A rocky shore, in the midst of a thunderstorm

Waves crashed against the cliffs, and the king stood alone, silhouetted against a tempest-painted sky. A voice, somehow larger and louder than the waves, surrounded him. "You must tell him. His name shall be Justice, and he will serve as a reminder of the injustice that will result if Anubisa is allowed to extend her dominion over the human race."

The king bowed his head, his fists clenched at his side. "I cannot tell him. I cannot risk my sons, and the enemies of my sons, knowing of his existence."

The voice, again. The voice that somehow Keely knew-although it was impossible for her to know it, it was impossible that it was true-was that of the sea god.

Poseidon.

"Do not defy me in this. You will tell him, as I have ordered. I have set a geas upon him, and he is cursed never to reveal the circumstances of his birth, unless he should then kill everyone who has heard him."

"Then you have created a monster and a murderer," the king shouted, pointing his sword-the sword-at the waves.

"No," thundered the god. "I have created a weapon, unlike any that ever has been honed for battle. He will serve your sons, and he will serve my justice. When he is ten years old, you will give him your sword, and you will rename it Poseidon's Fury, to ensure that my fury at Anubisa's treatment of my chosen king is never forgotten."

Lightning crashed down on the waves, and a dark, undulating shape arrowed through the water toward the shore, but before Keely could catch a glimpse of it, she fell back down into the dark.

Outdoors, in front of a small cottage

The small, blue-haired boy looked up at the king, bewilderment on his face, then down at the sheathed sword that rested in his thin arms. "But, but I don't understand, Your Majesty. Why would you give me your sword?"

The king stared down at him with no tenderness in his expression. "There's something I need to tell you-"

And Keely fell.

Twisting, turning, and whirling through the centuries, Keely fell from vision to vision. The one constant was Justice, growing from child to man to seasoned warrior, always with the sword either strapped to his back or being used in battle. Battle after battle. Desperate fight after desperate fight. Vampires and shape-shifters, all of them with the goal of enslaving or eating humans.

All of them defeated by Justice, wielding Poseidon's Fury.

Keely fell, and fell, and fell, in a never-ending vision. Vision wrapped inside vision, bloody battle after bloody battle, until she couldn't remember anything but carnage, pain, and death.

But she grew to know him-oh, yes, she grew to know this wild man who'd stolen her away. The anguish that lived deep inside him. The loneliness. The bitterness that came from living for centuries as a tool in an angry god's quest for vengeance.

Her heart turned over, and Keely felt the helpless tears rolling down her face. "Enough!" she cried out. "Enough, already. Please, I can't take any more of this. Please, please. No more."

She fell, again, down into the dark. But this time, instead of falling away, she fell toward-she fell toward a blue-haired warrior with flames in his eyes.

Chapter 18.

St. Louis Vonos materialized in the roomy den of the mansion in St. Louis's nouveau riche suburb of Ladue, and it was clear that nobody had been expecting him. They'd been looking for the recently deceased Xinon, and they'd not expected him until later in the week. So they were totally unprepared for the vampire to show up in their midst.

Which was just how Vonos liked it.

Dressed in a meticulously creased custom-made Savile Row suit, complete with exquisite Zegna tie and Ferragamo shoes, he knew exactly the impression he made upon the polo-shirt-and-khaki-pants-clad humans in the room. He did nothing without deliberate purpose behind it, even down to the choice of what to wear to help these idiotic sheep underestimate him.

The supermodel vampire, the press had labeled him. The Primator of haute couture. They didn't know whether to admire him or ridicule him for his polished-to-perfection appearance. A human politician would have been booted out of Congress for being too elitist. Not a "man of the people."

The thought amused Vonos. He was a man of the people. He just preferred to eat them.

In any event, the fascination-and fear-that he provoked in the populace was only enhanced by his carefully cultivated style. He was the leader of the Primus, the new, vampire-only, third house of Congress, and his constituents would never respect one who was not more powerful than they.

He finally deigned to notice the humans huddled around the desk. They were gaping at him like a particularly mindless species of carp. However, one who possessed, possibly, an iota of intelligence bowed deeply. "My Lord Primator. To what do we owe this honor?"

"Honor is an interesting word, human. May I call you human? Or do you prefer to tell me your name, which I will then immediately forget as I do most petty annoyances?" Vonos smiled widely enough to show his fangs and was amused when one of the men, a skeletally thin man with a very bad haircut, collapsed into a faint.

But the man who'd first spoken and must be some sort of leader had more presence of mind. "You may call me whatever you wish, of course, Primator Vonos, but my name is Rodriguez."

"Of course it is. How fitting. Do you know that I first resided in your lovely environs back when it was Spanish territory? They called it Northern Louisiana, I believe." He smiled at the memory, but then frowned as the pleasant recollection of simpler times and plentiful humans to feed on gave way to another, far more disagreeable memory. This wasn't the first time Atlanteans had confronted him on this turf. More than two centuries ago, a band of them had come to town and, with the help of both the colonial settlers and the native Illini, viciously murdered nearly all of his blood pride. Naturally, faced with the death of his vampire family, he'd been forced to flee. Discretion, valor, et cetera, et cetera.

"I will never flee again," he said, his nails digging into the edge of the desk so hard the wood cracked.

The human flinched. "Sir?"

"Never mind. I have learned your group is very ambitious when it comes to gathering members of the Apostates, Mr. Rodriguez."

A measure of the man's nervousness subsided, and he leaned forward eagerly. "Yes, it has been my privilege. I hope to be at the forefront of a new wave of converts. We can definitely see the future, and it involves interspecies cooperation."

Vonos was always amazed at the human capacity for utter and complete denial. Somehow, in the sheep's mind, subjugation had become cooperation. Well, as they said, whatever gets you through the day.

"We find ourselves unhappy with the actions of the local vampire and his blood pride," Vonos said. "From this moment on, you will coordinate all recruiting efforts through my office and through my local representative, whom I will introduce to you in the coming days."

One of the men cowering behind the leader muttered something that was too garbled for Vonos to make out. "Would you like to repeat that?" Vonos asked. "By all means, share with the group."

He did so enjoy these quaint human concepts.

"I didn't . . . I don't . . ." The man was stuttering too hard to get the words out. Fear tended to destroy conversational ability in the sheep.

"Please tell me," Vonos said, calmly polite, with a slight emphasis on the word please. Then he aimed a gentle, encouraging smile at the man. "Or I'll rip your tongue out by its root, and you won't have to worry about telling anyone anything ever again."

The sheep fell to his knees, babbling something incoherent, and Vonos sighed.

"Truly, he is starting to annoy me," he said to the man in charge. "Perhaps you would care to translate, before I lose my patience and kill every one of you?"

"He's afraid of what the local vampires will do to us if we stop cooperating with them," the leader said hastily. "We're-"

"I am uninterested in your rationales," Vonos said, cutting him off. "Be advised that the local vampires will never again be a threat to you or anyone else. We were unhappy with their carelessness."

Vonos's cell phone rang, and he held up one finger for silence. The sheep were at least good with their technology. He did so love his iPhone. Maybe he should convert that Steve Jobs fellow? Hmmm. Idle thoughts for another time.

Vonos glanced at the caller ID and noted that it was his personal assistant, one of the very few vampires that he trusted. He flipped open the phone. "Yes?"

"You have an urgent call from the human leader of the Apostates in Ohio," his assistant said. "He claims he has knowledge that you need."

"I'm growing astonishingly weary of these humans," Vonos said into the phone, while scanning the row of men cringing away from him. "Knowledge of what type?"

"I know it sounds insane, but he claims it's about Atlantis. He says an Atlantean warrior kidnapped one of his colleagues right out of her office. You told me to watch out for anything we could use against the Atlanteans, as insurance for when they want to negotiate with the U.S. government. This could be it."

Vonos narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. "The story sounds unlikely. The Atlanteans have been far too careful to allow anyone to witness something so lacking in finesse as a kidnapping."

"He swears it's true," his assistant said, excitement in his voice. "The Atlantean did something to him, some form of mind control that knocked him out, but he didn't stay out for long. He just lay there on the floor pretending to be unconscious and heard the whole thing. He says he knew that news like this would be crucial to our mission."

"He actually said that, did he? Crucial to our mission? These humans and their sense of melodrama."

"Well, this guy has been flagged for a while. He's a climber; wants to move up the hierarchy and be in line to be turned eventually."

"Ah. Immortality. The elusive prize at the end of all the sheep's rainbows. It does, however, cast a certain shade of doubt upon his claim. Perhaps he exaggerates in hopes of gaining accolades," Vonos said skeptically, but he allowed himself a tiny bit of cautious optimism. Anubisa would reward him well for building a strong case against the Atlantean advent into international politics. State-sponsored kidnapping of American scientists was certainly a good start.

"I believe I will visit this man myself," Vonos decided. "Who is he and where is he?"

The sound of shuffling papers came over the phone for a moment, and then Vonos's assistant came back on the line. "Here it is. Dr. George Grenning at Ohio State University."

Chapter 19.

Rebel regional headquarters, St. Louis Alaric stepped through the portal into a scene of controlled chaos and immediately looked around for the Atlanteans. Alexios, blood matting his golden hair into heavy clumps, stood near the stark concrete front wall of the warehouse headquarters, shouting orders to the heavily armed humans as they rushed back and forth, many of them limping or carrying wounded comrades.

Alaric grimaced at the acrid tang of gun smoke in the air. Christophe leaned against a graffiti-covered wall, bent over, with his hands on his thighs as if propping himself up. Alaric detected the faint residual glow of blue-green energy that surrounded Christophe; the warrior must have expended enormous amounts of energy quite recently.

Denal was nowhere to be seen. Nor Reisen, Jack, or Quinn. Something in Alaric's chest tightened painfully at the thought of Quinn, but he refused to allow it to overcome him. She would be fine. She had to be fine.

If Quinn were to die, he would have no reason to continue existing.

Although she'd made it very clear that she had no place in his future, just the knowledge that she was alive and walking through the same time as he made the bleakness of his life somehow more bearable.

He was a high priest imprisoned by the dictates of a god's whim. She was a rebel leader tortured by the memory of a dark deed. There was no way they could be together, no potential realm of the future that promised any hope.

But the idea of her death held the extinction of all hope, and he could not countenance it. He rapidly crossed the room to Alexios, who took one look at Alaric's face and immediately stopped issuing commands.

"She's alive, Alaric. She was wounded, but it was minor," Alexios said, a rough compassion in his voice.

A strange weakness raced through Alaric and he had to fight his own lungs to draw breath. Quinn was wounded.

"How minor?" he snarled. "Tell me, now."

"Relax. It's just a scrape. An overenthusiastic shifter caught her with a claw or two. Denal patched her up, and the two of them and Jack took off after the vamp leaders. Just to reconnoiter. They're going to find out where they hole up, so we can go after them in full force later. They sent Reisen off somewhere else."

Alaric narrowed his eyes. "Tell me nothing about the traitor."

Jack had been Quinn's partner for some years. They were coleaders of the North American rebels, and Jack also happened to be the fiercest shape-shifter Alaric had ever seen. But then, tiger shifters had never been known for their meek natures.

Jack was boldly confident, and Alaric suspected the tiger was developing more than a fellow-warrior attachment for Quinn. Not that it was any of his concern what Quinn did, he reminded himself, even as the pain of it stabbed through him.

He wrenched himself out of the poisonous thoughts. Alexios was wounded, and yet the priest who should be his healer was mewling like a cursed youngling. "Your head. How bad is it?"

Alexios jerked his head away from Alaric's hands. "It's nothing. A scratch. You know how head wounds bleed. I didn't even pass out this time."

Alaric caught the warrior's gaze with his own, while he called the healing power. "If I had the time to cosset stubborn warriors, I would go through the usual exchange with you, since I know how much you and the rest of the Seven need to prove how fierce and unstoppable you are. But we need you whole, so stand still before I lose the final shreds of my temper."

With ill-concealed bad temper of his own, Alexios snarled something about "meddling priests," but did as Alaric had asked. It was definitely more than a simple scratch, and Alexios had been quite fortunate to escape without losing consciousness. Alaric healed the wound quickly, making sure to flush out any lingering grime and blood, channeling a stream of pure water to encircle and cleanse the warrior's head.

Alexios stepped away from him the moment he'd finished, still muttering under his breath, but then he flashed a grin. "Gotta admit that feels a lot better. I guess you temple rats have your uses, after all."

"Glad to be of service," Alaric said dryly. "At least you refrained from sulking, unlike Denal-"

Denal. The thought of the young warrior, gone with Quinn, turned his blood to ice in his veins. Was he experienced enough in battle to be of any assistance should Quinn really need him? He tried to frame the thought in a voice gone suddenly hoarse. "Denal?"

Alexios shook his head. "Don't even say it. We all think of him as the youngling he used to be. But don't forget Denal gave his life for Conlan's future queen. Only her own sacrifice, in turn, brought him back. The battles he has seen in recent months have aged him. Even beyond that, Conlan and Ven did not choose the fiercest warriors in Atlantis for the Seven by random drawing."

Before Alaric could respond, one of the rebels, a dark-eyed, golden-skinned human female, approached them. "Alexios, we need to move the wounded to the hospital. Are you confident that we're good to go?"

The woman barely glanced at Alaric before dismissing him, but gave her full, respectful attention to Alexios. She wore the bow and quiver of arrows strapped to her body as though she were very familiar with the weight of such a weapon, and the daggers strapped to both of her long, lean thighs had well-worn tape wrapping their hilts.

"We're good, Grace. Jack took care of the shifters who were blocking the Jeeps before he and Quinn left with Denal. Tell the others we're moving out. You drive and I'll ride shotgun," Alexios said.

She nodded and then quickly walked away, leaving Alexios staring after her. "It still seems wrong to me that so many females must take up weapons in this battle," he said, so quietly that Alaric nearly missed his words.

"And yet it is their future, and that of their children, that is being corrupted by the vampires and rogue shape-shifters. What power is more formidable than that of mothers acting in concert?" Alaric replied.

Alexios said nothing. He continued to watch the woman as she directed the others to gather up the wounded. Finally he wrenched his gaze away and turned back to Alaric. "I've got to go. They need protection in case we've got some threat waiting for us on the route to the hospital."

"Do you have need of me?" Alaric lifted his hand and a shimmering ball of pure energy coalesced in his palm. "I would be most pleased to teach a few of the attackers a lesson or two in the power of Poseidon," he said, the rage and frustration of the past few days searing through his nerve endings.