Warriors of Poseidon 03 - Atlantis Unleashed

he joking. Ice shivered down her spine, which worked wonders for that focus she‟d been wanting to find. “Both halves of your nature. I‟m guessing that has to do with the „we‟
    persona you go into and the Nereid?”
    Before he could answer, she shook her head. “No. Not now. When we‟re out of here, I promise you, we‟ll talk about all of this. I won‟t run screaming for the hills for at least an hour or two.”
    His face darkened, and he narrowed his eyes. “You won‟t run away from me, Keely,” he said, steely command in his tone. “There is no place you can go that I will not follow. Know that now.”
    “Yeah, well, you should know that I‟m not so good at taking orders,” she fired back. “Instead of fighting about it, though, why don‟t we do something productive? Like escape?”
    She selected the largest of the sapphires and lifted it to show him. “I think I have a plan.”
    Placing the gem carefully back down on the cloth, she decided the time had come. “There‟s something I need to tell you. About the vision I had when I touched Liam‟s sapphire.”
    “Liam?” It was just one word but it carried a wealth of danger. Suddenly he was the feral predator again, and she didn‟t know why. Perhaps he and Liam had bad blood between them.
    Now wasn‟t the time to go into it, though.
    “Yes, Liam, but he‟s not important. You need to know my vision. I was in the room with your high priest Nereus and his wife, Zelia, while they discussed the Star of Artemis.”
    “That‟s impossible. Your vision must be wrong. I know this name, Nereus, but he couldn‟t be married. Poseidon deemed that his high priests could never marry. If they don‟t remain celibate, they suffer an enormous loss of their powers. Nereus was one of the most powerful priests in our history, so he could not have wed.”
    She shrugged. “Maybe the marriage records got lost in the files somewhere. I‟ve lived with these visions since I was a child, and they are never, ever wrong. Nereus was married to Zelia.”
    She recounted the story of her vision of Nereus and Zelia, and what they‟d said about the Star of Artemis. As she concluded her tale, an important detail struck her. “Justice, it has the power to heal fractured minds, they said. Maybe you could—”
    Horrified at what she‟d almost blurted out, she cut herself off mid-thought. She had no right.
    No right at all.
    Justice‟s clenched fists rested on his thighs, but when he spoke it wasn‟t to tell her to stay the hell out of his business, like she expected and, to be honest, richly deserved.
    “He knew? Liam knew this experience would harm you and yet he sent you into it with no warning?” The tone of his voice had changed—went deadly.
    “Well, no, he—”
    “He is a dead man,” he said flatly. “Each breath he takes is a debt owed to the nine hells.”
    A shiver raced down her spine at his words, which weren‟t delivered as a threat but more like a known fact. Keely spared a sudden sympathetic thought for Liam. “Well. That‟s very poetic, but not fair in any way. He had no idea that the vision would affect me so strongly.”
    “He should never have touched you,” he responded, implacable. “I will kill him for it.”
    “Right. Okay. Going just a little bit overboard, don‟t you think? Nobody‟s killing anybody.
    Anyway, what I was getting at was the intense emotional connection I seem to forge with any Atlantean objects I read. I was thinking—”
    She stopped and tried to fill her suddenly empty lungs with air, then began again, forcing the words out past the lump of fear in her throat. “I was thinking that I could start reading objects, one after another, until possibly one of them gives us some information about a way out of here.”
    She pasted an optimistic smile on her face and tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong. Tried not to think about getting trapped in a maelstrom of never-ending visions.
    Tried not to wonder if this would be the time she died in one, finally proving one way or another whether vision death equaled reality death.
    Of all the hypotheses she‟d ever formulated, this was the one she was least anxious to prove.
    Since her thoughts were whirling around like a hamster trapped in a wheel, she threw it in Justice‟s court. “Well? Did you hear me?”
    He sat, silent and still, his features icily pale. “In what possible delusional state could you believe that I would let you risk