Atlantis Betrayed

Chapter 21

Campbell Manor

Christophe waited, watching her every minute, but the shaking didn’t start for a while. First, she’d seen Sean safely into Hopkins’s care. Declan was sleeping, but she’d gone to his room and checked on him even after Hopkins reassured her. Denal sat in a chair by Declan’s window, daggers resting on his lap. He rose when they entered the room, but Christophe had already communicated with him so he knew there was no threat.

She leaned over and kissed her brother’s forehead, smoothing a strand of hair away, and Christophe was struck by the realization that she must have done the same so many times as the boy grew up. Declan didn’t wake, but he smiled in his sleep.

Fiona raised a hand to Declan but didn’t speak; she just turned and left the room. Christophe followed her, desiring with every fiber of his being that he could protect her from what came next, but helpless to understand how. If only Conlan were here, or Bastien. They were so much better with women and emotion.

He had never so desperately wished he knew how to comfort another.

She made it to her room and then to the shower, peeling her clothes and wig off along the way and letting them fall to the floor in a trail of discarded disguise. Moving robotically, stumbling as she walked, Fiona turned the water on to full heat and then climbed into the billowing steam in her glass-enclosed shower.

That’s when the shaking finally began.

Full-body shudders wracked her body as she leaned against the wall, and the glass trembled with the force of her pain. Christophe stripped out of his own clothes in an instant and entered the shower, pulling her into his arms.

“Shh, mi amara. Shh. It’s over now. Let it out, let it all out, but it’s over now. It’s all over. Shh. I’m right here for you.” He smoothed her hair away from her face, over and over, as she sobbed as if her heart were shattering in her chest.

“He could have died. He could have died. Did I rescue him from his murderous father only to kill him myself? He’s only twenty-two years old, Christophe, and he could have died.” A fresh wave of grief and reaction took her, and he could do nothing but hold her, rocking back and forth, until it subsided a little and she could listen to him.

Listen to reason.

“You can’t take the blame for that attack. They said they wanted me to stop asking about Vanquish. They didn’t even know who you were, in that wig and makeup. Me. Not you. It is I who bear the blame.”

She lifted her face to him, her eyes reddened with pain and fury. “No. No. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. On those bastards who stole the sword, and murdered the guards. On those vampires who attacked us.”

“I’m wondering if they’re the same.”

“If they already have the sword, why would they care about us?”

“It might have been misdirection. But we don’t need to worry about this now. Now you should rest.”

“No,” she said again. “Now I want you inside me. I want to feel something other than horror and fear and rage.” She lifted her arms and put them around his neck. “Make me feel, Christophe.”

And so he did. He lifted her in his arms and joined his body to hers, taking her there in the steaming heat. He directed the channels of water to swirl around her and caress her even as he held her and murmured nonsense words into her ear and thrust steadily home. She cried a little as she held him and kissed him, and the shudders of reaction gently, gradually, turned to trembling of a different sort entirely.

Their joining was not about passion and possession but a declaration of need; the simple need to experience warmth and light. To face their own mortality without doing so alone. He’d wanted sex after battle before, on many occasions. It was a purely chemical reaction to the adrenaline charge of a fight.

This was utterly, completely, different. This was seeking comfort and the welcome of home. He was fiercely proud to be the one she needed, and as if in reaction to the thought, the barrier between her soul and his began to open, surrounding them with heat and light. Her soul danced around her, a shifting dream of blues. But the lovely colors were darkened; tinged with black shadows and the somber gray of grief. It caught him off guard and he ceased to move within her.

She lifted her head from his shoulder, her eyes dazed and unfocused, and he decided to delay the choice. The time wasn’t right—he’d once thought the time would never be right—for the soul-meld. He used every ounce of focus and discipline he’d ever learned to shut the doorway to his soul. To keep her own at bay.

The icy chill of loss swept through him, and he wondered if the miraculous gift of the soul-meld, once offered and rejected, would ever be offered again. But Fiona lifted her lips to his and he sought refuge in her warmth and her passion, and he achieved his release as she cried out her own climax. When he finally released her, they quickly finished their shower, dried in huge towels, and he carried her to bed, pulling her into his arms and tucking the coverlets around them.

He closed his eyes and concentrated, setting magical wards around the room so none could enter it without his admittance, and then he kissed her.

“Rest now, beautiful one. Tomorrow we will figure this all out.” He kissed her again, and then, wrapped around her warm, still-trembling body, he watched her for a very long time, until she fell into a troubled sleep. When her steady breathing finally told him she’d succumbed to her exhaustion, he lay there, content simply to hold her, until dawn brushed its golden fingers against her windows. Then, at last, he, too, fell asleep.

Fiona woke up enveloped in warmth and the sensation of perfect safety for the first time since she’d taken up the role of the Scarlet Ninja. She blinked, disoriented by the large, muscular arm resting across her naked breasts, and then memory flooded back and her face and other, more intimate, parts of her warmed. Christophe. The shower. The way she’d practically begged him to make love to her.

Well. They were beyond petty embarrassments now. She was not a girl on a blind date. She was a grown woman. He was most definitely all man. Together, they’d battled vampires and survived. Anyway, he’d been more than willing.

“The thoughts running through your mind must be fascinating, if the expressions crossing your face in such rapid succession are anything to judge by,” he said. His voice was a rumble in his chest against her side and made her want to rub her face against him like a kitten.

“I was thinking about last night. The vampires. And the shower, and the museum, to be honest,” she confessed, her cheeks flaming again. Evidently whatever caused her to blush had not yet caught on that she was a grown woman.

“Ah, yes, the museum. One of my favorite memories of all time,” he said, chuckling. “And yet waking up here with you counts as its equal.”

She turned to look into his eyes. “Why? You must have woken up with many women before.” She didn’t want to think about it, but she had to face facts, especially if he really had seen more than three hundred birthdays. Even one or two encounters a year and that added up to . . . insanity.

She couldn’t think about that now or her brain would catch fire.

“Never, in fact.” He pulled her even closer and kissed her nose. “I don’t sleep with women.”

“Right. So you’re a monk?”

“I have had sexual encounters, but I have never slept with a woman before this night. I’ve never met a woman I trusted enough to let down my guard that much.” Sincerity and something else was in his gaze. A little embarrassment of his own, maybe?

She stared at him, fascinated. “Never? In all those years?”

“Never.”

“I—I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. “I feel honored.”

“You’re the one who honors me, Princess,” he said solemnly, but then a wickedly evil grin lit up his face. “If you want to honor me again, right now, you can climb on top of me and—”

“I get it, I get it.” She leaned in to kiss him and took her time about it. When she pulled back, she took a deep, shaky breath. “You do amazing things to me, Mr. Atlantean warrior.”

“Wait. Sean!” She pushed away from him and sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest. “I can’t believe I haven’t checked in on Sean.”

“He is doing well,” Christophe said. “I have already communicated with Denal. Sean’s wound has begun to heal, perhaps due to the liberal application of blessed water so quickly applied.”

She leaned back against the pillows. “That’s good. I guess I can wait a bit to check on him in person.”

“He, Denal, and Declan were planning a marathon battle of some video game after lunch,” Christophe informed her, leaning over to kiss the top of her breast. “I think we can safely skip that.”

“But Hopkins—”

“Let Hopkins get his own date.” He pulled her over and on top of him and proceeded to make love to her thoroughly for the next couple of hours, until they were lying in a tangle of rumpled sheets and bliss.

She traced a finger around the curves and lines of the tattoo on the upper left side of his back. “What does this mean?”

“That’s the mark signifying my oath as a warrior. Poseidon brands us with it when we’ve completed our training to be a Warrior of Poseidon. A sort of graduation gift.”

She caught the bitterness underneath the sarcasm. “You don’t like it?”

“Would you want to be branded?” He sat up, pushing his dark hair away from his face. “It implies ownership. I have never wanted to be owned.”

“What does it mean? The circle and the triangle and this symbol?”

“It’s a symbol representing our duty. Poseidon’s Trident bisects the circle representing all the peoples of the world. The triangle is for the pyramid of knowledge. All of Poseidon’s warriors wear this mark as a sort of proof of service. It means we’ve sworn an oath to serve Poseidon and accepted the responsibility of protecting humanity.”

“But you don’t? Want the responsibility of protecting us from our own stupidity, I’m guessing?”

He glanced at her, clearly surprised. “You are very perceptive for a ninja, Princess. Let’s just say I never did, before I met you. Now I’m starting to enjoy the job.”

She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m not a job.”

“No, you, my beauty, are a privilege and a fantasy. I fear I might wake up from this dream and be bereft of your presence.”

“Bereft. Nice. Poetic, even,” she said. “Did you know an eft is a kind of salamander, like a newt? Witches in the old days—or the poor women who were accused of being witches, at least—used to boil their tails in potions.”

He started laughing. “Wonderful. I try to be romantic for the first time in my life, and you start talking about lizards. My poor ego may die a hideous death.”

“But you’re not,” she said, serious now. “You’re not a romantic. You’re a warrior.”

“Does that bother you?” His eyes cooled to green ice, but she recognized it for one of his many self-protective techniques.

“No. I’m still dealing with the fact that I killed those two vampires. I used blessed water to deliberately harm them and it caused their death. That was me. I am now a murderer.” Her hands started to shake and she clenched them together.

“They were vampires.”

“Vampires have rights as citizens now.”

“They were trying to murder you. All of us. Self-defense and defense of others is still permitted, even in the screwed up new world you landwalkers are creating,” he said, rolling over to sit up and stare down at her. “Don’t ever think that you are bad or wrong for preventing them from killing Sean or yourself.”

“You scared me a little,” she admitted. “I’d heard you say the word—warrior. But I didn’t have context. I didn’t know how to believe it. Out there you were deadly beyond anything I’ve ever seen. So many of them and you were everywhere with your blades and your magic.”

“Are you still afraid of me?” His eyes were shuttered again, and his jaw clenched as if against her response.

“Did I just act like I was afraid of you? When I had my lips around your penis, for example?” He stretched blissfully in reaction to her question, and she laughed but then grew serious again. “No, oddly enough, you make me feel safe. You have so much danger inside you, but you put your own life on the line for me and Sean. There’s no way he killed six vampires, either, is there?”

“Let him think it, Fiona. He needs to be a white knight, especially after you threw yourself into the fray to save him.” Christophe lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a lingering kiss into her palm. “He’s not the one who swore an oath, after all, which makes his courage all the more impressive.”

“Do you want to tell me the words? The oath. I’d like to hear it, if it’s not too private.”

“The language is archaic. If you didn’t like me being romantic, you probably won’t like this, either.”

“Please? But only if you want to.” She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she wanted to hear it. She only knew that she did. Knew that if this man were capable of swearing an oath of one sort and following through on it, he was also capable of another kind of commitment. The personal kind.

The kind that suddenly mattered to her a very great deal.

He shrugged. “If you like. It goes like this: 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.”

A thrumming sense of power rang through the room, resonating in the air and in her bones, under her skin and blood and individual nerve endings.

“That’s beautiful,” she whispered. Even she, with so little magic, felt the magic in the words. “But you don’t like it?”

“It’s not the words I don’t care for, it’s their meaning. Why should I care anything about safeguarding mankind?” His face twisted with a rage so intense she flinched away from him. “Humanity murdered my parents.”