Warriors of Poseidon 02 - Atlantis Awakening

whispered. "I promise I will find a way to fix this."
     
    Then, even as she began to sink into the glowing red whirlpool in his eyes, he struck.
    She screamed as she felt him draining her blood and energy from her body. As she sank into the darkness, she looked up and over Daniel's shoulder and right into Ven's furious face and nearly laughed at the sheer unexpectedness of seeing him there.
     
    Please, God, please save Riley and the baby, she thought, and then the world faded into shades of scarlet and blood red, finally tunneling down to black.

Chapter 32
    Ven heard the screaming and fought to keep from rushing out into the cavern, sword drawn. The correct battle strategy was always to scout out the opposition. He peered around the corner and saw Daniel driving his fangs into Quinn, who fought like she had werecat in her DNA.
     
    Screw battle strategy. He raised his sword and charged, roaring an ancient Atlantean battle cry that surfaced from the depths of his being. He caught a glimpse in his peripheral vision of an enormous space filled with more vamps and shifters, and then he Atlantis Awakening – Warriors of Poseidon 02
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    was on Daniel. "You soul-sucking bastard. Prepare to die the true death, vampire," he snarled, trying to find a place on Daniel's body he could skewer without injuring Quinn.
     
    Daniel released Quinn and stared up at Ven. "All is not as it seems, Atlantean." He flashed twenty feet across the room, carrying Quinn, so there were now about fifty vamps and shifters Ven had to slice his way through to get to them.
     
    From behind him, the first notes of a dark song began. Then a glowing sphere of power shot through the room and struck one of the vamps in the front row. It exploded in splatters of decomposing slime, and the vamps surrounding it shrieked and backed up.
    The shifters milled around, not quite retreating, but not attacking anymore, either.
     
    On either side of Ven, Justice, Jack, and Erin stepped up so that they formed a solid line of attack. Jack and Justice were armed with the fallen shifters' weapons and Erin held two more of the glowing spheres in her hands.
     
    "Can't shift back to tiger form for a while, but I'm a fair hand with a knife," Jack said.
     
    "Less talk, more killing," Justice said.
     
    "Now they die," Erin and what Ven had come to think of as Not Erin said.
     
    Ven nodded. "Now they die."
     
    With that, they started forward toward the enemy, hopelessly outnumbered if you didn't count the fact that they seemed to have a seriously pissed-off Goddess on their side.
     
    "Stop!" The voice roaring through the room was icily inhuman, and it came from directly above them. The vampire floating down toward them was one of the oldest Ven had ever seen, if the whiteness of his skin were any indication.
     
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    "Ex-Emperor Caligula, I presume?" he drawled.
     
    "Once an emperor, always an emperor, Atlantean," Caligula sneered, then he turned his laser-like focus on Erin. "Finally, Erin Connors. You are even more lovely than your sister."
     
    The master vampire laughed, and the sound skated chills across the room. "Of course, she has had a rather difficult decade, so she's rather the worse for wear, as you humans might say."
     
    Ven raised his sword and stepped in front of Erin. "I will happily show you a little difficulty of your own, Atlantean style, you monster."
     
    "Ven. No. He has Deirdre," Erin said, choking on the words. There was no trace of the Goddess remaining in her voice, and he wondered where she'd gone.
     
    "Yes, I have Deirdre," Caligula said, baring fully descended fangs. "Would you like to see your sister? She might be a bit angry at you for abandoning her to me all those years ago, but I'm sure you can work it out."
     
    "I never knew," Erin screamed. "I thought she was dead. All these years, I thought they were all dead. I thought…" She broke off, sobbing.
     
    From high above them, a new voice—eerily similar to Erin's—called out. "You truly didn't know? All these years he told me… I believed—"
     
    "Yes, you believed me," Caligula said, doing an obscenely gleeful dance right there, still standing on air. "Not at first, not even for the first few years. But finally you believed that your own family had abandoned you to me in exchange for their own worthless lives.
    The joy of your surrender to my lies was truly sweet."
     
    Atlantis Awakening – Warriors