Heart Of Atlantis

couldn’t catch a break.

    Rio Jones knew she had maybe an hour, tops, before somebody found her. She had that kind of luck: the kind that trips over cracks in sidewalks, falls off her bike in the middle of rush-hour traffic in Times Square, and sees a major crime boss kidnapping a kid in broad daylight.
    A major
nonhuman
crime boss. She’d heard a flash of something so wrong—so
other
—in his thoughts that she’d nearly wrecked her bike when she’d turned to look at who or what was making that horrible noise. The taxi hadn’t even clipped her that hard; she’d had far worse working as a bike messenger for Siren Deliveries.
    Not that any of the fancy companies she delivered to would believe they’d hired a company owned by an actual siren. They just knew they got their packages on time. Ophelia liked to hire humans as messengers. She said they were slower but harder to distract. More reliable. Gave her more time to focus on her budding opera career, instead of dealing with Fae and demon hatreds, feuds, and failures to deliver on time. Punctuality was king in the cutthroat bike messenger wars. In fact, if Rio hadn’t been so focused on making it to her next delivery on time, she wouldn’t have taken that shortcut through the alley, and so she never would have seen the tall, dark-haired man step out of a limousine and snatch a small girl right off the street.
    The girl had screamed, Rio had slammed on the brakes of her bike and nearly gone over the handlebars, and the kidnapping bastard had met her gaze with eyes that seemed to blaze across the distance between them. Black eyes, almost all pupil, had tried to bore into Rio’s soul, until the struggling child had screamed again and the man had thrown the girl into the limo and slammed the door. He’d given Rio one last contemptuous, dismissive glance and then slid into the front seat next to the driver. By the time he’d changed his mind and the brake lights had flashed on the limo, she’d disappeared. She’d used her throwaway cell phone to call in an anonymous report to the human police, complete with license plate number, for all the good it would do. The human authorities had no pull in Bordertown and she knew it, but that little girl had been human. Somebody needed to know. A few minutes later, still shaking, she’d tossed her cell phone to the first homeless man wearing a cardboard sign she saw, with some vague idea that somebody might trace it.
    It was all too little, too late, though. She knew it. She’d heard the dark-haired man’s thoughts—they’d shattered the everyday barrier she wore around her mind like a scarf. The barrier was plenty to keep out human thoughts; if she heard everything that people thought around her all day long, she would have gone insane years ago.
    But this man—the kidnapper—he wasn’t human. Okay, she was used to that, working for a company in Bordertown and living there, too, but he wasn’t a low-level demon or a Fae or an ogre or anything else she’d ever heard of before. His thoughts had been
wrong
. Dark and terrifying, and yeah, demons were often the same to a degree, but this guy was something . . .
more
. Icy. Determined. Powerful. She wasn’t even sure how she’d known, but she’d somehow
felt
it. His thoughts had crawled with power and focus—and once he’d changed his mind about her being beneath his notice—
no loose ends
had been the exact words running through his jagged mind—that focus was aimed at her.
    That had been eight hours ago, and she had no doubt that he’d been tracking her every minute since.
    “And one little freak of a telepath isn’t going to have a chance against that,” she muttered to her tiny stuffed tiger before tossing it in her backpack. She was already wearing her locket, as always, so there were the only two mementos of her childhood safely retrieved. Other than that, she didn’t know what to bother taking. A couple of changes of clothes, all available cash, and her laptop computer. Packing wasn’t exactly difficult when you lived in a closet disguised as a studio apartment and owned next to nothing.
    She was wasting time. She knew where she had to go. The one person who’d promised he’d help her, any time and for any reason. The one person she’d ever felt safe with—until he’d abandoned her, like everyone always did. But he had power; she’d known it, and everybody in Bordertown, even the riffraff, knew it, too. He could help her figure out a way