? No? Go ahead, we'll wait. *taps foot* Oh, are you back already? Great! Here is chapter 2!
Chapter 2 – Six Weeks Later
Quinn sat in her claustrophobic
room and stared at nothing, trying to ignore the quarter ton of tiger leaning
up against her, wondering if she should take another shower, wander back to the
garden, or simply bash her head against the wall to alleviate the unmitigated
disappointment and sense of failure. As always, the idea of showers in a cave
vaguely amused her. She hadn’t bothered
to ask how Archelaus had installed showers and other modern amenities in a
cave. She’d seen enough of Atlantean power over the element of water to take it
for granted. Of course, in a world where vampires, shape-shifters, and even the
Fae had walked out of fairy tales and into reality a little more than a decade
ago, there were many, many things that nobody bothered to disbelieve anymore.
The crystal clear water in her cup was from a mountain
stream right here on Mount Fuji—no magic involved except that of Mother Nature
herself. It tasted better than any water she’d ever had before.
She stared down
at it as if answers to her multitude of problems might be hidden at the bottom
of the cup.
Whiskey would have been better. She could usually find an
answer or two at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Even if they were the wrong
answers, at least she had a place to start. The one thing she’d never, ever
been good at was feeling helpless, and now she'd lived through six entire weeks
of being completely and utterly unable to help Jack. They'd rested. He'd healed from his physical injuries and
eaten enough to clear out half of Japan of its livestock, probably.
But human Jack--her
Jack--still hadn't put in an appearance, and it was looking less and less likely
every day.
Jack looked briefly around the room and then dropped his
head back down on her leg. The low bed sagged from the weight of five hundred
pounds of tiger, but she wasn’t about to tell him to sleep on the floor. He’d
voluntarily followed her into the room and up on to the bed, after ignoring her
for the past week. She was glad and—maybe, just maybe—a little bit hopeful that
he’d followed her at all.
She hesitantly put a hand on his head, and his eyes snapped
open. Another mystery of the shape-shift: his eyes were green in human form and
pure amber fire as a tiger. She stared into their depths, thinking of that
saying about eyes being the windows to the soul. If it were true, then there
was nobody home in Jack’s soul.
Nobody human.
Only a disturbingly feral intelligence peered out at her
from behind that glowing amber. She steeled herself against the shudder trying
to shake its way through her body and rubbed one silky ear between her fingers.
Jack closed his eyes, and they sat there, two wounded warriors, heart-sore and
silent, for several long minutes. Jack’s rumbling snore was hypnotic, and Quinn’s
eyes started to close. Jack tensed and lifted his massive head a few seconds
before she heard Alaric’s voice.
He'd been there for her, staying in the background and
giving her the time and space she'd needed to rest and heal; the time she'd
needed to try to help Jack recover his humanity. But during every minute of those long weeks,
no matter how her heart filled with despair over Jack, Alaric had remained in
her awareness. A solitary presence,
brooding and watchful. He'd told her
when Serai and Daniel had succeeded in their quest; he'd let her know that
Riley and the baby were doing well.
Other than that, he'd honored her request for time alone, but she could
tell from the intensity of his emotion that his patience was coming to an end.
“Are you ready to talk to me yet?” he asked quietly,
dividing his attention between her face and the tiger at her side.
“Where is that woman, or portal spirit, or whatever she is?”
Quinn asked for the first time. She
hadn't had the energy to be curious about anything at first.
“Archelaus and his people are tending to her. This place is
a sanctuary, as you know, for those with the most dire need. They are well prepared
to care for lost souls.”
“Is that what we are? Is that why you brought us here?” She
heard the bitterness in her voice but was too tired to try to disguise it. The
fight had been too long. The losses too high. More than a decade of her life
fighting for human independence from the vampires and shape-shifters who were
taking over the country and the world, and she was no further along now than
she’d been as a desperate teenager. Even with the Atlanteans on her side, it
never felt like enough. Never felt like the rebels could win. Now there were
even some humans joining Team Evil—black magic practitioners and, horribly,
non-magical human collaborators who willingly served the bad guys, like sheep
volunteering for the slaughter.
She shook her head. “Let them do it. Why do we even care? It’s
social Darwinism.”
“What are you talking about?” Alaric crossed the room to
her side and pulled her to her feet, and she caught her breath at the
electricity that surged between their clasped hands. Even the lightest touch
from him was like a roundhouse punch to her emotions. She didn’t need to be an
emotional empath to know what he was feeling right now.
Burning need. Intense desire. A furnace of wanting seared
between them, and she fought to maintain her balance. She put a hand on his
chest to hold him at a distance, but the feel of his heartbeat under her
fingers only made it worse.
“I need for you to put a damper on all the strong emotion,
please,” she whispered. “I don’t have the reserves of strength right now to
handle it. I've spent so much energy
trying to convince Jack to come back--”
He brushed a kiss on her forehead, and her knees nearly
gave out from the tidal wave of longing she felt from just that brief caress.
But after that—nothing. It was as if a metal shield had slammed down between
them. Suddenly, she couldn’t feel even a hint of his emotions.
Perversely, she hated the loss of them. She looked a
question at him.
“I’ve had hundreds of years to learn to block my feelings, mi amara. Even a powerful aknasha
such as yourself cannot penetrate my defenses,” he said calmly. Or at least he sounded calm. For all she could tell, he might have been
boiling with suppressed emotion, but not an ounce of it leaked out.
His words finally registered in her tired mind, and she
pulled away from him. “Don’t call me your beloved, when you know we can never
be together, okay? Aknasha is fine; we all know I’m an
empath. But I can’t be your amara.”
She turned away and whispered, almost to herself, “Even if
I want to be.”
Jack, as if sensing the tension in the room, lifted his
lips away from his fangs and growled at Alaric.
“I’d almost rather he had enough fight in him to attack
you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Alaric replied dryly. “Your concern for my
safety is touching.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not worried about you. I’ve seen you in action, remember?”
Jack turned those huge golden eyes to her and growled
again, almost as if he understood her. He and
Alaric had thrown enough
testosterone at each other since they’d met that the Jack she knew—human Jack—would never have put up with her comment. The fact
that tiger Jack didn’t seem to like it either gave her another moment of hope.
Archelaus appeared in the doorway and nodded to her. “My
lady, you want your privacy, I know, but our guest wishes to speak with the two
of you.”
Quinn had to think for a second or two before she
remembered what guest he was talking about. By then, Alaric had caught her arm
in a firm grasp, as if to prevent her from moving. She pointedly looked down at
his hand and then up at him.
“No. I don't trust her,” he commanded.
“Of course you’re not talking to me, are you? You would
know better than to try to give me orders, Your Royal Priestliness, wouldn’t
you?” she asked in a voice so sweet it made Alaric blink.
“You—”
She cut him off. “Stop it. I’m still the leader of the
North American rebel alliance, as far as I know, even after this hiatus, not a
helpless woman who needs the big, strong Atlantean to tell her what to do. Let’s
go see this woman.”
“But—”
“The sooner we see her, the sooner we can find out who she
really is,” she explained, in her most reasonable tone. She figured reasonableness
was better than pulling out her Glock and shooting him in the foot.
He’d just heal himself, anyway, so it wasn’t like he’d
learn a lesson in Not Being Bossy.
She yanked her arm out of his grasp and strode across the
chamber toward Archelaus, surprised to find the older man grinning like a
delighted child.
“Oh, Alaric, you are in so much trouble, aren’t you?”
Archelaus said, shaking his head.
Alaric snarled something in a language that might have been
ancient Atlantean, but whatever he’d said, it only made Archelaus laugh out
loud. “Good luck with that, youngling.”
Quinn, who knew Alaric was at least five hundred years past
being called a youngling, shot a suspicious look at Archelaus but decided she
was too tired to care about the relative ages of Atlantean warriors. “Just take
us to her. Jack, are you coming?”
Jack slouched down off the bed and padded after her as she
followed Archelaus down the stone corridor toward a kind of courtyard. The area
was enclosed by the walls of the cave, but high up on one side an opening
allowed sunshine to stream into the space. The surprise at first had been the
garden flourishing in the heart of a cavern, filled with fantastical flowers
that she’d never seen before.
She noticed a trace of a smile cross Alaric’s
face and wondered at the source, realizing they'd never both been in the garden
at the same time before
She raised an eyebrow. “You like flowers?”
“It’s a miniature replica of the main palace courtyard in
Atlantis, even to the tiny fountain burbling in the corner,” he said.
Archelaus nodded. “Yes. A bit of home I couldn’t resist
bringing with me. My friends are always asking for cuttings and seedlings, so I
fear I have introduced Atlantean life to the surface before Conlan was quite
ready.”
“I doubt the high prince is concerned about this kind of
population,” Alaric said dryly.
Quinn tilted her head and stared up at the jagged edges of
the window, which was actually not much more than a cleft torn in the ground
above. “Had any hikers fall in recently?”
Archelaus smiled. “As you know, there is a powerful
repellent spell in the area above. I may not have mentioned this before, but no
hiker has come near the spot since the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, came on
a pilgrimage to the sacred Fuji-san in 1867.”
“The mountain is sacred to the Japanese?”
The Atlantean elder nodded. “Yes. Certainly more at that
time than now, as so many of our gods and sacred places have lost their meaning
in this modern age.”
“But not to you,” she pointed out, slanting a long look at
Alaric. “Your god, Poseidon, is as real to you today as he ever was.”
Jack, who was prowling around the edges of the room, lifted
his shaggy head and aimed his amber gaze at Alaric, growling softly.
Alaric ignored the tiger. He crossed his arms on his chest
and stared right back at Quinn. “As real, and even more demanding. Yet not all
of us will continue to dance to his tune forever.”
“You are his sworn high priest, my son,” Archelaus said,
his face troubled. “What you speak is worse than blasphemy; it is akin to
breaking an oath.”
Alaric turned away from the man, as if dismissing the
topic, and pointed at the dark-haired woman sitting silently on a bench in the
middle of the space. Her back was toward them, but Quinn recognized the cut of
her hair and her slight figure.
“Yes, that is our visitor. Her name is Noriko, and it is
also Gailea, as far as we can understand. She speaks in an odd language—a
confusion of ancient Atlantean mixed with Japanese. Between my friend Mizuki
and myself, we’ve managed to cobble together what we think she means, but she
mostly has sat silent, as you see her, since she arrived, refusing to talk much
at all. She was very ill when she
arrived and now she appears to be somewhat better, but she will not allow us to
examine her, nor will she allow Alaric near enough to attempt a healing.” Archelaus
said, frowning. “I confess I do not know how to proceed with her. I am merely
an old warrior, not wise enough in the ways of women or lost souls.”
The woman turned her head and pinned her dark gaze on
Archelaus. “You are quite wise, and your heart is evident, Old One,” she said
in perfect, lightly accented English.
Alaric stepped forward slightly so that he stood between
Quinn and the woman. Probably thought he was being subtle about his
protectiveness. Quinn rolled her eyes as she dodged around him.
“Now that you have deigned to speak to me, state your name
and how you appeared in our portal,”
Alaric demanded.
The woman rose gracefully to her feet and bowed, dark eyes
flashing with a hint of defiance. “I needed time to discover the shape of my
current reality. I am Gailea, the one you know as the spirit of the portal, and
you, Alaric, are as arrogant as ever, I see.”
"The shape of your reality. Yeah, because that makes sense," Quinn said,
studying Gailea’s delicate Japanese features and raising an eyebrow, not caring
that the other woman recognized her skepticism.
“You look so much like the
other ancient Atlantean woman I know. You and Serai could practically be
sisters.”
Gailea bowed again, this time toward Quinn. “And I am also
Noriko, the woman you see before you. She came to Mount Fuji to die. She
recently discovered that she had an advanced stage of cancer, and having lost
her family to the tsunami, she believed she had no reason to live.”
Shame flushed Quinn’s cheeks with heat, but she knew
better, after years of dealing with traitors, spies, and villains, to take
anything that anyone said at face value. “And we should believe you why,
exactly?”
Noriko/Gailea calmly said quite a long paragraph of . . .
something.
Alaric snapped to attention, whatever it was that she’d
said. His body tensed and he clenched his hands into fists at his sides.
“Poseidon’s long-term plans and schemes can no longer rule
my life,” he snapped. “I don’t want to know what you think.”
Before Gailea could respond, Jack snarled viciously and
leapt through the air toward her, knocking the woman/portal spirit to one side.
As Noriko backed away toward the cave wall, Quinn automatically drew her gun
and dropped into a battle-ready crouch; years of fighting with Jack at her side
had trained her responses to his actions to be instantaneous. She followed Jack’s
gaze up and up. The light in the chamber suddenly dimmed, and everyone else
looked up at the opening in the top of the room, too, just in time to see the
first of a wave of wild creatures with bared fangs and outstretched claws leap
down through the air.
Quinn’s mouth dropped open. “Monkeys? Now we’re being
attacked by flying monkeys?”
