“Oh, hell no,” she blurted out.
He turned to her and smiled that hideous smile full of teeth. “Possibly they only want to eat you, though. Suddenly I look better to you?”
She wanted to disagree, but in comparison to this bunch, he was at least mostly human-looking. She’d be damned if she’d be signing up for either option, though.
The din built up to a dull roar again, and Ptolemy turned to give his family his full attention. Probably safest. Quinn watched with growing interest as he drew a familiar small wooden box out of his pocket. She didn’t know what he’d done with the scepter.
“I have retrieved the crown jewel of Atlantis!” He withdrew the tourmaline, placed the box on a ledge, and flourished the gem about. The chattering and squeaks rose to a nearly unbearable level, and then a hush fell on the room as Ptolemy prepared to do . . . nothing.
He waved Poseidon’s Pride about in a high arc over his head, and absolutely nothing at all happened.
“Maybe it doesn’t work here?” Quinn held out her hand. “Want me to take a look?”
“It’s not a faulty handgun, you moron,” Ptolemy snarled at her. “What possible use would you, a mere non-magical human, be?”
She held up her hands, palms out, in surrender. She didn’t have any desire to be his next victim. “Hey, I was just offering to help. Shutting up now.”
One of the bolder brothers—cousins? uncles? Quinn had no idea and didn’t really want to think about it—started to lurch closer, chittering loudly, until Ptolemy leapt forward and smashed it in the face with one clawed hand. Sensing weakness, the others swarmed the fallen one and tore it to shreds before moving back and giving Ptolemy and Quinn a little space.
She’d been in enough battles to realize that the temporary retreat wouldn’t last. This was pretty clearly an “eat what you kill” kind of society, cousin or not, and she was starting to worry that she would be the one who got eaten. Or worse. Her mind stuttered away from the alternatives.
“It must be useless in my dimension,” Ptolemy finally said, and Quinn rolled her eyes.
“Gee, I wish I’d thought of that.” She sniped, and Ptolemy casually backhanded her so hard she flew backward and cracked her head against the wall before falling in a heap to the floor.
Maybe there really was a time to quit being a smart-ass, and captive in a demonic dimension was a good place to start. Her skull rang with pretty little bells for a few long minutes, as she blinked and tried to focus. She was fairly sure he’d torn open her lip, too, but she didn’t care enough to take her hands away from her poor, aching head, until she noticed one of the smaller atrocities staring at her like she was catnip and he was a very hungry kitten. Then she started to worry. More.
“Wipe your face,” Ptolemy said, throwing a piece of cloth at her. She looked at it and realized he’d torn it from his shirt.
“Human blood is a delicacy to them,” he said nonchalantly, but she noticed his gaze was fixed a little bit too intently on her chin.
“Only to them?” She wiped the blood away and then rolled up the cloth and threw it as far as she could from where she still sat on the floor. Several of the creatures hurled themselves into a biting, snapping frenzy over the cloth, which she didn’t find reassuring in the least.
“If I can’t get this to work, we might have to run for it,” Ptolemy said, continuing the hit parade of not reassuring. He shoved the gem into his jacket pocket and scowled as he scanned the room.
“Can’t you just call your portal and get us out of here?”
“Not without taking some of them with me. Do you think your world is ready for them?”
She looked around at the mass of monsters inching bit by bit closer, many of them actively drooling long, glistening ropes of slime as they watched her with, generally, more than two eyes each.
“No, my world is definitely not ready for them,” she agreed. She put a hand on her knife hilt and prepared to kill as many of them as she could before they killed her.
She just hoped Alaric found a way to be happy, one day. The thought of Alaric reminded her of the shell he’d given her and bolstered her courage, in spite of the pain still ringing in her skull, and she climbed to her feet, the better to fight off the atrocities.
“I’m not asking this to be a smart-ass, but why did we come here again?”
“I wanted you to see why I must escape this place, so you would better understand me when we are mated,” he said sadly. “Instead, I have caused you to become even more horrified by me.”
For one brief moment, she almost felt sorry for him. She thought she’d had sibling rivalry problems, when she and Riley hit puberty together, and there were two emotional empaths in the same house. At least neither of them had tried to kill and eat the other one’s boyfriend.
Of course, neither she nor her sister was a murderous kidnapper who wanted to take over somebody else’s world, either.
She squared her shoulders and tried to put a tiny bit of empathy in her voice as she forced herself to lean forward and hug him. “I actually do kind of understand, and I’m sorry for what you’ve endured, but kidnapping me and forcing me to have your kids, plus conquering my world, isn’t the way to my heart.”
He looked surprised, and then he laughed. “I don’t care about your heart. It’s another organ entirely that I need.”
Leering, he patted her stomach, and any shred of sympathy she’d had for his plight vanished in the wave of revulsion that punched her in the gut as hard as he’d punched her in the face.
“For now, though, you have to go,” he said as, at some unknown signal, his family started to swarm the spot where they stood. “I’ll hold them off and then make it back to you later. You’ll be safe enough.”
He picked Quinn up and threw her at the wall as hard as he could, over the gaping, shark-toothed maws and grasping, claw-handed reach of the atrocities who were leaping for her. She braced for impact and wondered if she could survive a shattered skull, but the wall dissolved into the garish orange light of his portal, and she fell through it. The last thing she saw of his dimension was one of his relatives stabbing its swordlike appendage into Ptolemy’s back so hard that the tip of it came out the front of his chest, exactly where his heart would have been if he’d been human.
Ptolemy opened his mouth to scream, and a blackish-green oily liquid gushed out. Surely that had killed him. Surely. In spite of the nausea-making vortex, she smiled fiercely—both with triumph and because she had a wonderful secret. Those creatures were trapped on their side of the vortex; none of them seemed to be smart enough to figure out the portal.
And, even better, Quinn’s past had come to her rescue. One of her mentors in her early days of rebel training had been a champion pickpocket. Quinn had forced herself to embrace Ptolemy for a very, very good reason. She put her hand inside the front waistband of her borrowed pants and double-checked that the leather pouch she’d borrowed from Lauren’s things was still secure.
And that Poseidon’s Pride was secure inside it.
She’d known she was quite likely to die from daring to touch the gem, but she’d had to try, and apparently Alaric’s magic, which he’d shared with her, was powerful enough to protect her. Or else it was gearing up to incinerate her, but she was frankly too tired to care which, especially if this never-ending trip through the demon portal didn’t end soon.
As if on command, it dumped her—out of the portal and into the frying pan, so to speak—and she landed in the same hotel room where Ptolemy had held her hostage before. The windows Alaric had blown out were in the process of being replaced, and seven thugs pointed seven guns at her.