Heart Of Atlantis

shocked her by laughing.
    “And so it begins,” he said. “Now, my beautiful wife-to-be, to prove your loyalty I only have one request. I need for you to end what’s left of the life of this miserable worm on the floor. If you disobey me, I will kill every human in this building, slowly and painfully—”
    “Done,” Quinn snapped. She whirled around to grab a rather flimsy-looking wooden side table and snapped one leg off over her knee. Then she knelt down next to the secretary-general.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered, before she plunged the makeshift stake into his heart.
    She’d just committed murder on live TV. Another act for which she could never, ever forgive herself. She opened her mental shield, just a crack, for just a moment.
    Good-bye, Alaric.

    The blast of Quinn’s pain and remorse swept through Alaric with the force of a tidal wave, before she shut it down hard. She was trying to tell him good-bye.
    Alaric needed to kill something.
    Bad
.
    “Oh, my god, she really did it,” shouted the man with the portable viewing device. It had been Alaric’s only window to Quinn and Ptolemy for the past several minutes.
    She’d had no choice. Yet again he had the thought that they were all ultimately helpless pawns in a chess game played by gods. Another stain on her soul, and Quinn had already been sure that she could never atone for the dark deeds she’d performed in her short life.
    He, of all people, knew what it had cost her to kill that man. Even though the secretary-general had been a vampire, he also had been a man working for good in the world, not trying to conquer and enslave humanity. Even though she’d been forced to it—even though she’d clearly given him a quick end when his alternative was a long and agonizing death—and in spite of the threat that Ptolemy would kill humans if she did not comply.
    It didn’t matter. She’d killed, again, and this time not in direct self-defense, or at least so she would believe. Alaric’s skin heated up as his very bones vibrated with fury. If he did not find an outlet for his rage, he might very well set off an explosion. The humans closest to him backed away as Alaric’s body began to glow with hot, silver-blue energy.
    “Ah, hey, man, are you all right?” one of them, braver than the others, dared to ask.
    “No,” he managed to say. “No, I am very far from all right. You should leave now. Leave and take all of your friends. This area is about to become very dangerous.”
    “Oh, wow,” the man with the viewing device yelled. “The king of Atlantis is getting ready to do something bad, again. He has that woman he called his consort by the hair—”
    “Move, fool.” Alaric snatched the device from the man, just in time to see Ptolemy pull Quinn up into his arms.
    “Now I’ll be a little busy for a while,” Ptolemy said, smirking directly into the camera. Quinn’s eyes were wide and blank, staring at nothing, like she’d reached and then moved past the end of her endurance. Alaric’s mind stuttered at the thought of what else Ptolemy might have done to her in that building.
    He wondered how long he could make it take for Ptolemy to die.
    Ptolemy’s next words smashed through Alaric’s plans of blood and death.
    “I have to impregnate my future queen.” Then, in a flash of light, he pulled another of his vanishing tricks, and this time he took Quinn with him. When the ugly smoke cleared, there was nobody left in view on the small screen but the mayor, who picked up a chair and smashed it into the camera that was transmitting the scene. The news feed went black.
    “Give me my iPad, man,” the human whined, grabbing for it, and Alaric hit him in the face with his precious toy.
    Alaric tried for several seconds—that lasted for an eternity—to sense Quinn anywhere within the range of his power.
Nothing
. She was gone. She’d disappeared as surely as if she’d died. Alaric stood silently as the prospect of his future without Quinn washed through him in waves of bleak, desolate despair.
    Then he called to his power and began to destroy the world.
    He destroyed the news vehicle in front of him with a single blow, and it disintegrated in a satisfying explosion that blew pieces of shrapnel thirty feet in the air. The columns in front of the building went next, one by one. He smashed every one of them into rubble.
    Humans ran wildly in every direction away from him, and Alaric laughed. Madness and murder and death swirled