Atlantis Awakening Read online

“Stop. Stop it, Erin. There’s nothing we can do but go forward,” he said. “If Justice had the opportunity to protect Quinn and Jack and kick a little vampire ass, he would have gone for it. We can only hope that our quest for the Nereid’s Heart brings us to all three of them.”

  “Damnit, when will this end? Every step we take seems to bring us further and further into Caligula’s trap.” She slammed her hands down on the ground, then curled her fingers into claws in the snow. “I don’t know how much more…Wait! What’s that?”

  She lifted something white and shook snow off of it, then handed it to him. “It’s paper, probably trash, but it’s a big coincidence that Justice’s hair was right here, and I don’t believe much in coincidence. You open it.”

  He carefully unrolled the ball of paper and read the words written in dark, slashing handwriting, then looked up at Erin and gave a shout of triumph. “Finally! Chalk one up for the good guys! It’s a note from Justice with directions and a map. It says warded opening Point Success. Does that mean anything to you?”

  She took the paper from him and examined it. “Yes, it means we have to get to fourteen thousand feet and figure out a way to pass through another witch’s warding.”

  Turning her vivid blue eyes up to meet his gaze, she bared her teeth in a feral smile that would have made any warrior proud. It certainly made Ven proud, even as fear for her ripped at him. “Then we can join Justice in the vampire ass-kicking party.”

  Quinn lay still in the darkness, slowly working her way back to consciousness, and wondered if anybody had gotten the license plate of the truck that had run her over. The image of the vampire’s fist coming at her face flashed into her mind, and she sat up fast.

  Big mistake. Huge.

  The concussion she’d probably sustained swirled nausea through her body, and she leaned over and threw up the remainder of her previous night’s dinner onto the stone floor. When her aching stomach had pushed out everything it had, she scrubbed her mouth with a shaky hand and wished for water. Actually, she wished for a toothbrush and some mouthwash, too. Why not go all the way and wish big?

  The thought forced a rusty laugh past her parched lips, and, as if in response to the sound, a viciously bright light seared into her eyes.

  “If you hadn’t turned your head at the last second, my fist surely would have driven your nose into your skull,” said an unpleasantly familiar voice from behind the headache-inducing light.

  “Well, nobody wants that, do they? How would I even blow my nose without my brains coming out?” She was pleased to hear that her voice sounded faintly mocking, instead of faintly terrified. Which, to be honest, was a more honest description of how she felt, considering they’d stripped her of her weapons, may have killed her partner, and she was acting with diminished capacity.

  Guess Jack was right. Sometimes the rebel leader was a girl.

  The light lowered so it wasn’t shining directly in her eyes, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Dry heaving had been imminent, and that was definitely not on her top ten list of fun ways to spend her free time.

  But now she could see the vamp’s face, and that wasn’t much better. He looked a tad bit angry.

  “If Caligula didn’t want you for his little demonstration, I’d take care of you myself,” he hissed. “But don’t worry, bitch. I may still get my hands on you when he’s done. And I’ll make sure you scream for a very long time.”

  At the mention of Caligula’s name, Quinn ran strategies through her mind, considering and just as rapidly discarding most of them. There wasn’t much she could do until she found an opening. For now she’d have to wait and watch. But if they gave her the slightest chance, she was going to dance on the salted grave of one very old ex–Roman emperor.

  “Bring it on, fang face,” she said, forcing herself to her feet. “Let’s go meet the big bad.”

  “Bold words, considering they may serve as your epitaph,” he snarled.

  She shrugged, then winced. Right. No shrugging until large bottle of extra-strength acetaminophen found and consumed. “It’s better than ‘Here lies Fred. He’s dead.’” She laughed again, faking a humor she didn’t feel in the slightest. “Or how about ‘Here’s old John. He’s gone.’”

  He snarled a truly obscene curse and smacked her between the shoulder blades to shove her along. Her headache picked up drumsticks and started pounding out something with a heavy beat right between her eyes. Aerosmith, maybe.

  “Sheesh. None of you dead guys ever has a sense of humor,” she managed, and then she stumbled in the direction he indicated, chin up and shoulders squared, praying that Erin somehow found a way to save Riley and the baby. If Quinn could help her by playing cat and mouse with a two-thousand-year-old vampire, that’s exactly what she was going to do, even if the thought of it sent ice searing through her veins.

  She glanced over at Mr. Undead and Unfriendly. “Hey, ugly. Do you think Caligula has any Tylenol?”

  Point Success

  After Ven had transported them up the mountain at a dizzying rate of speed, he’d shimmered back to his form and now stood silently, watching her. Erin found the warded area easily enough, but deciphering the magic was far more challenging. She paced back and forth before the area of ground that would be indistinguishable from the rest to any non-Magickal. Aside from the magic, only a slight decrease in the ambient air temperature marked it as different. Her amber sang out a warning whenever she stepped too closely to the warded area, and heat seared her skin when she reached out with her magic.

  Ven tried brute force, in spite of her warning, and bounced off the edge of the transparent magical shield. “Isn’t that a little odd? I mean, doesn’t your average hiker kinda notice when he gets knocked on his ass by an invisible wall?”

  She sighed and held out a hand to help him up. He shook his head and pushed himself up off the ground, grumbling something about warrior, swords, and freaking witches. She figured she was better off not asking him to repeat it.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Ven. A non-Magickal would simply be directed subconsciously slightly away from this area. It’s probably no more than three square feet, so it wouldn’t be noticeable. Especially since the spell is reinforced with a look-away spell, so they literally would not see this spot or even know that they’d been guided away from it.”

  “Right. No offense, but I don’t care how the spell works,” he said, stabbing the shield with his sword and cursing when it zapped a bolt of electricity up the sword to his arm. “All I want to know is, can you break it?”

  She focused all her concentration on the ward’s intricate patterns and sent her own magic out to meet it and unravel tangled skeins of power. For every step forward she made in the process, it seemed that the ward’s magic knocked her a half step back. Finally she pulled back and looked at Ven.

  “I’m going to have to call the Wilding. I can’t get past this warding any other way.”

  “So do it. You’ve already proven that you can control it,” he said. “I’ll be right here with you.”

  “It’s not that, Ven. It’s that vampires and anybody who is part of the dark seem to be able to sense the Wilding. By calling it, I’ll be giving our position away.”

  He turned those dark, warrior eyes on her. “I think we’re past worrying about that. Breaking the ward may set off some kind of magical car alarm, for all we know. And if there’s only one way in, it’s bound to be guarded. I’d already given up any hope for stealth a while ago.”

  He bent to place his sword on the ground, then scooped her up and kissed her fiercely. “No matter what occurs, remember that your soul has melded with mine, Erin Connors. I do not plan to let you escape me so easily.”

  “Same goes, Lord Vengeance,” she whispered. “Same goes.”

  Then she gently pulled away from him and opened her mind and soul and the power of her gems to the Wilding, and reveled in its power as it immediately came to her call and spiraled through her body. It was a matter of seconds to undo t
he ward, which now seemed almost pathetically simple to her. As the last strand of its magic snapped, destroying the warding entirely, the ground shook beneath her feet. The powerful sound of a tolling bell—or possibly a ruby calling to its singer—rang through the ground and up into the air through a dark opening that slowly appeared in the snow.

  This time, even Ven heard it, if the startled glance he sent her way was any indication. “That’s the Nereid’s Heart?”

  “I think it must be,” Erin said, finding it hard to speak over the gemsong, rubysong, and heartsong flooding through her senses. “It’s lovelier than I ever could have imagined.”

  He retrieved his sword and raised it, then peered down into the darkness of the hold. “There are steps carved into the rock, like a stone ladder, and what looks like a tunnel branching off from it,” he reported.

  Erin simply smiled at him, feeling drunk with the wonder of the pure, undistilled power that poured through her, circled around her, and wrapped her in its heat.

  His eyes narrowed as he watched her, but he said nothing, just held out a hand. She placed her own in his, and he squeezed it briefly and then started down into the hole. The ruby continued to toll its clarion call to her, to her, only to her.

  The power. The power. Oh, the power. She could lose herself in it. She wanted to lose herself in it. To hide away from the pain and desolation of the past ten years.

  “Erin.” The voice was faint and barely penetrated the music, but it kept nagging at her. “Erin! Snap out of it! I need you with me if we’re going to do this.”

  Ven. It was Ven, he’d climbed back out of the hole, and he was saying something. With difficulty, she focused her gaze on him. “Do you hear the ruby, Ven? It’s singing to me and tempting me with so much power. A seduction of power,” she said, lifting her arms and twirling around, her voice lilting with the cadence of the rubysong.

  “Erin! I need you to concentrate.” He grabbed her shoulders, stared down into her eyes, and spoke a single word. “Caligula.”

  The name was a slap of cold water against the fog permeating her brain. Clear, sober thought instantly returned as she clamped all of her control down, hard, on the Wilding.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It just caught me for a minute.” She shuddered against him. “It’s so seductive, Ven. It wants me to call it and own it, and it would be so easy to fall into the whirlpool of its power and never return.”

  “You have to fight it. You must control it, or we’ll never succeed.” The blue-green flames were back in his eyes, and for a momentary flash of time, she could see into his soul to the deep concern he had for her safety.

  She twined her hands in his silky black hair and closed her eyes, not speaking, not thinking, just letting the pure tactile sensation of his thick hair sliding through her fingers occupy her entire present.

  She stood that way for at least a minute, and then she released him and nodded. “I’m back. I’ve got it under control. It’s okay.”

  “Are you sure? I will not take you into the darkness if there is no hope of return, my lady,” he said quietly, dropping back into the formal speak that underscored the intensity of his words.

  “I am sure. Into the belly of the beast, Ven,” she said, trying to smile. “Well, I don’t mean that literally, of course.”

  “I’m the only beast whose belly you’re going to get near,” he growled, flashing a grin that belied his mock ferocity.

  “Then lead on, beast. The sooner we go, the sooner we get through this,” she said. And then she followed him down the stone ladder into the dark.

  Chapter 29

  Caligula’s cavern lair

  Quinn sauntered forward into the enormous cavern, hands in her pants pockets as if facing a criminally insane master vampire was just another day in the life.

  Sadly, since she’d started working for the rebel cause, it kind of was just another day in the life. Another step toward the redemption she could never earn. She didn’t even fear death anymore as much as she feared the idea of never seeing Riley again.

  She tried to ignore the rapid pounding of her heart and studied the space, which was lit by torches placed strategically on the stone walls. Dozens of vamps lurked and skittered against the walls, hiding in shadows, making hideous hissing sounds that she figured translated into “yummy, fresh blood walking.”

  But the centerpiece of the room—and, hey, want to bet that he’d planned it that way?—was the vamp floating about fifteen feet above the floor, slowly twirling in a circle, black silk cape flowing behind him. He had a Caesar-type hairdo, which she supposed made sense, but he looked like he should be wearing a toga, not a cape.

  Well, “no guts, no glory.” Or something like that. Maybe, “mouth off and he’ll eat your guts.”

  Either way, she knew it was something about guts. And that was something she had plenty of, notwithstanding the acid curling and roiling around in them. A sense of enormous power, barely leashed, washed over her, and her emotional empathy shut down completely in the face of the pure evil in his intentions.

  She took a deep breath and looked straight at him. “Seriously, dude, a cape? Are you kidding me? Too many Bela Lugosi flicks? Or are you more a Frank Langella or Gary Oldman fan?”

  Before he could reply, a huge tolling sound, like some kind of King Kong of a Liberty Bell ringing to alert the soldiers or something, started booming through the cave. This meant that it also started booming through her skull, which was definitely not a happy development in the world of Quinn.

  As she clutched her aching head and moaned, she noticed that she wasn’t the only one suffering. The vamps and shifters were all clutching their heads, too, and moaning, snarling, and hissing out hideously tormented sounds. Clearly the bell was affecting them on a far more visceral level than it was affecting her, which meant white magic was involved somehow.

  Which might mean Erin. Way to go, Erin. It boomed through the cave for several minutes, and then stopped with one extra-loud, final gong. She hesitantly lifted her hands away from her ears, wondering if a person’s skull could actually explode from a headache, and getting the feeling she might be close to finding out.

  Caligula raised his hands from his ears and snarled, then he lowered his levitating form down closer to the floor and to her. As he approached from above, he almost caught her eyes, but she was careful to quickly lower her gaze. She might have a talent or two in the area of rebel strategy, but there was no way she could pit her emotional empathy against a master vamp’s mind-thrall powers and come out a winner.

  Or even come out alive.

  “What was that noise? Not a happy noise for vamps, I’m guessing,” she said, unreasonably proud of the near-steadiness of her voice.

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face, as if he didn’t know what the noise was, either.

  “That noise is none of your concern, Quinn Dawson. I have heard much of you. The infamous rebel leader who drives even master vampires out of their home territories. And yet here you are, and you’re nothing but a little girl,” he sneered.

  Quinn clenched her fist around the hilt of the wooden stake that was strapped to her leg underneath her pants. Cutting holes in all of her pockets was second nature these days.

  “I’m getting really tired of being called a girl,” she observed. “Plus, if you’re trying to piss me off, Emperor Fang Face, you can do better than that, surely. Bet your former enemies back in the old days would laugh so hard to see you skulking around in a damp, dark cave like this.”

  She deliberately turned her head from left to right as she scanned the room. “Not even a good interior decorator could help this dump.”

  She tensed, waiting for him to strike, but he merely laughed. Somehow his laughter was far more chilling than his snarling had been. “I see through your pathetic ploy, Ms. Dawson. You want to enrage me to the point where I kill you quickly.”

  “Right, because so many of my more successful plots involved me getting bloodsuckers to kill
me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Not a lot of the brain power survived the past two thousand years, did it?” She tried not to flinch as a dark wave of hatred washed over her, nearly crushing her.

  “You know as well as I do that a quick death would be a boon to one whose eventual death will be neither painless nor quick,” he said. He floated down the last few feet until his boots touched the floor. Then he smiled at her, and her spinal fluid turned to ice water. His smile held the promise of unspeakable atrocities of pain and torture beyond anything she could imagine.

  Not that she wanted to imagine it.

  She was literally scared speechless, but tried to remember that he had the power to feed her fear and increase its intensity. She tried to fight through the terror that was paralyzing her and whispering urgently to her of her own defeat and death.

  A crushing pressure smashed into her, forcing her to her knees, paralyzing her limbs. He could walk right up to her and bite her neck at his leisure now, because she couldn’t move a single muscle to stop him. All she had left were the tarnished prayers of a woman who wasn’t sure she even believed.

  I’m going to die right here in this crappy cave. Please, God, if you even exist, tell Riley that I love her.

  “I’m going to make an example of you, little rebel,” Caligula crooned. “I’m going to turn you vampire, and then make you one of my generals. Any who look into your lovely dark eyes gone red and glowing will know my power.”

  A powerful voice thundered through the cavern. “I ask a boon, my lord. I ask that you give this woman to me, that I may turn her to vampire for your use. It is beneath you to do the task yourself and spend the slightest effort on this pitiful human.”

  Caligula turned to face the newcomer, and the pressure holding Quinn in place lessened, allowing her to raise her head and see who wanted to play “drain the rebel” this time.

  Except it was Daniel. And the sight of him gave her that most dangerous of weapons—hope.

  The tunnel

  Thanking Poseidon that the ruby had let up on the tolling, Ven led the way, banging into the wall occasionally and wishing for the night vision that the shifters had. Not that he’d want to get furry just to be able to see better in dark places, but not smacking his damn head into the damn walls every damn minute would be nice.