Atlantis Redeemed (37 page)

She stared at him for a very long time, but then she nodded. “After. Now we have to go. I have an idea of which direction they went.”

 

 

 

 

Tiernan and Brennan ran. Past the rooms that looked like more labs, more holding cells, and guard quarters. They ran, and they were lucky. They didn’t see anybody. They didn’t see an exit, either, so they kept running, although they were slow and clumsy from captivity and trying hard to be quiet, which slowed them up even more.

They came to a branching intersection and skidded to a stop.

“Sure. All that expensive equipment and nobody could afford an exit sign,” Tiernan said bitterly. “Which way?”

He shook his head. “I can only guess.”

“Let’s go right. We’ve taken enough left turns on this mission,” she said.

They took the right-hand turn and ran, and when the corridor snaked left, they followed it, only to run into two very surprised people heading toward them.

Strike that. Litton and a very scary-looking vampire.

Brennan raised his hands into the air, but a buzzing sound came from behind them with no warning, and the next thing Tiernan knew, Brennan was down on the floor, straining against the electricity of the Taser charge.

“You didn’t think you could escape, did you?” Litton said, sneering.

“This is the human with the resistance?” The vampire stared down at Brennan. “Easy enough to subdue.” He kicked Brennan in the head.

Tiernan screamed. “No, damn you!” She dropped to Brennan’s side, ripped her torn sleeve off completely, and wrapped her hand in it to pull the Taser leads from his skin. Then she lifted his head into her lap. He was bleeding, but he was still breathing. She stared up at the vampire and silently swore she’d stake him in his nonexistent heart before she died, if she had to spend the rest of her life trying.

“Now it’s your turn,” Litton said, and she flinched, but he obviously didn’t mean her turn to get kicked in the head.

They dragged her off and strapped her back down in that damn chair. She fought them until one of the guards came into the room.

“Dr. Litton, we thought you should know that Mr. Brennan is dead,” he said, and Tiernan’s mind couldn’t process it. No. It couldn’t be the truth, but the guard was not lying; she would know with this guard. His lies had always sounded to her like sandpaper rubbing on steel, and there wasn’t a hint of that now.

That couldn’t be her heart, tearing apart inside her chest. And yet it was. She gave up, and let out the cry. It came from so far deep inside her that even the vampire took a step back, flinching at the sound.

“Please,” she whispered to the vampire. “I would prefer the kick now.”

The vampire stared down at her, puzzled, but then Litton fastened the helmet on her head, and nothing else mattered but the pain and the light. Her brain shattered and re-formed, as it had so many times before, but this time there was a difference. This time she had entirely given up hope.

She quit fighting it, but her Gift resisted in spite of her conscious mind, and when Litton kept returning, over and over, and telling her he was her friend, her Gift forced her to tell him that it was a lie.

Litton was not her friend. He never would be. He had killed the one man she’d ever wanted to spend her life with; the one man whose courage and kindness had given her hope for the future.

He finally shrieked with frustration or rage and ordered them to ramp it up to the red zone, and she laughed. The red zone might mean freedom, now that she had seen there truly was nothing left to live for. Susannah was gone. Tiernan would never live as a slave to this monster, and although her heart and mind and soul flinched away from the thought, Brennan was dead—Brennan, dead in this horrible place after two thousand years protecting humanity.

She faced death with little regret, except that she would never be able to break the story, bring this evil to the light of day. Brennan was gone, so there was no point to hoping for a future for herself.

She heard Litton’s voice: “If she can’t be enthralled, she may as well be dead.”

She laughed. She’d won. She was free. The red haze of agony lightened and turned to a pure and indescribably beautiful white light, and suddenly everything else and everyone else fell away and a single figure stood there, limned by the light, carrying a bundle in her arms.

“Welcome,” Susannah said, smiling, holding her baby. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Tiernan smiled and stepped forward into the light.

 

 

 

 

Devon’s eyes snapped open from the brief rest. He needed more, the long, healing day sleep, but there was no time and, underground, he could survive without it. He immediately warmed several bottles of blood; he and Deirdre needed the sustenance. He hated to wake her, but she would be terrified if she woke alone.

“Deirdre,” he said. She shot straight up off the long bench where he’d put her when they made it to his rooms and flew at him, her eyes blind with fear.

He caught her and soothed her, repeating her name over and over until she came out of it and calmed down. She drank four bottles of blood in huge gulps, not stopping until she’d drained them all. Then she wiped her mouth and stared at him, still silent.

“I have to go after them,” he said. “I need to get to Brennan. You should stay here, where it’s safe. The others will see me as weak now, after Jones, and I’ll have to battle at least one, if not several of them.”

“I’m going with you,” she said, showing her fangs.

“It’s not safe.”

“I have never been safe,” she said flatly, and the argument was finished. She was going with him.

 

 

 

 

Alaric scanned the room. Lucas and twenty of his shifters, Jack, Alexios, Quinn, and about a dozen of her rebels all stood ready to assist. It would have to be enough.

“We have an idea of how to get in, but we’re not entirely sure,” Quinn said. “We’re going to need to search.”

“I know the direction Brennan’s last mental blast came from,” Alexios said. “We can use that to triangulate.”

Alaric nodded. “I have been trying to reach him since I arrived, but the static you mentioned is too strong. It is almost certainly electrical interference, on an enormous scale. A laboratory full of equipment would not be enough, I don’t believe, so I’m somewhat confused.”

Quinn shoved a hand through her choppy dark hair. “It could be Tasers. Or an electrified cell. Or you may have to face the possibility—”

“No,” Alexios said firmly. “No. The only possibility we face is the one where we find them, alive and mostly unharmed. If you believe different, feel free to get out.”

“Alexios,” Alaric snarled, but Quinn held up a hand, shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Alexios,” she said. “I’ve seen too much death lately, and I’m becoming hardened to it. We’ll find them alive.”

“No time like the present,” Lucas said. “It’s a plus to catch vamps in the daytime, even if they are underground. They’ll be weaker.”

They headed out the door, coordinating directions among them. Quinn stepped into the lead vehicle with Lucas and Alexios, and Alaric leapt into the air. He would fly as mist and keep an eye on her.

Just in case.

 

 

 

 

Brennan struggled to his feet. He had to get to . . . the woman. He had to save her—he couldn’t fail her again.

He
wouldn’t
fail her again, although he couldn’t remember her name. It was right there, teasing the edge of his mind, but not quite available. Not quite real. It didn’t matter, though. Wasn’t relevant.

He had to focus, to ignore his body’s weakness and fight them. They hadn’t even bothered to lock his cell door yet, since he’d been collapsed on the floor and they thought he was unconscious. The two men guarding him had both gone to the door and were talking to someone else in the hall.

Fools. He’d kill them both before they realized he was awake. Kill them and rescue the woman, and then find another way to escape, if he had to kill a thousand vampires and these thugs, too. The men had guns. Brennan knew how to use a gun. Ven had taught him, in spite of his reluctance. Now he was fiercely, triumphantly, glad of it.

He took two steps, cleared the cell door, and had almost reached the thugs, who still didn’t notice him, when the world—or simply thousands of years of lost emotion—crashed down on his head, smashing him to the floor. Memories flooded into him, through him:

Tiernan, collapsing in his arms in Boston. His emotions soaring back, swirling around him like playful waves.

Tiernan, in the hotel room. In the forest. In Atlantis.

Tiernan, Tiernan, Tiernan, whose courage and unshaken belief in him had been enough to help him survive the ever-increasing torture of the chair and the helmet.

He
remembered
her. He wanted to shout and dance with joy, but the guards turned around and saw him, and anyway, the joy turned to despair, because it was too late.

Because the words of the curse were tolling bells of death in his mind:

He remembered her.
Fully
, as Poseidon had decreed. That could only mean one thing. He threw back his head and howled, so loud and so long that he almost didn’t hear the guard rush up to the ones standing at the door. Pain ripped through his gut, tearing him apart, eviscerating him.

“Isn’t Brennan dead? I told the woman that he was dead, like the scientist told me to, and she quit fighting. They killed her,” the man said, hoarse with fear or excitement. “The woman. Tracy Baum. They jacked up the juice too high, and she’s dead.”

Brennan wanted to die. He was ready to beg for death, so that he could follow her into the next life.
Soon, Tiernan
, he vowed.

First, he would kill them all.

The berserker rage flamed up inside him, but this time, instead of trying to control it, he fed the fire. The sensory overload triggered another memory, and he rolled over onto all fours, hunched into himself, and slipped Alaric’s vial out of his pocket. He’d forgotten it, when he’d forgotten her.

Now he would remember, and he would make sure that no one who’d had any part in harming her would ever forget. He drained the tiny bottle, feeling the energy shoot through his body like bottled starlight—if starlight were mixed with rocket fuel and magic.

“Now,” he snarled, leaping to his feet. “Now you will all pay.”

He called the power, and his body itself became a lightning rod for the energy and the starlight and the sheer, destructive force of a Warrior of Poseidon who had nothing left to live for.

They’d killed his woman. They would feel his wrath.

He threw water at them in the form of a tsunami, or at least that’s what he intended, but instead a lightning bolt shot out from his fingers and smashed through the room, zigzagging through the space, leaving nothing but devastation in its wake. It exploded the steel bars of the cells, crushing them into an insane sculpture of twisted metal, and smashed the men into piles of broken bone and flesh on the floor.

The electricity in the room sparked wildly, trying to ground itself, but he didn’t allow it to dissipate; he took it into himself and felt the power surge through him. When every cell in his body was lit up like a supernova, he headed through the door toward the lab.

Litton was going to die first.

 

 

 

 

Brennan ran through the hallway with lightning at his fingertips and murder in his eyes. Nothing mattered—nothing would ever have meaning again—beyond the single imperative: kill them.

Kill them all.

He burst through the door to the lab and saw her pale, still body, death’s unfeeling messenger having come and gone and taken its toll. The small, cold corner of his heart that had held out hope—in spite of the guard, in spite of the curse—shriveled and died in his chest.

Four came at him: two in the white coats of science, one with his gun already in hand, and one with fangs bared. Brennan never slowed down. He blasted them with the dark power; the lightning they’d called into his brain so many times had become part of him. He wielded death and despair on the wings of shining, surging power, and they died.

They all died. The men burned and the vampire flamed into ash on the floor.

And it was good.

But Tiernan, his Tiernan, his true mate. She still lay silent and unmoving, unseeing eyes staring up at the ceiling, the beginning of a smile on her pale, dead face.

He pressed his lips to hers and tried to breathe for her, in and out, over and over, but her lifeless form never responded, though her skin was still warm. He tried, desperate for some response—any response—but it was futile. He straightened at last, the final, dreadful acceptance claiming him.

She was gone.

“It wasn’t my fault,” a voice came, sniveling from the corner. “Damn Smitty for quitting, I need him here now. It wasn’t my fault.”

Litton.

“You will die for this,” Brennan said, but he didn’t recognize his own voice. The lightning had swallowed him up, eaten his soul, and the power surged through him until he had a voice filled with thunder and gale-force winds.

He was no longer Brennan, but a storm-chased tsunami, and he would wreak destruction like the world had never known.