"The thoughts running through your mind must be fascinating, if the expressions crossing your face in such rapid succession are anything to judge by," he said. His voice was a rumble in his chest against her side and made her want to rub her face against him like a kitten.
"I was thinking about last night. The vampires. And the shower, and the museum, to be honest," she confessed, her cheeks flaming again. Evidently whatever caused her to blush had not yet caught on that she was a grown woman.
"Ah, yes, the museum. One of my favorite memories of all time," he said, chuckling. "And yet waking up here with you counts as its equal."
She turned to look into his eyes. "Why? You must have woken up with many women before." She didn"t want to think about it, but she had to face facts, especially if he really had seen more than three hundred birthdays. Even one or two encounters a year and that added up to . . . insanity.
She couldn"t think about that now or her brain would catch fire.
"Never, in fact." He pulled her even closer and kissed her nose. "I don"t sleep with women."
"Right. So you"re a monk?"
"I have had s.e.xual encounters, but I have never slept with a woman before this night. I"ve never met a woman I trusted enough to let down my guard that much." Sincerity and something else was in his gaze. A little embarra.s.sment of his own, maybe?
She stared at him, fascinated. "Never? In all those years?"
"Never."
"I-I don"t know what to say," she admitted. "I feel honored."
"You"re the one who honors me, Princess," he said solemnly, but then a wickedly evil grin lit up his face. "If you want to honor me again, right now, you can climb on top of me and-"
"I get it, I get it." She leaned in to kiss him and took her time about it. When she pulled back, she took a deep, shaky breath. "You do amazing things to me, Mr. Atlantean warrior."
"Wait. Sean!" She pushed away from him and sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest. "I can"t believe I haven"t checked in on Sean."
"He is doing well," Christophe said. "I have already communicated with Denal. Sean"s wound has begun to heal, perhaps due to the liberal application of blessed water so quickly applied."
She leaned back against the pillows. "That"s good. I guess I can wait a bit to check on him in person."
"He, Denal, and Declan were planning a marathon battle of some video game after lunch," Christophe informed her, leaning over to kiss the top of her breast. "I think we can safely skip that."
"But Hopkins-"
"Let Hopkins get his own date." He pulled her over and on top of him and proceeded to make love to her thoroughly for the next couple of hours, until they were lying in a tangle of rumpled sheets and bliss.
She traced a finger around the curves and lines of the tattoo on the upper left side of his back. "What does this mean?"
"That"s the mark signifying my oath as a warrior. Poseidon brands us with it when we"ve completed our training to be a Warrior of Poseidon. A sort of graduation gift."
She caught the bitterness underneath the sarcasm. "You don"t like it?"
"Would you want to be branded?" He sat up, pushing his dark hair away from his face. "It implies ownership. I have never wanted to be owned."
"What does it mean? The circle and the triangle and this symbol?"
"It"s a symbol representing our duty. Poseidon"s Trident bisects the circle representing all the peoples of the world. The triangle is for the pyramid of knowledge. All of Poseidon"s warriors wear this mark as a sort of proof of service. It means we"ve sworn an oath to serve Poseidon and accepted the responsibility of protecting humanity."
"But you don"t? Want the responsibility of protecting us from our own stupidity, I"m guessing?"
He glanced at her, clearly surprised. "You are very perceptive for a ninja, Princess. Let"s just say I never did, before I met you. Now I"m starting to enjoy the job."
She punched him lightly in the shoulder. "I"m not a job."
"No, you, my beauty, are a privilege and a fantasy. I fear I might wake up from this dream and be bereft of your presence."
"Bereft. Nice. Poetic, even," she said. "Did you know an eft is a kind of salamander, like a newt? Witches in the old days-or the poor women who were accused of being witches, at least-used to boil their tails in potions."
He started laughing. "Wonderful. I try to be romantic for the first time in my life, and you start talking about lizards. My poor ego may die a hideous death."
"But you"re not," she said, serious now. "You"re not a romantic. You"re a warrior."
"Does that bother you?" His eyes cooled to green ice, but she recognized it for one of his many self-protective techniques.
"No. I"m still dealing with the fact that I killed those two vampires. I used blessed water to deliberately harm them and it caused their death. That was me. I am now a murderer." Her hands started to shake and she clenched them together.
"They were vampires."
"Vampires have rights as citizens now."
"They were trying to murder you. All of us. Self-defense and defense of others is still permitted, even in the screwed up new world you landwalkers are creating," he said, rolling over to sit up and stare down at her. "Don"t ever think that you are bad or wrong for preventing them from killing Sean or yourself."
"You scared me a little," she admitted. "I"d heard you say the word-warrior. But I didn"t have context. I didn"t know how to believe it. Out there you were deadly beyond anything I"ve ever seen. So many of them and you were everywhere with your blades and your magic."
"Are you still afraid of me?" His eyes were shuttered again, and his jaw clenched as if against her response.
"Did I just act like I was afraid of you? When I had my lips around your p.e.n.i.s, for example?" He stretched blissfully in reaction to her question, and she laughed but then grew serious again. "No, oddly enough, you make me feel safe. You have so much danger inside you, but you put your own life on the line for me and Sean. There"s no way he killed six vampires, either, is there?"
"Let him think it, Fiona. He needs to be a white knight, especially after you threw yourself into the fray to save him." Christophe lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a lingering kiss into her palm. "He"s not the one who swore an oath, after all, which makes his courage all the more impressive."
"Do you want to tell me the words? The oath. I"d like to hear it, if it"s not too private."
"The language is archaic. If you didn"t like me being romantic, you probably won"t like this, either."
"Please? But only if you want to." She couldn"t explain, even to herself, why she wanted to hear it. She only knew that she did. Knew that if this man were capable of swearing an oath of one sort and following through on it, he was also capable of another kind of commitment. The personal personal kind. kind.
The kind that suddenly mattered to her a very great deal.
He shrugged. "If you like. It goes like this: We will wait. And watch. And protect. And serve as first warning on the eve of humanity"s destruction. Then, and only then, Atlantis will rise. For we are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the mark of the Trident we bear serves as witness to our sacred duty to safeguard mankind."
A thrumming sense of power rang through the room, resonating in the air and in her bones, under her skin and blood and individual nerve endings.
"That"s beautiful," she whispered. Even she, with so little magic, felt the magic in the words. "But you don"t like it?"
"It"s not the words I don"t care for, it"s their meaning. Why should I care anything about safeguarding mankind?" His face twisted with a rage so intense she flinched away from him. "Humanity murdered my parents." murdered my parents."
Chapter 22
Christophe leapt out of the bed and called to magic to clothe himself in pants and a shirt as he paced the room, suddenly feeling like a caged animal.
Like that little boy in the box, so many years ago.
"What happened?" Fiona sat curled up in the bed, her knees to her chest, cla.s.sic protective body posture. She was probably afraid of him now.
He deserved it. He may as well tell her all of it now. Let her see how pathetic he"d been. How humans had destroyed his childhood.
"We used to walk the land, did I tell you that? Not just the warriors among us but the normal citizens. Scholars who wanted to learn about humanity, for example. People like my mother and father. They could travel through the portal and, maintaining anonymity, travel among humans and even live in one place for a little while. Studying and learning, gathering anthropologic data about different cultures, much like your own anthropologists who travel to different lands."
She nodded. "Of course. If you have all this magic, we must seem fairly uncivilized to you."
He laughed. "It"s not just the magic. The magic is maybe the least of it. We had technology and books and treasures beyond all imagining. That"s why humans tried to conquer the Seven Isles in the first place, more than eleven thousand years ago. That"s when we knew we had to escape. Well, that and the cataclysm."
"Cataclysm?"
"The Ragnarok Ragnarok. The Doom of the G.o.ds," he recounted. "The G.o.ds decided to take their petty squabbles to a world-ending level, and it happened to coincide with an attack upon Atlantis. The king and elders at that time decided we needed to remove ourselves from the battlefield before we were destroyed. So we went for a little swim, shall we say."
"Okay. Okay. Let me catch up here," she said, climbing out of bed and pulling on a cerulean silk robe. "You realize that Ragnarok Ragnarok is Norse mythology. Atlantis is Greek mythology. Your stories are becoming a little confused." is Norse mythology. Atlantis is Greek mythology. Your stories are becoming a little confused."
He whirled around to face her. "Do you think the G.o.ds care about how humans have cla.s.sified them? Norse, Greek, Roman, whatever? G.o.ds fight each other, f.u.c.k each other-and who or whatever they can catch, actually-and play games with human lives like you"re all chess pieces on a giant board. No, not even as important as chess pieces to them. More like bugs underfoot. My ancestors didn"t want Atlantis to suffer the same fate."
"But-" She shook her head, more to herself than at him. "No. That"s not important now. Tell me how your parents died."
She walked toward him, hands outstretched, but he didn"t want to touch her. Couldn"t bear for her to touch him; not now. Not while he told this story that he"d never told anyone before. She was too pure, too perfect. Too good to hear his story of betrayal, torture, and death.
Oh, they"d known. The warriors who"d rescued him had certainly known some of it, suspected more. But he had never spoken a word of it in more than three hundred years.
She touched his arm and looked up at him with those blue, blue eyes. "Please."
And he was undone.
"My parents were among the lucky ones, in their minds. They were societal anthropologists, content to study farming villages in rural Ireland. Of course I didn"t know that then, I learned about their study later. We lived on the outskirts of a tiny place, I don"t even remember the name, if I ever knew it. We had a view of the sea. I spent most of the first four years of my life there."
Memories he"d buried for far too long surfaced: of playing in a field with his father, a man who always made time for a boisterous son. His mother telling him stories by the fire. He couldn"t remember their faces. It had been too long. It was more of an impression of warmth and safety.
A feeling of home home.
His eyes burned, and he turned away from Fiona, ashamed to let her see his weakness. "They only returned to Atlantis maybe once every few weeks or couple of months. I don"t know. Time moves differently to a child, of course. We"d wait until the village was asleep and then my father or mother would call to the portal."
He laughed bitterly and ran a hand through his hair. "It always came for them them. Maybe even the portal finds me tainted."
She put her arms around him and rested her cheek on his back. "No. Never. Not the man I"ve grown to know so well in such a short time. You"re amazing. I can"t believe you"ve done your job, protecting us for so long, even with so much anguish in your heart."
He caressed the back of her hand, but only for an instant; he still couldn"t take her touch. Not now. Not during this story. He walked away from her.
"It was bound to happen. One morning one of the village women stopped by to talk to my mother about something. Some sewing circle, probably. I remember that she always loved the sewing circles." He smiled a little at the faded and out-of-focus memory of falling asleep at his mother"s feet, tugging on her skirt, as she worked on some garment for him or for his father. She"d liked to sing as she sewed. He remembered that.
Perhaps it was why he never, ever sang.
"This stupid woman walked in as we were coming back to the cottage through the portal. She ran, screaming as if the devil himself were after her. My parents knew it was over, so they hurriedly gathered their few possessions, but-" He doubled over, the pain of it fresh after so very many years.
"Christophe? What is it?"
"It was my fault. I killed them."
Fiona put her arms around him, tightening them when he tried to get away. "No. Shh. It"s my turn. Let me comfort you."
He shook his head violently, his big body shaking in her embrace. "I can"t-"
"Let me be the strong one this time? Yes. You can. I owe you." She stroked his back and murmured soothing words of comfort, much as he"d done for her in the shower. When his breathing slowed to normal, she let him escape her hug, but she kissed his cheek before he managed to pace away from her again.
"I ran away. Off to the fields to play or something. They called me and I thought it was a game, so I stayed hidden around the side of the barn. I remember the warmth of the sun on my head, and then nothing until a great shouting woke me up."
"Your parents?" She wasn"t sure she wanted to hear the answer anymore; in fact, she was desperately sure she did not. But she knew he needed to tell his story, so the least she could do was muster the courage to hear it.
"They brought the sheriff. Or magistrate. Or what the h.e.l.ls ever he was called back then. But he was none of those things. He was Fae. Unseelie Court Fae. The murdering b.a.s.t.a.r.d killed my parents." He smashed his fist into his palm and the dark drive to seek vengeance was in every line of his face and clenched muscle in his body. He suddenly seemed taller and wider, and he was glowing again. Not the gentle blue-green of the energy spheres but the scarlet of fire and retribution.
She knew a little bit about retribution herself.
"He and his deputies dragged my parents out of the house. Then they sent the villagers away. I remember watching them go. It was so strange, how they"d come shouting and yelling down the lane to our house, but they ran away in total silence. They knew, you see. I figured that out later. They knew."
She didn"t want to ask; more than she wanted to draw her next breath she so didn"t want to ask, but she knew she must. "They knew what?"
"They knew the murderers were Fae and that they"d kill my parents. They didn"t want to know, so they ran, but they knew."
He fell heavily onto her bed and the crimson flame vanished. "I could see, you know. I never told anybody, but I saw it all. They told me-the warriors who came for me, later, more than a year later when they finally found me-they told me that my parents had gone away to the Summer Lands. Silverglen, where Fae danced and animals talked and all manner of beings lived in peace and harmony forevermore."
"They lied? How could they do that? Who was it? I want to have a stern talking to with those men," she said, fisting her hands on her hips.
He smiled up at her, just a hint of a smile, but it was encouraging in the midst of this horrible story. "So fierce, mi amara mi amara. So fierce on my behalf. I truly am blessed among men."
"They told you, in effect, that your parents had abandoned you," she said gently. "That"s a horrible thing to do to a child. Trust me, I know."
"No, it didn"t matter," he said, shaking his head. "I knew what had happened. The Fae sucked the life force out of them until my mother and father were nothing but dust on the dirt floor of our barn. Dust mingling with dust. Of course, the symbolism was lost on a four-year-old child."
"What did you do?" She came to kneel at his feet and covered his clenched fists with her hands.