Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

millennia ago.”
    “That‟s what Liam called it, too. I guess it‟s as good a name as any. There‟s a talent called psychometry, which has to do with picking up impressions of a person from touching an object that belongs to him or her. But what I do is far more specific. I almost always only pick up one scene, and it seems to be the one that had the most emotional resonance for the object. It‟s an entire scene, complete with dialogue and action, too.”
    “So you could not—”
    “I couldn‟t hold a shirt belonging to a missing child and know where he‟d been taken, for example,” she said, remembering the pain and frustration when she‟d tried once to do just that. Tried to make her gift valuable to society in more ways than learning unprovable facts about ancient artifacts. “What I‟d get is more likely the scene where he first met his new puppy, wearing that shirt, because of the overwhelming joy that would resonate in the fibers of the cloth. Or the pain and grief if his puppy had died . . .”
    “I understand. I am sorry.”
    “It‟s okay. I have to admit it‟s kind of a relief to talk about this with somebody who believes me. I don‟t really want to end up in the Atlantean version of the nuthouse.”
    He pulled her closer to him until her head rested on his chest. She felt somehow comforted by the reassuring beat of his heart beneath her cheek.
    “By nuthouse, I‟m guessing you mean insane asylum? Has anyone ever threatened you with such a place, simply because you have a Gift that is out of the ordinary for humans?”
    His arms tightened even further, as if in response to a threat, and she made a small noise of protest. He instantly loosened his hold, and she took a deep breath. “Not exactly a threat.
    More like a long history of being institutionalized. My childhood—well, let‟s just say it wasn‟t all that much fun.”
    Keely realized that sitting in Justice‟s lap, no matter how seductively comforting, was perhaps not a position of strength for her. Suddenly she was telling him things she‟d never told anybody before and didn‟t really want to start talking about now.
    She shifted, putting her hand against his chest to push away, but froze when she noticed the hardness nestled under her bottom. Her breath caught in her throat and heat seared through her, melting her defenses. He clearly desired her, and there was a tiny part of her that wanted to stand up and cheer.
    Except—except he‟d been in the Void for so long. She didn‟t know what it was, but it didn‟t sound like the sort of place where you could go out and meet women. So what did that make Keely other than a convenient outlet—a woman who was handy and available? There was nothing more to it than that. Embarrassment flushed her face.
    No. A zillion times no.
    Her physical strength was no match for his, so she stopped trying to push away from him.
    “Please let me go, so I can get up now,” she said quietly.
    For the space of a heartbeat, he didn‟t move. Then he sighed and she felt the warmth of his breath in her hair. When he released her, she scrambled away from him, snatching up her gloves and pulling them back on her trembling hands.
    “Thank you. For catching me when I, well, when I went under.”
    “Please don‟t thank me, when it was my action that sent you into that painful vision,” he growled, leaping to his feet and beginning to pace the floor. “If I had only known—an object reader forced to touch, unprepared, the instrument of such violence over so many centuries. I don‟t know how you could endure it.”
    He snarled a long burst of the language she remembered from her vision. From the sound of it, she‟d just heard quite a lot of choice Atlantean swearing. She nearly grinned in spite of the circumstances; her scientific side was itching for her laptop or at least a pen and paper so she could start transcribing.
    This was better than the lost library at Alexandria. This was a living speaker of an ancient dead language. Phrases like “kid in a candy shop” or “pig in mud” rushed through her mind.
    This was the find of the decade. The century, even.
    If she happened to survive it.
    The thought drove her to her feet. She needed to be on even ground with him. “It was fairly difficult,” she admitted, ruefully recognizing that her confession was probably the understatement of the year. “But it wasn‟t all violence. At least, it wasn‟t all battlefield violence. The scene with