Atlantis Rising (9 page)

He sensed her startled gasp and could almost see her. Her touch returned to him, her emotions fluttering like tiny sea anemones in his mind.

I can feel you,
aknasha
. I’m going to protect you, too. You have great value to . . . my people.

She sent a slight hint of amusement—that, and an overwhelming sense of her exhaustion.
That is a very pretty thought, but I’m not very valuable to anyone. I just need to take a bubble bath and go to sleep now. Good-bye.

With that, the feel of mental doors crashing down snapped off his connection to her. He flinched back from the sensation, mouth dry, fighting to keep his body from hardening anew at the idea of her naked body glistening in a tub of scented bubbles.

He clenched his eyes shut and groaned.

Ven’s eyes narrowed. “What is it? The threat?”

Conlan’s eyes snapped open, and he saw Ven and the rest of the Seven crouch into battle readiness, blades at the ready. Alaric threw his arms into the air as if to command power, the ocean waves instantly responding with a crashing symphony of percussion against the shore.

Conlan held up one hand. “No, it’s okay. There is no threat.”

He grinned. “Or, to be more accurate, the threat is going to take a bubble bath.”

“What is it, Lord Reisen?”

Reisen sliced his hand through the air, commanding his warrior to desist. Stop making noise while Reisen opened his mind and senses to any disturbance in the elements.

For a minute, he’d almost thought—

But, no. Conlan was long dead. The royal house in chaos. Nobody willing to step up and admit that Anubisa had murdered the heir to the Seven Isles.

Until now.

Reisen glanced down at the long shape wrapped in scarlet velvet on the table. The Trident. He almost couldn’t believe that he’d actually taken it. That it now lay on a table in one of his safe houses, right under the noses of the sleeping landwalkers in the buildings around him.

Snatched out from under Alaric’s nose.

The thought of that last gave him a great deal of satisfaction. Arrogant prick. Their final confrontation, nine days ago, flashed into his mind.

He stopped, fixing the priest with his gaze. “He’ll be—
wrong.
”

 
Reisen reached out to touch the folds of velvet covering the Trident. He’d been more than half prepared to be killed for the sacrilege of touching it. Poseidon’s Trident. The vehicle of ascension for Atlantean kings for millennia.

Yet, when he’d grasped it that day in the temple, it had remained quiescent. Inanimate. Merely a pretty artifact, melded gold, silver, and orichalcum shaped in the same design he wore branded into his chest.

But with seven open spaces that showed where its seven jewels had nestled before the Cataclysm.

Before they were scattered to the surface lands for protection and safekeeping.

“My lord—” the warrior began again. Pulled from his musings, Reisen glanced at him. Micah, first of his Seven.

“We need to move on. They will surely be after us soon,” Micah said, hands fisted on the handles of his daggers.

Brother warriors of Poseidon. Further bonded by the enormity of the act they committed now.

“Is it justice, Micah?” Reisen wondered aloud. “Is it justice that we do for our homeland? Or is it treason, as Alaric will surely name it?”

Micah’s eyes shone with the fervor of their cause. “It is justice to seek the jewels that have been lost. To restore Atlantis to its former glory, my lord. After more than eleven thousand years, it is surely time.”

Reisen nodded slowly. “Yes, it is time. We were tasked to serve as first warning on the eve of humanity’s destruction,” he said, quoting the ancient words.

“The brazenness of the denizens of the night is surely more than a first warning,” Micah growled.

A smile fleetingly crossed Reisen’s face. The
denizens of the night.
The archaic language reminded him that Micah hadn’t spent much time out of Atlantis. And yet, it was chillingly accurate.

“To Atlantis, then, Micah,” he said, holding his own dagger high in the air. “To restoring the glory and supremacy of Atlantis.”

The rest of his warriors, who’d entered the room as he and Micah spoke, raised their daggers above their heads in unison.

“To Atlantis!” they shouted in unison. “To Mycenae!”

Reisen smiled. Yes, to Atlantis and Mycenae. And to his own ascension to the throne of a newly restored Atlantis.

“To Mycenae,” he roared.

Then he glanced yet again at the bundle on the table, struck by a glimpse of motion and flickering light.

“I must have imagined it,” he muttered, words drowned out by his warriors’ thundering shouts.

Because, just for a split second, the velvet had seemed to glow.

“Are you out of your royal mind?” Taking a break from pacing and swearing viciously in ancient Atlantean, Latin, and a little-used dialect once heard near Constantinople, Ven stopped in front of his brother, hands fisted on his hips.

Conlan sighed, not knowing whether to award his brother battle medals for creativity, or order Justice to arrest the King’s Vengeance for treason.

Conlan stepped in close to Ven, invading the nine hells out of what Ven liked to call his personal space. “I did not ask for your judgment upon my actions. I merely described a possible threat to our warriors. If more humans have the capacity to incapacitate us with emotional telepathy—”

He didn’t mention that he’d left out a hell of a lot in the telling. There was no threat to Atlantean security regarding his fierce attraction to her.

He blew out a breath. Even princes were allowed some privacy, right?

Ven shook his head in disgust, then resumed pacing and cursing. Conlan tuned him out after he heard something about “spawn of a dung beetle” in early Portugese and turned to Alaric, who had remained uncharacteristically silent during Conlan’s explanation of the evening’s events.

Alaric speaking was dangerous enough.

Alaric silent was deadly.

The priest stared at him, unblinking, seeming almost inhuman in his stillness. If ever a man had seemed unsuited to the priesthood, Conlan would have named Alaric. Matching Conlan in height, Alaric’s heavily muscled form suited the lethal menace in his eyes.

No schoolboy would ever seek him out to tell tales of childish mischief in the confessional, for certain. And yet it was rumored that more than one woman, seduced by Alaric’s dark beauty, had harbored hopes of convincing the dark priest to . . .
bend
. . . his vow of celibacy.

Conlan nearly laughed at the thought. It was well known that Poseidon would strip the powers from a priest who breached his celibacy vow. Power was Alaric’s only mistress; no female could come between him and his quest for ever more of it.

As if reading his prince’s mind, Alaric bared his teeth in a cold pretense of a smile. “I agree with Conlan.”

“Look, I—
what
?” The agreement threw him off.

“You heard me,” Alaric returned, face expressionless. “You want to follow this human to her home to ensure her safety. You demand we transport her to Atlantis as your . . .
guest.
I agree with you.”

Ven exploded. “Great. Now I have two of you out of your freaking minds. I’d have expected better of you, Temple Rat.”

Alaric’s gaze shifted smoothly to Ven, and something whispering of deadly danger shimmered in his eyes. “I am high priest to the sea god now, Lord Vengeance. It is time we put away childish . . . endearments.”

Conlan shifted to stand between the two men. The last thing he needed was his two most trusted advisors bashing each other’s brains out. “Calm down, Ven. You’ve gotta be a role model for my warriors, right?”

Ven snorted. “I
am
a role model in all things that matter. But standing emotionless and icy in the face of seriously deep trouble is not my style. I’m more a ‘take names and kick ass’ kind of guy.”

He paused for a moment, slamming his daggers back in their sheaths. “And agreeing that we take a human to Atlantis? Especially
now
, when the Trident is in the hands of the enemy? I repeat, you’re both out of your
fucking
minds.”

Shaking his head, Ven nonetheless stepped back and away, sweeping an arm out as if to urge Alaric to continue.

Alaric shrugged. “Knowledge is power. The human has powers that are unknown to us. If she truly can convey emotion over the mind path, then she must be studied and analyzed for the source of that ability.”

Ven started to interrupt, but Alaric held up a hand. “Not to mention the potential enormity of a weapon with the power to bring a warrior of such strength and mental shielding as Conlan to his knees,” he said, his tone clinically dispassionate.

Conlan made a growling sound low in his throat, surprising himself and, from the looks of it, everyone around him. “You would dissect Riley in a laboratory, if you believed that was the only way to understand her gifts, wouldn’t you?”

Alaric raised one eyebrow. “
Riley?
You know her name?”

Fury rising, Conlan clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white, fighting to regain enough composure to speak. “You. Will. Not. Touch. Her,” he gritted out.

Alaric immediately held his hands out, palms facing down, as if to show that he intended no harm. He lapsed back into formal speak, perhaps realizing the threat from Conlan. “I sense a disturbance in the elements surrounding us, and yet you showed no outward sign until now. As I am unlike your human, and cannot sense emotions, you must explain your reaction to my words.”

Conlan forced his hands to unclench and took cleansing breaths. “I don’t even know if I
can
explain. Or, if I could, that I would want to.”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. His mind involuntarily reached out to touch Riley’s restlessly sleeping consciousness. That simple touch calmed him a little.

Just enough to piss him off. What the
hell
was going on?

“I need time to understand it, myself,” he admitted.

Ven broke in. “Alaric, surely you must see that our most important job is to retrieve the Trident, not play babysitter to some human female. I like humans myself, Conlan, and have enjoyed many a happy hour with them.”

Conlan’s brother flashed a wolfish grin. “Hell, sometimes with two of ’em at a time. I’ve even defended thousands of them from the vamps and the damn shape-shifters over the centuries. But you don’t see me going around staking out their houses.”

Someone barked out a laugh. Conlan’s gaze whipped down the line of his warriors. Bastien. Of course. He was too damn big to be afraid of anything. Even the wrath of two Atlantean princes.

Damn
. He had to admire the sheer balls of the man.

Conlan turned back to Ven, nodded. “You’re right. But this one is different. She may have the ability to be used as a weapon against me—against
any
of us—and how can that be good?”

The part of his brain where duty gave way to need shouted out at him.
And I
want
her. I
will
have her.

“Agreed,” Alaric replied, startling Conlan. But of course Alaric was responding to his words, not his thoughts.

Or so Conlan hoped. If the priest had mastered thought-mining, the politics of Atlantis were headed for a big pile of reeking whale shit.

Alaric’s gaze never flickered. “She could distract us at a critical point and cost us the object of our quest. We contain the female, and then we retrieve the Trident. It is the wisest course of action, as you say, Conlan. It is also true that I need time and a quiet place in which to scry for its location.”

Ven grumbled a little then rolled his eyes. “Well, when you put it that way . . . Let’s do this thing.”

He jerked his head toward the left, and Bastien, Denal, and the rest ranged themselves around Conlan, Alaric, and Ven. Black coats billowing out behind them, nine of the deadliest predators ever to travel the earth and its oceans shimmered into watery mist and headed for a tiny house holding a sleeping human female.