Vampire in Atlantis

a rain check on that beer?”
    “Another night,” Daniel agreed. He watched as the prince of Atlantis, one of the few men Daniel had ever called friend, leapt into the air and dissolved into a sparkling cloud of iridescent mist. The Atlantean powers over water were both beautiful and deadly. Daniel had seen both.
    He waited until the last droplet of mist had long since vanished from his sight before he spoke, repeating the words that had given away his intent. “Good-bye, my friend.”
    And then he went to face the dawn.

Chapter 2
     

     

The Maidens’ Chamber, Atlantis, deep beneath the Mediterranean Sea
     
    “They might die. They might all die.”
    The frantic words sliced through the fog that kept Serai’s mind in a near-permanent state of peaceful rest. The speaker’s urgency was such that she cast around in her memory for his name, but she couldn’t find it. One of the many, many attendants who had come and gone, lived and died, while she and her sisters waited out the millennia until they were freed. After the first thousand years, she hadn’t bothered to try to learn their names. They almost never spoke to her, after all. Only around her. About her.
    “ So beautiful ,” they’d say. Or, more often, “ What a waste. ”
    The fact that she agreed with the second assessment didn’t make it sting less.
    “The companion stone is no longer sufficient,” another one said, breaking into the painful memories. “If we can’t find the Emperor, the maidens are all going to die.”
    Die. She and her sisters were going to die? No. No . Serai jolted awake with the same painful wrench in her chest that accompanied each year’s brief period of consciousness. But something was wrong this time. Her internal clock, finely tuned after more than eleven thousand years of existing in the prison of stasis, told her that it hadn’t been an entire year since her last brief period of semi-wakefulness. It hadn’t even been half that. The pattern that had ruled her life for so long had changed, and she didn’t know why.
    From the sounds of the controlled chaos in the room, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what was going on. Normally tranquil attendants, the current high priest’s acolytes, scurried around like rodents caught in a marble-walled trap. Voices that were always kept at hushed, serene, tones were raised in agitation, loud enough to drown out the ever-present gentle music. They were all panicking, and their fear transmitted itself to Serai—primal instincts that had long been buried shot into instant awareness.
    Danger. Daniel .
    Why did the two go so naturally together? Why, even after all this time, did her mind instinctively turn to the only man she’d ever wanted to rescue her? The only one she’d believed she could count on. She’d been wrong, though. So very wrong. Her heart, however, seemed not to have given up its lonely, helpless, hope.
    Daniel .
    Daniel. She used to pray she’d forget him, but she gave that up as futile after the first half a thousand years or so. How long must she be tortured with memories of the man who’d abandoned her? She had no time to think of long-lost love or the searing guilt that had followed her fateful choice on that long-ago day. This time, she had to rescue herself.
    Serai opened her eyes and—it took nearly a full moment—the realization of the miraculous nature of that action flooded through her with the power of a lightning strike on storm-tossed waves.
    She’d opened her eyes .
    For the first time in millennia, she’d opened her eyes, and she had no intention of closing them again. In the spirit of the moment, she tried yet another impossible task and raised her arm from the pale cream- and rose-colored cushions of the silken pallet upon which she’d lain, encased in crystal and powerful magic, for so long. Action followed thought and she watched, wondering, exultant, as her hand touched the crystal covering of her prison.
    A shudder of relief wracked her body—her limbs were obeying her commands—and a cry escaped her throat. Hoarse, rusty, and almost unrecognizable, but it was still her voice making that sound. Her voice. The stasis had done its job, then, as promised by a long-dead high priest, and kept her safe and whole throughout the turning of the world.
    Kept them safe. She and her sisters-in-captivity. There were so few of them left now.
    Pain stabbed at her, biting into her insides, and she instinctively hunched over to curl