Heart Of Atlantis

Ptolemy, retrieve the gem, and return it to Alaric before he blew some kind of magical gasket trying to keep the Trident from blowing up the dome.
    Alaric was probably furious by now. She couldn’t help it; she grinned.
    “You won’t like me when I’m angry,” she growled in true Bruce Banner fashion, and then she started laughing when a woman passing by gave her the finger.
    “Oh, yeah. I’m in New York.”
    She finished the coffee, dumped the cup in a handy trash can, and headed for a souvenir shop to find a map of the city. She needed to be at City Hall by eight.

    Alaric paced and ranted and swore and raved until Conlan threatened to hit him over the head with the nonpointed end of a spear.
    “She’s gone. Unprotected. Every single murderer and thug on the planet will have seen her face by now, and she’s up there all alone because the portal has decided, for the first time in all of recorded history, to do whatever in the nine hells it feels like doing!” Alaric was shouting by the end of it, and Conlan narrowed his eyes and picked up the spear.
    “I’m not kidding. I will hand your ass to you on a plate, and you are too busy keeping the Trident from nuclear meltdown, and the dome from collapsing, to zap me with magic, so for once it would be a fair fight,” the pain-in-the-ass high prince of Atlantis said.
    Alaric forced himself to take a deep breath. “Fine. I will calm down. I will pretend that the entire continent is not about to be destroyed. I will pretend that the sea god is not ignoring us. I will pretend that I can do this on my own, even though the Trident grows more unstable with every second that passes, and I am nearly at the limits of my strength already.”
    He bared his teeth at Conlan. “Don’t we all feel better already?”
    His entire body pulsed with the strain of pushing more magic than he’d ever channeled, and the Trident kept increasing its erratic instability. He knew he didn’t have much longer, if something didn’t happen to shore up the balance on his side of the equation.
    “We need one for the good guys, as Quinn would say,” he said, flinching as a sharp pain stabbed him in the temple.
    Conlan’s eyes widened a fraction, and he reached over to touch Alaric’s ear. His finger came back red with blood.
    “Just how much power are you having to expend to keep the dome from shattering?”
    Alaric grimly shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
    A shout heralded Marcus’s arrival at the head of an armed contingent of half a dozen warriors surrounding Riley and the baby, Erin, and Keely with Eleni.
    Erin and Keely were both furious, and they immediately started letting Conlan know it.
    “We are not about to scuttle through the portal like rats abandoning a sinking ship, when we can stay here and help,” Erin said.
    “I’m surprised Marcus managed to drag you out here,” Alaric said, before wincing as another sharp pain in his head nearly blinded him. At this rate, he’d be dead before the dome collapsed, anyway.
    “He threatened to stab us,” Keely said dryly. “When we didn’t believe him, he threatened to stab that guy.” She pointed to a youngling barely old enough to hold his sword.
    Marcus nodded grimly. “And they knew damn well I’d do that.”
    The young warrior gulped audibly, but stood tall and tried to look brave. Conlan laughed a little before he pulled Riley and Aidan into a fierce embrace. Alaric tried not to envy Conlan those last moments with his family, even as every fiber of his being demanded that he abandon the battle to contain the Trident and go after Quinn.
    “You know, he would have done it. He stabbed me once, in training,” he told the young man, whose eyes grew huge.
    Keely took in the situation with her scientist’s keen grasp of a problem, and then turned to Alaric. “Right. Where’s Quinn? You two need to reach the soul-meld, right here and now, or Atlantis isn’t going to survive.”

Chapter 16
    Alaric glared at the damnable woman. “What in the nine hells are you talking about?”
    “I tried to tell you last night, but nobody wanted to listen. What happened to Nereus was his power increased exponentially when he achieved the soul-meld with Zelia. He became the most powerful priest in the history of Atlantis
,
” she said. “That’s why the Elders decreed celibacy for the high priest. They decided nobody should have that kind of magic. They were afraid he could gain enough power even to