Heart Of Atlantis

television screen so hard she was surprised the heat in his eyes didn’t burn a hole in the screen. “Can you make the device speak louder?”
    “Turn up the volume,” Ven said.
    “As I said,” Alaric snapped.
    Quinn shook her head at the two of them.
    Archelaus pressed a button on the remote and the voice of the wannabe Atlantean king filled the room.
    “I have documented proof that I am the direct lineal descendant of Alexander the Great, conquerer and Atlantean, and I will take my rightful place upon the throne as soon as Atlantis rises from its watery grave,” he intoned.
    Ven snorted. “Watery grave? Seriously?”
    Quinn was stuck on a different part of the man’s statement. “Alexander the Great was Atlantean?”
    Alaric shrugged. “Narcissist. Lust for power. Amazing while it lasted, though.”
    Quinn studied the man standing at the bank of microphones. He definitely looked regal. He was tall and imposing, with a TV politician kind of look to him. All toothpaste-commercial teeth and good hair. Even a tan, whether real or spray-on. But under the made-for-prime-time charisma, she could just see the jagged edges of something with real teeth. Something that would chew up enemies and vomit up their remains before calmly flossing.
    She shuddered. “There’s power there. Dark power. I’ve seen enough
wrong
in the past decade to recognize it. He’s just . . . not right.”
    Alaric slanted a measuring glance at her. “I tend to agree, even without the added incentive of his ludicrous claim.”
    “He does kind of look like you,” she pointed out. “The collective you. Atlanteans. Same dark hair, same height and bone structure, but with an added layer of smarm. Are you sure there’s no chance he could be a descendant, like he claims?”
    “Impossible to tell from here,” Alaric said.
    Reporters surrounding the man shouted questions at him, but he stood calmly in the center of the firestorm of attention, smiling slightly as if he were mildly amused. Finally, he held up his hands, and the questions slowly died down as the reporters began to fall silent in order to hear what else he would say.
    “I will answer all of your questions eventually, but what I have to say now is of the most urgent nature.” He drew a sheet of paper out of a large envelope and held it tightly, making eye contact with each reporter in turn.
    “We Atlanteans have long been on a mission to protect humanity. Our goal has been, and always will be, to work with you to secure your lives and safety against the vampire menace that threatens to destroy you. To that end, I must speak with this woman. If any of you know how to contact her, please have her call me at the Plaza Hotel. It is quite literally a matter of life and death.”
    He slowly turned the paper around, and revealed that it was actually an eight-by-ten-inch photograph.
    Of Quinn.
    Alaric swore so viciously in a mixture of English and Atlantean that even Quinn, who was well accustomed to being surrounded by people who used colorful language, flinched.
    “This is Quinn Dawson, the leader of the North American rebel alliance. I understand that by revealing her secret identity on national and international TV, I have placed her in extreme danger.”
    The camera zeroed its focus in on the photograph, which was grainy in the blurry picture but unmistakably Quinn.
    “My cover is blown,” she said numbly. “I’m a dead woman.”
    Alaric’s face was a study in icy rage. “No,
mi amara
. It is he who is a dead man.”
    “Call me, Quinn Dawson,” Ptolemy continued. “Together, we will take back the planet. Human and Atlantean together. This I swear.”
    The reporters, all swooning over the double scoop, shouted questions so fast and furiously that they were unintelligible, but the man simply bowed and held up his right hand with the enormous gemstone in it, and a flash of sickly orange-red light enveloped him. When the light was gone, so was he.
    “A cheap trick,” Ven said dismissively. “Any five-dollar magician can do that.”
    “But a five-dollar magician could not touch Poseidon’s Pride, let alone wield it,” Alaric said slowly. “If that truly is the missing gem, there is something to this man’s claim, at least of being Atlantean, perhaps.”
    Quinn started laughing, and it was high and wild. “Well. Think they’re hiring at McDonald’s? Because that, my friends, just put me out of a job.”
    Alaric stared at her in disbelief. “Out of a
job
? Are