Heart Of Atlantis

surface, and put your hands up,” he commanded, and Quinn started to laugh. She couldn’t help it.
    “Here we go again.”

Chapter 21
    Alaric raised a hand to blast the annoying metallic monster out of the sky, but Quinn stopped him.
    “No. Those are the good guys. Can’t we just make a quick getaway?”
    So he swooped underneath the helicopter, darted right, and was halfway across the city before the machine had time to turn around. There were advantages to his method of flight.
    She directed him to a large building near the water, and he landed in the alley next to it, managing not to draw any more unwanted attention.
    After a brief battle where her desire to walk fought his need to hold her, he finally, reluctantly, released her. She led the way up three flights of stairs to an industrial loft with a state-of-the-art security keypad next to its massive steel door. She punched in a long string of numbers and then held her thumb over a small square of glass. It scanned her, and the door opened.
    “Welcome, Quinn,” an electronic voice said, as they entered the space.
    “She’s an artist, but she also does something for the northeast region of P-Ops,” Quinn explained.
    Alaric didn’t know what to expect, given the location and security, but it turned out to be an artist’s studio. Finished and unfinished paintings and sculptures filled the enormous space. The tools of an artist’s trade littered every flat surface, paints and brushes crowding mallets, knives, chisels, and tools he did not recognize.
    Quinn walked over to a large canvas propped against the far wall, near a bank of enormous windows, as the door automatically swung shut behind them and a metallic click announced that the security system was again engaged.
    “This is amazing,” she said, her voice hushed. “Almost makes me believe in hope again.”
    Alaric had no time for art, especially now. His first impulse was to blast a hole in the painting so his woman would turn around and look at
him
, instead of at a lifeless bit of canvas and paint. He took a steadying breath and shook his head.
    Bad enough to be insane. He wouldn’t add childish to his list of flaws.
    He walked over to join her, and she reached for his hand. The gesture went a long way toward calming the beast that had been raging inside him since he’d watched her be taken.
    It was a deceptively simple canvas. A child and an old woman sitting companionably on a park bench, feeding the birds. But the details shone through to provide a spectacular sort of wonder to the mundane scene.
    “The puppy chewing on her shoe. I don’t know why, I’m not really a puppies and kittens kind of girl, but there’s a hopefulness there, that a woman so old would get a puppy and believe she’d live to see it grow into a dog,” Quinn said softly, her face pale and strained with the weight of the horrors she kept imprisoned in her mind.
    “You’re going to have to tell me,” he said gently, when what he wanted to do was rage and storm and break things. “What happened with Ptolemy, and what happened with that vampire? I need to know, and I think, even more than that, you need to tell it.”
    She inhaled deeply, blew it out, and then finally turned to face him. “That’s just it. Nothing happened. I mean, plenty happened—he made me kill someone, Alaric. He made me kill the secretary-general of the United Nations on live TV.”
    Tears shimmered in her lovely dark eyes, but she impatiently scrubbed them away with the back of her hands. “This dress—I need to get out of it. Now. Let me go take a long hot shower and find some of Lauren’s clothes, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
    She ran up the metal spiral staircase as if she couldn’t bear to wear the offending garment a moment longer, and Alaric followed right behind her, because the last thing he planned to do for the foreseeable future was let her out of his sight. He slowed, however, as he realized that the shower itself posed a problem, because the gods themselves knew he had no idea where he’d get the control to keep from following her in.
    By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the dress was wadded up in a metal trash receptacle and he could hear the sound of running water from behind a closed door. He scanned the high-ceilinged, clearly feminine room for obvious dangers, sent his magic searching for any that weren’t obvious, and then settled down on the floor in front of the door to wait for her, energy