Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

a sanctuary he had not visited in more than two centuries.
    As a deep, blue-green mist swirled from nothingness to surround him, his last sight was of the shocked faces of Alaric and his brothers. Then, before she had a chance to protest, he tightened his hold on Keely and closed his eyes as the darkness claimed them.

Chapter 14
    Atlantis,
    a cavern underneath the Temple of the Nereids
    Keely‟s consciousness shattered and re-formed, over and over, brilliantly colored particles of matter swirling around her like a sandstorm conceived by an insane artist. It lasted for mere seconds—somehow she knew that—even though her sense of time and space was thrown off-kilter. She existed and did not exist simultaneously in several different realities, but in every one of them, she was held by arms like steel bands against a rock-hard chest.
    If steel and rock were to throw off heat like a furnace and smell like blood and dirt.
    Suddenly, the vortex disappeared and she landed on her feet, hard, on a stone floor. Only Justice‟s strength and balance kept her from falling. She waited, eyes clenched shut, taking rapid, shallow breaths, until she could trust herself to talk or move without danger of losing the contents of her roiling stomach.
    The arms around her tightened, pressing her closer into his embrace, and fear overruled nausea. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed against his chest with all the strength she could muster. She may as well have saved herself the effort for as much effect as she had on him. It was like pushing against boulders in a cave-in; the same sense of sheer immovable weight.
    Fear turned into frustration and an overwhelming feeling of having had way, way more than enough pulsed through her head with the beginning of a whiz-banger of a headache.
    “Let. Me. Go,” she gritted out from between clenched teeth, staring determinedly at his chest.
    Although she was above-average height for a woman at five-eight, he was considerably taller, probably at least six-four. Somehow she knew she didn‟t want to look into his eyes. Not now.
    Not when he still held her trapped in his arms.
    He finally spoke, still with that rusty hoarseness to his voice. “We are not sure that we wish to let you go, our Keely.”
    Her mind stuttered over his odd use of the plural, but before she could figure out a response, his arms loosened and, in spite of his words to the contrary, he released her. She immediately stumbled back and away from him, refusing to look down at her own shirt and pants, now also streaked with the blood from his body. Nausea was winning, and she didn‟t need to give it a boost. Instead, she scanned her surroundings to try to figure out where she was.
    Figuring out how she‟d gotten there could wait till later.
    The dark space was enormous, with the roof so high overhead that she couldn‟t see it. The floor was an intricately patterned mosaic that reminded her of the floor she‟d seen in her vision of Nereus. The faint, not unpleasant scent of minerals hung in the slightly humid air. It reminded her of the hot springs in California.
    “Where are we?” She‟d start with the simple questions, since she wasn‟t at all sure how sane the wild man who‟d abducted her really was. Simply because he was the man from her vision—or his evil twin—didn‟t mean that she was safe with him.
    She involuntarily touched the carving through her shirt. The man she‟d seen, sitting next to the fire, carving her fish . . . he was like an oddly distorted photographic image of this warrior.
    It made her doubt her visions.
    It made her doubt herself.
    Maybe this man, Justice, was a descendant of the warrior from her vision? Maybe.
    “A cavern deep beneath the Temple of the Nereids,” he said. “Fitting, isn‟t it, since our Nereid half has finally assumed dominion over us?”
    Okay. Time to tackle the obvious question. “Us? Who is us? Do you always talk about yourself in the plural?” Maybe not the best idea, to confront his psychosis head-on, but she was an archaeologist, not a shrink. After an entire childhood spent being dragged from one psychiatrist to another, she was uniquely qualified to know the difference.
    Manic-depressive . Borderline sociopathy. Complete lack of any sense of reality .
    The diagnoses, professional sounding or not, burned through her mind like acid. Had she spent all those years trying to convince her parents she really was normal—really was sane—only to lose her grip on