Atlantis Awakening (18 page)

He smiled at her, reveling in the feel of her, in her music, in the light and color that was her soul. “Now that we have found it,
mi amara
, how could we survive without it?”

Erin woke suddenly, a warm and unfamiliar heaviness across her stomach, and stared into a pair of very amused black eyes.

“You snore,” he said, laughter lacing the words.

“I do not!” Indignation warred with embarrassment. She lay there nude, zipped into the sleeping bag with him, the warmth of his arm and one leg casually thrown across her body.

She had an instant to realize that she would be happy to wake like this every morning, and then the memories of the previous day crashed through her sleep-filled mind. “Oh, Goddess, Ven.” She pushed at his arm and struggled to sit up. “How could we…when so many others—”

“No, Erin. Don't diminish what we shared with regrets. We needed to rest and regroup, and our bodies needed the reassurance of each other. Our souls—”

“No. Please. I can't talk about that right now. We may not survive this fight with Caligula, and I can't go into it if…just not now.”

He pulled her into his arms and held her for a long moment, saying nothing. Then he spoke against her hair, his chest rumbling beneath hers. “As you wish,
mi amara
. But there is one thing I need to tell you, as much as I may not want to do so. The soul-meld does not negate free will. You are not bound to me, if you should choose—” His voice cut off, and he stilled before inhaling a huge breath. “If you should choose another path than mine.”

She pulled away from him, and this time he let her go. “The soul-meld, that's what allowed me to see inside you? What allows you to hear my music?”

“Yes. It is a pathway between the souls of two who have the ability to find love on a much higher scale of intimacy than merely physical or emotional.”

She laughed a little, shaken. “So, does using formal speak help you
negate
the fact that you're centuries old and I only have a human life span? Or that we might both die in the next day or so? How does that play into everything?”

A muscle in his jaw clenched at her words, but he answered her calmly. “If you were to die, I would end my existence as well. So it would be a good idea for us to get up and make that coffee and get to work practicing for what we plan to do, wouldn't it?”

She blinked, not even sure where to start in asking about the “end my existence” part of that statement. Not sure she wanted to know the answer.

 

After they drank coffee and ate some of the food provisions they'd brought, Ven stood before the fire, staring into the flames. The wood he'd added crackled merrily, since he'd done some Atlantean thing to sweep it clear of every drop of water and snow that had clung to it. She glanced at her watch. “We slept most of the day away, but we still have about four hours of daylight. Dark comes early in Washington in the winter. And I may need the sunlight to try some of the spells in the scroll Marie gave me.”

He turned to her, face impassive. “We have part of the day tomorrow, as well, to plan and prepare, if we need it. You also have the book from Gennae? The one from the Fae?”

“Yes, although it really ticks me off that she took so long to give it to me. She's had it since I turned twenty-one—five long years—but Berenice convinced her not to give it to me. Said I wasn't ready,” she said bitterly.

“No use crying over plucked peacock feathers,” he said, shrugging.

“Spilled milk.”

“What?”

“We say ‘no use crying over spilled milk,'” she explained, smiling a little.

“Why would you cry over spilled milk? Does that injure the cow in some way?” His brow furrowed with confusion.

“Never mind. If we survive this, we'll have a crash course on stupid human sayings.”

“
When
we survive this,
mi amara
,” he said, voice coated with shards of ice that she knew weren't meant for her.

“That's another thing. What does
mi amara
mean?”

His expression softened for a moment. “That's another thing we'll talk about when we survive this.”

“How much time do we have, Ven? Marie and Conlan told that messenger that they could only hold Riley in stasis for forty-eight hours without risk of harm to the baby. And that she was fading, fast.”

“We must locate the Nereid's Heart within the next seventy-two hours if we're going to make a difference,” he said. “There is something you must know, Erin. Her system is apparently rejecting the baby as a foreign body, which puts the future of any Atlantean-human mating at risk.”

The room swirled around her as the implications of that crashed into her. “Mating? You mean…not that we know each other well enough to even…but we could never…I mean—”

He crossed the room in two strides, knelt in front of her, and took her icy hands in his own warmer ones. “Not now, Erin. Not now. Let us add this to the list of ‘things to worry about later,' okay?”

She looked around the cabin, with its bare wooden floor and walls, the pile of Ven's weapons centered on the table, the scroll and book that might teach her some way to harness her gem singer Gift in front of her, and blew out a breath. “Sure. Why not? It's an awfully long list. That's going to be one humdinger of a conversation.”

“Humdinger. Humdinger.” He rolled the word around in his mouth, clearly enjoying the sound of it, then the amusement faded from his face in slow degrees, leaving the icy promise of death in its wake. “Yes, we'll have a humdinger when we have destroyed the monsters. For now, we train.”

10,000 feet beneath the cabin on Mount Rainier

Caligula watched as the cringing, cowering fools from his blood pride shuffled into the main floor of the cavern, shivering as they assembled before him. The smell of dried blood covered them all, so some success must have been achieved, but there were far fewer than the nearly two hundred he'd sent out into the night to sow fear and dread into the humans.

Far more important than the missing vampires, however, was the other who was missing. He snarled at the leaders, who he'd turned many years earlier than these newest idiots. “Where is she? How is it possible that one weak human female managed to escape all of my best and brightest—all of my most powerful?”

They bowed until their foreheads touched the damp and icy dirt of the cavern floor. “She was protected, my lord. The Atlanteans and many shape-shifters were there in the building that you sent us to. And the witches had warded their home so strongly; there was no way for us to breach it.”

He bared his fangs and hissed at them, too furious to form words. The leaders began to moan, knowing that he enjoyed nothing more than killing the bearer of bad news.

Well. Perhaps not
nothing
more. He glanced at the alcove where Deirdre was imprisoned and licked his lips. Then he turned his attention back to the fools, suddenly realizing yet another who was missing. “Where is my general? Did Drakos not lead you to them?”

“He did, my Lord, but he was injured badly by the Atlantean prince. He shot Drakos in the belly. We might have retrieved him, but even as we tried to break through the witch's shield, the Atlantean priest called power beyond anything we'd ever seen. He blasted some kind of lightning strike through the building and destroyed every one of us within a mile.”

The rage built inside Caligula's skull like a vat of boiling oil, until he was certain his very brains must be seared and bubbling from the intensity. “And yet you
managed to escape this catastrophe
?” He roared so loudly that sheets of ice and dirt and stone crashed down from the walls.

“I, uh, I retreated when the electricity began to build, my lord. I saw a vampire get electrocuted in a lightning storm once, and I was—”

“You were afraid,” Caligula sneered. “You were more afraid of an Atlantean lightning strike than you are of me?” He dove down at the cowering vampire. “Truly you are a fool.” With one slash of his extended claws, he ripped the man's head from his shoulders and then jumped up and down on the skull, shrieking, until nothing but a featureless lump of smoking slime hissed underneath his boots.

After a few minutes more, he leashed his rage and carefully wiped first one, then the other of his boots on the bent back of one of his blood pride who still cowered on the ground. Then he sought to center himself and find calm within. If he had lost Drakos, and all he had remaining to him were imbeciles the caliber of these, then he would need to retreat and regroup before he could press further. If he lost Erin Connors because of it, her sister would pay for it in agony beyond any he'd visited upon her thus far. He wanted them both—it had gone beyond obsession to him some time ago—and he would not be denied.

But at least he had begun the work of smashing the so-called civilizing advances the humans were forcing on the undead. He and his kind were born to rule the night, not to obey puny laws made by the sheep. His gaze raked over the worthless members of his blood pride.

Well, he amended,
some
of his kind were born to rule the night. Some were simply cannon fodder. But the most powerful generals and emperors learned to tell the difference early on, or they were assassinated by those they'd once trusted.

A slight disturbance in the air interrupted his bitter memories and heralded the approach of another vampire, one with a familiar cast to his thought patterns, although they were nearly unrecognizable under the throb of agony slicing through them. A black form plummeted to the ground before him and struck the ground hard, bouncing once and then lying still. The stench of blood and pierced intestines rose rankly through the air.

Caligula cautiously rolled the bundle of bloody clothing over with one foot and stared down into the burned and battered face of his only general.

Drakos slowly opened his eyes, his entire body wincing with the effort it must have cost him. “I am here, my lord, to report. And I know how we can capture the witch. She's on her way here to us, now.” He broke off, coughing and groaning, very near to permanent death.

Caligula smiled and raised one wrist to his mouth, then tore it open with his fangs. As he bent to his general and held his wrist to Drakos's mouth, he smiled the smile that had once held all of the Roman Empire in terrified thrall. “Drink, Drakos. Drink and tell me everything.”

As Drakos clamped on to his wrist and began to drink, the hideous tolling noise began to pound through the cavern again, and his blood pride squawked and scrambled away, covering their ears. Caligula bared his teeth and snarled out a challenge to the earth itself. “I recognize your noise as the herald of my own dominion, whatever you are!” he shouted into the darkness. “I am Caligula, and I will rule the world!”

The noise grew even louder, until he was forced to pull his wrist away from Drakos and cover his ears against it. Somehow, however, even over the horrible noise of the unknown bell, and though his hands covered his ears, high above him he heard Deirdre begin to laugh.

The Temple of the Nereids, Atlantis

Conlan looked down at Riley's pale, sleeping form and forced himself to believe in miracles. The flickering light of the candles reflected prisms of color from the jewels surrounding the low bed in one of the Temple's many healing rooms.

He forced the words out past a throat frozen with pain. “The stasis holds?”

“Yes, I can easily hold it for the full forty-eight hours,” Marie said.

He shot a hard, measuring stare at the First Maiden, noting the gray pallor and the lines of strain in her face. “Are you sure? Marie, I know I have no right to ask you to risk your own life or health—”

She shook her head. “Do not finish that thought, Your Highness. As First Maiden, it is my right and my privilege to offer aid to the women and unborn babes of our realm. Can I do less for the future heir than I do for the least of us?”

“Why? Why is this happening?” His voice was a howl of anguish, more wounded animal than man. “Why does her body reject the child?”

“The energy of her pregnancy is…wrong. I've never felt anything like it before. It's not a simple miscarriage, but something fundamentally off—discordant—in the energies between mother and baby.”

He stared down at Riley, who had become more important to him than his own life. His beloved, his soul, his future queen. He finally asked the question that she had forbidden him to speak, or even to think, although it gouged bloody holes in his heart to form the words. “If you took the babe?”

Marie's face paled even further, and she swayed on her feet. “I cannot, Conlan. Riley spoke to me before she agreed to the stasis, and she made me swear on my oath as First Maiden that I would do nothing that would harm her child, if there were the slightest hope that the baby might survive. No matter who might ask.”

He made himself ask. “Is there that hope?”

She touched Riley's forehead with one slender hand, then looked up at him, a quiet strength in her eyes in which he desperately wanted to believe. “As long as there is life, there is hope, my prince. Now we must pray to the Goddess and to Poseidon that your brother and the gem singer are successful.”

The cabin

Ven finished reinforcing the magical warding that Alaric had taught him, then settled back to watch Erin. She'd spread the gemstones from the velvet bag Marie had given her across the table more than two hours before, and then spent the time since staring at them. She had not moved except to lift first one, then another, stare intently at them, then place them carefully back down on the wooden surface. He'd reined in his questions and his curiosity, but when she put her head down on her arms, the muffled sound of despair sliced through him like the sharpest dagger.

He pulled her up off the bench and into his arms. “Tell me,” he murmured against her hair.

“I can't do this. I don't know enough. Marie expected me to somehow instinctively know how to use these gems; how to channel their power. I'm the gem singer, woo hoo,” she said bitterly. “But even though I hear their song, I don't know how to use it. I don't know how to sing their songs.” Her voice caught on a sob against his chest.

“I can hear the power of the stone in the mountain calling to me, Ven. It's so loud it's like thunder in my chest and bones. Every hour, on the hour, it rings and calls me.”

“If you hear it, then we can find it, Erin. It's calling out to you to find it and we will.”

“But will it matter? If I can't figure out how to sing these small healing gems, how will I be able to sing the healing of a jewel so powerful that it calls me through thousands of pounds of dirt and rock? I'm not enough, Ven. What if I try and fail and Riley's baby dies?”

His heart clenched in his chest, both at the thought and at the resonance of the pain in her voice. “We won't fail. I'll be there, and I'll be your strength.”

He remembered her word. “Together, we'll be a humdinger.”

A tiny laugh escaped from her lips, and she looked up at him and touched his face, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Thank you. I needed to jump off the self-pity train and get back to work.”

He nodded and pressed a brief kiss to her lips. “More coffee?”

“Yes. I hope you brought a lot.”

As Ven gathered the pot and bag of coffee, he glanced back at her. She'd rolled up her sleeves and was choosing another gemstone. “Sing to me, damnit,” she muttered, and a grin quirked at his lips.

If anybody could lay the magical smackdown on a hunk of rock, his money would be on Erin.

 

Hours later, Erin sat half covered by the sleeping bag, surrounded by Ven's unique spicy scent, and watched him pace the tiny cabin floor. “This isn't easy for you, is it? Being inactive?”

“No. I think I'd rather be stabbed than sit around waiting.”

She curled her arms around her knees and sighed. “I'm sorry I'm holding us up, I really am. But I needed time to rest. My magic is drained. Plus, I have to study the scroll and the book of the Fae that Gennae gave me, to see if there's any way I can be prepared to find and then deal with a gemstone as powerful as the Nereid's Heart. I'm worried that it will knock me out or something, because I don't know what I'm doing, and then you'll be surrounded by attacking vamps with an unconscious witch on your hands.”

He crossed over to her and touched her hair. “I wasn't criticizing you in any way, please know that. You are braver than any of us have any right to expect.” He clenched his hands into fists at his side, and then forced his fingers open, but not before she saw the suppressed rage in the movement. “If there were any way I could retrieve the jewel without you—”

“You can't, so forget it. Marie said the Heart would destroy anybody who wasn't a gem singer who tried to touch it. You do hear it, though? I'm not going crazy?”

He nodded. “I do hear it, but very faintly. More like a quiet reverberation that I feel under my feet than a sound, really.”

“I think it's the gem singer thing. I'm attuned to it, so it blasts through me every time it starts up. It's more frequent now, did you notice? More like every forty-five minutes.”

“As if it recognized your presence and wanted to make sure you noticed it?”

She forced a smile. “Yeah, well no worries there. It would be hard to miss.”

He began pacing again, and she tried to think of something that would distract him before he went nuts with the enforced idleness. The slight soreness between her thighs gave her an idea, but she wanted to actually talk to the man, not become some lust-driven bimbo. The thought made her laugh. If any witch in the history of the Craft had less likelihood of becoming a bimbo, lust-driven or otherwise, she'd like to meet the woman. They could form a club: only the grim and dedicated need apply.

“That's an interesting smile. You wanna share that joke?” Ven had stopped pacing and was leaning against the wall near the door, his arms folded across his chest.

“No, that was definitely an inside joke,” she said, reminding herself to work on her poker face later. If she had a later. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me about Atlantis. What does it mean to be the King's Vengeance? Is Ven a nickname from that title, or your real name? Exactly how old are you?” The questions tumbled out as fast as she could think of them. Anything to keep the calculation of probabilities associated with
later
at bay.

“The King's Vengeance is my title from birth, as the second son to the prince and heir. But it is only an honorary title until I have earned it by battle challenge.”

“What does that mean? You had to challenge the old King's Vengeance to some kind of duel?”

He smiled. “Not exactly, not like your movies with the swords or pistols at dawn. But there is a component of the position being passed down from uncle to nephew. My uncle served as King's Vengeance to my father, but after—” His smile faded so quickly that she knew his uncle hadn't merely stepped down from his job.

“Was it bad?” she asked hesitantly. “I saw some of your past when we…with the soul-meld. But I didn't want to pry into your privacy, especially when I know how those memories can burn.”

“It was obscene,” he said flatly, all warmth and humanity leached from the vast, icy darkness that looked out at her through his eyes. She shivered, and the movement seemed to bring him back from some faraway place, but the iciness in his expression remained. “My mother—Anubisa tortured my mother nearly to death while she made my father watch. She has some sick, twisted vendetta against my family—especially the males of our family—and she held my father captive for nearly a year before she killed him.”

“Oh, Ven, I'm so sorry. Please, you don't need to tell me this now—”

“Yes. Yes, I do. You should know what you're getting yourself into with me,” he said, his voice gone flat and dead, as if he'd given up any hope that she would want him after he told his story.

He didn't know her very well yet if he thought that, she thought. Seeing his pain and hearing what he'd suffered only made her want him more; want to comfort him and heal him and sing solace to his soul.

“It wasn't the first time she'd captured my father. She held him briefly long ago, when Conlan and I were very young, and when he came back he was changed. Drained. Silent. As if she'd broken something inside him that couldn't be repaired. My mother helped him, but I never quite believed he came all the way back.” He stared at the fire, and she had the feeling he was almost talking to himself, expressing thoughts he'd never before spoken out loud.

“That's how my father was after my mother and sisters were killed,” she murmured. “It was almost as if they took his heart and soul with them, and all that was left for me was his body, hollowed out, going through the motions of life without the intent or the meaning.”

Ven seemed to come back to himself at her words, and she saw warmth in his gaze again. “I am sorry you had to endure so much pain so young. I wish I could take some of the anguish from you.”

“I feel the same way, but we all have to carry our own burdens, don't we?” She'd meant it as a rhetorical question, but somehow it came out differently. Almost as a plea.

“No, I don't believe we do. I would have said the same thing before I saw what Conlan and Riley are to each other. But somehow they share the weight of each other's burdens and, in so doing, lighten the load of both.”

She thought back to the fiercely passionate looks the two had shared, whether or not anyone was watching them, and felt a moment of sharp envy…that vanished under concern. “What will happen to him if she…if she—”

“He will end his existence,” he replied, and the ice formed over his features again. “If she and her babe die, he will die as well, and I will be left, alone, the last of my bloodline.”

She pushed the sleeping bag aside and stood up, then swiftly crossed the room to him. “Then we will make sure that doesn't happen, won't we?”

He pulled her into a fierce hug, and she felt his heart thundering beneath her cheek. “I cannot believe Poseidon has gifted me with you, no matter how briefly you choose to stay.”

She smacked his arm. “Hey! I'm tired of that kind of talk. It sounds like you're trying to get rid of me,” she joked, trying to lighten the mood a little. He rewarded her with his quick grin. “Am I so annoying that you're already trying to dump me on some other man?”

The grin vanished, and the blue-green flames flared in his pupils again. “Simply because I bow to the dictates of free will does not mean that I would not want to kill any man you took to your bed, Erin. I am a predator and have been one for nearly half a millennium. I would ask that you do not tease me about this one subject.”

Her breath caught in her throat, and desire flared at the stark need in his eyes. “You have an interesting way of going from caveman to polite gentleman in one sentence, Ven. I'm not sure I'm witch enough to deal with your contradictions.”

His arms tightened around her, and pain flashed so briefly in his eyes she wasn't entirely sure she'd seen it. “You are all the witch—and all the woman—that I could ever ask for, my little gem singer. Do not ever doubt it.”

She rose on her toes to kiss his nose, fighting the urge to rip his shirt off and kiss him senseless. She knew they were terrific together with their clothes off. Now she wanted to know how good they were with their clothes on. Just in case.

Just in case.

Pulling away, she took the two steps to put her in front of the fire. “So Ven is your real name?”

He took a long breath before answering, but she didn't look back at him, afraid that if she saw heat mirroring hers in his eyes she would be back to the naked thing in a heartbeat.

“Yes, it is. Ven, the King's Vengeance, of the House of Atlantis. There are seven isles that comprise Atlantis, each with its own House, and the main and largest of them is also named Atlantis, and houses the rulers of the Seven Isles.”

“So it's a royalty thing, I got that, and it must be hereditary. What about the other Houses? Are the rulers there dukes or earls or something like that?”

He laughed. “No, we don't have such titles. The ruling families are simply Lady and Lord, but Atlanteans from nonruling families can also earn the title of Lord or Lady for acts of valor or distinction. Marie is the sister of my friend and brother warrior, Bastien, and she has earned the title of Lady many times over, for her great service healing the childbearing women and their babies.”

Erin bit her lip. “Crap. I must have broken protocol a dozen times in the brief time I was there. I never called Marie ‘Lady Marie' at all. Nobody mentioned—”

“She does not allow us to use the title, saying that she is content to be simply Marie, or First Maiden in service to the Nereid Goddess.”