Heart Of Atlantis

your dreams, buster. Now, give me the gem before I turn you into a girl.” She very deliberately pointed the gun at his crotch.
    He laughed. Not the usual reaction a man had when confronted with the loss of the family jewels.
    “I think your gun won’t work,” he said, and she flinched and cried out as the metal flashed to searing hot. She dropped it, fast, and watched in horror as her Glock melted into a puddle of shiny liquid metal, ate a hole through the table, and pooled on the floor.
    “If you have any knives or more guns on you, I’ll give you a moment before I melt them, too,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to suffer any burns in inconvenient places.”
    The knives and her backup gun were seared to molten heat so quickly that she rushed to remove them and tossed them on the table before her clothes caught on fire.
    “Is that all you’ve got?” she challenged him.
    “Oh, no, I have much more,” he said, taunting her. “You’ll discover just how much when I impregnate you with the new heir to Atlantis.”
    Reality tilted on its axis for a moment as her brain tried to process what he’d said, and her skin tried to crawl off her bones and run away from the overwhelming revulsion and terror of his words.
    No. Not again.
    She almost hadn’t survived the last time.

    Alaric followed Faust out of the building into the dirty gray street, and the immediate problem became apparent. The children.
    Alaric pointed to two women on the other side of the street who were dressed in the law enforcement uniform of the city. “They will care for the children.”
    Faust shook his head. “No. No way. They’ll put them in foster homes. I take care of them, man.”
    Alaric raised one eyebrow, but didn’t state the obvious again. They were out of time for debate. “Then point me toward City Hall and remove yourselves from this place.”
    Faust gave him quick directions, and then he and the children disappeared around a corner so fast it was as if they’d never been there at all. Alaric watched them go and then headed off toward City Hall, transforming into mist to travel so he could avoid any more nasty surprises. He spared a moment to wonder why the portal would send him to Faust, but then dismissed it as unimportant to the mission at hand as he sped past broken and boarded-up windows of abandoned and decrepit buildings.
    Quinn, Quinn, Quinn, Quinn.
Her name beat though his mind like a command.
    She could be anywhere in the world—probably was so far from him he’d never find her—but his senses automatically scanned for her in a wide pattern to try to catch any hint of her presence. Just as he did, a wave of Quinn’s emotion—pure, unadulterated terror—slammed into him so hard it sent him crashing down through the air, out of his mist form, and smashed him into a parked car.
    She was here in New York.
Here.
He struggled to climb out of the dent his body had made in the hood of the car, and another blast of her emotion knocked him down again. Wherever she was, she was so scared she could hardly think. A renewed flare of white-hot power surged through him, and he shot into the air again, ignoring the crowd of humans that had formed around the car. Whoever had scared Quinn was about to learn exactly what the high priest of Atlantis was capable of—and it was going to be a very, very painful lesson.
    He followed Quinn’s fear and rage across the city to find, to his utter lack of surprise, that it was coming from City Hall. The coincidences were just piling up, and none of them were good. He didn’t bother to knock, just headed straight for the window closest to where he could sense Quinn and arrowed straight for it, planning to smash it open on the way.
    Instead, he crashed into an invisible shield of magic and bounced back through the air. The force of his collision with the shield pushed him out of his mist shape again and smashed him down to the ground. He lay there for a minute or so, shaking his head at the offers of hands up or any other help, simply trying to force air back into his abused body and snarling at the humans until they all gave up and left him alone. Ptolemy’s press conference was bigger news than a man falling from midair, evidently. As he climbed to his feet, a sharp ache alerted him to the presence of at least one cracked or broken rib.
    “This day just keeps getting better and better,” he growled, and a woman standing nearby pulled her child closer to her.
    He almost