Atlantis Unmasked (3 page)

He despised waiting.

Hospital security was there in force, and the police were on their way. Luckily, Grace had excellent contacts within the local Paranormal Ops unit, and Alexios had met some of the officers before. He wasn't worried about the police. P Ops needed to be told about the attack, at any rate.

However, although he didn't want to examine the reasons
why
too closely, he was worried about Grace.

She'd somehow attached herself to him the first time he'd run a mission with the human rebels in St. Louis, adopting him as a mentor without bothering to ask his opinion of the idea.

He'd snarled at her to leave him alone. Repeatedly. When she'd simply fallen back and quietly continued to shadow him, he'd tried a different tactic and ignored her.

If he were honest with himself, he'd admit that he'd only pretended to ignore her. Grace was a hard woman to ignore. She was fiercely independent, dark eyes burning with quiet intensity and a dagger's-edged intellect. Slender, with firm, toned muscles, she was still an athlete, like she'd been as a child. An Olympic contender in swimming at only fifteen years old, Quinn had told him.

But a decade ago the world had changed, and Grace's world had collapsed beneath her. A band of female vamps, celebrating their newfound freedom when vampires and shifters had declared their presence to the world, had run across Grace's big brother in a bar. He hadn't survived the party.

Grace nearly hadn't survived his death.

They'd been alone in the world, their father gone when they were young and their mother dead from cancer not long before Grace lost her brother. Quinn said Grace had been broken. Lost.

But she'd found a purpose in fighting back. Spent the past ten years training for command in the rebel army. He'd seen her in battle, and she was good. Damn good. Her reflexes and strength were incredible for a human, and she was almost preternaturally lethal with her bow. But she'd been running on rage and adrenaline for a decade, and if Michelle died—Michelle, the only friend she had left from the innocence of her childhood—Grace was going to crash, hard.

Alexios had seen the signs in her. He knew it was coming. The only thing he couldn't figure out was if he wanted to be around when it happened. It was bound to be personal, that kind of emotional overload.

Too personal for an Atlantean warrior, sworn to the service of his prince and the sea god, who'd vowed to live his life free of even the most casual emotional attachments.

A doctor wearing bloodstained scrubs pushed through the doors to the waiting room and looked around expectantly. “Nichols? Michelle Nichols?”

The blood drained out of Grace's face, but she jumped up out of the chair. “Yes, that's me. I mean, I'm her friend. What happened? Is she okay?”

The doctor frowned, and Alexios started across the room. It wasn't news he wanted Grace to hear alone.

“She lost a lot of blood, and she had a collapsed lung,” the doctor said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “I'm not going to lie to you. We did the best we could, and now we wait and see. If your friend's a fighter, she just might have a chance.”

Grace stood frozen, seemingly unable to speak. Alexios put an arm around her and shut down the part of his brain that wanted to think about how right she felt there. She was merely a soldier temporarily in his command, and it was his turn to stand for her.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said. “We'll wait for news.”

The doctor nodded, barely glancing at Alexios, and then the man's head snapped up for the customary double take Alexios had grown so bitterly accustomed to over the years. “I hope you don't mind my professional curiosity, but how did you get that facial scarring? And have you ever considered cosmetic surgery?”

Alexios's eyes iced over as he regretted, once again, the fact that he couldn't just stab humans who had balls bigger than their brains. “Your concern is misplaced, Doctor, although I thank you for it,” he gritted out, trying not to choke on the words.

Grace turned toward him and rested her head on his chest. It was the first sign of weakness she'd ever shown in his presence, and a wave of fierce protectiveness washed through him.

“I need some air,” she murmured. “Please, Alexios, please help me. Get me out of here.”

Alexios tightened his arms around her and nodded to the doctor. “Thank you again. We'll wait for any news, as I said.”

Losing all interest in Alexios, the doctor started to move off, but then stopped, a trace of sympathy crossing his face. “She's going to be in the ICU for quite some time. You two should go get cleaned up and get some rest.”

Nodding again, but not bothering to reply, Alexios steered Grace toward the exit. The doors opened with a hydraulic swishing noise, and the three men outside turned toward them, hands automatically reaching inside jackets. They relaxed slightly when they saw it was Alexios and Grace.

“All clear out here,” said the stocky one who'd moved the Jeep for them. Spike, maybe. Or Butch. One of the odd names-that-weren't-names that the rebels used. “Any news?”

Grace shook her head, but didn't speak. Fine tremors shook through her body, and Alexios knew the meltdown was finally on its way.

“Almost everyone is doing well, as you said,” Alexios reported tersely. “Michelle was in surgery a long time, though, and the doctor said she lost a lot of blood. He said she'll make it, if she's a fighter, and we all know that she is.”

He addressed the words to the man, but they were meant for Grace. She drew in a shuddering breath, and he knew at least part of the meaning had penetrated.

“She's going to make it,” he repeated. “But Grace needs some air. We're going to walk a little bit. You're sure the way is clear?”

The taller man, older, with leathery skin and a hawk-like nose, nodded. “We're good. We were sure with dark coming on that the vamps would start showing up, but we ain't seen hide nor hair of 'em. The boys are patrolling all the way around the hospital for the shifters, too.”

Alexios nodded. “We won't go far.”

He herded Grace down the sidewalk and away from the lights and sounds of the ER. She walked with a jerking, halting gait, like a marionette dancing on the strings of a drunken puppet master. When they reached a low stone wall, partially hidden by some bushes, he guided her to it. Then he sat next to her, his arms around her, and held her while she wept.

The sound of her sobbing—muffled because she tried to hide it from him—and the feel of her warmth as her body trembled in his arms overwhelmed the rock-solid defenses Alexios had carefully constructed over the past several years. He inhaled deeply, trying for control, but failing miserably when the scent of sunshine and flowers from her hair shuddered through his senses.

She was tough, a warrior woman. She never showed weakness to anyone—ever. And yet here she was, crying in his arms. Needing him to comfort her. The fierce drive to protect and cherish surged through him, and a tsunami of unexpected and unwanted emotion crashed through the barriers around his heart like a tidal wave through a fragile coral reef.

She turned her tear-drenched face up to his when his body shuddered against hers. “Alexios?”

There was only one choice he could make. Only one recourse open to him. He needed to taste her lips more than he had ever needed food or water or even air to breathe.

He kissed her.

He kissed her, and she gasped a little against his mouth, but then she was kissing him back. She was
kissing him back.
She twined her arms around his neck and pulled him closer to her and opened her mouth to his invasion, welcoming and enticing him.

Seducing him with her lips and warmth.

He groaned, or perhaps she did, but either way the sound was swallowed up in the heat between them, and he was tilting her head better to devour her and kissing her and wanting her and needing her . . .

The red flashing light of an emergency vehicle splashed on the side of the building, at the furthest edge of his peripheral vision. A vision but not a vision. A memory but not a memory.

Flames.

The fires. The pain.

The torture.

He wrenched his mouth from Grace's and stared at the flashing light. Heart pumping. Muscles clenching.

“Alexios?” She struggled in his arms, and he yanked her even closer, maddened that she would try to escape
him
.

“Alexios,” she said, stronger now. “You're hurting me.”

Somehow the words sank in past the memories. Past the waking nightmare.

There was no choice. There was only despair, and the death of hope, and an eternity of loneliness stretched out in front of him. They'd twisted him, and now he was broken. Wrong.

Alexios took the only honorable option available to him.

He left her there, bewildered and alone. Walked, then ran, then flew as mist through the air, desperate to escape. He never stopped, not even once, until he'd traveled all the way back to Atlantis. His throat burned with unspoken words; his eyes burned with unshed tears.

He ran, and he made yet another promise: he'd never allow himself to touch Grace again.

Grace cut through the water with long, smooth strokes. Swimming had always been her refuge. Her solace.

Her escape.

Pool, lake, or ocean, it almost didn't matter. All she needed was the water, welcoming her, lifting her—buoyant—above sadness and pain. Water washed her clean of the blood, the tears, and the grief. It offered comfort, though she didn't deserve it.

A temporary forgetfulness, though it was her curse always to remember.

She quickened her strokes, slicing cleanly through the rolling waves. The winter wind was blowing at a fair clip, tossing swells of deepest blue almost playfully. Nature watching to see if she could handle the challenge. Chillingly indifferent if she could not. The undercurrents were a trap for the unwary—stronger swimmers than she had been towed out to a suffocating death.

Death. Even now, in her ocean refuge, her mind always turned back to death.

Grace slowed her pace, lifted her head out of the water, and shook the droplets from her lashes. Rolled over to float on her back, letting the gentle swell carry her for a while. The cold winter water was too much for most swimmers, but something in her heritage protected her from extremes of hot and cold. The “Diana DNA,” she called it. Her hair was a tangle across her body; she should have tied it back. Should really cut it. What kind of self-respecting rebel leader had long hair?

The thought resonated like an echo in her mind, whispering secret refrains to half-buried memories. Robert.
Robbie
. Her brother.

Grace allowed herself to remember. On this, of all days. Once a year, she allowed herself the weakness of memory. Of emotion. And pretended not to notice when salt water of her own making slid down her cheek to join the sea.

Grace jerked her hair out of his hand. “That doesn't even make sense. Wouldn't it be
aquadynamic
or something? For an older brother, you sure act like you're eight years old sometimes,” she loftily informed him. “If—if—I make the Olympic team, I'll cut my hair. But for now—”

Those had been the last words he'd ever heard her say. That night, the supernatural creatures everyone had always believed were only myths had shown up on television and Internet broadcasts all over the world. They were real; they'd wanted the world to know. Persecuted minorities. Time for the world to change and recognize their rights.