Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

of much use in a moving vehicle. He spat forth a stream of words that absolutely had to be Atlantean cursing; she‟d fought with warriors for enough years to recognize the cadence. If the Ice King of Calm was swearing, it had to be bad.
    The realization brought her to a snap decision of her own. Grace wrenched the parking brake up, released her seat belt, and threw herself underneath his arms in a twisting half turn toward the backseat. Alexios slammed his hard chest down on her back, though, capturing her in a contorted embrace.
    “No. If you lift your head, the attacker on the roof of that building is going to shoot you,” he breathed in her ear.
    “I need to get to Michelle. Now.”
    “I will not lose you,” he said as he slowly pulled away. The words were so quiet that she nearly missed them. She snapped her head to the left and found his face a breath away from her own. Fury rode the high cheekbones and hard angles of his face. “I‟m going out there,” he said. “When I give the signal, you put this vehicle in gear and get the hells out of here.”
    He dropped the empty gun on the floorboard and pulled his daggers out of their sheaths. The movement was fluid and oddly slowed by stress-skewed perception, almost encapsulated in a bubble of time. She noticed the hairs on his tanned and muscled forearms were burnished gold, and she even had time to think it an odd observation to make before dying.
    Then, in a move that made her wonder if somehow she‟d gotten a head injury in the crash, Alexios simply disappeared. It wasn‟t sudden. It took maybe three or four seconds. But his body dissolved into a shimmering cascade of sparkling mist and, utterly transparent and nearly without shape, he soared through the open window beside her, leaving Grace with her mouth open in wonder and tiny water drops caught in her eyelashes.
    “Oh dear. I think I may have died,” Michelle said, moaning. “Either I just saw Alexios turn into an angel, or you and he are going to have some seriously interesting sex.”
    Stifling her ready retort, Grace resumed her crawl into the backseat to help Michelle, careful to keep her own head down. There was blood everywhere; the gunshot had smashed through the window next to Michelle and hit her shoulder. Glass glittered in her short dark hair, and shallow scratches bled on her forehead and cheeks.
    “How bad?”
    Michelle tried to smile, but it turned into a grimace. “I won‟t be wearing any sleeveless dresses for a while.”
    Grace‟s eyes burned. If she lost her best friend . . . “Damnit, Michelle, quit with that British stiff-upper-lip crap. How bad?”
    In the pale glow reflected from the streetlamp, Michelle‟s face was whiter than a St. Louis blizzard. “Maybe a little bad. It‟s just below my shoulder, but I‟m starting to have a hard time breathing, and—” As if on cue, Michelle‟s sentence trailed off into a horrible wheezing gasp.
    “It must have punctured your lung. Oh, dear Lord and goddess help us, we‟ve got to get out of here,” Grace said, offering up prayers to Diana and to the Christian god. She snatched her bow and half-empty quiver from the back and pulled herself into the driver‟s seat, fitting arrow to bow with an ease born of long practice. She took aim through her open window and waited to deliver silver-tipped death.
    She was a descendant of Diana, and her aim was always true.
    “I‟m going to get you to the hospital,” she promised, scanning the area for Alexios or the attackers.
    A dark shadow somersaulted through the air toward the Jeep, and she tracked it without thought, acting purely on instinct and natural talent.
    “Didn‟t you have enough back at HQ, you bastards?” she screamed. “A dozen dead shifters and at least a half dozen dead vamps isn‟t enough? I‟ll kill every single one of you if she dies.”
    The shadow moved almost faster than her eye could follow until it materialized into a coalescing shimmer in the pool of light cast by the streetlamp. She eased the pressure of her fingers on the arrow.
    Vamps didn‟t travel as mist. It was Alexios, transformed back into himself.
    He bared his teeth and the expression on his face was so utterly feral—so inhumanly predatory—that Grace caught her breath, ice skating down her spine.
    “Go. Now,” he ordered. “I‟ll be right above you. Get her to the hospital. Now.”
    “You got them?”
    “They won‟t hurt anyone else,” he said. “Now go!”
    Michelle‟s