Vampire in Atlantis

Chapter 15

“Are you sure this is right?” Daniel looked around, his night vision excellent, and wondered if Serai’s exhaustion was playing tricks upon her connection with the Emperor. She’d fallen back into a deep sleep at the hotel after their conversation about plans, not even waking when Melody’s friends brought the gear. Apparently the events of the day and night before and the strain from the Emperor’s fluctuations had weakened her far beyond what she’d wanted to admit. He’d spent a restless day trying to sleep, listen for danger, and keep from touching her. Or biting her. Or fucking her.

Or all three at once.

He’d also had three cold showers and a brief period around noon where he feared he was descending into lunacy. Oh, yeah, it had been a hell of a day. And now his fragile, darling, innocent sex kitten of a princess was telling him to shut up.

“Yes, as I said the other five times, Daniel. Please be quiet now, so I can try to sense the Emperor again.” She leaned against a tree and looked up into the sky. “Look. It’s Draco, curled around the Little Dipper. Was that one of your names?”

“Honey, there’s nothing little about my dipper.”

She rolled her eyes, but at least he’d made her smile. It lightened the shadows in her eyes, if only for a moment. “No, Draco. Or Drakos.”

“How could you know that?”

“Oh the attendants in the temple loved to gossip, and the exploits of Conlan and his warriors were constant fodder. I heard much of their vampire ally Drakos. A vampire who was a friend to the high prince’s brother was very gossip-worthy. It never occurred to me that Drakos could be . . .” she finished in a strained voice.

“I’ve had many names over the years,” he said, shrugging the backpack to a more comfortable position. “Something to pass the time. Daniel was not always a name that fit in where I happened to be.”

“What are some of the others?”

He breathed deep of the pine-drenched desert night air and caught the slightest scent of sea salt and woman.

His woman.

He shook his head. She was his only in his dreams. The beauty never ended up with the beast, despite brief moments of pleasure and the beast’s futile wishes.

“Names? Or are you ignoring me on purpose?” she asked teasingly.

“They almost always began with the same letter, for ease of remembering. Drakos, Demetrios. Lately, Devon. Once, for a memorable period, D’Artagnan. Generally back to Daniel whenever possible.”

“Because it’s your real name.”

“Yes, but that’s not the reason. I kept coming back to Daniel because it was the name you’d called me,” he said softly, but he knew by her indrawn breath that she’d heard him.

“I . . . Wait. Daniel, I can feel it. The Emperor. It’s closer than ever before, and it’s moving.” She started running forward and he caught her arm.

“No. Let’s not charge headlong into danger, okay? It’s safe to bet that whoever has the gem is not going to want to give it up and is almost certainly not after it for innocent reasons. It has a lot of power, which tends to draw the attention of those who want to accumulate a lot of power. These are rarely the nicest people you might want to meet.”

She turned toward him, and he tried not to think about touching the curve of her neck, or the delightful curve where her hip met her waist. Tried not to think about unbraiding her hair and wrapping his hands in fistfuls of those lush curls.

Tried not to think about it. Failed miserably, but at least he’d tried.

“Daniel. You’re looking at me the way I looked at that chocolate cake,” she murmured. “I confess I like it, but now isn’t the best time.”

He leaned down and stole a single kiss. It would have to tide him over. “You’re right, of course. Now tell me about what you feel, and how close you think the Emperor is to where we are now.”

“It’s north—no, west of here. Where is that?”

“It’s the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness area,” Daniel said grimly. “Of course they couldn’t be at a coffee shop. Well, enough of this. We can’t do much with the car Melody’s friends brought us, since the direction you’re sensing is pure hiking country, but we’re certainly not hiking, in spite of these fancy clothes and boots. You’re wasting energy you don’t need to expend, especially when you’re traveling with someone who can fly.”

“No!” She backed away from him, violently shaking her head back and forth. “I can’t.”

“I’ll keep you safe. It’s just a matter of closing your eyes if you feel dizzy.” He knew it was easier to show her, so he swept her into his arms and launched into the air. He made it about ten feet above the ground before she started to scream.

In his ear.

He was so startled he nearly lost his grip on her waist, and she slipped a little and then started screaming even louder. Then her entire body started shaking and spasming in his arms, and he headed back for the ground, fast. When he landed and her feet were firmly on the ground, though, the screaming didn’t stop. If anything, it intensified in volume, and she kept shaking so hard he was afraid she was having a seizure.

“Serai, please, tell me what to do. I’m sorry, I didn’t know, please help me. Damn it, I don’t know what to do here,” he said, holding her tightly to try to calm the spasms.

Slowly—ever so slowly—the shaking subsided. She stopped screaming and began sobbing, loud, hoarse sobs that were almost as painful to him as they must be to her. She pulled away from him and sank to the ground, still sobbing as if her heart would break any minute.

“Delia. Oh, no, poor Delia, she was the youngest of us. All that lovely golden hair, oh no, oh no, oh no,” she kept repeating, tears streaming down her face.

He crouched down and took her in his arms and patted her back and stroked her hair—anything that might offer her some comfort. He had a sinking suspicion about who Delia might be, and even the monster crouched inside him roared its anguish at the thought. If one of the other maidens had just died, how long might it be until the person wielding the Emperor’s powers caused Serai to join her?

Daniel would find this witch and kill her. Take the Emperor back to Atlantis, so Alaric and the rest of them could figure out a way to save Serai and the others. He’d capture Poseidon himself and demand the sea god’s help, if need be.

Whatever it took.

“Whatever it takes,” he said, out loud, as Serai’s sobs began to quiet. “We will find the Emperor and rescue your sisters. I swear this to you on my life.”

She finally stopped crying and took a deep, shuddering breath before looking up at him. “I felt it, Daniel. I felt her die.”

“Delia?”

She nodded. “Yes. She—The Emperor’s connection to us stuttered and grew weak, but then a powerful surge of energy speared out through it and the witch who’s trying to access its power. She’s learning how to use it, Daniel. But I don’t think she has any idea that she’s hurting people by doing it. She’s . . . afraid, I think. And Delia. Oh, Daniel. She never had a chance to live her life at all. It’s not fair.”

As she cried, curled against his chest like a wounded child, his heart shattered and then re-formed in ice and granite. So the witch who played with the Emperor’s magic was afraid, was she? Not yet she wasn’t. She hadn’t known anything like the terror he was going to crash down on her head. When he got his hands on her and anyone else who’d been participating in this deadly game, they’d all be very, very afraid.

They would be afraid, and then they would be dead. He swore it on his ancient oath as a mage of the Nightwalker Guild.

“I can’t fly, Daniel. I’m sorry,” she whispered, interrupting his silent plans to rip, tear, and maim.

A horrible thought jumped into his mind. “Is that why you had the seizure? Serai, I’m sorry. I thought if you saw how safe it is, you’d—”

“No. No, the seizure was due to the Emperor, but I can’t fly. I’m terrified of heights, and I don’t know how to calm down. I don’t think we have time for me to try to learn how to be unafraid, not now. Maybe later?” She attempted a smile, but her face was far too pale, and her terror was evident in her eyes and the way she bit her lip.

“Don’t worry about it. We can find another way. I can walk almost as fast as I can fly. We’ll find the Emperor. I promise you.”

They took a few minutes to drink some water, and Serai splashed a little on her face, and then they resumed following the path that only she could sense, to wherever the Emperor was now. The hike would have been beautiful in the daytime, Daniel imagined, but imagination was all that he’d known of sunlight for so long—other than those brief moments in Atlantis—that he didn’t dwell on it. There was a unique kind of beauty in the dark. The moon’s silvery light cast fascinating geometric shadows on the red rock formations for which the areas was famous. He could tell by Serai’s pounding heartbeat, though, that she had no attention to spare for scenery.

“Tell me about the fear of heights,” he said, mostly to distract both of them from what waited ahead in the night. “I wouldn’t have thought there were all that many high places in an undersea city.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Not that many. Enough.”

He could hear it in her voice: this was no random fear. “Enough?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said flatly.

“Maybe I need to hear it. What happened?”

“I threw myself off one of the palace towers. I wanted to die.”

Serai sped up her pace, but she might as well not have bothered. Daniel’s fingers bit into her shoulders as he swung her around to face him, and his face was strained and harsh in the moonlight; as forbidding as if a stranger faced her. Which, after all, was exactly what he was now, despite what they’d shared in that hotel bedroom. He’d lived thousands of years that she knew nothing about, while she’d waited, trapped in a crystalline cage, bound to millennia of nothingness.

“Why?” His harsh voice echoed in the clear, cool night air. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Have you never looked into your future and found it so bleak that you decided not to face it?” She shot the question at him but was surprised when he flinched.

“But you were a princess. You had everything to live for—”

“I had nothing. You were gone, and they told me you were dead. After my father’s physician verified my maidenhood was intact, he told me the wonderful news. I was to be put to sleep and locked in a cage for centuries, if not longer, and when I woke up I would get to be queen! Of the Seven Isles! No matter that everyone I’d ever known and loved would be dead and rotted to dust by the time I awoke.”

His face hardened, probably at the bitterness in her tone. But what did she care for his feelings? He’d been happy enough to abandon her with no concern for hers.

“I came back for you,” he said in a voice like broken glass. “I came back as soon as I was able, and you were gone. No, you went one better than that—you were gone and you’d taken your entire continent with you. Atlantis was gone, Serai. Gone forever. Destroyed and all of you dead, or so the Atlanteans remaining on the shore told me. I wanted to die then, too. Tried my damndest to make it happen, but the monster I’d become took over, and all I knew for hundreds of years was the bloodlust.”

He bent down to pick up a stone and hurled it through the air so hard it shattered into dust when it struck the nearest rock face. “Bloodlust and despair. Bleak emptiness, for centuries. When I finally met these Atlanteans no more than a year or two ago, it never would have occurred to me to ask about you—a woman who’d lived so many millennia ago. I’m sorry. That was my failure. But had I known you lived, and had I known how to find a city at the bottom of the sea, either then or now, I would have braved the wrath of Poseidon himself to come for you.”

She froze, caught by the raw sincerity of his words. It was impossible to do anything but believe him, which meant he hadn’t willingly left her.

“You didn’t abandon me,” she whispered, and he pulled her into his arms in a fierce embrace.

“I would never have left you. But now you have survived imprisonment and stasis, and you deserve to have a life with someone other than an ancient monster.” He held her so tightly, almost as if he were saying good-bye, and the surety came to her that he would leave her as soon as they found the Emperor, if she did not take steps to prevent it.

Starting now.

“I will tell you what happened that day, if you like,” she said quietly. “If you promise not to leave me again.”

He tried to pull away, but she tightened her arms around his waist.

“I promise not to leave you until we have completed this task and you are safe,” he finally said, before he broke away and started walking again.

It was her turn to grasp his arm and pull him to a stop. “That’s not good enough. You want me. I know you do.”

He groaned. “What does that matter? I’m not what you’ll want—what you’ ll need—when you’re safe and you’ve had a chance to think about your future.”

“Then promise me that. You won’t leave me until I ask you to do so.”

He bowed his head and blew out a breath, but finally nodded. “Yes. I will promise that.”

She smiled and rose up on her toes to kiss his cheek, and then started on toward the Emperor’s faint but steady presence somewhere west of them.

“Though it will probably kill me, when you do ask,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.

She raised her chin and smiled a little. He’d have a very long wait coming if he was waiting for her to ever ask him to leave. Especially after the last time . . .

“Do you want to hear? About what happened that day after you were injured?”

“Yeah. Why not? We have a long walk in front of us, I’m guessing,” he said casually, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other. But she knew better. She knew she mattered to him.

She was counting on it.

“You, first. What happened after you pushed me down through that trapdoor, to the hiding place underneath the shop?” She paused for a moment to confirm her sense of the Emperor, and then kept walking, not giving Daniel a chance to argue. Still, they walked along in silence for another five or six minutes before he finally spoke.

“I did my best, but I was a foolish boy. The soldiers who attacked were well-armed and no strangers to battle. Or looting and raping and pillaging, for that matter. I probably would have been better to have hidden with you.”

“You wanted to protect me,” she said, touching his arm. “You wanted to protect the shop, too, over your sense of loyalty to your absent mentor.”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Right. Absent. He was there all the time, all those days I thought he was out buying things for the shop. He was sleeping beneath my feet, hiding from the sun. Sleeping in the dirt like an animal, like he taught me to do.”

She shivered at the stark bitterness in his voice. “But I thought he helped you. He was so elegant, the few times I met him, and the jewelry in the shop so exquisite. Where did he find that?”

Daniel shrugged. “I made some of it. The not-as-elegant pieces, although I tried so hard—Well. That’s another story. But he purchased some of it, and I did see him fashion some of the more amazing abstract pieces himself. I remember thinking at the time that he had uncommon strength in his hands and fingers, the way he could bend the metals.”

She remembered the unusual look of many of the pieces. So very lovely—styled with classic lines and simplicity, instead of the ornate design that had been in fashion then. She’d wanted one for herself, but her father was strict about such purchases, always telling her that one day she’d have a husband to buy things for her.

The wave of anger that swept through her at the memory caught her off guard, as did the sharp loneliness that followed. Though she’d had so many differences with her father and had once hated him for what he’d done to her, he’d still been her father. Now he was gone, along with her mother and brother, her friends, and everyone else she’d ever known. She was alone in a world that had moved on without her, and only Daniel had survived as her single constant from then till now. She slipped her hand in his and squeezed, needing the comfort, and was relieved when his fingers tightened around hers in response.

“One of the soldiers who believed strongly that he deserved a free helping of rings and bracelets stabbed me in the side and smashed the hilt of his sword against my head. That’s the last thing I knew,” Daniel said. “I suppose I should have been grateful that he didn’t use the sharp end and rip out my throat. I knew how to forge a sword but not much of how to use one, at least not in a real fight.”

“I think they must have thought you were dead. There was so much blood, Daniel. You had bled so much that I was sure you were dead when we first found you.”

His hand tightened around hers with gentle reassurance. “I nearly was.”

“Yes, you nearly were,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “I hid down there, terrified, until long after the shouts and stamping of the horses had passed. After I’d heard only silence for nearly half an hour, I finally gathered the courage to come back up and find you. But I couldn’t move the door. I tried with all my strength and even pushed with a board I found down there in the dirt with me, but to no avail.”

“I’d fallen right over top of the trapdoor,” Daniel said. “My last-ditch attempt to hide you, I remember. And all I did was cause you more fear and pain.” He kicked a tree root.

“No, you can’t think like that. You did your best, and you saved my life. Or, at the very least, you saved me from being used as a plaything for those horrible men.” She shuddered at the thought of being violated like that. Death wouldn’t have been worse—death was final, with no chance of healing. But death might have been easier. Ice ran through her veins at the thought of what she’d escaped.

“You were too valuable for that, mi amara,” he said gently. “You would have been treated as a precious commodity to become some warlord’s wife.”

She stumbled over a fallen branch, uncharacteristically clumsy in her shock at his use of the Atlantean term for “my beloved.” He’d called her his beloved, and probably didn’t even realize it.

She’d never forget it.

But, still, they were talking about the past. “Warlord’s wife. Prince’s wife. King’s wife. What does it matter? All of them would have robbed me of my freedom in different ways.”

“Would Conlan have forced you to wed him if you said no?” Daniel growled. “I can convince him of the error of that thinking the next time I see him.”

“I don’t know. I like to think not, especially with the choice he himself made that shattered Atlantean law, but I just don’t know. Princes generally choose with politics in mind, not people, or so the Emperor has shown me over the past millennia.”

“Back to that day,” Daniel prompted. “You finally got out when the mage woke up to help, he told me.”

“He terrified me. I was suddenly aware that someone other than me was down there, and I was afraid that one of the soldiers had found his way in, but then I thought it might be a nightwalker. I’d only heard of them—you—vampires,” she explained, stumbling over the words. “I didn’t know what to think. If his bloodlust was going to mean my horrible death.”

“Adrianus had been controlling his bloodlust for centuries by then.”

She stopped, closing her eyes and reaching out for the Emperor’s unique energy signal again. “I can feel it, closer this time. Daniel, we’re nearly there. But, oh, no, not again.”

Pain smashed into her as the witch controlling the Emperor channeled power through it once more, and Serai doubled over. “It’s stronger this time. I think I’m in trouble. Oh, by the gods, it hurts.”

Daniel shocked her by throwing her on the ground, safely cradled in his arms, and covering her body with his own. “We’re definitely in trouble. I can hear voices, and they’re coming from the trees and sky, and they’re moving too fast to be human. This can’t be a coincidence. Whoever has the Emperor, they have vampires with them.”