Atlantis Unmasked (21 page)

“Move away from my right arm,” she snapped, needing space to draw her knife. “I knew I shouldn't have left my gun and bow in the room.”

“It was dinner, Grace,” Sam said, moving in front of Michelle, holding his Glock at the ready in a two-handed Weaver stance. “Who takes a gun to dinner in a tourist town?”

“Who but you, you mean? Funny man.” She reached into her pants pockets and through the openings cut in the bottoms of the pockets to the silver-bladed knife strapped to her right thigh and the wooden stake strapped to her left. “Alexios, can you see what it is?”

“It's trouble. Move. Now. There are too many, Sam, and I don't want the women—”

“To hell with that,” Grace cut him off. “Michelle, you should—”

“Already on it,” Michelle said cheerfully, stepping out of her shoes. “Bet you didn't know Louboutin made a pair of stilettos like this.” She scooped up her shoes and pressed something on the insides of each with her thumbs. Four-inch blades snapped out of the heels, glittering with deadly silvery light.

“Good thing those damn rookies are gone,” Sam drawled, cool as the ice floating in a Georgia mint julep. “They'd just get in the way. Shifters or vamps?”

“Both, maybe, but definitely shifters. At least ten on this side alone,” Alexios said, glaring at Grace. “I know you're a good fighter, but you don't have your bow, and I don't want you caught up close and deadly with a few hundred pounds of shifter. Get the hells out of here and take Michelle and her little toys with you.”

“When hell freezes over is when I'll run away like a little girl and leave you to face those attackers alone,” Grace said, glaring right back at him.

Alexios growled a threat, but it came out in jumbled-up English and Atlantean, and then it was too late, anyway, too late, because the first wave of them came over the walls, fangs and claws bared. Panthers. They were panthers, but they weren't all in full panther form but an obscene hybrid of panther and human, and just when he had time to wonder how big cats had climbed a thirty-foot stone wall, the first one hit him hard.

Alexios went down, smashed onto his back, but his dagger was swinging up, all of his power behind it, and it drove into the panther's stomach and ripped a path through its entrails, drenching Alexios in guts and blood and rank stench. He heard shots—the Glock firing round after round; thank Poseidon for Sam.

Alexios shoved the panther off him and rolled. In seconds, he was up and going after the next one, scanning for Grace. She'd been backed into a corner by a huge black panther that was snarling and batting at her but not yet ready to brave Grace's long silver knife.

Everything in Alexios pushed at him, hard, to turn to mist, go to Grace, and fly with her clear off the roof to safety, only then coming back to rejoin the fight. But if he did, if he left Michelle and Sam and they died, any feeling Grace might have for him would die with them.

He stayed. He fought.

Sam continued to fire his gun to deadly effect, and now Michelle had a gun, too. Sam must have had a backup. Two more of the panthers, these a tawny reddish brown, leapt in tandem for Alexios's head while another came in low and hot toward his legs.

“I am not in the mood to have my nuts bit off by a panther,” Alexios shouted. He leapt up to meet the two coming by air, but he transformed during his leap so that the panthers passed harmlessly through his mist form and crashed into their companion on the ground. Sam and Michelle fired shots steadily, and first one, then the second, then all three panthers lay dead.

Once again in corporeal form, he landed on the edge of the wall and scanned its rock face and the grounds below for any further attackers. They needed to know what they were dealing with. Now.

All clear, at least on this side of the fort. No time to worry about the other sides, though. He spun around as the snarling and eerie high-pitched screams of panthers filled the air, almost drowning out the worst possible sound in the world: the recruits, all loud laughter and drunken singing, were arriving back at the fort.

Another scream, this one behind him, and Alexios whirled around to find Grace standing over the body of the black panther, calmly pulling her knife out of its throat. Or maybe not so calmly, he realized, as light flashed from the blade when her hand trembled.

“They're going after the rookies,” Sam yelled, and Alexios turned again, this time to realize that only five of the panthers lay dead or dying and the rest were flowing down the stairs toward the courtyard in a silent wave of lethal purpose.

The shouting and screaming started before Alexios had made it three paces toward the stairs, and he didn't wait to see if Sam followed before transforming into mist again so he could put himself between the attackers and their woefully inexperienced and unprepared prey.

Alexios soared down the stairs and plunged in between a snarling tangle of shifters and humans, steeling himself to tune out the screams, howls, and shouts—to focus—as he transformed back into his body in a barely sufficient circle of open space.

“Bet you didn't see that coming,” he said to a very startled panther as he drove his dagger into the side of its neck, efficiently opening its jugular vein and stepping out of the path of blood spray with the agility of years of experience.

Too many years. Too many battles. Too much blood.

“Alexios! Here!” Sam's shout wrenched him out of his self-indulgent musings, and he whirled around in time to see another of the attackers clamping its powerful jaws down on the back of a human's neck. Alexios lunged for them, but he was too late. With a grisly crunching sound, the cat chomped through flesh and bone and then shook the body as if warning them away.

Another one of the recruits screamed, but Alexios ignored it, heading straight for the cat. The dead human was female, and she looked like . . . Smith. It was Smith. The cheerful one he'd helped earlier.

Alexios's rage built inside him with the power of a raging typhoon, until fury exploded into sound and the noise coming from his throat had more in common with the screams of the cats than it did with any noise a man could make. He dove toward the panther, shouting at it to let her go, stretching full out in a leap that took him over the cat's back. As he rose above its spine, he drove both daggers into the base of its skull, smashing through into its brain.

He collapsed on top of the cat, hands still clenching the hilts of his daggers, and then he wrenched the blades out, scraping past bone. The cat's head flopped back down on the ground. It was dead. He'd killed it. But killing the cat meant nothing.

It wouldn't bring Smith back.

And Grace . . . He shot up off the ground, whirling around to find where Grace was in the fray. Sam stood near the base of the staircase, Glock still at the ready, with the forms of two dead panthers at his feet. One of the recruits knelt by another dead cat over near the wall, the human gripping the hilt of the sword that pierced the cat's chest.

Five of the recruits were down, but three of them were moving and trying to sit up. The other two were ominously still.

But no Grace. No Michelle.

“Where's Grace?” he shouted at Sam. “Where is she? Where's Michelle?”

The man shook his head. “I thought she listened to you and stayed topside, out of trouble.”

Alexios shot across the ground, running so fast his feet barely touched the grass. “Grace? Listen to me?”

Sam's face went cold. “Oh, no. Oh, not Grace.”

But Alexios was already gone, taking the steps four at a time, racing to discover a truth he wasn't sure he was brave enough to face.

“Please, please, please, please,” he chanted as he ran, and when he hit the top of the stairs he skidded to a stop at the sight of three figures huddled by the wall.

She looked up at him, oh, thank the gods. Grace looked up at him, and his world hadn't ended before it had even had a chance to begin. He shot across the space between them so fast he barely had time to register that Michelle seemed to be fine, or that the panther wasn't completely dead, but twitching on the ground next to them. But then he reached Grace and swept her up in to his arms so fast that she let out a startled squeal, but it didn't matter because she was alive, she was alive, and then he was kissing her and devouring her mouth and she was alive and he was never, ever going to let her go again.

She kissed him back for a moment, but then she made a noise that sounded like protest and he loosened his hold on her and lifted his head, finally noticing the pain in her eyes and the tight way she held her body upright.

He lowered her to her feet and, still holding on to her arms—unable to let himself release her completely—he scanned her frantically, looking for a wound. At first he saw nothing, but then the wet darkness along the side of her shirt under her arm caught the light. He touched her gently, and his hand came away warm and wet with her blood.

“No. No, I won't have it. You cannot be injured,” he commanded, knowing even as he said the words that it was ridiculous—that
he
was ridiculous—that he couldn't command an injury to un-happen. “Where is Alaric? Where is one of your human healers? How bad is it? Why are you standing? Let me take you to the hospital immediately,” he demanded in a confused jumble of words.

“Calm down,” she said, her voice shaky but determined. “It's not really that bad. He caught a claw on my side and ripped, but my rib cage blocked him from doing any real damage.”

Sam, who'd rushed up behind Alexios, quickly assessed the situation and nodded. “Right. Glad you're okay. I'm off back downstairs to sort things out there. Michelle, can you help?”

Michelle nodded and followed after him after she retrieved her shoes. Alexios noticed she held both shoes in her left hand while still clutching the pistol in her right. “You were very brave,” he said to her, acknowledging her courage during the fight.

Michelle shook her head once, her face very grim and pale. “No. I wasn't.” Then she headed for the stairs.

“I'll be right down,” Grace said. She took a step, but then winced and made a small helpless sound.

“It does hurt a lot more than you'd expect,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. “I bet you think I'm being a big baby about a scratch, though, after all the injuries you've suffered.”

He gently gathered her back into his arms, needing to hold her, careful not to jar her wounded side. “I would suffer a thousand more deadly wounds than ever I have before in order to spare you this single one,
mi amara
. Where is the hospital? I'm taking you there now.”

She shook her head, her sweet-smelling hair brushing the skin of his throat and chin and almost masking the coppery-rust smell of blood. “No, you're not. You need to tell me what happened downstairs. We've got to take care of the recruits, decide what to do about these bodies, and question this one when he shifts back to his human shape.”

As if on cue, the panther at their feet snarled and tried to pull himself up from its prone position but then fell heavily back onto its side.

“Is this the one that harmed you?” Alexios fired the question at Grace, but never took his eyes off the panther.

“Yes. But don't hurt it. We need to question him to find out what he knows.”

Grace leaned her head on his shoulder for a few seconds and sighed. “Please put me down, Alexios. Really, I just need a bandage. Maybe some peroxide and Neosporin. But first we need to lock this shifter up in one of the cells downstairs while we deal with the rest of them.”

But it was as if all the gods of war were pounding their drums inside Alexios's brain. He could hear nothing over the crashing, hammering pulses of rage that demanded he hurt and tear and rend this monster who'd dared to touch Grace.

He carefully released her and pressed a brief, gentle kiss on her lips. She said something, but he couldn't hear it over the drums.

He couldn't hear
anything
over the drums.

The monster had hurt her. It needed to die.

He whipped around, between her and the panther, just in time to see that it had been deceiving them. Masking the extent of its injury. Because now it had its legs underneath it, as it crouched, ready to spring at him.

“Grace, get down,” he said, shouting so that she would hear him over the escalating pounding in his head. Then he leapt forward, but this time he didn't bother to draw his daggers. This time he'd kill it with his bare hands.

He launched himself toward the snarling beast, matching feral rage with his own primal fury. He smashed into the cat in midair, escaping its opened jaws by inches and catching it around its thickly furred neck. He twisted in flight, using his forward motion to jerk the lower half of his body around until he was almost straddling the panther, and scissored his legs around its middle.