Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

glanced up at Alexios, who started to put an arm around her, then hesitated, as if afraid of being rebuffed. She leaned into him, too tired and afraid for Michelle to force herself to stand alone, yet again.
     
    Just this once, she would lean on someone else. Just this once.
     
    St. Louis University Hospital, emergency room
     
    Alexios looked around the crowded waiting room, remembering the countless times he or another of his fellow warriors had needed to be healed. Unlike the healing chambers in Atlantis, which were an oasis of serenity—all fresh air and sunlight, soft, silken cushions, and masses of flowers from the palace gardens—this room where desperate and injured humans waited smelled of sweat, blood, antiseptic, and despair.
     
    Grace huddled in an orange plastic chair, strangely diminished without her many weapons strapped to her body. He stood across the room from her, leaning against a battered vending machine, and tried to think of a time he‟d seen her without them but came up empty. The bow, knives, and guns were part of her, oddly dissonant to her beauty and her name.
     
    Grace. It suited her. She was grace in motion, in and out of battle. Except now, when she hunched in that ugly chair, arms wrapped around her knees, waiting for the bleakest kind of bad news.
     
    After they‟d removed their visible weapons, he‟d helped her into the ER, trying not to wonder why something deep in his chest ached at the feel of her in his arms. Then Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
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    she‟d pulled away from him and collapsed into that chair, and she hadn‟t moved since.
    Alexios had wasted a good ten minutes convincing various hospital personnel that he didn‟t need to be treated for a head wound, after they‟d caught sight of the apparently alarming amount of blood that remained in his hair and on the side of his face. He‟d finally snarled something along the lines of “it‟s not my blood,” and they‟d backed off, all wary apprehension with a healthy dose of fear mixed in. Ever since then, he‟d waited.
    And waited.
     
    He despised waiting.
     
    Hospital security was there in force, and the police were on their way. Luckily, Grace had excellent contacts within the local Paranormal Ops unit, and Alexios had met some of the officers before. He wasn‟t worried about the police. P Ops needed to be told about the attack, at any rate.
     
    However, although he didn‟t want to examine the reasons why too closely, he was worried about Grace.
     
    She‟d somehow attached herself to him the first time he‟d run a mission with the human rebels in St. Louis, adopting him as a mentor without bothering to ask his opinion of the idea.
     
    He‟d snarled at her to leave him alone. Repeatedly. When she‟d simply fallen back and quietly continued to shadow him, he‟d tried a different tactic and ignored her.
     
    If he were honest with himself, he‟d admit that he‟d only pretended to ignore her. Grace was a hard woman to ignore. She was fiercely independent, dark eyes burning with quiet intensity and a dagger‟s-edged intellect. Slender, with firm, toned muscles, she was still an athlete, like she‟d been as a child. An Olympic contender in swimming at only fifteen years old, Quinn had told him.
     
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    But a decade ago the world had changed, and Grace‟s world had collapsed beneath her. A band of female vamps, celebrating their newfound freedom when vampires and shifters had declared their presence to the world, had run across Grace‟s big brother in a bar. He hadn‟t survived the party.
     
    Grace nearly hadn‟t survived his death.
     
    They‟d been alone in the world, their father gone when they were young and their mother dead from cancer not long before Grace lost her brother. Quinn said Grace had been broken. Lost.
     
    But she‟d found a purpose in fighting back. Spent the past ten years training for command in the rebel army. He‟d seen her in battle, and she was good. Damn good.
    Her reflexes and strength were incredible for a human, and she was almost preternaturally lethal with her bow. But she‟d been running on rage and adrenaline for a decade, and if Michelle died—Michelle, the only friend she had left from the innocence of her childhood—Grace was going to crash, hard.
     
    Alexios had seen the signs in her. He knew it was coming. The only thing he couldn‟t figure out was if he wanted to