Atlantis Unleashed (20 page)

Waves crashed against the cliffs, and the king stood alone, silhouetted against a tempest-painted sky. A voice, somehow larger and louder than the waves, surrounded him. “You must tell him. His name shall be Justice, and he will serve as a reminder of the injustice that will result if Anubisa is allowed to extend her dominion over the human race.”

The king bowed his head, his fists clenched at his side. “I cannot tell him. I cannot risk my sons, and the enemies of my sons, knowing of his existence.”

The voice, again. The voice that somehow Keely knew—although it was impossible for her to know it, it was impossible that it was true—was that of the sea god.

Poseidon.

“Do not defy me in this. You will tell him, as I have ordered. I have set a
geas
upon him, and he is cursed never to reveal the circumstances of his birth, unless he should then kill everyone who has heard him.”

“Then you have created a monster and a murderer,” the king shouted, pointing his sword—
the
sword—at the waves.

“No,” thundered the god. “I have created a weapon, unlike any that ever has been honed for battle. He will serve your sons, and he will serve my justice. When he is ten years old, you will give him your sword, and you will rename it Poseidon's Fury, to ensure that my fury at Anubisa's treatment of my chosen king is never forgotten.”

Lightning crashed down on the waves, and a dark, undulating shape arrowed through the water toward the shore, but before Keely could catch a glimpse of it, she fell back down into the dark.

The small, blue-haired boy looked up at the king, bewilderment on his face, then down at the sheathed sword that rested in his thin arms. “But, but I don't understand, Your Majesty. Why would you give me your sword?”

The king stared down at him with no tenderness in his expression. “There's something I need to tell you—”

And Keely fell.

Twisting, turning, and whirling through the centuries, Keely fell from vision to vision. The one constant was Justice, growing from child to man to seasoned warrior, always with the sword either strapped to his back or being used in battle. Battle after battle. Desperate fight after desperate fight. Vampires and shape-shifters, all of them with the goal of enslaving or eating humans.

All of them defeated by Justice, wielding Poseidon's Fury.

Keely fell, and fell, and fell, in a never-ending vision. Vision wrapped inside vision, bloody battle after bloody battle, until she couldn't remember anything but carnage, pain, and death.

But she grew to know him—oh, yes, she grew to know this wild man who'd stolen her away. The anguish that lived deep inside him. The loneliness. The bitterness that came from living for centuries as a tool in an angry god's quest for vengeance.

Her heart turned over, and Keely felt the helpless tears rolling down her face. “Enough!” she cried out. “Enough, already. Please, I can't take any more of this. Please, please. No more.”

She fell, again, down into the dark. But this time, instead of falling away, she fell
toward
—she fell toward a blue-haired warrior with flames in his eyes.

St. Louis

 

Vonos materialized in the roomy den of the mansion in St. Louis's nouveau riche suburb of Ladue, and it was clear that nobody had been expecting him. They'd been looking for the recently deceased Xinon, and they'd not expected
him
until later in the week. So they were totally unprepared for the vampire to show up in their midst.

Which was just how Vonos liked it.

Dressed in a meticulously creased custom-made Savile Row suit, complete with exquisite Zegna tie and Ferragamo shoes, he knew exactly the impression he made upon the polo-shirt-and-khaki-pants-clad humans in the room. He did nothing without deliberate purpose behind it, even down to the choice of what to wear to help these idiotic sheep underestimate him.

The
supermodel vampire
, the press had labeled him. The
Primator of haute couture
. They didn't know whether to admire him or ridicule him for his polished-to-perfection appearance. A human politician would have been booted out of Congress for being too elitist. Not a “man of the people.”

The thought amused Vonos. He was a man of the people. He just preferred to eat them.

In any event, the fascination—and fear—that he provoked in the populace was only enhanced by his carefully cultivated style. He was the leader of the Primus, the new, vampire-only, third house of Congress, and his constituents would never respect one who was not more powerful than they.

He finally deigned to notice the humans huddled around the desk. They were gaping at him like a particularly mindless species of carp. However, one who possessed, possibly, an iota of intelligence bowed deeply. “My Lord Primator. To what do we owe this honor?”

“Honor is an interesting word, human. May I call you human? Or do you prefer to tell me your name, which I will then immediately forget as I do most petty annoyances?” Vonos smiled widely enough to show his fangs and was amused when one of the men, a skeletally thin man with a very bad haircut, collapsed into a faint.

But the man who'd first spoken and must be some sort of leader had more presence of mind. “You may call me whatever you wish, of course, Primator Vonos, but my name is Rodriguez.”

“Of course it is. How fitting. Do you know that I first resided in your lovely environs back when it was Spanish territory? They called it Northern Louisiana, I believe.” He smiled at the memory, but then frowned as the pleasant recollection of simpler times and plentiful humans to feed on gave way to another, far more disagreeable memory. This wasn't the first time Atlanteans had confronted him on this turf. More than two centuries ago, a band of them had come to town and, with the help of both the colonial settlers and the native Illini, viciously murdered nearly all of his blood pride. Naturally, faced with the death of his vampire family, he'd been forced to flee. Discretion, valor, et cetera, et cetera.

“I will never flee again,” he said, his nails digging into the edge of the desk so hard the wood cracked.

The human flinched. “Sir?”

“Never mind. I have learned your group is very ambitious when it comes to gathering members of the Apostates, Mr. Rodriguez.”

A measure of the man's nervousness subsided, and he leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, it has been my privilege. I hope to be at the forefront of a new wave of converts. We can definitely see the future, and it involves interspecies cooperation.”

Vonos was always amazed at the human capacity for utter and complete denial. Somehow, in the sheep's mind, subjugation had become cooperation. Well, as they said, whatever gets you through the day.

“We find ourselves unhappy with the actions of the local vampire and his blood pride,” Vonos said. “From this moment on, you will coordinate all recruiting efforts through my office and through my local representative, whom I will introduce to you in the coming days.”

One of the men cowering behind the leader muttered something that was too garbled for Vonos to make out. “Would you like to repeat that?” Vonos asked. “By all means, share with the group.”

He did so enjoy these quaint human concepts.

“I didn't . . . I don't . . .” The man was stuttering too hard to get the words out. Fear tended to destroy conversational ability in the sheep.

“Please tell me,” Vonos said, calmly polite, with a slight emphasis on the word
please
. Then he aimed a gentle, encouraging smile at the man. “Or I'll rip your tongue out by its root, and you won't have to worry about telling anyone anything ever again.”

The sheep fell to his knees, babbling something incoherent, and Vonos sighed.

“Truly, he is starting to annoy me,” he said to the man in charge. “Perhaps you would care to translate, before I lose my patience and kill every one of you?”

“He's afraid of what the local vampires will do to us if we stop cooperating with them,” the leader said hastily. “We're—”

“I am uninterested in your rationales,” Vonos said, cutting him off. “Be advised that the local vampires will never again be a threat to you or anyone else. We were unhappy with their carelessness.”

Vonos's cell phone rang, and he held up one finger for silence. The sheep were at least good with their technology. He did so love his iPhone. Maybe he should convert that Steve Jobs fellow? Hmmm. Idle thoughts for another time.

Vonos glanced at the caller ID and noted that it was his personal assistant, one of the very few vampires that he trusted. He flipped open the phone. “Yes?”

“You have an urgent call from the human leader of the Apostates in Ohio,” his assistant said. “He claims he has knowledge that you need.”

“I'm growing astonishingly weary of these humans,” Vonos said into the phone, while scanning the row of men cringing away from him. “Knowledge of what type?”

“I know it sounds insane, but he claims it's about Atlantis. He says an Atlantean warrior kidnapped one of his colleagues right out of her office. You told me to watch out for anything we could use against the Atlanteans, as insurance for when they want to negotiate with the U.S. government. This could be it.”

Vonos narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. “The story sounds unlikely. The Atlanteans have been far too careful to allow anyone to witness something so lacking in finesse as a kidnapping.”

“He swears it's true,” his assistant said, excitement in his voice. “The Atlantean did something to him, some form of mind control that knocked him out, but he didn't stay out for long. He just lay there on the floor pretending to be unconscious and heard the whole thing. He says he knew that news like this would be crucial to our mission.”

“He actually said that, did he? Crucial to our mission? These humans and their sense of melodrama.”

“Well, this guy has been flagged for a while. He's a climber; wants to move up the hierarchy and be in line to be turned eventually.”

“Ah. Immortality. The elusive prize at the end of all the sheep's rainbows. It does, however, cast a certain shade of doubt upon his claim. Perhaps he exaggerates in hopes of gaining accolades,” Vonos said skeptically, but he allowed himself a tiny bit of cautious optimism. Anubisa would reward him well for building a strong case against the Atlantean advent into international politics. State-sponsored kidnapping of American scientists was certainly a good start.

“I believe I will visit this man myself,” Vonos decided. “Who is he and where is he?”

The sound of shuffling papers came over the phone for a moment, and then Vonos's assistant came back on the line. “Here it is. Dr. George Grenning at Ohio State University.”