Atlantis Unleashed (22 page)

Atlantis, the cavern

Keely fought her way back to consciousness, feeling the after-math of the most intense vision she'd ever had kicking her butt like a tequila hangover. She was trapped; something was holding her down. Something . . . or someone.

Her eyes snapped open, and she looked up into his face. The face she'd known for years, even though they'd only just met. Her hand automatically went to the fish carving, still safely under her shirt.

The image of his infant self swam through her memory, disorienting her. She couldn't help herself; she needed to touch his face. Justice flinched a little at her touch, but then leaned his head into her hand, his arms tightening around her. She realized she was lying in his lap and wondered why it felt so completely right.

Part of her knew that she should move away. The rest of her wanted to stay right there in his arms for a very long time.

She felt safe in an entirely unsafe situation, no matter that it was crazy. But, then again, she'd just lived through centuries of his life, and she knew him on a more fundamental level than she'd ever known anyone before.

“You are well?” His voice was husky, and his black, black eyes were warm and unexpectedly gentle. “You have been unconscious for several hours. If I had harmed you in any way—”

He left the sentence unfinished, but his face hardened and his eyes iced over with self-recrimination.

“No,” she managed. “It was the sword. You had no way to know. I . . . I get visions from touching objects. Especially ancient artifacts that have so much violent and emotional history attached to them. I've never reacted to anything as intensely as I did to your sword.”

Justice glared at the sword, his lips curling back from his teeth, then he blinked. “You are an object reader, then? That is a Gift we had thought lost millennia ago.”

“That's what Liam called it, too. I guess it's as good a name as any. There's a talent called psychometry, which has to do with picking up impressions of a person from touching an object that belongs to him or her. But what I do is far more specific. I almost always only pick up one scene, and it seems to be the one that had the most emotional resonance for the object. It's an entire scene, complete with dialogue and action, too.”

“So you could not—”

“I couldn't hold a shirt belonging to a missing child and know where he'd been taken, for example,” she said, remembering the pain and frustration when she'd tried once to do just that. Tried to make her gift valuable to society in more ways than learning unprovable facts about ancient artifacts. “What I'd get is more likely the scene where he first met his new puppy, wearing that shirt, because of the overwhelming joy that would resonate in the fibers of the cloth. Or the pain and grief if his puppy had died . . .”

“I understand. I am sorry.”

“It's okay. I have to admit it's kind of a relief to talk about this with somebody who believes me. I don't really want to end up in the Atlantean version of the nuthouse.”

He pulled her closer to him until her head rested on his chest. She felt somehow comforted by the reassuring beat of his heart beneath her cheek.

“By nuthouse, I'm guessing you mean insane asylum? Has anyone ever threatened you with such a place, simply because you have a Gift that is out of the ordinary for humans?”

His arms tightened even further, as if in response to a threat, and she made a small noise of protest. He instantly loosened his hold, and she took a deep breath. “Not exactly a threat. More like a long history of being institutionalized. My childhood—well, let's just say it wasn't all that much fun.”

Keely realized that sitting in Justice's lap, no matter how seductively comforting, was perhaps not a position of strength for her. Suddenly she was telling him things she'd never told anybody before and didn't really want to start talking about now.

She shifted, putting her hand against his chest to push away, but froze when she noticed the hardness nestled under her bottom. Her breath caught in her throat and heat seared through her, melting her defenses. He clearly desired her, and there was a tiny part of her that wanted to stand up and cheer.

Except—except he'd been in the Void for so long. She didn't know what it was, but it didn't sound like the sort of place where you could go out and meet women. So what did that make Keely other than a convenient outlet—a woman who was handy and available? There was nothing more to it than that. Embarrassment flushed her face.

No. A zillion times no.

Her physical strength was no match for his, so she stopped trying to push away from him. “Please let me go, so I can get up now,” she said quietly.

For the space of a heartbeat, he didn't move. Then he sighed and she felt the warmth of his breath in her hair. When he released her, she scrambled away from him, snatching up her gloves and pulling them back on her trembling hands.

“Thank you. For catching me when I, well, when I went under.”

“Please don't thank me, when it was my action that sent you into that painful vision,” he growled, leaping to his feet and beginning to pace the floor. “If I had only known—an object reader forced to touch, unprepared, the instrument of such violence over so many centuries. I don't know how you could endure it.”

He snarled a long burst of the language she remembered from her vision. From the sound of it, she'd just heard quite a lot of choice Atlantean swearing. She nearly grinned in spite of the circumstances; her scientific side was itching for her laptop or at least a pen and paper so she could start transcribing.

This was better than the lost library at Alexandria. This was a living speaker of an ancient dead language. Phrases like “kid in a candy shop” or “pig in mud” rushed through her mind. This was the find of the decade. The century, even.

If she happened to survive it.

The thought drove her to her feet. She needed to be on even ground with him. “It was fairly difficult,” she admitted, ruefully recognizing that her confession was probably the understatement of the year. “But it wasn't all violence. At least, it wasn't all battlefield violence. The scene with your mother—”

He whirled around. “Did you say my mother?”

She almost retreated when she saw his eyes. They'd turned a fiery blue-green color again, nearly feral. Burning.

“What do you know about our mother?” He sprang across the floor toward her and this time she did take a step back. He was all warrior now, the gentleness she'd seen earlier gone as if it had been a mirage. “Tell us. Tell us everything.”

He was back to the plural self-reference again. She considered options, and then finally went with the simplest. The truth. “Yes, I saw your mother. I tried to help her, but he . . . he—” She shuddered to a halt, shaking her head in denial.

This wasn't a story she wanted to tell him. Not now, not ever. Especially not when Justice was “they” again. She wondered who the second personality was and where it had originated.

She wondered if it were something he could ever heal.

It wasn't anger, but rather wonder tinged with awe that crossed his face as he fell to his knees on the floor in front of her. “Tell us,” he repeated. But this time it was a plea, not a demand. “Please tell us.”

She couldn't resist him. Couldn't resist the naked pleading on his face. Couldn't resist the sound of the lost little boy in his voice.

She knelt down next to him, took his hands in hers, and she told him everything, heedless of the tears pouring down her face.

Justice listened to Keely with a growing sense of sorrow. Of loss. He'd kept a tight leash on his pain and wrath all of his life. Ever since his older brother, son by birth of the man and woman Justice had thought were his parents, had told him the truth in a fit of pique. That he'd been adopted. That his real parents hadn't wanted him.

That nobody wanted him.

But his brother had been punished for lies, and Justice had been hushed and comforted by the woman he'd begun to suspect was no blood kin to himself. In spite of her reassurances, he'd been old enough to realize that none of them had looked anything like him. Although, to be fair, he'd never met another Atlantean with blue hair, and he'd spent most of his first decade of life searching. He'd quit wondering about it after his tenth birthday, of course. Shaved his head in a rage.

Blue stubble had been worse. He'd nearly sustained broken ribs in the three or four schoolyard fights over that one.

When the king himself had confronted him with the truth of his birth, it was almost a relief. Bittersweet, to be sure, and filled with confusion and pain, but still a relief. He wasn't crazy. He
did
fit in, somewhere. Belonged to someone.

He was the son of the king. The king of all Atlantis! But his relief and joy burned to ashes in his mouth almost before it had a chance to be born. The king told him of Poseidon's command, and of the
geas
. Justice could never reveal the truth, or he'd be driven to murder anyone who'd heard the story of his birth and heritage.

Worst of all, the king—his father by blood—had never wanted him. Justice's own father had cast him aside. Had told him his mother had never wanted him, either, confirming Justice's most secret, darkest fear: that he was unworthy of even a parent's love.

It had been a relief to be ordered to the warrior training academy. Constant physical exertion was a civilized way to release the fury that rode him so hard. He'd snarled and spat his defiance at his trainers and fellow students like a wild blue-haired animal, pushing himself to the limits of his endurance and then beyond. Far beyond. The healers all grew to despise the sight of him.

But then, one perfectly ordinary day, everything had changed. He'd met Ven and Conlan. Liked them. Admired them, even, though he'd hated them for having what he would never have—a true family who loved them. A place to belong.

Now this woman, this object reader, this
human
who'd come to represent his soul's salvation, told him that he hadn't been unwanted. His mother had wanted him. He whispered her name. “Éibhleann.”

The Nereid, who'd fallen silent, echoed the liquid syllables of their mother's name in their mind. “Éibhleann.”

Anguish pounded through them. Éibhleann was an ancient Nereid name meaning beloved of the goddess. What foul irony lay in that?

Keely's voice fell silent. She'd finished her recounting of the visions she'd seen, visions she'd
lived
. Visions of his life.

“Justice? Are you . . . well, it sounds stupid to even ask this, but are you okay?”

The gentle concern in her voice nearly broke him, when centuries of battle had not. She sounded worried for him. For
him
, when she should hate him for what he'd done to her. First abducting her, then putting her in such danger and through so much suffering.

He was a monster. No matter what he needed, she deserved better.

There is none better than us,
the Nereid shouted in his mind.

Justice tried to slam the mental door shut, but only partially succeeded. Keely's hands trembled in his; he'd been clenching them far too tightly. “I'm not sure what I feel right now. But regardless of my reaction to this news, thank you. Thank you for giving me the truth that I never knew before.”

“Your mother loved you, and she wanted you,” Keely said. “Her emotion was very powerful, Justice. What they told you about being unwanted—it was a lie. It was a big, fat, cowardly lie.”

He smiled at the outrage in her voice. She was furious on his behalf. Warmth swept through him at the thought. Had anyone, during the entirety of his life, ever been outraged on his behalf before? They'd depended upon him, they fought at his side, and they'd saved his life.

But outrage? No. Never.

Only Keely had ever stood up for him like this.

“So you told him,” he murmured. “You told the king of Atlantis himself that he was wrong. I would give everything I own to have been able to see that.”

She smiled back at him, and the shared flash of humor turned something over inside his chest. He knew he wanted her; he'd accepted that he hungered for her. But perhaps it was more. Perhaps she was breaching the barriers he'd long since established around his emotions.

Shock reverberated through his mind, and the Nereid broke through again.
Yes, let her in. She told us the truth. My—our—mother was a warrior woman, as all Nereid maidens are. She fought for us, and she died for us. Somehow, she spoke to us through this human. Isn't that enough to let us know that this female belongs to us?

Justice looked at Keely again, but this time he saw her through the lenses of the Nereid's eyes. Her quiet beauty became sharper, more sensual. The green of her eyes glowed like the most precious jade. The curve of her lips turned sinful, almost begging him to capture them with his own. The pulse beating in her throat fascinated him. He wanted to taste her skin. He wanted to trace the path from her neck to the lovely, enticing breasts hidden beneath her shirt.