Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

headless body fell to the ground, dissolving in a flood of slime. “My shotgun shell for his head. Seemed fair to me.”
    Then he aimed almost without looking and took off another one‟s head, still with that eerie calm.
    Justice raised his sword and yelled a battle cry. “Las Pinturas!” Then he dove toward the vampires, hacking, slashing, and slicing, a study of grace in motion, centuries of training and practice evident in every move. No matter what Anubisa had done to him, no matter what battles the disparate sides of his heritage fought over possession of his mind and soul, he was an Atlantean warrior. A Warrior of Poseidon.
    And these vampires were all going to die.
    Two of them dove for him in a coordinated move, and he sidestepped the first, slashing into its neck as it flew by him, then circled around in a smooth motion to drive his sword into the next. As the vamp screamed and died, a rush of power so hot and powerful shot through the sword‟s blade and rushed into Justice‟s arm that he nearly lost his grip on it. Instead, he raised his arm into the air and shouted out his fierce joy as the sword gleamed with an inner light; first the symbols on the blade that he‟d seen in the Void and then the entire blade transforming from the hated dull black to silver-blue fire.
    “For Atlantis!” he shouted, and then he called the water that he‟d held at bay and threw his left arm forward, pointing at a group of the remaining vampires. The water obeyed his command and shaped itself in deadly arrows of glittering ice and shot toward the vamps in a hail of sharp-edged death.
    As the three fell, their heads rolling off to the sides, he heard the sounds of two different shotguns going off. Alejandro had claimed another, blowing its head off, and another villager had punched a hole in one of the vamp‟s chests. Unfortunately, it had missed the heart, and the wound was closing before their eyes.
    A third shotgun blast sounded, this time from behind him. Justice whirled around to see Keely standing in front of the door to the safe house. Not five feet away from her, another vampire dissolved into the ground in a pool of green slime.
    Keely stood there, shaking, her hands firmly holding the shotgun to her shoulder, her eyes enormous as she looked up and met Justice‟s gaze. “I . . . I got it,” she said in a shaky voice that unleashed the fury of a thousand monsters in Justice‟s mind.
    Hatred larger than the world swelled within Justice at the idea that one of them had come so close to her. Fury deeper than any ocean pulsed through the Nereid in waves of ice and fire.
    “We‟re done playing with you,” he said, and he dropped his sword, lifted his arms into the air, and roared out a sound that shook the trees themselves. Slicing his arms down through the air, he blasted a shock wave of concussive force through the clearing, knocking the villagers on their asses as it traveled straight to the vampires.
    Like water crashing against the rocks, the wave of his fury smashed through the remaining vampires, and every one of them exploded into a bloody shower of acid and flesh. Justice heard screaming but he didn‟t know if it came from someone else or from his own throat as the force of the power he‟d harnessed tried to shake his mind free from its moorings.
    Madness laughed at sanity and the power, the power, oh, by all the gods, the power of it beckoned and seduced until he began to whirl around, dripping with acid and chunks of spattered vampire, laughing and laughing and laughing. The cosmic stream of the universe flowed through him and around him, inviting him to dance a waltz of the ages.
    Why didn’t you tell me? We are all-powerful! We will kill them all and take anything and everything we want! Justice demanded of his Nereid half.
    The Nereid was strangely silent for a long moment. Then he finally replied. But what if everything we want is something that must be given to us, not taken?
    Justice stopped spinning, frozen to immobility by the words. Then a quiet voice broke through the madness.
    “Justice, come back to me. We need you. I need you. Please come back to me.”
    He forced his eyes to focus on what was right before him, instead of gazing out at the energy stream of the universe. He released the colors and light long enough to figure out why the voice called to him so powerfully.
    It was her. It was Keely, and she was crying. “Please. Please come back to me. You‟re frightening them,