Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

unprepared prey.
     
    Alexios soared down the stairs and plunged in between a snarling tangle of shifters and humans, steeling himself to tune out the screams, howls, and shouts—to focus—as he transformed back into his body in a barely sufficient circle of open space.
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    “Bet you didn‟t see that coming,” he said to a very startled panther as he drove his dagger into the side of its neck, efficiently opening its jugular vein and stepping out of the path of blood spray with the agility of years of experience.
     
    Too many years. Too many battles. Too much blood.
     
    “Alexios! Here!” Sam‟s shout wrenched him out of his self-indulgent musings, and he whirled around in time to see another of the attackers clamping its powerful jaws down on the back of a human‟s neck. Alexios lunged for them, but he was too late. With a grisly crunching sound, the cat chomped through flesh and bone and then shook the body as if warning them away.
     
    Another one of the recruits screamed, but Alexios ignored it, heading straight for the cat.
    The dead human was female, and she looked like . . . Smith. It was Smith. The cheerful one he‟d helped earlier.
     
    Alexios‟s rage built inside him with the power of a raging typhoon, until fury exploded into sound and the noise coming from his throat had more in common with the screams of the cats than it did with any noise a man could make. He dove toward the panther, shouting at it to let her go, stretching full out in a leap that took him over the cat‟s back.
    As he rose above its spine, he drove both daggers into the base of its skull, smashing through into its brain.
     
    He collapsed on top of the cat, hands still clenching the hilts of his daggers, and then he wrenched the blades out, scraping past bone. The cat‟s head flopped back down on the ground. It was dead. He‟d killed it. But killing the cat meant nothing.
     
    It wouldn‟t bring Smith back.
     
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    And Grace . . . He shot up off the ground, whirling around to find where Grace was in the fray. Sam stood near the base of the staircase, Glock still at the ready, with the forms of two dead panthers at his feet. One of the recruits knelt by another dead cat over near the wall, the human gripping the hilt of the sword that pierced the cat‟s chest.
     
    Five of the recruits were down, but three of them were moving and trying to sit up. The other two were ominously still.
     
    But no Grace. No Michelle.
     
    Oh, no. Please, Poseidon, no.
     
    “Where‟s Grace?” he shouted at Sam. “Where is she? Where‟s Michelle?”
     
    The man shook his head. “I thought she listened to you and stayed topside, out of trouble.”
     
    Alexios shot across the ground, running so fast his feet barely touched the grass.
    “Grace? Listen to me?”
     
    Sam‟s face went cold. “Oh, no. Oh, not Grace.”
     
    But Alexios was already gone, taking the steps four at a time, racing to discover a truth he wasn‟t sure he was brave enough to face.
     
    “Please, please, please, please,” he chanted as he ran, and when he hit the top of the stairs he skidded to a stop at the sight of three figures huddled by the wall.
     
    She looked up at him, oh, thank the gods. Grace looked up at him, and his world hadn‟t ended before it had even had a chance to begin. He shot across the space between them so fast he barely had time to register that Michelle seemed to be fine, or that the Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
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    panther wasn‟t completely dead, but twitching on the ground next to them. But then he reached Grace and swept her up in to his arms so fast that she let out a startled squeal, but it didn‟t matter because she was alive, she was alive, and then he was kissing her and devouring her mouth and she was alive and he was never, ever going to let her go again.
     
    She kissed him back for a moment, but then she made a noise that sounded like protest and he loosened his hold on her and lifted his head, finally noticing the pain in her eyes and the tight way she held her body upright.
     
    He lowered her to her feet and, still holding on to her arms—unable to let himself release her completely—he scanned her frantically, looking for a wound. At first he saw nothing, but then the wet darkness along the side of her shirt under her arm caught the light. He touched her gently,