Atlantis Unmasked (29 page)

Tiny, who'd been keeping a lookout on the roof, headed down the stairs, talking into his phone. “Sam's here,” he said, his eyes going from Grace to Alexios. Whatever he saw didn't make him happy, if the scowl was anything to judge by.

She nodded. “Thank you, Tiny. Thank you so much. And please thank your men for me. Will you take this . . . Eddie . . . with you outside for a little while, so we can talk?”

Tiny smiled at her, obviously besotted like every other damn man who got anywhere near her. It gave Alexios a cramp in his gut.

Or maybe that was gas.

Certainly couldn't be the way his balls had swollen into melons and then shriveled back into walnuts all in the course of the past hour.

After Tiny left the courtyard with Eddie, Alexios decided the time had come to put it all out on the table. He rounded on Ethan. “What in the nine hells did you do to her?”

“Do to whom, water boy? And you might want to watch that tone with me,” Ethan said, narrowing his eyes.

“Alexios, leave it alone,” Grace ordered sharply.

“I'll be godsdamned if I will. Whatever he did with that alpha dominance thing affected you badly,” he shot back at her. Then, doomed to honesty by some freak of genetics, he shrugged. “Okay, it wasn't all bad, at least for me. But it made you drunk, and then it made you sick. I want to make sure that this can't randomly happen to you anytime you find yourself near an alpha shifter.”

“And this is your business because?” Grace left the question hanging in the air, but her voice made the threat plain.

Well, wasn't that just too freaking bad. “Everything you do is my business. Get used to it,” he snapped.

Ethan studied Grace for a moment, then turned to Kat, ignoring Grace's sputtered protests. “Is it true? What happened?”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Alexios was very close to the edge of seriously pissed off.

“No, I'm not calling you a liar, you idiot,” Ethan snapped. “It's just that Kat is a little more qualified to describe exactly what reaction Grace had.”

“I'm standing right here,” Grace said, clenching her hands into fists.

“They get like this,” Bastien said to her. “Don't take it personally. I'd never survive if I did.”

Kat swung her head around to stare at Bastien, her long tawny hair flying in the sunshine. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know,” Bastien replied calmly. “If I weren't so secure in my manhood, all this shifter ritual and hierarchy and alpha
miertus
might make me feel a little threatened.”

Alexios whistled. “Did you really just say ‘secure in my manhood'? Oh, boy. Wait till I tell Justice. You will never live that down.”

“I don't think you have room to talk,” Kat pointed out. “ ‘Blah, blah, character, blah'?”

Grace flushed a dark red and started to say something, but Kat cut her off. “Shifters have hearing that's far superior to that of humans,” she said, not unkindly. “It's true,” she said, this time to Ethan. “She was as drunk on the alpha call as cubs at their first Change.”

Grace made a strange strangled sound and then blew out a deep breath. “Stop right there,” she said carefully. “I am a descendant of Diana. If you think for one moment—”

Alexios was watching Grace, so at first he didn't understand why she stopped speaking in midsentence. Then he followed her startled gaze. Ethan had dropped down and was kneeling, head bowed, facing Grace.

“What in the—”

“The panther was Diana's special animal and consort,” Ethan said, raising his head to stare at Grace reverently. “Our pride has been waiting for more than a century to find another descendant of Diana to honor.”

“Freaking Poseidon's freaking balls. Here we freaking go again,” Alexios muttered. Then he crossed the lawn until he stood between Ethan and Grace, facing the shifter.

“You,” he said, pointing at Ethan's fat head. “You are marrying Bastien's sister. You have no right to talk about consorts and honoring with my . . . with Grace. Got it?”

Ethan got a strange look on his face and scrambled to his feet. “No, no, it's not like that. Strictly an honorary consort kind of thing.”

Bastien shook his head as he stepped closer. “No, I don't think my sister is going to go along with the consort concept, honorary or not. I think I might have to kill you. Nothing personal, you understand.”

“You can try,” Ethan said amiably. “Good luck with that.”

Just then, Sam walked into the courtyard with his dog and stopped, staring at the three men. “What in the blazing blue hell is going on around here?”

Alexios was inexplicably glad to see the grumpy old man's face. But Grace needed to feel that she was in charge.
She
should fill Sam in on current events. He turned to ask her to do that, but she was gone.

Kat was gone, too.

Just . . . gone.

Alexios whirled around, frantically scanning the courtyard, but Sam hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, rocked back on his heels, and started laughing. “If you could see the look on your face, boy. She and that lovely ranger woman walked by me a couple of minutes ago. Said something about a pissing match going on out here.”

Alexios sighed. He should be used to it by now. As long as he expected the unexpected, he could at least pretend to understand her. “And the injured?”

“Well, we've got two fairly badly wounded who are staying with the doc until their families can come get them, two who are primed and ready to get revenge, and the rest are inside packing up their duffels as fast as they can, so they can get the hell out of here.”

Alexios nodded grimly. “My thanks to your doctor friend. It could have been worse.”

“Alaric?” Bastien asked.

“Unreachable. Quinn.” It was enough of an explanation. Everybody knew about Alaric and Quinn. A shadow crossed Bastien's face, but he said nothing further.

“It can always be worse,” Sam said, answering Alexios's earlier comment. “Anybody gonna fill me in?”

Blue wandered over to Ethan, sniffing curiously, and gave a tentative bark. Ethan looked down at the dog and made a growling sound that rumbled up from his chest, and Blue quickly backed off and hid behind Sam. Sam patted his dog's head and shot a keen glance at Ethan. “Maybe start with the panther.”

Alexios made the introductions and then told Sam what they'd learned. Sam listened intently, never once interrupting, until Alexios had finished. Then he nodded.

“Matches up with what my friend the doc said. This Prevacek is a piece of work. Old-school Russian mafia turned vamp. Took a liking to hot weather and moved over here for good in the 1700s. Big, bad, and thoroughly nasty. Has political aspirations, too. Wants to get into the Primus, but doesn't have the buy-in ready. Interesting part is that Vonos is throwing a big ball for the press and the high-society types in a couple of days. Might be something to check out.”

“Sounds like Prevacek is running his own game. Either that or he lied to those idiots about why he wanted them to come after our so-called theater group,” Alexios said. “I gotta tell you, I hate coincidences. And we are definitely going to find a way to get into that ball.”

“I, too, am no fan of coincidences,” Bastien said. “However, as you yourself have more than likely realized, this attack does not fit either of the two parallel patterns. You and your ‘theater troupe' are neither a fringe group of human society—”

“Unless your acting is really, really bad,” Ethan put in.

“Funny man. It's not too late for me to kick your kitty-cat ass,” Alexios advised him.

Ethan made a “bring it” gesture, and Bastien sighed. “Nor, as I was saying, was this an attack made to look like an accident.”

“They always like this?” Sam asked Bastien.

“They just met. But there was a little problem with Ethan's alpha call, Grace's response, and something about ancestry and consorts,” Bastien explained.

Sam threw up his hands, clearly disgusted. “Stop, already. I can't deal with this on no sleep and not enough coffee. Don't want to know; don't care. So let's say that this Prevacek is offering up a little bit of dead theater troupe to Vonos as some kind of twisted proof of his initiative and loyalty. What's he gonna think when he realizes none of them came back?”

“We could send Eddie in with a story,” Bastien said doubtfully.

Ethan and Alexios made simultaneous snorting noises, then glared at each other.

“Eddie hasn't got the brains the gods gave a—oh, hey. Shifter,” Alexios said.

“I'd have to agree with that,” Ethan said. “He must have some Atlantean DNA in his background.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Enough, already, children. What are we going to do next?”

Grace walked into the kitchen and introduced Kat to Michelle, still seething about Alexios's high-handedness. The two shook hands, the ranger's blond Amazon height a striking contrast to Michelle's petite darkness.

Michelle hugged Grace. “I'm so glad to see you again. It was a rough night. We've lost all but two of the recruits, too.”

“Sam filled me in while you were dropping off your stuff in your room. You may as well go right back and get it, because you're leaving,” Grace said. “It's too dangerous here.”

“Danger is my middle name,” Michelle said. “Actually, I wish danger were my middle name. My actual middle name is horrible beyond the admitting of it. Michelle Danger sounds rather brilliant, doesn't it?”

“You realize you people are all crazy, don't you?” Kat said, not really phrasing it as a question. “Do you have any hot tea?”

“Crazy like a fox,” Grace said.

“Panthers eat foxes,” Kat pointed out.

“Really? That's disgusting,” Michelle said, making a face. “Bushy tail and all? And yes, we have tea. Real tea, not that nasty tea bag stuff.”

“Thanks. And no, we don't really eat foxes,” Kat said, rolling her eyes. “I'm more of a cheeseburger-and-fries kind of gal. But I don't think you can talk, considering you Brits invented that barbaric sport you call riding to the hounds. I'd love just once to jump into the middle of that as a panther. Scare a few stuffy old men, wouldn't I?”

“Maybe we could talk about what we're going to do now and leave refighting the Revolutionary War for later,” Grace said. “Only two recruits left, and I need to get both of them out of here. Boy, won't Quinn and Jack be proud when they get back from wherever they've gone off to?” She clutched her head in her hands and moaned.

“Who cares whether they'll be proud?” Kat shrugged. “You're the woman on the ground, so to speak.”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Grace said flatly.

“Well, here's one that isn't. What are
you
going to do with the remaining two?”

“I'll be glad to take them wherever you need me to,” Michelle told Grace. “I'd rather stay with you, but as long as you have Alexios, I won't worry about you as much.

“Here we go again. Everybody trying to protect me. I'm supposed to be the one who takes care of everyone else,” Grace said.

“Hey, these Atlanteans are handy in a fight,” Kat said. “Don't underestimate the power of teamwork. We're all better off fighting this fight together, because the bad guys—even the
vampires
—are learning that very lesson.”

Alexios showed up in the kitchen doorway, looking a little sheepish around the edges. “I'm sorry about that.”

Part of her wanted to make an issue of demanding a long apology on the spot, in front of witnesses, but mostly she just didn't want to hear it. Because every time he did something kind and gracious, or something protective and cherishing, it made it harder and harder for her to contemplate life after he left.

“No worries,” she finally said. “Michelle has offered to take our last two recruits off to another training area. Any ideas?”

“Yes, in fact. Brennan is in Yellowstone with a friend of mine. They're setting up a joint command—Pack and human. I think that would be an excellent place for them.”

Kat looked up. “Pack? Are you talking about wolves? Because I've got to tell you, I'm not a fan. It seems like the shifters who most consistently take the vampires' side are wolves.”

“Perhaps. But Lucas is a friend and very definitely on our side. Sam already has one of Tiny's men lined up to go with them to Yellowstone, though. Michelle doesn't need to go. However, I agree she needs to be somewhere safe, and Bastien and Ethan have a proposition for her.”