Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

at Maria who sat, sobbing, at the end of the table. “While I shirked my duty,” he finished, a dull flush on his cheekbones.
    Justice met Alejandro‟s gaze in a moment of perfectly shared understanding. They were both warriors who had failed to protect their charges. They both would die to make it right.
    Fine. Let him come.
    “What is the plan, then?” The bruised-looking skin under Keely‟s eyes emphasized her stark, drawn pallor. “You‟re the mighty Atlantean warrior, so why don‟t you tell us all about it?”
    Where there had been love and laughter in her eyes only a few short hours before, now there was nothing but desolation. Keely‟s guilt must be as crushing as his own, he realized.
    Not only Atlantean warriors carried the weight of innocents on their souls.
    “They want to barter, so we barter,” he said flatly. “Me for Eleni.”
    A chorus of dissent broke out around the table, but Keely looked down at her hands resting on the table and said nothing, although she flinched as if from a blow.
    “They‟ll kill you,” Alejandro said. “Kill you first, then Eleni, and then the rest of us. I have no illusions that we can hold off a blood pride of angry vampires with a few shotguns.”
    “Maybe. But if so, I plan to take them with me,” Justice replied, never taking his eyes off Keely. “Anyway, plan A is that nobody dies but vampires. I suddenly have a lot to live for.”
    Keely finally looked up at him, and the black emptiness in her eyes scared him more than the idea of facing a hundred vampires.
    “Give me a shotgun,” she said.
    “You will not come anywhere near that nest,” Justice began. “I‟ll—”
    But it was her turn to cut him off. She ignored him as completely as if he didn‟t exist and turned to Maria, who was still weeping. “If you can shut up for five minutes, get me a shotgun,” she said with icy disdain. Then she lifted something from her lap and placed it on the table in front of her in an eerie echo of Justice‟s action of mere minutes before.
    It was the bloody slipper.
    Maria, shocked into silence, traded a long look with Keely and then squared her shoulders and hurried off. Keely selected a piece of bread and started chewing it with grim determination.
    “We need to eat,” she said, still in that utterly flat tone. “We haven‟t eaten all day. It‟s still an hour until twilight, and I won‟t fail Eleni again because I was too damn stupid to put fuel in my body before I went to rescue her.”
    Justice, who could function at full capacity for up to six days with no food, decided to follow her lead. Maybe letting Keely feel in control of something, even something as meaningless as the decision to eat bread and cold stew, would help her find her way back from her own personal hell.
    She swallowed the piece of bread and began on her previously untouched bowl of stew, slowly and methodically eating one spoonful after another. It was like watching a zombie or one of those robots in the movies Ven liked to watch. There was nothing of human emotion about it, no trace of fear or sorrow.
    Just spoonful after spoonful of cold stew.
    His mouth dried out so much he was almost unable to swallow the bread. If by his folly he had lost both the child and Keely, there was nothing left for him. His mind tortured him with visions of a world without Keely, and a Void blacker than any Anubisa could conjure yawned like an abyss at his feet, beckoning.
    Alejandro looked from Justice to Keely and then nodded as if reaching a decision. He broke off a hunk of bread and started chewing.
    Keely dropped her spoon in her bowl and metal rang against metal; a hollow, haunting sound.
    Then she turned those dead eyes on Justice again and something in his soul shriveled.
    “You told us what you‟re going to do,” she said. “Now tell us how we can help.”

Chapter 39
    Just before twilight, San Bartolo
    The men from the village had hidden themselves as best they could in the trees and grass surrounding the temple, but the plan for them to cover Justice with protective gunfire was a dismal failure. The topography didn‟t lend itself to any real cover; in order to see their targets clearly they‟d have to come into the open or they‟d be firing blind and take the chance of hitting Justice or Eleni.
    Of course, if the vamps forced him to take the meeting inside the temple where the mural was, all bets were off. He‟d be entirely on his own.
    Keely, shotgun ready and aimed, lay on the