Heart Of Atlantis

chin.
    “Only to
them
?” She wiped the blood away and then rolled up the cloth and threw it as far as she could from where she still sat on the floor. Several of the creatures hurled themselves into a biting, snapping frenzy over the cloth, which she didn’t find reassuring in the least.
    “If I can’t get this to work, we might have to run for it,” Ptolemy said, continuing the hit parade of
not reassuring
. He shoved the gem into his jacket pocket and scowled as he scanned the room.
    “Can’t you just call your portal and get us out of here?”
    “Not without taking some of them with me. Do you think your world is ready for them?”
    She looked around at the mass of monsters inching bit by bit closer, many of them actively drooling long, glistening ropes of slime as they watched her with, generally, more than two eyes each.
    “No, my world is definitely not ready for them,” she agreed. She put a hand on her knife hilt and prepared to kill as many of them as she could before they killed her.
    She just hoped Alaric found a way to be happy, one day. The thought of Alaric reminded her of the shell he’d given her and bolstered her courage, in spite of the pain still ringing in her skull, and she climbed to her feet, the better to fight off the atrocities.
    “I’m not asking this to be a smart-ass, but why did we come here again?”
    “I wanted you to see why I must escape this place, so you would better understand me when we are mated,” he said sadly. “Instead, I have caused you to become even more horrified by me.”
    For one brief moment, she almost felt sorry for him. She thought
she’d
had sibling rivalry problems, when she and Riley hit puberty together, and there were two emotional empaths in the same house. At least neither of them had tried to kill and eat the other one’s boyfriend.
    Of course, neither she nor her sister was a murderous kidnapper who wanted to take over somebody else’s world, either.
    She squared her shoulders and tried to put a tiny bit of empathy in her voice as she forced herself to lean forward and hug him. “I actually do kind of understand, and I’m sorry for what you’ve endured, but kidnapping me and forcing me to have your kids, plus conquering my world, isn’t the way to my heart.”
    He looked surprised, and then he laughed. “I don’t care about your heart. It’s another organ entirely that I need.”
    Leering, he patted her stomach, and any shred of sympathy she’d had for his plight vanished in the wave of revulsion that punched her in the gut as hard as he’d punched her in the face.
    “For now, though, you have to go,” he said as, at some unknown signal, his family started to swarm the spot where they stood. “I’ll hold them off and then make it back to you later. You’ll be safe enough.”
    He picked Quinn up and threw her at the wall as hard as he could, over the gaping, shark-toothed maws and grasping, claw-handed reach of the atrocities who were leaping for her. She braced for impact and wondered if she could survive a shattered skull, but the wall dissolved into the garish orange light of his portal, and she fell through it. The last thing she saw of his dimension was one of his relatives stabbing its swordlike appendage into Ptolemy’s back so hard that the tip of it came out the front of his chest, exactly where his heart would have been if he’d been human.
    Ptolemy opened his mouth to scream, and a blackish-green oily liquid gushed out. Surely that had killed him.
Surely
. In spite of the nausea-making vortex, she smiled fiercely—both with triumph and because she had a wonderful secret. Those creatures were trapped on their side of the vortex; none of them seemed to be smart enough to figure out the portal.
    And, even better, Quinn’s past had come to her rescue. One of her mentors in her early days of rebel training had been a champion pickpocket. Quinn had forced herself to embrace Ptolemy for a very, very good reason. She put her hand inside the front waistband of her borrowed pants and double-checked that the leather pouch she’d borrowed from Lauren’s things was still secure.
    And that Poseidon’s Pride was secure inside it.
    She’d known she was quite likely to die from daring to touch the gem, but she’d had to try, and apparently Alaric’s magic, which he’d shared with her, was powerful enough to protect her. Or else it was gearing up to incinerate her, but she was frankly too tired to care which,