We’ll find them,” Lucas told him. “Now that Honey took the children and all the young and elderly away, we’re left with only our best fighting force, and no worries about family to distract us. We’ll find them.”

  “We’ll find them, all right,” Alexios vowed, his hands on the hilts of his daggers. “If we have to take every damn scientist in that entire conference hostage, we’ll find them.”

  Chapter 26

  Litton’s labs, deep underground

  Brennan slammed his body against the bars, and again the electricity zapped him so hard that it knocked him to the floor. This time, probably the dozenth, he stayed down a little longer. He was beginning to weaken and tire; an animal trapped in a cage, his much-prized logic and control gone.

  Tiernan. The rage and terror built and built inside him, overwhelming him, driving him to escape, to protect her, and he was killing himself trying. But his frenzied mind had gone feral—insisting h
e had no other choice. He gathered himself for another charge.

  “Brennan.”

  Just a single word, just his name, but it had the power to calm something; to soothe the edges of the madness long enough for him to look up and find her. They’d put her in the cage right next to him, and most of the guards still stood around the room, calling out taunts to Brennan and vile remarks to Tiernan.

  She ignored all of it, an oasis of purity in the midst of the cruelty and violence. She ignored the guards and the cell and everything but Brennan, focusing her gaze on him so intently that he could almost feel the weight of it, tangible, upon his skin.

  “Brennan, you have to calm down,” she said, trying to smile a little, perhaps to offer reassurance. She was trying to comfort him, when he had let her be captured. Allowed her to be harmed.

  When they escaped, he would spend the rest of his life making it up to her.

  “I need you to be calm. For me. I’m freaking out here, and you’re not helping,” she said softly.

  Shame swamped him. He must find his control, for her even more than for himself. He closed his eyes, searching for his serene center, but it was impossible. His newly found emotions were churning like a tempest at sea. He could manage a semblance of tranquillity—the thinnest of veneers—but no true calm. Not until he had her safe in Atlantis, preferably locked in his rooms, for the next hundred years at least.

  “Brennan?”

  He opened his eyes. She was so pale; her eyes dark and haunted. She needed him, she’d said. He’d be damned if he’d let her down.

  “That man,” she began, her voice soft and trembling. “I—I killed him.”

  He moved a little closer to the bars between them, a small movement so as not to attract the guards’ attention. “I know. He was a monster. I saw him hurt your friend in that video. He deserved to die.”

  She flinched a little. “Is it so simple in your world? You just pick who deserves to die? No trial? No remorse? It’s not like that for me.”

  He remained silent, not knowing how to comfort her. Emotion was too new to him—a foreign language in which he could not navigate nuance. Wielding words like blunt weapons would cause more harm than help now.

  “And yet I killed him, you’re thinking,” she said. “But it wasn’t like that. I—I picked up that dagger to defend myself when one of the guards came at me, and then you were there fighting them, and the lights were off, and I heard his voice and swung around. I was going to hit him, and, well, I guess I did hit him, but the knife was in my hand and . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and she covered her face with her hands. He could tell she was sobbing, because each shaking movement of her shoulders fractured another piece off the edges of his heart. He needed to hold her, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The electric charge on the bars would kill a human with any prolonged contact. It had almost knocked him out, and he had an Atlantean warrior’s strength and endurance. He tried to find his calm center again, to analyze their options, but the only thing he came up with was, again, the obvious: they were in very deep trouble.

  “We’re kind of screwed, aren’t we?” she said, unknowingly echoing his thoughts as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

  “No. We are not. Remember that Alexios will be on his way to find us very soon.” He put far more confidence in his voice than he felt. Alaric had told them that any type of massive electrical force would interfere with their abilities. Brennan studied the wiring connected to the bars and conceded that the entire setup certainly qualified as massive.

  Oh, yes. They were definitely screwed.

  “That was a lie. You don’t believe Alexios is on his way at all, do you? I think we should—” Her eyes widened as she jerked her head up to stare at something over Brennan’s left shoulder.

  “How about you let me do the thinking,” came the surly, accented voice from behind him. “These morons guarding you should let me do the thinking, too.”

  Brennan slowly turned and positioned himself so that he could see the new player but still keep Tiernan in his line of sight. The man was built like one of Yellowstone’s bison. Thick, broad, all muscle and no neck. He wasn’t quite as tall as Brennan but twice as wide, probably not an ounce of fat on him. He also was far from stupid; keen intelligence shone from his unusual gray eyes as he assessed the situation.

  “I hear you’ve been making a run at the bars, over and over,” he said to Brennan. “Want to tell me how you’re not dead yet?”

  Brennan said nothing, just swept a dismissive glance over the man.

  “Right. Well, you’re not a shifter, and you’re not a vampire, and you’re sure as hell not Fae, so I’m wondering what other kind of wee beastie we’ve caught in our net.”

  British. Or somewhere in the British Isles. Brennan hadn’t heard “wee beastie” in several hundred years.

  “A rich beastie,” one of the goons called out, and the rest of them started laughing.

  “Shut up, or I’ll shut you up,” the newcomer said, but without heat. He was still studying Brennan, who had the uncomfortable feeling that the man was trying to mind-probe him. Some definite psychic power there.

  “Stay out of my brain,” he growled.

  The man laughed. “You’ll wish it was me in your brain after Litton gets done with you. Crazy bugger is a menace. It really ought to be him locked up in here like an animal, but he’s the one that signs the checks.”

  “Is money all you care about?” Tiernan called out. “You’re willing to torture your fellow human beings for that monster—and all for money?”

  The guards started laughing, but the British one did not. He simply trained that dead, measuring stare on Tiernan. “I’ll do a lot of things for money. Nothing else matters, does it? And if you think your boyfriend here is human, well, I’d guess you’re going to have a very interesting honeymoon.”

  “Yeah, Smitty, if they live to have a honeymoon. Odds are bad,” one of the guards called out, to the loud amusement of his colleagues.

  Smitty, if that’s who he was, aimed that dead stare at the loudmouth, who quit laughing immediately.

  So. This was the one of whom to beware. Brennan carefully noted everything about him. The time of reckoning would come, and soon. Smitty must be first in line to die. He was the biggest threat.

  Smitty walked around the outside of the cages until he reached Tiernan’s cell. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but take your clothes off.”

  “What?” Tiernan moved away so fast that she nearly backed into the bars. Brennan called out a warning and she stopped, only a breath away from a massive jolt of electricity.

  “You’d survive it,” Smitty told her. “Once.”

  Brennan found that he was cursing; a steady, virulent stream of ancient Atlantean that should have singed the flesh off the man’s bones. He switched to English. “Touch her and die. I will hunt you down, peel the skin from your body, and eat the beating heart from your chest if you touch so much as one hair on her head.”

  Smitty’s head jerked up at the icy menace in Brennan’s voice, and he, too, seemed to mark Brennan as the one true threat in the room. “I don’t respond to threats, and I don’t hurt women,” he said flatly. “But these morons almost certainly didn’t check you two for weapons, and I’m not going to wake up dead because your fancy piece there slipped a switchblade in my carotid artery, the way she did to that idiot upstairs.”

  “Carotid artery?” Tiernan repeated, and her face drained of all residual color until she resembled a ghost or, worse, a vampire.

  Smitty grinned, displaying large, crooked teeth. “It’s the artery—”

  “I know what it is,” Tiernan shrieked, an edge of madness in her voice. “I didn’t do it, though. I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean it.” She abruptly sat on the floor, pulled her knees up to her chest, and dropped her head down on them. “I’d like this day to be over now,” she whispered, but Smitty heard her.

  “Right. You can get some sleep in a
few minutes, but first I want those clothes,” Smitty said, producing a large and deadly looking gun from somewhere. “Do it now, or I’ll shoot your boyfriend in the leg.” He cast a dispassionate glance over at Brennan. “You’re next, cupcake, so you may as well strip down now.”

  Brennan’s rage consumed him, and he hurled himself at the bars, desperate to get at Smitty. The jolt from the high voltage seared through him, knocking him back several feet.

  “Brennan. Brennan!” Tiernan was standing up now, pulling her shirt over her head. “Stop. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. We just need to get through it.”

  He stood there, his body shuddering with the force of the electrical shock and the fury, fighting to control himself, but when he raised his head, gasping for breath, he met Tiernan’s gaze and the connection between them locked into place with an almost audible snap. He’d seen inside her soul, and he knew what she needed now.

  She needed him to be in control—for her. There was no way in the nine hells he’d let her down.

  The fury cooled to ice, and he nodded. “Yes. None of this matters.” He yanked off his own shirt and then stripped out of his jeans as Tiernan did the same. The sight of her, trembling in her undergarments, triggered his rage again but he simply funneled it into the ice, to be carefully preserved for later. For when he fought his way free and killed them all.

  The guards outside the cells were hooting and making lewd remarks, but most of them shut up when Brennan slowly turned his head and trained his gaze on them. Marking them. One by one.

  Smitty held his hand through the bars, and Tiernan, stumbling, took her clothes to him. He took them and shook them, then patted them down for weapons.

  “If you’d turn around, miss,” he said, still emotionless. “I think you can keep your knickers if I can see all the way around that you’re not concealing anything in them.”