With that, he blasted the glass out of the windows, picked her up, and flew out of the building with her in his arms. She closed her eyes, held on to him with all her might, and offered up a sincere wish that he was right. Also, that he wouldn’t drop her.
They were due a little good luck, weren’t they?
Even as she thought it, she realized she’d probably jinxed them, because that was how the life of Quinn Dawson, ex–rebel leader, was going these days. Would it be fire, hail, or a plague of flying cockroaches?
They rounded the corner of the hotel, heading for the park, and nearly ran into a police helicopter and the officer hanging out the side with a loudspeaker.
“Stop flying now, land on the nearest surface, and put your hands up,” he commanded, and Quinn started to laugh. She couldn’t help it.
“Here we go again.”
Chapter 21
Alaric raised a hand to blast the annoying metallic monster out of the sky, but Quinn stopped him.
“No. Those are the good guys. Can’t we just make a quick getaway?”
So he swooped underneath the helicopter, darted right, and was halfway across the city before the machine had time to turn around. There were advantages to his method of flight.
She directed him to a large building near the water, and he landed in the alley next to it, managing not to draw any more unwanted attention.
After a brief battle where her desire to walk fought his need to hold her, he finally, reluctantly, released her. She led the way up three flights of stairs to an industrial loft with a state-of-the-art security keypad next to its massive steel door. She punched in a long string of numbers and then held her thumb over a small square of glass. It scanned her, and the door opened.
“Welcome, Quinn,” an electronic voice said, as they entered the space.
“She’s an artist, but she also does something for the northeast region of P-Ops,” Quinn explained.
Alaric didn’t know what to expect, given the location and security, but it turned out to be an artist’s studio. Finished and unfinished paintings and sculptures filled the enormous space. The tools of an artist’s trade littered every flat surface, paints and brushes crowding mallets, knives, chisels, and tools he did not recognize.
Quinn walked over to a large canvas propped against the far wall, near a bank of enormous windows, as the door automatically swung shut behind them and a metallic click announced that the security system was again engaged.
“This is amazing,” she said, her voice hushed. “Almost makes me believe in hope again.”
Alaric had no time for art, especially now. His first impulse was to blast a hole in the painting so his woman would turn around and look at him, instead of at a lifeless bit of canvas and paint. He took a steadying breath and shook his head.
Bad enough to be insane. He wouldn’t add childish to his list of flaws.
He walked over to join her, and she reached for his hand. The gesture went a long way toward calming the beast that had been raging inside him since he’d watched her be taken.
It was a deceptively simple canvas. A child and an old woman sitting companionably on a park bench, feeding the birds. But the details shone through to provide a spectacular sort of wonder to the mundane scene.
“The puppy chewing on her shoe. I don’t know why, I’m not really a puppies and kittens kind of girl, but there’s a hopefulness there, that a woman so old would get a puppy and believe she’d live to see it grow into a dog,” Quinn said softly, her face pale and strained with the weight of the horrors she kept imprisoned in her mind.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” he said gently, when what he wanted to do was rage and storm and break things. “What happened with Ptolemy, and what happened with that vampire? I need to know, and I think, even more than that, you need to tell it.”
She inhaled deeply, blew it out, and then finally turned to face him. “That’s just it. Nothing happened. I mean, plenty happened—he made me kill someone, Alaric. He made me kill the secretary-general of the United Nations on live TV.”
Tears shimmered in her lovely dark eyes, but she impatiently scrubbed them away with the back of her hands. “This dress—I need to get out of it. Now. Let me go take a long hot shower and find some of Lauren’s clothes, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
She ran up the metal spiral staircase as if she couldn’t bear to wear the offending garment a moment longer, and Alaric followed right behind her, because the last thing he planned to do for the foreseeable future was let her out of his sight. He slowed, however, as he realized that the shower itself posed a problem, because the gods themselves knew he had no idea where he’d get the control to keep from following her in.
By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the dress was wadded up in a metal trash receptacle and he could hear the sound of running water from behind a closed door. He scanned the high-ceilinged, clearly feminine room for obvious dangers, sent his magic searching for any that weren’t obvious, and then settled down on the floor in front of the door to wait for her, energy spheres in hand against any possible threat.
He finally took a moment to try to communicate again with Christophe and Atlantis, as much as a means of distracting himself from the image of Quinn’s wet, soapy, naked body as anything else.
We are well, but I don’t know for how long. Conlan is losing his mind, since we don’t know where the portal took the women and children, and it won’t answer our call. We cannot evacuate anyone. But the magic is holding, and somehow Serai realized what was happening, from wherever in the world she and Daniel are, and she’s reinforcing our magic, too. Between that and what you did, we are holding strong for now, but you need to find that gem and get it back here.
Alaric told him some of what had been happening, but left out anything to do with Quinn. There was no need for sharing that information. Or the news of the tsunami he’d almost used to destroy the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Poseidon helped shore up our defenses, Christophe. He said he’s locked in a battle with the gods of other pantheons to determine the fate of the world, but we don’t have time to worry about that until the current crisis is resolved.
Well, fix it, Christophe returned. That’s what you do, right? I’m just here temporarily, so don’t get any ideas about leaving the priesthood to me. No how, no way.
Alaric cut off the conversation without responding. He had no patience with Christophe’s carefree ways. Not now, when every fiber of his being was demanding he cut ties to his own responsibilities and flee with Quinn before anything worse could happen. Or perhaps his lack of patience was a mask for an emotion far darker—a manifestation of his own bitter envy.
He could never do it—doom his people to extinction without even trying to save them. Not even for Quinn. But it was surprising how enticing the idea was to him; he, who hadn’t been tempted to swerve in his duty even once in so many centuries, suddenly wished fervently to throw it all over and live a simple life with the woman he could finally admit he loved.
Tempting brought him back to thoughts of Quinn in the shower, and his pants suddenly no longer fit properly. Yes, the body knew what it wanted to do, and the parts definitely worked, so there were two concerns alleviated about the possibility of ending hundreds of years of celibacy. The sound of the running water stopped, and he groaned at the lovely mental image of Quinn drying off her body. Driven by a primal hunger that was far older than Atlantis itself, he climbed to his feet, shoved his dagger in its sheath, and put his hand on the doorknob.