Vampire in Atlantis (20 page)
Read Vampire in Atlantis Online
Authors: Alyssa Day
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Paranormal, #Fiction
“You promised to turn me. I want to be a vampire,” Smithson said. “Whatever it takes.”
“Indeed. Whatever it takes, I promise to drain all the blood from your body.” Nicholas let all the feeling and movement vanish slowly from his expression until he stood utterly motionless, like a particularly deadly block of ice.
Smithson shuddered again, but persevered. “And then give me some of yours. Three times. Once is only a blood bond, I know that much.”
Ivy pounded on the window, saving Nicholas from the annoyance of a reply.
“You let him go,” she screamed. “I’ll do anything you want. Just let him go.”
Nicholas pressed a button on the panel set into the wall next to the window and leaned forward. “You’ll do anything I want, anyway, my beautiful little witch. Now try again with the jewel, and we’ll send in food and drink for you and the boy.”
Tears gathered in her eyes, but she blinked them back, squaring her shoulders to appear strong for her boy. Nicholas admired that in a mother. His own son’s mother had been a sniveling coward, too terrified to even let Nicholas approach his boy. No matter that Nicholas had been forced into this life; he’d not chosen to become vampire.
Ancient history had no place here, however. He banished the unwelcome memories and focused on Ivy. Beautiful and deadly, the witch had dabbled in the black side of her magic often enough to gain the title sorceress and dark powers she had no business wielding. Time enough to put shackles on her later, though. For now he needed every bit of her strength and didn’t care overly much where she found it.
“No, Mom, your nose has been bleeding again,” Ian said, trying to stop his mother from approaching the amethyst. “You know what the doctor said. Too much magic, and you could get a brain aneurysm, remember? You can’t push like this again.”
Ivy shook her head. “Ian, you don’t understand. I have to help these . . . men . . . or they’ll hurt us.” She put a gentle hand on his face and tilted it to the light to better see the bruising, and when she turned back toward the window, her eyes were glowing with a deep purple fire.
“Know this. Whoever hurt my son will pay for it,” she said, each word a deadly chip of ice. “If you touch him again, I’ll kill you.”
Nicholas inclined his head, though she couldn’t see it, and touched the panel again. “You have my word your son will be unharmed. The one who bruised him will be punished. We will not release either of you, however, until you achieve our goal. Do you understand?”
It was her turn to nod. She drew in a deep breath and then turned to the amethyst, and three quick steps later she held it in her hands. It did something to her—something he couldn’t see but which clearly hurt her, judging by the sound she made and how her face drained of all color. She only tightened her fingers around the gem and closed her eyes, and began murmuring something under her breath, a kind of chant that even Nicholas, with his vampire hearing, couldn’t quite make out.
Seconds later, though, a pulse of magic rocked the building, and a weak, pale beam of violet light shot out of the gem, spilling between her fingers and across the room. Its end terminated on the third drawer of the second in a line of filing cabinets.
Precisely spotlighting the single location in the room where he had previously hidden a small cache of gold and jewels.
“Houston, we have liftoff,” Nicholas murmured.
Smithson hesitantly moved up next to him at the mirror as the light vanished. Ivy fell to the ground, and her son ran to gather her up. Nicholas stared at the thin stream of blood that trickled from the witch’s nose. A brain aneurysm would be most unfortunate at this point in the process.
“We need to find a way to strengthen or reinforce her magic so it doesn’t harm her to use the gem,” he told Smithson.
The banker blinked rapidly, which had the unpleasant effect of making him look even more like a rodent than he usually did. “You care about what happens to her? I thought she was just a tool.”
“I take good care of my tools, as any competent mechanic would. If she dies, she is of no use to us, and we need her for this.”
“Are you finally ready to tell me what exactly the plan is?”
Nicholas glanced at the human, considering. So long as he kept Smithson at hand, there was little to no chance of betrayal. Why not, after all? There was no danger here.
“The gem acts as a dowsing rod for other gems and for gold. Any valuable mined from the earth. It might even find oil, for all we know.”
Smithson whistled, long and loud. “That’s—that’s—”
“Exactly.”
“How did you find out about this?”
“It was one of your human archaeologists, actually, who recently discovered cave writing that translated into a heretofore unknown legend from the days of the Sinagua Indians. According to these pictographs, the Sinagua hid a great treasure when the vampires first came to the area. Their medicine men warned them that they might not survive as a people, and apparently they wanted to record this story for posterity.”
Smithson held up a hand. “Hold up. Your kind is why the Sinagua died out all those years ago? Have you told anybody? All the historians and archaeologists around here would go crazy for that information, and now that vampires are part of society, you can tell them this stuff freely, right? It’s not like you can get in trouble for what some unrelated vampires did hundreds of years ago.”
Nicholas bared just the slightest hint of fang. “Are you so sure they were unrelated?”
Smithson recoiled a little, but said nothing.
“The vampire goddess Anubisa—Chaos praise her, wherever she may be—long ago laid down a prohibition against sharing our history with mortals. But none of that is your business. All you need to know is that the legend from the pictograph told of a magical gem from the city beneath the waters, and that it could find treasure such as gems and gold and silver, because like called to like.”
“The city beneath the waters? Venice?”
Nicholas wished for a moment that he could afford simply to drain the fool now and give his dead body to the members of his blood pride to dispose of. Sadly, necessity made strange crime-committing fellows.
“Atlantis, you idiot.”
Smithson started laughing. “So it’s a fairy tale. Great. You’re basing our hope of funding for the consortium’s initial investment on Atlantis? Why not just ask Santa Claus for the money?”
“Atlantis most definitely existed and still does. From what I hear, it’s nearly ready to take its place in the world again, if you and your kind don’t bomb it back to the deep when it rises. But those are problems for another day. For now, we feed our witch and her son and let them rest, because this evening we’re going out to the canyons and caves to see what we can find when fewer prying eyes will be around.”
Smithson’s expression still said he didn’t really believe any of it, but just then Ian, having settled his mother on the bench inside the interrogation room, walked over to the file cabinet and pulled open the drawer which the gem had pointed out just minutes before.
“Holy crap, Mom! There’s a freaking fortune in here!”
“Don’t say holy crap, Ian,” Ivy said tiredly, not even bothering to open her eyes. She’d wiped the blood off her upper lip, Nicholas saw, but she looked pale enough to faint at any moment. Nearly unconscious and clearly in pain, but still mother enough to chastise her son for bad language. As Nicholas watched the lovely witch, he felt something in his chest warm in a way he hadn’t felt for more than three hundred years, and he flinched away from the window.
He’d been wrong. There was danger here, after all. He watched her a moment longer and then turned to the banker.
“Bring me the man who hurt that boy. I want to have a word or two with him over breakfast.”
He laughed, fangs fully descended, as the banker scurried from the room. Nicholas was in a wonderful mood, and why not? The witch would find the gem, the consortium was on track, and to top it all off, the blood of a man who had hurt a child would taste so much better than scrambled eggs. He glanced through the one-way glass again, his gaze returning to the lovely witch and her son.
Yes. So much better than eggs.
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.
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.
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.”
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