“I don’t know. All of them?”
His mind flashed back to a movie he’d watched with Ven once on a rare evening the demands on an Atlantean warrior and a vampire leader abated enough for them to escape their responsibilities. “Can you do kung fu?”
“What? What are you talking about?” She stood up and pushed the heavy weight of her hair back from her face, igniting in him a powerful desire to be the one touching her hair. Kissing her sensual lips. Caressing—No.
Stop.
Virgin. In trouble. Not taking advantage of her. Not if he ever wanted to live with himself.
“What about kung fu?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Stupid random thought. So why is the jewel hurting you?”
She crossed to the fire and put her hands out to the heat, although it wasn’t particularly cold in the cave. Not to him, at least. Maybe to a woman fresh out of thousands of years in a crystal prison, it felt freezing. He had no idea how to deal with this Serai, the woman who had stepped out of a fairy tale, so beautiful and so tempting.
“Sleeping Beauty,” he murmured.
She glanced back at him over her shoulder, the fire silhouetting her curves through the thin material of the dress, and his body hardened. Wanting. Needing. Even his fangs were aching, trying to drop down, and he’d had complete control over them for centuries. He realized he was breathing in time with the beat of her heart, and he forced himself to back away as far as he could get. Still, it was a cave. He was maybe a dozen paces from her, a distance he could cross in a split second with vampiric speed.
She could be his, the monster inside him whispered. She belonged to him. He could take her, right now, and never let her get away from him.
“Daniel, I need your help.”
He sighed. The four deadliest words in any language, especially when spoken by a damsel in distress. He smiled at the thought of a woman who could become a saber-toothed tiger ever being a damsel in distress, but what the hell. He had his little quirks—the delusion that he could ever be a white knight foremost among them—and he was way past believing he could change.
“You’re smiling?” Her voice rose, and he could tell she was annoyed. She’d gotten that little frown on her face, the same patrician, aristocratic expression that had warned her guards all those years ago that they’d better leave her alone for a while or face a highly unpleasant few hours.
“You need my help, and I gladly and most willingly give it, my lady,” he said, sweeping his best, if quite rusty, bow. He’d been a blacksmith, not a courtier. “But I need more of the facts. What is the Emperor doing to you, and what do you need my help with?”
“It’s connected to me and to the other maidens, who are still in stasis, and somebody is trying to use it. Someone has already tried to channel magic through it, and it nearly killed him . . . no, her,” she said thoughtfully. “It felt like female magic. She’s gone now, from my awareness, either dead or unconscious, but for a moment we were connected. I could feel the others, too. If this woman, this witch, tries to wield the Emperor again, it could kill us all.”
At the thought of Serai’s death, the breath left Daniel’s body so fast and hard he nearly doubled over, but instead he put his hands on the hilts of the daggers he always wore, even in Washington.
Actually, especially in Washington.
“We need to find it. Now,” he said, and his voice rasped as he formed the words.
“I can feel it,” she said. “I think I can find it. We should leave now.” She started toward the cave entryway, but stumbled before she’d gotten three steps.
“You have to rest first,” Daniel said, catching her before she could fall, and steeling himself against the punch of bloodlust. “Sleep. Your body isn’t used to so much activity. I don’t know how you’re walking at all, actually, after such a long period of inactivity. How are your muscles not atrophied?”
“The Emperor and the high priests over the years took care of that. Magic can achieve what science cannot, after all. Think of it. How am I even alive in a world that has changed beyond any possibility of recognition?”
She pulled away from him a little but then surrendered to his unspoken demand, leaning back against his chest and sighing. Daniel realized she was trembling, and he swept her into his arms and carried her back over to the pallet. He arranged the blankets around her again, prepared to wait on the floor near the entry way, blocking anyone from entering, but she stopped him with one slender hand on his arm. He stared down at the curve of her wrist and at her delicate fingers, wondering how something so clearly fragile had the power to stop him in his tracks.
“Please, stay with me?” she whispered. “I’m afraid to fall asleep. I’ve slept so long and . . . what if I never wake up? Please stay with me and promise me you’ll wake me. Promise you won’t let me slip away.”
He looked up and was trapped. Caught in her gaze, fixed—immovable—by the crystalline hint of tears tangled in her long lashes. “I’ll stay. Rest now, and we’ll find your Emperor when you wake up.”
She didn’t close her eyes or relax a single muscle, and he realized she needed to hear the words.
“I promise,” he said, and with a long, gentle sigh, she relaxed back onto the blankets, closed her eyes, and almost immediately fell into an exhausted sleep. He sat next to her, fighting his own need for sleep, content to watch her. An hour or so later, a quiet noise alerted him to Quinn’s presence in the entryway.
“Is that her? The one you left behind?” Quinn looked tired; even more tired and thinner than the month before when he’d last seen her.
“Yes. This is Serai,” he said quietly, not wanting to wake his sleeping beauty.
“Get some rest, Daniel. I’ve got some of my top people on lookout. We’re safe here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Even from Jack?”
“Even from Jack,” she said, smiling a little. “He’s still unhappy about the blood bond. We need to talk about that sometime,” she added, her smile fading.
“I know.”
She turned to leave, and then looked back. “I’m happy for you, Daniel. Don’t screw this up.”
“But that’s what I do best,” he whispered when he was sure Quinn could no longer hear him. He finally gave in to the impulse that had been driving him and smoothed a stray curl away from Serai’s pale cheek. He thought of Quinn and the unwanted blood bond, and then of Deirdre, dying to protect him.
“I’ll kill for you,” he vowed to Serai’s sleeping form. “I’ll die for you. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do to keep you safe. And then I’ll leave you, because that’s the best gift I could ever give you. My absence.”
She curled toward him, into the heat of his body, as if agreeing, and his resolve hardened even as his heart turned to ash inside his chest. He’d already planned to die once this day. Another time was no hardship at all, he swore to himself.
No hardship at all.
Chapter 7
Quinn entered the main chamber of the cavern, deep in thought but still on her guard, to see that another Atlantean had joined the party. Some days she wished she’d never heard of the so-called lost continent, or at least that it had stayed lost. Hard to forget it, though, when her sister was married to the high prince and would soon be queen. Delicate, sweet Riley, queen of Atlantis. It boggled Quinn’s mind. Or it would have, if she hadn’t been living in a world gone crazy since the day nearly eleven years ago when vampires and shape-shifters worldwide had announced to the planet that they really did exist and then promptly started taking over, by any means necessary.
The political means were somebody else’s problem, not Quinn’s. It was the violent means employed by almost all bloodsuckers and the rogue shape-shifters that Quinn concerned herself with these days, and had for the past several years. A girl needed to keep busy, after all. Especially when the girl was leader of the entire North American rebel faction.