Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

fingers. “My gloves!
    What did you do with my gloves?” Her breathing sped up again until her lungs burned inside her chest.
    He silently pointed to the floor near the pallet where she‟d slept. She backed away from him and bent down to snatch them up, but he moved with that eerie, inhuman speed and caught her wrist before she could pull the first glove over her hand.
    “Why, Keely? Why the gloves? Do you feel they offer you some protection?” A grimace twisted his face. “Am I so terrifying to you?”
    He released her wrist and crouched down, then stood up with his sheathed sword in his hands.
    Before she could protest, deflect, or take any evasive action at all, he shoved it into her arms.
    “Take this, then. Take the sword I‟ve worn for so long it is a part of myself, and use it against me if you fear me so much,” he said, his dark eyes and roughened voice coated with ice. “To kill a man, press the pointed end here.” He placed his palm flat on his chest, over his heart, but it was too late, too late.
    Too late.
    The hilt of the sword fitted itself into her hand as though it were seeking her. Seeking her knowledge of it. She had a fanciful notion that it was laying claim to her mind, even as Justice had laid claim to the rest of her when he‟d brought her here.
    Soon there was no room for thought as the weight of ages crushed the whimsy, crushed her defenses. Ages of time and eons of violence. Violent, bloody death splashing through the unprotected corridors of her mind.
    “No,” she tried to protest, even as the resonance of the sword‟s history beat her into submission. “No, no, no. Too much, too much. I can‟t . . . my gloves . . . I can‟t—”
    “Keely!” He called out to her, but the sound was muted. Muffled. Yet again, he caught her.
    Held her.
    But it was too late. She fell, screaming soundlessly, into the blackness of her own personal void. As she fell, she looked into his eyes and managed one final sentence.
    “I can‟t survive it.”
     
    Keely smashed into the reality of the vision with actual physical pain. A great wrenching and tearing of the fabric of her existence manifested itself in the searing pain of broken and bleeding flesh, oddly focused on her face and throat.
    She gasped and fell back, her attention captured by the floor—a very different floor than the one in the cavern. This floor was brilliantly white marble, inlaid with designs of gold and copper and another metal, similar to copper, but sparkling and almost gem-like. The wrenching pain began again, and she realized she might not survive the vision. Pain like nothing she‟d ever felt wrapped around her throat as though it had been crushed. She gasped, wheezing in a breath, but a moaning cry came from farther into the room and she looked up to try to find the source.
    It was a dark-haired woman, kneeling on the floor, clutching at her belly. Her enormous, rippling, pregnant belly. The woman was clearly in labor, and the agony of it made Keely rethink any random yearnings she‟d ever had for children. She cried out again. It must be contractions. If they came this quickly, one on top of the other, didn‟t that mean something?
    Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. The woman was about to have a baby—right there on the floor. Keely started to call out, but the sharp, searing pain that sliced through her throat told her that the woman she‟d become in her vision wasn‟t going to be talking anytime soon. What had happened to her? She gingerly felt her neck and flinched from the sting of torn flesh. Her fingertips traced the wound and discovered a long slice in her skin; it seemed to be shallow but was bleeding quite a bit.
    From the way the side of her face hurt, someone had struck her quite recently, but her questing fingertips couldn‟t find any cuts on her cheek or near her eye, where the pain centered.
    She wore a simple cotton dress and sandals. No jewelry or adornment. She was probably seeing the room through the eyes of a servant girl, then. But why a servant girl? Usually the visions took her to someone who had a close personal connection or deeply emotional connection to the object she touched. Would a servant girl ever . . . ?
    Slowly, a horrifying thought crossed her mind. She lowered the hand clutching her throat and stared almost blindly at the bright red blood that stained her fingers and palm.
    She tried to seek answers in the terrified mind of her host, but all she could see was an image of the sword,