Atlantis Unleashed (14 page)

The connection was so intense that she stumbled, forgetting how to breathe. Her entire body strained toward him, intent on anything he might say or do.

But he stood silently, simply staring at her, as the hideous-looking creature behind him shuffled ever closer. Then Justice raised his sword and pointed it directly at her, looking beyond his brothers, Alaric, and the rest of them as though they didn't exist. Justice simply stared at her, his face drawn in icy lines almost as though he knew her, almost as though he despised her. She shuddered in reaction, but was unable to speak.

He mimicked her silence, saying nothing for nearly a full minute longer.

Conlan glanced at Keely, then turned back to his brother. “Justice? Can you hear us?”

Justice's gaze flickered toward Conlan, but he gave no other sign that he had heard or understood the words before his gaze locked onto Keely again. After another breath of silence, in which nobody seemed to know what to do or say, he spoke, in a harsh, rasping voice. “You are her. You are Keely.”

His words were a demand, not a question. She found herself nodding, as though compelled to respond. “Yes,” she replied, voice barely above a whisper. “I am Keely.”

He smiled a slow, dangerous smile, and the whiteness of his teeth was almost shocking in the darkness of his face. “We are Justice,” he said. “And you are ours.”

Justice stared at the woman, wondering when and how she'd become the focal point of his universe. Wondering how she could be so beautiful that she glowed like a jewel in the setting of Atlantis. He was drawn to the courage he saw in her eyes and—for the barest instant—nobility and honor coun seled him to turn away. To remain in the Void and never, ever attempt to find her again. She was light to his darkness, and he was twisted.

Everything about him was wrong.

For that single, frozen moment, the Atlantean side of him struggled against the compelling need, harsh demand, and bitter hunger that poured forth from his Nereid half. But his Nereid side had been too long denied.

It wanted. It
needed
. It needed Keely, and it would have her.

A wordless roar exploded up from his lungs and burst from his throat. He would take her. Now. He stepped forward to cross the entryway, but at the first touch of his hand to the glassy surface, a fierce electrical charge knocked him back half a dozen paces.

Behind him, Pharnatus, the poor creature he'd nearly forgotten, stumbled to a stop. “I understand not what is happening here, my lord. But any entryway from the Void is gated and shielded by death magic. As the vampire goddess created them, so must they be passed. Without a blood sacrifice, you cannot join yon fellows, nor they you.”

Justice swung around, snarling, the sword still raised in his hand. Pharnatus cringed, shielding his face with one arm, his wild eyes rolling in their sockets. “What little sight I have left to me proclaims that you are near to taking my life,” he said, with no little dignity. “At least let me say my final words to the gods of my fathers before you do so.”

Before Justice could deny it, almost before he could check the impulse to strike out, the deformed creature who had once been a man bowed his head and knelt on one knee. He began murmuring a simple litany of prayer and Justice was shocked to hear that it was a prayer of gratitude.

Thankfulness
.

He grasped Pharnatus by the shoulder and yanked him up. “What can you possibly have left in the way of gratitude? What can you be saying to those worthless gods of yours, who would leave you in this hell for thousands of years? They deserve neither your prayers nor your thanks, but only your hatred and vengeance.”

Justice's Greek was almost unintelligible as he snarled it through clenched teeth, but the man before him seemed to understand.

“Perhaps you would have been right, once,” Pharnatus murmured through cracked and twisted lips. “Perhaps I would have died with vengeance on my tongue and loathing in my heart, then. But you came, and you brought light through your holy sword. Light shone upon my face again, for one last time, after two millennia of darkness. How can I not be thankful? How can I not believe in my gods? For you are their messenger, and now, with your shining sword, you will deliver me to them.”

Justice took a step back, all but screaming with frustration. “I am no god's messenger, you poor, deluded fool. I am naught but the cast-off bastard of a hypocritical king, and the unwanted bane of the sea god. Even my own mother abandoned me. So speak to me not of gods and messengers. I will not kill you. Though my name is Justice, I am no deliverer of it.”

He turned back to the window. He would have no entry into Atlantis, then. He would never again set foot in his home-land. He had not known that the thought of it would wrench through him with such biting agony and rank despair, but he would give his own life before he would take that of this poor, miserable creature.

He could not bear to look at Keely again, so he was careful to gaze only at Conlan and Ven. “Brothers,” he said, the word somehow shaping itself in Atlantean instead of the ancient Greek. “After all these years, I can finally call you my brothers, and then it is only so that I can tell you farewell.”

The Nereid inside him howled silently with rage, but it was silenced by the Atlantean half of his soul when he saw the tears that fell from his brothers' eyes. Conlan and Ven, the brothers he'd never been able to claim, stood anguished before him, with the evidence of their regard for him tracking down their faces.

“Never farewell, my brother,” said Conlan, his dark eyes flashing to silver. “Not when we have only just found you. I claim as king's right the sacrifice. Know that I do this in love for you, and be healed by it.”

Before Justice could react, Conlan lifted a dagger to his own throat and pressed the blade into his flesh. Ven's reaction was much quicker, however, as he snarled out a warning and knocked Conlan's blade from his hand. “You will not, you damned fool! I told you, if anybody is sacrificing himself for our brother, it's going to be me.”

With that, Ven twisted so that he was under Conlan's arm, and he forced Conlan's hand up until the dagger, still clenched in Conlan's fist, cut into Ven's throat. A line of vividly scarlet blood oozed from underneath the blade, mesmerizing Justice with its vibrant color.

Vibrancy. Life. The lives that both of his brothers were willing to sacrifice for
him
. The realization knocked him out of the strange trance caused by the sight of the dripping blood. “No. No! You cannot. I will not have it. I will not have your lives upon my conscience. I am not, and never have been, worthy of your sacrifice.”

But either they didn't hear him, or they ignored him, because they were fighting over the dagger. Fighting each other over who would die so that he could return home.

Agony wrenched like cold steel through his chest at the thought of either of them dying on his behalf. “No,” he shouted again. “I will not have it. I am returning to the Void, so any sacrifice you make would be in vain. Lower your blade, and do not continue with this course of stupidity.”

He forced a mocking sarcasm that he did not feel into his voice. “You are such fools, the both of you. I am almost ashamed to call you my brothers. Leave off this madness now. I gladly return to the Void to escape your maudlin sacrificial tendencies.”

And then, in an act of courage beyond any he'd known in all of his centuries, he raised his head to take one last look at Keely. He drank in the sight of her—the glorious red hair he would never touch, the lush body he would never feel next to his own. “Remember me, my lady. That is all I ask of you for this or any lifetime. Remember me, although you never knew me, for I feel that I have known you for all eternity and hungered for you for even longer, still.”

With that, he turned to walk away, fighting every instinct that he possessed. His mind and heart and soul screamed at him that he could not leave her. And yet his honor knew that he could not allow his brothers to make the ultimate sacrifice for him.

As he turned, sword still held out in front of him, forgotten, Pharnatus blocked his way. “No ‘cast-off bastard' would occasion such loyalty on the part of his brothers,” he said, a simple dignity shining on his twisted features. “You are a messenger of the gods, although you do not know the truth of yourself. You are the emissary of my deliverance from darkness, from Anubisa, and from meaningless death.”

At that moment, Pharnatus gasped and lifted his head to stare in wide-eyed terror at something over Justice's shoulder. Justice whirled around to see what new threat had arrived, but before he'd even begun to turn his body toward Anubisa's damnable portal, a sudden and ominous weight shoved itself onto him.

Reflexively, he bent his knees to catch Pharnatus as the man fell into his arms. But, looking down, Justice realized that his sword was buried to the hilt in Pharnatus's abdomen, and he threw his head back and howled his despair to the throbbing red sky.

“To any gods who are listening, know this,” the Greek said, straining to shape each word, his face contorted in a shining combination of agony and exultation. “I do this of my own free will, and my sacrifice must release Lord Justice from his imprisonment.”

Justice screamed and pulled the sword out of Pharnatus, as the man collapsed into his grasp. “No! Not for me! Never for me! I don't deserve your sacrifice,” he cried out, his own tears pouring down his face. “You cannot do this.”

“I have done it,” Pharnatus said, voice fading. “And it is now for you to live your life with the knowledge of it. The knowledge that you are worthy, and the gods have chosen you for a reason.”

With that, a joy suffused the Greek's face, and he held up his arms as though to an unseen herald. “Alexander, my lord, you have come for me,” he cried.

With one last shuddering breath, Pharnatus closed his eyes and died.

A giant booming noise slammed through the Void like a shock wave, and Justice looked up to see that the distorted surface of the entryway had turned transparent.

High Priest Alaric leaned through the opening and held out one arm. “His sacrifice has opened the way, but only one living being may pass. I cannot come to you, Justice. You must walk through to us.”

“I will not leave him,” Justice rasped. “I did not deserve him, and I will not leave him.”

“You may bring his body,” Alaric said. “He is no longer alive, and thus is not subject to the strictures of the Void. But come now, before the gate closes.”

Justice looked down at his sword and noted, with some corner of his mind, that it no longer glowed. In fact, the blade itself had turned black. “Black to match my soul, which was so unworthy of his sacrifice,” he said bitterly. Through habit borne of centuries, though, he wiped it on his sleeve and sheathed it on his back instead of hurling it out into the waste-land of the Void.

“Now, you must hurry,” Alaric urged. “We do not know how long the gate will remain open.”

There was nothing else for it. If he remained in the Void, he would render Pharnatus's sacrifice irrelevant. He could not—would not—do that. He gathered the fallen man in his arms and stood. Then, in a single leap, he passed through the gates of the Void and into Atlantis.

As he crossed into the air of his native land, the fragile peace between his two natures shattered. The Nereid half of his soul screamed defiance, and his Atlantean side bowed its head in shame that the fallen man had sacrificed himself for such a worthless being as himself. His skull pounded with the raging fury of his divided psyche's battle for control.

But what matter was more pain after so long of nothing else?

He thrust his pitiful burden into Alaric's arms. “I would ask that you honor this man with the ancient burial rites. He was a Greek foot soldier in Alexander's army and survived two millennia in the Void.”

Alaric inclined his head. “So it will be done, as honor and testament to his survival and for his sacrifice.”

Justice threw his head back and shouted out a harsh bark of laughter that had no humor in it. “There was no reason behind his misguided act, although the selflessness is of itself worth honoring. But he should not have done it for me. Never for me.”

Behind him, Ven and Conlan stepped closer. As one, they put their arms around him in a fierce embrace. In that instant, they were finally more than comrades or fellow warriors. They were brothers—
family
. For an instant, Justice allowed himself to experience what others had known. The warmth of belonging. But then he pushed them away.

“Do not think to include me in your royal lineage through a mere accident of birth,” he sneered. “We are brothers in name only, and I would not have it any other way. I seek nothing now but to release myself from the burden of this man's unwanted sacrifice.”