May in Atlantis: Poseidon’s Warriors Read online

  May in Atlantis

  Poseidon’s Warriors

  Alyssa Day

  Holliday Publishing, LLC

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Excerpt January in Atlantis

  About the Author

  Books by Alyssa

  Prologue

  The Warrior's Creed:

  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.

  * * *

  After eleven thousand years beneath the seas, the lost continent is found!! But Atlantis isn't necessarily fitting in with humans all that well, after 11,000 years away.

  The fabled group known as Poseidon's Warriors need to keep taking names and kicking asses when it comes to their job of protecting humankind from any of the vampires, shifters, Fae, or other supernatural creatures who want to prey upon them.

  This year: a new group of Atlantean fighters are on the move. The king calls them The Twelve.

  The rest of Atlantis calls them Denal's Deadbeats.

  January: Flynn, Jake and Griffin fought to save a group of kidnapped girls from the clutches of the demon and human members of Hell's Dark Angels…and Flynn met Eva, the love of his life, who just happens to be a demon whisperer.

  February: Jake, Griffin, and Lucas faced a moral dilemma – a band of rogue shifters planned to force the shift on the members of Humanity Prime, a hate group that works to destroy all creatures and beings supernatural, creating a moral dilemma for the warriors: which group is worse? But innocents were at the H Prime enclave, and Poseidon's Warriors would never stand for the harming of the innocent. Jake met Savannah and reached the soul-meld with her just before she found out if her forced shift would turn her into a falcon--or kill her. And Lucas? Lucas went berserker and killed so many rogues he may never be able to come back from the depths of darkness…

  March: Jake and Savannah found their happily ever after, in spite of a small, feathery problem. Lucas decided whether to help Rhiannon--the woman who'd betrayed him—or go after revenge.

  April: Poseidon's first female warrior had a lot to live up to, but she was furious that nobody seemed to want to let her do it. Instead, the werewolf prince of Europe, Pine, personally requested her to serve as temporary ambassador between Atlantis and his wolves, since she saved his life in the battle at H Prime. When they defeated a demon and fell in love, nobody was more surprised than April.

  And now it's May, and a poet-turned-warrior has to work with a Fae princess—after he's sworn a blood oath to kill every Fae he encounters.

  It's turning out to be a crazy year.

  1

  Madness stains dark a life

  Giddy, gadding, foolish, until

  Death

  Sacrifices the light

  * * *

  Atlantis

  Gabriel had been in the middle of reading one of his prize-winning poems to a group of adoring fans when he got the news his brother had been murdered.

  He'd never written poetry again.

  Five years without writing—without creating—felt like five years of existing with a missing limb. Instead, he'd poured his time and energy into working in Atlantis's extensive libraries: cataloguing scrolls, learning everything there was to know about computers, now that he knew computers existed, teaching classes in the same, and then supervising teams of scholars to preserve every bit of Atlantean knowledge and history by digitizing it and uploading it into the cloud.

  The cloud.

  He understood the concept, but it was still odd to finally be able to see actual clouds, in the actual sky, after he'd lived an entire life beneath the dome of Atlantis, far beneath the surface of the sea. Now that King Conlan and Alaric, the former high priest, had brought Atlantis to the surface after more than 11,000 years, the world was adjusting to the reality of Atlantis.

  And Atlanteans were adjusting to the reality of the world.

  Gabriel?

  He was just sick to freaking death of working in the libraries, surrounded by the works of other creators, when he could no longer find a way to reach the words locked inside his own brain and heart.

  He leaned back against a pillar on the veranda overlooking the sculpture garden and sighed, no longer even the slightest bit interested in seeking out something to eat. He hadn't had much of an appetite since, oddly enough, the day the demon horde had attacked back in January. For once, he'd felt useful, when he'd herded a group of children into one of the scroll vaults to protect them and then proceeded to do just that, all by himself, his only weapon an ancient ceremonial sword he'd snatched off one wall.

  Eleven demons had lain dead on the floor by the time the assault was defeated and three of the palace guards came through on a sweep. He'd been injured, but nothing major. A trip to the healers later that evening, after his mother threatened to drag him by the ear to the Temple if he didn't go, had put that to rights.

  Since then, nothing but the unrelieved monotony of cataloguing the work of others, broken only occasionally by the sport of ducking the queen's desire to pin a medal on him.

  Humans.

  The new queen, a human from America, seemed to be a nice enough person, but she had odd ideas about the need for recognition or awards for times` when a person was just doing his duty. Gabriel's sister, Echo, had slain eight demons of her own, and she hadn't been able to escape the awards ceremony.

  "For superior service to Atlantis," she'd told him, smirking and waving the medal the king and queen had personally bestowed upon her. "Eva was recognized, too, and given full Atlantean citizenship for what she did."

  Echo's new friend was mate and wife to one of Poseidon's newest warriors, Flynn, and had been rumored to have the ancient power of demon-whispering. Or, at least, they'd been rumors until the attack. Eva had ordered any and all demons within her range back into their own dimension, and Gabe had heard that they'd obeyed instantly.

  Nice Gift to have.

  "Working hard?"

  Gabe turned to see Denal, one of the king's most trusted warriors, striding across the lawn from the gardens toward him. Denal was the leader of the newest group of Poseidon's Warriors and might not even know that most of Atlantis called his ragtag band "Denal's Deadbeats" or, when they'd downed enough ale in the pub, "Poseidon's Rejects."

  Denal had never once spoken to Gabriel before.

  The remnant of the poet Gabe had once been stirred in the ashes of his soul and whispered that this was a moment of which songs would be sung: the moment that started the quest.

  Began the journey.

  Changed his life.

  The bitter pragmatist that he'd become ignored that voice and simply nodded. "Denal."

  The warrior walked up to stand a few paces away and turned to stare out at the peaceful scene in the sculpture garden. Children were listening to a museum historian drone on about the history of T'Naath, the greatest sculptor in Atlantean history, who'd had the power of singing stone and marble into shapes of almost inhuman beauty. The children were listening with the sleepy half-attention that Gabe imagined children in museums all over the world shared.

  The human historians who'd been allowed to visit the museum and attend lec
tures and tours, on the other hand, hung on every word, writing frantically into notebooks, typing frantically on computer tablets, and, basically, frantically being frantic about this glimpse into the art of a world they'd long believed to exist only in myth.

  "Bet if you told them you're an honest-to-gods Atlantean poet, they'd shit their pants," Denal finally said, a corner of his mouth quirking into not-quite-a-grin. "Maybe I'll let them know. Make their day."

  Gabe narrowed his eyes. "Do it, and I'll take that sword off the wall again."

  The warrior sighed and slowly turned to face him. "Now you've done it. You've gone and said something interesting, for a change."

  "We've never spoken before. How in the nine hells do you know whether I say interesting things ten times a day and twice that on Sundays?"

  Denal laughed. "You're right. I have no idea. I just figured it was 'blah, blah, poetry, poetry, look at my lacy shirt, I'm so pretty, blah, blah.'"

  Something dangerous reared its head inside Gabe, but he pushed it back down where it belonged. Out of the way. Buried beneath denial and despair.

  "Well, I am so pretty, especially compared to you, but I'm fresh out of lacy shirts. Do you want something, or did you just stop by to be a giant pain in my ass?"

  "Your sister's much nicer than you are," Denal said silkily, almost as if he wanted to get his ass kicked.

  In his current mood, Gabriel was more than happy to comply.

  "You mention my sister again, and we're going to have a problem," he said, instead. "Why don't you just tell me what you want, so I can turn you down and go find some lunch?"

  "I heard about you and the demons during the attack."

  Gabe started shaking his head before Denal even finished his sentence. "No. Tell the queen I appreciate it, but—"

  "I'm not Riley's errand boy," Denal growled, and surprise at Denal's anger—and that he called the queen by her first name—made Gabe blink, but he didn't ask, because, one, he figured it was none of his business and, two, he didn't really give a damn.

  "Fine. I’m out."

  Before he could take a step, Denal stopped him with a hand held up. "No, you're not. You're going to the training grounds with me, because, much to my dismay, you're Poseidon's newest warrior."

  Gabriel froze, and then he started laughing. "Boy, do you have your wires crossed. I don't know who told you that I'd be interested in that, but he or she was sadly mistaken. I'm a poet, not—"

  "You were a poet, at least according to Echo," Denal pointed out.

  Gabe's lips curled back from his teeth. "I told you not to talk about my sister."

  "I don't take orders from poets," Denal sneered. "Get your ass down to the training grounds within the next hour."

  "If you think I’m going to—"

  "I don't think you're going to do much of anything. Anybody can have a boost of adrenaline when it comes to protecting kids, after all. But Poseidon himself seems to think different. So, you're Poseidon's newest warrior. Welcome to the team, insert motivational whale-shit speeches here."

  Shock knocked Gabe back a step. "Poseidon? The sea god wants me to be one of his elite warriors?"

  Denal, who'd turned to go, barked out a laugh. "Elite. Yeah, sure. Let's call it that. I'm stuck with you, a drunk, and a freaking dragon shifter in this new trio of eliteness. I'm screwed."

  By the time Gabe could form words, Denal was gone.

  "A dragon shifter?"

  The group of children filing past him turned to give him wary looks, but he ignored them and started toward the training grounds to find out what in the hells was really going on. This was what he got for taking action during the attack?

  He should have just taken the damn medal.

  A dragon shifter. That couldn't be true. There were no Atlantean shifters. The only dragon shifters he'd heard even rumors of lately had been the ones who'd held Flynn captive for a brief time before Flynn had returned home and become one of Poseidon's Warriors at the beginning of the year. He tossed the idea around in his mind all the way to the training grounds, but ultimately decided to wait and see.

  Unfortunately, he saw more than he wanted to when he rounded the corner of the armory. He caught sight of the man who must be the dragon shifter, because he knew the drunk personally.

  And he was going to kill him.

  2

  One of the demon dimensions

  Erielle N'Elysium crouched in the shadow of the jagged boulder and waited until the creatures passed by her. The green sky was darkening, the last rays of the malignant sun causing the metal on the demons' harnesses to glint with a dull shine.

  More than a year trapped in the hell that was this particular demon dimension, and Erielle still couldn’t force herself to become accustomed to green sunlight or purple sand.

  All she'd wanted to do was escape—and then everything had backfired.

  Spectacularly.

  Never let it be said that a princess of the Seelie Fae didn't do anything in a spectacular fashion. Even failure.

  But this time—this time, please, may the Goddess grant it—she thought she finally had a way out. She'd followed this particular band to learn their patrol routes for more than three weeks, or what passed for weeks in a world where the sun only set every eighty-two hours. She'd also learned something that she imagined they’d want to keep very, very secret.

  The smallest of them—the one that looked like his parents had been a water buffalo and a bat—knew how to open a portal to Earth.

  A lot of them knew how to open minor portals, the kind that transported them a few feet in one direction or the other. They used the trick in their frequent and loud squabbles, which she'd thought was some kind of play, until she'd seen how many were left dead on the ground afterward.

  So, yes. The portals moved them a few feet in whatever direction, or maybe even a bit farther, but she wasn’t sure of that, since she had no partner to help her figure out where one of them turned up when it vanished.

  But this one—the one she called Grumpkin—it knew how to get to Earth. She'd seen the other side when he'd opened a few portals, and she'd learned demon for Earth pretty damn fast. All she needed to do now was capture one little bat-eared demon and force it to open a portal in complete silence, so its horde of friends didn't find her, stop her, kill her, and eat her.

  She shuddered. Maybe not even in that order.

  The ugly truth was that she'd escaped into the demon dimension to evade one monster, only to find herself surrounded by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of others. Far too many to fight; almost too many to evade.

  But she'd survived. She'd done whatever it took—as often as it took— and she'd survived. She wasn't the pampered Fae princess she'd been, a little more than a year before, and she'd never be that person again. The person she was now was stronger. Tougher. Almost feral.

  Maybe even a monster, herself.

  No. Never that.

  A survivor.

  And now she was going home to her little brother, who'd been alone with no protection from the evil of Fae court intrigues for far too long.

  She'd timed it perfectly. Practiced over and over, if only in the confines of her mind.

  Now it was Go time.

  She waited until the first four of her targeted group went into the cave. Grumpkin stopped to talk with the lone sentinel on duty, as he always did, relieving himself in a long, bilious red stream into a clump of scraggly black bushes, as he always did.

  Twelve beats. He always pissed for twelve beats.

  Something in Erielle's soul died a little bit, realizing she knew that.

  Later, damn it. Get home now, cleanse my soul from this hideous world later.

  Twelve beats. Always twelve beats. She counted off the first six, and then she let her knife fly.

  The sentinel was dead, her dagger in his eye, before he ever hit the ground. Before Grumpkin could move or cry out, she was on him, another of her blades at his throat.

  "Make a sound,
and you're dead," she said in the guttural Common Demon tongue she'd learned during her year trapped in hell.

  The demon instinctively started to turn, his fleshy elephantine trunk going up into the air and snuffling, but he remained silent. Probably because he got a good look at his buddy bleeding out on the ground.

  "If you do what I say, I have no need to hurt you," she told him, using the most reasonable voice she could muster.

  Of course, he had no reason to believe her. He was a member of a species who killed for fun, for pleasure, for profit, and for food. Why would he possibly believe that any other race he encountered wouldn't do the same?

  He took a breath, as if to speak, and she tightened the knife against his throat, drawing blood. His blood smelled like burning sulfur, but the rest of him smelled like rotting corpses, so she wasn't sure it made the olfactory assault any worse.

  "I am Fae. Raise one finger if you know what that means."

  His body shuddered, but then he raised one finger.

  "Then you know I cannot lie. If you do what I say, I have no need to hurt you," she repeated.

  She moved an inch or two to the right, in order to see his face. His eyes were bulging out even more than usual, which she guessed meant he wanted permission to speak.

  "Go ahead, then. If you yell, you will die. If you try to fight me, you will die. If you say anything I don't like, in any way, you will die."

  He nodded but then winced when her blade bit into the pebbly skin of his neck.

  "You're going with me. Move."

  He dragged his feet but moved faster when she dug the blade in harder. Twenty-nine paces to the side of the rock not visible from the cave opening.