“Better not let Quinn hear you say that,” Daniel said, before the pain of her name caught up to him. She’d been his friend. Until the forced blood bond. Now she was—if not an enemy, still no longer a friend. Wary. Not afraid, not Quinn, but she’d never trust him again. He knew, because he could still feel her inside him. Whispers of her emotional resonance touched his mind at times. The blood bond.
He’d saved her life and killed her trust. He’d thought it a fair trade, at the time.
“Quinn’s not a girl. She’s a rebel leader. Now are we going for a beer or what?” Ven demanded, gesturing toward Daniel’s hands. “Also, quit going all Lady Macbeth and wiping your hands on your pants. You don’t need to ‘out, damned spot,’ when you didn’t get slime on them.”
“Quoting Shakespeare? I expected something from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Daniel tried to smile but couldn’t sustain the effort. “Lady Macbeth. Interesting you say that. I feel like I’ve gotten slime on my hands every day since I took this job.” Daniel forced himself to quit rubbing his hands on his pants and took a deep breath. “I’m not a politician.”
Ven threw back his head and laughed. “Nobody sane is. You’re a warrior, my friend, like me. Now, let’s go get that beer and talk about how we’re going to keep you bloodsuckers from taking over the world. No offense.”
“Not tonight. I’m not a politician anymore anyway. I just resigned.” Daniel looked up at the stone front of the Primus entrance, built only a few years ago but designed to look like it had existed for millennia. The vampire aristocracy was big on pretense. Like the idea that they were aristocracy. Daniel’s own mother had been a peasant who owned a single mule.
Ven whistled long and low. “Conlan is not going to be happy to hear that.”
“With all due respect to your brother, whether or not the high prince of Atlantis is happy with my career choices is not big on my list of concerns. Good-bye.”
Ven’s hand grasped Daniel’s arm with almost vampire-like speed. Damn Atlanteans anyway.
“Remove your hand, or I’ll do it for you,” Daniel snarled. “You presume too much.”
“I’ve been told that before,” Ven said, but he released Daniel’s arm. “You saved my life. I’m not going to stand idly by while you sacrifice your own.”
“How did you—”
“You said good-bye. You never say good-bye. Ever. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that a vampire who has lived for thousands of years might get tired of putting up with life every once in a while. Especially when every day brings a new battle.”
Daniel looked into his friend’s eyes and lied to his face. “I’m not there yet.”
Ven stared back at him, hard, but finally nodded. “Fine. Take a rain check on that beer?”
“Another night,” Daniel agreed. He watched as the prince of Atlantis, one of the few men Daniel had ever called friend, leapt into the air and dissolved into a sparkling cloud of iridescent mist. The Atlantean powers over water were both beautiful and deadly. Daniel had seen both.
He waited until the last droplet of mist had long since vanished from his sight before he spoke, repeating the words that had given away his intent. “Good-bye, my friend.”
And then he went to face the dawn.
Chapter 2
“They might die. They might all die.”
The frantic words sliced through the fog that kept Serai’s mind in a near-permanent state of peaceful rest. The speaker’s urgency was such that she cast around in her memory for his name, but she couldn’t find it. One of the many, many attendants who had come and gone, lived and died, while she and her sisters waited out the millennia until they were freed. After the first thousand years, she hadn’t bothered to try to learn their names. They almost never spoke to her, after all. Only around her. About her.
“So beautiful,” they’d say. Or, more often, “What a waste.”
The fact that she agreed with the second assessment didn’t make it sting less.
“The companion stone is no longer sufficient,” another one said, breaking into the painful memories. “If we can’t find the Emperor, the maidens are all going to die.”
Die. She and her sisters were going to die? No. No. Serai jolted awake with the same painful wrench in her chest that accompanied each year’s brief period of consciousness. But something was wrong this time. Her internal clock, finely tuned after more than eleven thousand years of existing in the prison of stasis, told her that it hadn’t been an entire year since her last brief period of semi-wakefulness. It hadn’t even been half that. The pattern that had ruled her life for so long had changed, and she didn’t know why.
From the sounds of the controlled chaos in the room, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what was going on. Normally tranquil attendants, the current high priest’s acolytes, scurried around like rodents caught in a marble-walled trap. Voices that were always kept at hushed, serene, tones were raised in agitation, loud enough to drown out the ever-present gentle music. They were all panicking, and their fear transmitted itself to Serai—primal instincts that had long been buried shot into instant awareness.
Danger. Daniel.
Why did the two go so naturally together? Why, even after all this time, did her mind instinctively turn to the only man she’d ever wanted to rescue her? The only one she’d believed she could count on. She’d been wrong, though. So very wrong. Her heart, however, seemed not to have given up its lonely, helpless, hope.
Daniel.
Daniel. She used to pray she’d forget him, but she gave that up as futile after the first half a thousand years or so. How long must she be tortured with memories of the man who’d abandoned her? She had no time to think of long-lost love or the searing guilt that had followed her fateful choice on that long-ago day. This time, she had to rescue herself.
Serai opened her eyes and—it took nearly a full moment—the realization of the miraculous nature of that action flooded through her with the power of a lightning strike on storm-tossed waves.
She’d opened her eyes.
For the first time in millennia, she’d opened her eyes, and she had no intention of closing them again. In the spirit of the moment, she tried yet another impossible task and raised her arm from the pale cream- and rose-colored cushions of the silken pallet upon which she’d lain, encased in crystal and powerful magic, for so long. Action followed thought and she watched, wondering, exultant, as her hand touched the crystal covering of her prison.
A shudder of relief wracked her body—her limbs were obeying her commands—and a cry escaped her throat. Hoarse, rusty, and almost unrecognizable, but it was still her voice making that sound. Her voice. The stasis had done its job, then, as promised by a long-dead high priest, and kept her safe and whole throughout the turning of the world.
Kept them safe. She and her sisters-in-captivity. There were so few of them left now.
Pain stabbed at her, biting into her insides, and she instinctively hunched over to curl into the cramping ache. Unfortunately, the crystal case had been designed for sleeping maidens, not those having contortions, so she smacked her head into the gently curved cover and cried out again.
Pain. Sensation. Feelings she’d lacked for so long she couldn’t remember them. The shock of tactile sensation strangled the words she’d been about to speak, and before she could even remember what they’d been—What does one say after eleven thousand years of silence? Shouldn’t it be weighty and profound?—the first crack appeared in the surface of her crystal cage.