“You love it here,” he said mildly, knowing he was right.
She looked around, her gaze lingering on the flowers and fountains before moving to the delicate crystal-and-marble curves of the palace towers and spires. “Yes, I do. Except for this. Conlan, it’s wrong to keep women imprisoned like prized heifers at the county fair for an ancient idea of a breeding program. You know it, I know it, and—”
“Virginsicles,” Keely interjected, a dark look on her face. Justice wrapped an arm around her legs and glanced up at her. He never let the stunning redhead get far from him, since her love was the only thing that had ever been able to help him control his dual nature.
Keely almost absently smoothed a strand of Justice’s long blue hair off her pants leg and then scowled at Conlan. “I call them the virgin popsicles. Frozen in that damn stasis until they get to be released to be bedded and bred.”
“Trust an archaeologist to be blunt,” Ven drawled.
Erin lightly smacked Ven on the back of head. “She’s right.”
“I know she’s right. I didn’t say she wasn’t right, just that she was blunt,” Ven said. “Also, ow.”
Conlan felt like he was rapidly losing any slight bit of control he’d had over the meeting. He should have called them to the war room. He felt he had at least some semblance of control—or the illusion of it—over his opinionated family members there.
“We’ve been trying. You know we’ve been trying,” he told them all, but he was looking right at Riley. “The last time the priests and mages were able to release one of the maidens from stasis was when they freed my mother, hundreds of years ago. We have been unable to use the Emperor since then.”
“Then how exactly did you expect to marry Serai?” Justice asked, making Conlan want to kick his ass.
Riley’s glare turned from hot to glacial in a split second, since, after all, they were talking about the woman who’d been Conlan’s intended bride. But he couldn’t help or change past history. All he could do was fix the present and do his best to chart the future.
“The priests didn’t tell me,” he muttered. “The previous temple chief attendant was sure he’d be able to figure out what was wrong, and the high priest before Alaric was afraid to let anybody know there were problems for some asinine reason. We’ve been working on it since we found out, which was when they were trying to release Serai from stasis for our, ah, for—”
“For your royal wedding,” Riley said through clenched teeth.
“Yes. Yes, damn it, yes,” he said, frustrated and worried all at once. “We’ve had our best mages and Alaric himself trying to discover how to free those six women from stasis, and the best they can do is tell me there has been something wrong with the connection to the Emperor. Now, apparently, it’s worse.”
“And Serai escaped? Or vanished? What exactly happened?” Erin leaned forward. She’d been gone to one of her coven’s council meetings on the surface when it happened, and Ven must not have had time to fill her in yet.
“She definitely escaped,” Conlan said grimly. “She somehow blasted out of the stasis chamber, knocked out the attendants, then made it to the portal dock and knocked out both of my guards—although how a woman who has been in stasis for thousands of years can take out two of our best guards is beyond me—and fled. Somewhere. The gods themselves only know where.”
Erin shrugged. “The answer to part of your problem is easy enough. She has enough magic to take out at least half of all of your warriors in one shot. Maybe more. Maybe all.”
Conlan, Justice, and Ven all looked at her in utter shock. “What?”
“Didn’t you realize it?” Erin walked over to one of the bushes and leaned down to sniff a cluster of pale pink flowers. She turned back to face them and surveyed their surprised expressions, then shrugged again. “I thought you knew. Just walking by the temple where they slept gave me such a charge of powerful, yet contained, magic that I got a buzz like a champagne drunk.”
“Maybe it took a witch or at least someone sensitive to magic to feel it,” Keely said. “I’ve been inside several times, in the course of my studies of everything about Atlantis, and never felt anything like that.”
Justice shot up off the ground and grabbed Keely’s shoulders, lifting her up and almost off her feet. “Did you touch the stasis pods? That kind of magic could seriously harm you. We would be very distraught if you were to be harmed again.”
Ven met Conlan’s gaze. When Justice started to speak of himself in the plural, it meant the deadly Nereid half of his soul was rousing to fury, and nobody within reach was safe when that happened. Nobody but Keely, of course.
Keely knew it, too. She put her hands on either side of Justice’s face and leaned forward to kiss him. “Put me down, you Neanderthal, or I’ll dye your hair pink when you’re sleeping. Think how silly you’d look.”
Everyone held a breath until Justice grumbled but lowered her feet to the ground and then embraced her tightly. “It’s Nereid, not Neanderthal,” he muttered.
Keely laughed and hugged him back. Justice released her, but didn’t let go of her hand.
“No, I didn’t touch the stasis pods. I learned my lesson about objects of magical power with Poseidon’s trident.” She bit her lip. “Maybe, if it’s the only way, I could try—”
“No. We forbid it,” Justice roared, and Conlan pulled Riley behind him out of pure reflex. He didn’t think Justice would ever harm her, but when the Nereid was out of control, there might be explosions.
“No,” Conlan said. “It’s too dangerous and probably not useful. The objects tell you something about the past, right? What we need to know is where she went after she escaped.”
“I wish you’d quit saying ‘escaped,’ like she truly was a prisoner,” Riley said, folding her arms across her chest. “She left. I’d leave, too, if I’d been held hostage against my ovaries for all that time. I’d have done more than just leave a few people unconscious behind me, too.”
Conlan very carefully did not smile at his fierce but tenderhearted warrior woman. She would never have hurt innocents, in spite of her tough talk, but he understood her point very well.
“I intend to make an official apology to her and to the remaining five, as soon as I can find Serai and find a way to release the other maidens,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sure an apology will help,” Riley said, rolling her eyes. “Hey, we’re sorry we stole the past eleven thousand years of your life, here’s a gold watch. Have a nice day.”
“I’d like a gold watch,” Ven offered. Erin smacked him in the head again.
“Look, we’ll do whatever necessary—give them gold, jewels, houses, whatever they want,” Conlan said. “First, we have to find them. And right now? I’m worried that Serai is lost somewhere and hurt. What could she possibly know about surviving on the surface? What if she stepped out of the portal right into the middle of a vampire’s lair?”
A cold wind swept through the air, and all six of them looked up to see Poseidon’s high priest, Alaric, materialize in one of his dramatic entrances. “It’s worse than you realize,” Alaric said, as usual not wasting time with small talk. “I’ve just been to the temple, and the magic that maintains the stasis is in flux. We either figure out how to release those women now, or they may all die.”
Ven raised an eyebrow. “How’s Quinn?”
“I did not see the rebel leader on this trip to the surface,” Alaric said, his eyes glowing bright green with barely restrained power.
Ven snorted. “You mean, you didn’t see the woman you’re ass-over-priestly-teakettle in love with?”
Erin lifted a hand to smack Ven in the head again, but this time he caught her wrist and kissed her palm.
“Perhaps you should consider your next words carefully, Your Highness,” Alaric told Ven. “Should you wish to continue life as one of the palace peacocks, I can make that happen. How is your appetite for birdseed?”