Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

no hint of whether or not he shared the sentiment.
    “There is no evidence that President Warren has joined the Apostates, however.”
    Christophe threw back his head and laughed. “Yeah, who needs to join a cult devoted to finding sexual pleasure through intense pain when you‟re already married to a ballbuster like this country‟s First Lady?”
    “Perhaps we should leave the political speculation for the time being,” Brennan said, a hint of command in his quiet voice. “We are the Warriors of Poseidon, and it is not our purview to speculate on the humans and their leadership choices, much as we may dislike those choices.
    It is our honor and duty only to protect them from those predators who formerly kept to the shadows of the night.”
    “Right. The pride of Atlantis protecting the damn sheep who invited the wolves in to dinner,”
    Christophe sneered. “In the decade since the shifters and vamps declared themselves to humanity, they‟ve taken over. Vampires in Congress and now in the British parliament.
    Shape-shifters controlling the media. Every one of them walking around as though they owned the place. Oh, wait—they do.”
    Christophe snarled a phrase in ancient Atlantean and sliced a hand downward. A funnel of churning water spiraled up through the air at his command, climbing high enough to spray water at their boots before Christophe released it.
    Alexios gritted his teeth against the urge to reprimand the younger warrior. After all, Christophe was only acting out the maddening frustration they all felt. “No time for any of that now. This sect may have some knowledge that can help us find Justice. That‟s all we care about tonight. The mission is to get it out of them, any way we can.”
    As the three warriors shimmered into mist and silently soared up toward the rooftop, Alexios forced the toxic memories of his own time as Anubisa‟s captive from his thoughts. Memory was such a pale and impotent word, anyway; it was more like a full-on, lights-and-sound flashback to the torture that had seared through his body and mind. Almost as though he yet again endured the lash of her metal-tipped whips or the agony of her mind rape.
    Two years of imprisonment to the vampire goddess, in payment for some wrong she believed Poseidon had done to her so long ago that any memory of it was lost in the waters of time. At least to anyone mortal.
    Goddesses had very, very long memories.
    Two years of being brought to the point of death and beyond, over and over and over again.
    That he‟d survived was no testament to his own strength or courage, but rather to how low he‟d been on her list of priorities. She hadn‟t been around to play her twisted games with him very often, or he would have been dead.
    Or worse than dead. A pathetic toy to do her bidding. A man couldn‟t outplay a goddess, after all. Not even a man who was also an Atlantean warrior.
    As the memories shuddered through his soul, he forced himself to focus. On the mission. On Justice—his colleague and friend. And tried not to wonder if, after four long months of Anubisa‟s very personal attentions, there would be anything left of Justice to find.
    It took them only minutes to find the right window on the hotel‟s top floor. Shamelessness, or the exhibitionist tendencies of its inhabitants, meant that the curtains were thrown wide. He felt his lips curl back from his teeth as he stared through the phantom reflection of his own scarred face on the glass at a scene straight out of something Dante might have written.
    The hotel furniture, probably high quality and all kinds of expensive, was shoved against the walls to make a roughly square open space in the center of the suite. Dozens of naked, sweat-slicked bodies twisted and contorted into impossible positions. The gyrating forms of several red-robed Apostates whirled from victim to victim. Each of the red robes carried whips and other, darker-purposed steel implements with which they slashed out in precise movements.
    The worst part of it was that there was a deliberate rhythm to it: choreographed pain in a perverted dance.
    The blood dripping from every player and soaking into the pale cream color of the carpet was shockingly vivid and almost too bright to be real. But even as Alexios watched, the robed figures sliced new gashes into flesh, causing the nude humans to cry out and writhe on the floor.
    Alexios snarled an ancient curse in his native tongue and shimmered back into his