Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

unintelligible sounds. It was as if he‟d gone temporarily insane. For some odd reason, he reminded Grace of Renfield from the Dracula movies.
     
    “If he starts eating bugs and calling for his master, I‟m so out of here,” she muttered.
     
    Alexios and Bastien just looked puzzled, but Kat started laughing. “You are definitely a girl after my own heart,” Kat said.
     
    Ethan advanced into the room toward the crazed shifter. “Eddie, what are you doing?
    You know me. What would your grandmother think about this?”
     
    But there was no spark of reason in Eddie‟s maddened eyes. Not even a glimmer of recognition on his wildly grimacing face. When Ethan took yet another step forward, Eddie threw himself on the ground clutching his head, and screaming his first coherent words. “No! No closer. You‟ll kill me. They‟ll kill me. My head—it‟s in my head.”
     
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    Ethan looked a question back toward Alexios and Bastien, but they simply shook their heads. “I gave him a pretty bad beating,” Alexios admitted. “He hurt Grace. But, as you can see, the Change healed his injuries.”
     
    It was true. The man was still naked, though there was a neatly folded pile of clothes just inside the door. For a moment, bitterness washed through Grace‟s mouth like acid.
    How nice of them to give him warm clothes to wear. After all, it‟s not like he‟d tried to kill her or anything. It‟s not like his buddies had killed two of her people.
     
    For a moment, she was tempted to retrieve her bow and put them all out of Eddie‟s misery. But she was supposed to be in charge. She was supposed to have a level head.
     
    So she ought to act like it. “Isn‟t there some super-duper alpha power thing you can do, Ethan?”
     
    Ethan flashed a grin at her over his shoulder. “Wow. First I have a man who recognizes Bastien‟s shortcomings, and now I find a beautiful woman who can tell I‟m super-duper.
    This is a good day.”
     
    “If you are lucky, my sister will only use her magic to hang you from a tree by your feet, and not any of your other body parts,” Bastien said mildly.
     
    Alexios and Ethan both flinched, but then Ethan laughed. “I don‟t think so, Brother . Ask her some time about creating homemade thunderstorms in my bedroom.”
     
    “We are so not going there, now or ever,” Kat said, grimacing. “And if you boys are done being boys, we have a problem here to deal with.”
     
    Ethan held his hands out at his sides and slowly shook his head. “No, we do not have a problem. Eddie isn‟t going to be a problem at all, are you, Eddie?”
     
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    The captive showed no sign of comprehension, but Ethan started toward him anyway. A sound unlike anything Grace had heard before rose in the room, centering on Ethan.
    No, strike that. It was actually coming from Ethan. If someone crossed the purr of a jungle cat with the roar of a motorboat engine, that might describe the sound. It was a low, primal rumbling that somehow managed to insinuate itself into the marrow of Grace‟s bones. She felt almost light-headed as Ethan continued calling out his alpha dominance to their captive.
     
    Kat shifted restlessly next to Grace, and Grace glanced over to find that the ranger‟s entire body was straining forward toward the room and Ethan. Kat‟s eyes had changed, too; the pupils had narrowed and were beginning to look more feline than human.
    Evidently the alpha‟s call affected the other shifters in his pride very strongly, whether it was directed at them or not.
     
    Grace‟s skin tingled from the inside out, and she realized that shifters weren‟t the only ones affected. Bastien stepped closer to Kat and pulled her into his arms, and Grace noticed that his eyes had gone from clear blue to almost black. A muscle in the Atlantean‟s jaw clenched, and she wondered if there were some history between Ethan and Bastien that wasn‟t as rosy as it might appear on the surface.
     
    At the doorway to the cell, Alexios stood sideways, turning his head back and forth, dividing his attention between Ethan and the prisoner on his left and Grace on his right.
     
    Grace stepped forward, almost involuntarily, but Alexios held up his arm to block her from entering the cell. She glanced up at him, but she was still caught in the thrumming rhythm of the alpha‟s insistent call, and it was as if she