Atlantis Redeemed (2 page)

The Society of Neuroscience is an organization devoted to advancing the understanding of the brain and nervous system. However, I am sure that, unlike my fictional IAPN, it is not filled with evil scientists who wish to experiment on live shape-shifters. And apologies to the lovely Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel—I doubt they’ve ever had vampires crash the party! Thanks to Janet Chapple’s excellent book,
Yellowstone Treasures
, for details on the park geography. Any mistakes in my version are fictional license.

I hope you’ll love Brennan and Tiernan’s story as much as I loved writing it, and as always, thank you from the bottom of my heart for spending some time with me and the Warriors of Poseidon.

Hugs, Alyssa

We will wait. And watch. And protect.

And serve as first warning on the eve of humanity’s destruction.

Then, and only then, Atlantis will rise.

For we are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the mark of the Trident we bear serves as witness to our sacred duty to safeguard mankind.

 

 

 

 

Rome, 202 B.C.

 

Brennan fell against the stone wall of the tavern, his wild laughter tinged with madness. “Another round for the house!” He fumbled in his pouch for a fistful of silver denarii and tossed them on the woman’s tray. Her dark eyes widened until he could see white all the way around her irises.

“But this is far too much,” she protested, her gaze darting furtively toward her father, the fat innkeeper in his stained toga that proclaimed him a free citizen of Rome, albeit a dirty one. “He will cheat you, you know,” she whispered.

He took the tray out of her hands and dropped it on a table, uncaring that the cups and coins flew in all directions, and pulled her close in a drunken embrace. The generosity of ample breasts, overflowing the low-cut bodice of her stolla, distracted him for a moment from his pursuit of ale. Her right nipple was barely covered by the dingy fabric of her palla, and he experimented with tightening his embrace to see if it would pop all the way out of the blue cloth.

Sadly, his brilliant ploy didn’t work. He inhaled a deep breath of the roasted meat and wine scent of the tavern and immediately wished he hadn’t, as his head started spinning.

“So, my beauty, is there someplace more private we might go and I will give you a chance to earn even more of that silver?” He grabbed a fistful of her lovely round ass and squeezed, grinning. She was no slave girl, who would have no choice in the matter, but a free woman, his wine-soaked conscience reassured him.

But her face wore an expression of utter confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t know any foreign language,” she said, almost cringing, as if he would beat her for her failure. She sidled away from him and scrambled for the scattered coins, slapping the hands of greedy bar patrons trying to help themselves to either coins or free cups of wine.

Brennan blinked, momentarily bewildered, but then he realized he must have been speaking in Atlantean, which had nothing in common with Latin, unfortunately. He had a tendency to fall back on his native tongue in the heat of battle or the lax-brained befuddlement of extreme drunkenness.

He spoke Atlantean a lot these days.

He felt the rumble coming up from his belly and managed to considerately turn his head to avoid belching in her face. “An-another place? Private?” he managed, this time in her language instead of his.

“Oh!” Her face cleared as she understood instantly. He probably was not the first, or even the tenth, of her father’s customers to seek out a dark and private place with the buxom wench during the past several days. The thought momentarily sent a shudder of distaste through him, but as he released her and downed the bottom half of his cup, any misgivings vanished in a sea of effervescent intoxication.

Catching his hand, she dragged him through the cheering crowd of revelers, all raising a toast to their benefactor. He bowed sloppily, nearly tripping over the unfamiliar sandals, but the determined woman, almost certainly more enchanted with the contents of his pouch than with him, righted him with a steadying arm and herded him toward a doorway in the back of the tavern.

“Give her a good one, Brennan,” one of his most regular drinking buddies, a centurion called Sergius, called. “She likes it if you squeeze her tits while you tup her.”

Brennan stumbled again, a disquieting sense of wrongness pervading his sodden mind. Why was he here? He was one of Poseidon’s finest, finally called to service in the sea god’s chosen elite, and he was rotting out his brains and his gut with second-rate women and third-rate wine.

The wench shoved the wooden door shut behind him and grabbed his cock through the heavy folds of his toga, and his doubts disappeared in a spike of lust.

“Now let’s be seeing what coin you have for a poor innocent girl,” she cooed, leering at him with pursed lips and narrowed eyes that had not been innocent in years. Then she squeezed his cock again, harder.

He roared out a great whooping noise and grasped her melon-sized tits with both hands. “That’s the idea,” he said. “Why don’t you lift that skirt and let me see what you’ve got under there?”

As he bent his head to hers, the woman’s eyes widened again and then went blank, almost fish-eyed, as they glazed over and then closed. Her head fell back and her plump body went limp, oversetting his already precarious balance so they both went crashing to the filthy floor. Long-ingrained courtesy stirred Brennan to flip them as they went down, so he landed on the bottom of the heap, cushioning her unconscious body from the fall.

“Well. I never had exactly
that
effect on a woman before,” he muttered to the amphorae of olive oil grouped around his aching head, as he stared at her in befuddlement.

AND SO YOU STILL HAVE NOT
, a voice thundered through the room. Brennan’s free hand automatically went to his dagger, but he found only an empty sheath.

YOU THINK TO DRAW YOUR WEAPON AGAINST ME?
the voice continued, and now it sounded somewhat annoyed. Brennan’s head tried to clear, but the sheer quantity of wine he’d consumed during the day thwarted any attempt at mental acuity.

“I am a Warrior of Poseidon,” he declared, but even to himself he had to admit the claim feeble, considering his present circumstances.

YOU ARE MY WARRIOR, YES, THOUGH I WOULD BE MOCKED AMONGST ALL OF THE OTHER GODS WERE THIS TRUTH TO BECOME KNOWN
.

Oh,
miertus
. This was one tsunami of a wine-induced hallucination, if Brennan suddenly thought he was hearing the sea god himself. He struggled with the limp weight of the wench, trying to move her to one side so he could rise and at least face this . . . whatever this was . . . on his feet.

A flash of silvery blue light shot through the dark room, and suddenly the woman was gone—vanished as if she’d never been there. Brennan leapt to his feet and whirled around and around, nearly falling down again as vertigo overtook him.

“What? Where did she—”

THE WOMAN HAD NO PLACE IN OUR DISCUSSION. SHE IS NOW AT HOME IN HER BED, ALONE FOR A CHANGE
, came the dry response.

“But why are you here—” Brennan belatedly realized that he was in no way showing appropriate deference to the sea god and dropped heavily to his knees. “My lord, accept my profuse apologies. Do you have need of me?”

WHAT SAD EXAMPLE OF GODHOOD WOULD HAVE NEED OF SUCH AS YOU?
the voice thundered.
YOU HAVE TRIED MY PATIENCE WITH YOUR CONSTANT DRUNKEN DEBAUCHERY AND EXCESS. HADES HIMSELF, RULER OF THE NINE HELLS, ASKED ME TO GIFT YOU TO HIM.

“Hades?” Brennan struggled to follow the sea god’s logic. His knees hurt from dropping on the stone floor and his head was thumping from the booming sound of Poseidon’s voice. In fact, he was feeling quite sorry for himself and not a little beleaguered by his severe misfortune. “What would Hades want with me?”

“But—”

Brennan shifted on the floor, daring to raise his head and search yet again, but the sea god had manifested only his voice. “Not to be impertinent, but when you say eternity—”

Lightning and thunder crashed through the room, the percussive force smashing Brennan, facedown, into the oil-and-dirt-soaked stone.

Brennan nodded, not daring to say another word, as the hot, slow trickle of blood from his battered head spread under the side of his face. Silence. Understood.

Thunder crashed through the room again, and Brennan belatedly wondered why none from the tavern had come back to investigate the storm taking place in their storeroom, before the sea god continued.

Poseidon laughed, and his laughter contained the sound and fury of tidal waves that could destroy civilizations.

Brennan, robbed of any coherent response as the enormity of Poseidon’s curse sank in, just lay on the floor, stinking of blood and wine, still too drunk to comprehend the full extent of what was happening to him. “Bit harsh, don’t you think?” he managed.

With a final crack of thunder, the sea god disappeared with a booming admonition.
REMEMBER.

The peculiar feeling of heaviness that always accompanied great power disappeared, and Brennan’s ears popped with a sizzling burst of pain as they adjusted to its absence. Warmth pooled in his ear canals and he wondered what had burst in his head and whether the healers would be able to repair what Poseidon himself had wrought, but the self-indulgent thought immediately vanished, crushed under the weight of Poseidon’s words. Corelia had taken her life?

Denial burned through the alcoholic haze in his brain. Surely not. He would have heard. Wouldn’t he?

A child?
His
child? Pain beyond the imagining of it ripped through him at the thought, and he clutched his roiling gut and rolled back and forth on the filthy floor. She had killed herself and taken his child with her? Because of what he, Brennan, had done? No.
No
.

No. It must not be true. He had offered to wed her and been ridiculed for his trouble. She’d made no mention of a child . . . But a god had said it. Poseidon himself.

As the realization of truth seared through Brennan’s consciousness, he threw back his head and roared out his agony, slamming his fists on the stone, over and over. No. What had he done? What—what—

What was happening to him? The pain was vanishing, slipping from his soul as easily as the clothing had fallen from Corelia’s body during their trysts. A bland numbness, hideous in its emptiness, settled over his senses. Suffocating him. A brief flash of terror at the alien feeling and then that, too, was gone. A vast nothingness established itself in its place.