Heart Of Atlantis

surprised to see the change.
    Conlan’s face hardened. “It was a waste of resources. Anybody who infiltrates the palace will go for Riley or the baby, not a stuffy roomful of old scrolls and maps.”
    Justice snarled out an Atlantean curse. “If any should try to harm the prince or your lady, we will personally deliver him to you. In several trips.”
    At the sound of the plural
we
, Alaric sent out a subtle mental touch, to discover if Justice were still walking on stable mental ground. He was relieved to find that all was well.
    Justice grinned at him. “I was talking about we, the warriors, not we, the two halves of my dual soul, priest, but thank you for your concern for my welfare.”
    Alaric couldn’t get over the change in the man since he’d found Keely and their adopted Guatemalan daughter, Eleni. Justice had always been hard, vicious, and almost terrifying. He was still all of those things, when battle called for it, but he had somehow found the ability to laugh, too.
    Conlan led the way to the scarred wooden table that had seen countless war councils for thousands of years. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily.
    “Here we go again,” Conlan said wearily. “I’m more and more tired of being high prince some days.”
    Alaric took the chair opposite the prince, and Justice leaned against a wall.
    Alaric glanced at them both in turn. “Well, then, you will be delighted to hear that there is a man on the surface who has just declared to the world that
he
is the rightful king of Atlantis.”
    He leaned back in his chair and waited for the explosion.
    It didn’t take long.
    Conlan smashed his fist on the table. “You need to explain this now. It took everything I had to wait this long to hear the story behind what you told me on the beach, but I did not wish to ruin my wife’s sister’s first visit to Atlantis so soon. I also wonder why my brother didn’t tell me this. Did he know?”
    “He knew, but you said Erin was in danger. He had to go to her. None of us would have done differently, and you know it,” Alaric pointed out. “Also, Quinn is in the middle of all of this, and she will not appreciate being treated as a helpless female who needs to be shielded from plans.”
    Conlan blew out a deep breath but then nodded.
    “She knows this, though, and I don’t. Tell me. Everything.”
    The door slammed open, and Ven ran into the room. “Sorry I’m late. Got held up. Erin is going to put me in an early grave.”
    Erin, walking in behind him, rolled her eyes. “I’m the most powerful witch in my coven. If I can’t handle a little uprising from black magic wannabes, I deserve to be stripped of my wand.”
    “I thought you said wands were for Harry Potter,” Justice said, tilting his head.
    She grinned at him. “Figure of speech. ‘Stripped of my wand’ just sounds cooler than ‘stripped of my elemental magic and the Wilding,’ right?”
    Conlan glared at all of them. “Can we focus? Now? Please? Consider this a royal decree, if that helps.” He pointed at Ven. “You and I will discuss your lack of communication skills later.”
    Ven snorted and flung himself into an upholstered chair near the table, one long leg draped over the arm. Alaric told them everything. Everything about Ptolemy Reborn, the attack in Japan—all of it. Except for what had occurred between him and Quinn on the island, of course. Some things were meant to be private.
    Conlan sat back in his chair, stunned, when Alaric finished his recitation. “The portal is alive? We guessed it had some form of sentience, but this is . . . surprising, to say the least. And now apparently the portal spirit is male, not female, if the voice we heard when Quinn spoke to it is an indicator.”
    “I think we have no time to concern ourselves with the portal just now,” Alaric said.
    “Yeah. It’s worse than even you know. That blast, Alaric? The one Ptolemy blew up the hotel with? News reports are saying that the king of Atlantis announced his presence in the world by killing seventeen people,” Ven said grimly. “Those Platoists and a few of the hotel staff.”
    Conlan’s face turned to stone. “I have been preparing the way for Atlantis’s arrival on the surface for months. Foreign dignitaries, heads of state, all of it ruined by this impostor.”
    Alaric’s fury rose up inside him with the force of a typhoon over open ocean. “Yes,” he snarled. “We wouldn’t want the deaths of a few innocent humans to get in