Vampire in Atlantis

Keely interjected, a dark look on her face. Justice wrapped an arm around her legs and glanced up at her. He never let the stunning redhead get far from him, since her love was the only thing that had ever been able to help him control his dual nature.
    Keely almost absently smoothed a strand of Justice’s long blue hair off her pants leg and then scowled at Conlan. “I call them the virgin popsicles. Frozen in that damn stasis until they get to be released to be bedded and bred.”
    “Trust an archaeologist to be blunt,” Ven drawled.
    Erin lightly smacked Ven on the back of head. “She’s right.”
    “I know she’s right. I didn’t say she wasn’t right, just that she was blunt,” Ven said. “Also, ow.”
    Conlan felt like he was rapidly losing any slight bit of control he’d had over the meeting. He should have called them to the war room. He felt he had at least some semblance of control—or the illusion of it—over his opinionated family members there.
    “We’ve been trying. You know we’ve been trying,” he told them all, but he was looking right at Riley. “The last time the priests and mages were able to release one of the maidens from stasis was when they freed my mother, hundreds of years ago. We have been unable to use the Emperor since then.”
    “Then how exactly did you expect to marry Serai?” Justice asked, making Conlan want to kick his ass.
    Riley’s glare turned from hot to glacial in a split second, since, after all, they were talking about the woman who’d been Conlan’s intended bride. But he couldn’t help or change past history. All he could do was fix the present and do his best to chart the future.
    “The priests didn’t tell me,” he muttered. “The previous temple chief attendant was sure he’d be able to figure out what was wrong, and the high priest before Alaric was afraid to let anybody know there were problems for some asinine reason. We’ve been working on it since we found out, which was when they were trying to release Serai from stasis for our, ah, for—”
    “For your royal wedding,” Riley said through clenched teeth.
    “Yes. Yes, damn it, yes,” he said, frustrated and worried all at once. “We’ve had our best mages and Alaric himself trying to discover how to free those six women from stasis, and the best they can do is tell me there has been something wrong with the connection to the Emperor. Now, apparently, it’s worse.”
    “And Serai escaped? Or vanished? What exactly happened?” Erin leaned forward. She’d been gone to one of her coven’s council meetings on the surface when it happened, and Ven must not have had time to fill her in yet.
    “She definitely escaped,” Conlan said grimly. “She somehow blasted out of the stasis chamber, knocked out the attendants, then made it to the portal dock and knocked out both of my guards—although how a woman who has been in stasis for thousands of years can take out two of our best guards is beyond me—and fled. Somewhere. The gods themselves only know where.”
    Erin shrugged. “The answer to part of your problem is easy enough. She has enough magic to take out at least half of all of your warriors in one shot. Maybe more. Maybe all.”
    Conlan, Justice, and Ven all looked at her in utter shock. “What?”
    “Didn’t you realize it?” Erin walked over to one of the bushes and leaned down to sniff a cluster of pale pink flowers. She turned back to face them and surveyed their surprised expressions, then shrugged again. “I thought you knew. Just walking by the temple where they slept gave me such a charge of powerful, yet contained, magic that I got a buzz like a champagne drunk.”
    “Maybe it took a witch or at least someone sensitive to magic to feel it,” Keely said. “I’ve been inside several times, in the course of my studies of everything about Atlantis, and never felt anything like that.”
    Justice shot up off the ground and grabbed Keely’s shoulders, lifting her up and almost off her feet. “Did you touch the stasis pods? That kind of magic could seriously harm you. We would be very distraught if you were to be harmed again.”
    Ven met Conlan’s gaze. When Justice started to speak of himself in the plural, it meant the deadly Nereid half of his soul was rousing to fury, and nobody within reach was safe when that happened. Nobody but Keely, of course.
    Keely knew it, too. She put her hands on either side of Justice’s face and leaned forward to kiss him.