Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

and all three of them started forward.
    Brennan was ready for them. He shoved Tiernan behind him so that her back was against the tree, a more defensible position. Then, daggers whirling, he faced the three. “These have silver tips. Is that an injury you are prepared to suffer for whatever they’re paying you?”
    The leader hissed but froze in place. Silver wounds did not heal easily for vampires and could even be fatal. Not something your average human billionaire businessman might be expected to know, but Brennan wasn’t too concerned about protecting his cover story at that particular moment.
    “We heard about the animal attacks,” Tiernan said. “We promise to come back soon. We just wanted a little alone time.” She laughed, and it was light and flirtatious—almost a giggle.
    Brennan clenched his jaw tight to keep his mouth from falling open.
    Tiernan? Giggling?
    Damn, but she was good at this undercover work.
    The vampire leader shot another glance at Brennan and his daggers, but whatever orders he was following evidently didn’t give him room for independent decision making. “We may bleed, but your woman will suffer threefold for every blow you land on one of us.”
    Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    “I look forward to playing with her a little,” one of the others said, and then he laughed, a long, shrill cackle of unholy glee. “Devon didn’t say we couldn’t play with them.”
    “Devon?” Tiernan’s voice was sharp. “He knows you’re doing this?”
    The leader made an ugly hooting noise. “Knows? We follow his orders, little snack.”
    Before he’d even quit speaking, the vamp launched himself at Brennan, leaping twenty feet through the air, nails lengthening to outstretched claws and fangs glistening in the ribbons of moonlight that shone through the trees.
    Brennan met him in midair.
    Daggers clashed and steel rang, but Brennan’s towering rage gave him the strength of ten warriors, and he parried the vamp’s attacks and whirled around, one dagger extended in a death blow. Even before the vamp’s head thudded onto the ground, the neck still smoldering from the orichalcum blade, Brennan turned and shot four razor-sharp shuriken in a smooth underhanded motion at the second vamp. The throwing stars served their purpose brilliantly, decapitating the second vamp as neatly as his daggers had done to the first.
    He whipped around to the tree where he’d left Tiernan, just in time to hear her scream. The third vamp was closing in on her, laughing and dancing from foot to foot, mocking her and making lewd suggestions as to what he was planning to do to her cold, dead corpse.
    Tiernan, from the tone of her remarks, was not a fan of this.
    Brennan’s newly found emotions swept through him with the force of a hurricane. Part of him was overcome with pride to see his woman holding off a vampire with only two sticks. Another, far larger, part of him was burning with a fierce rage so powerful that it seemed as if the earth itself must be scorched from the heat of his fury.
    Then the vamp shot out a claw-tipped hand and scratched a furrow on the side of Tiernan’s face before she could block him, and the balance tipped far, far over into insanity.
    Brennan rode the fury, harnessed it and pulled magic, water, and power out of the soil and the trees and the very air itself. He roared out a challenge—a grim promise. “By Poseidon and Atlantis, you will die for daring to touch her.”
    He called to the water and transformed it into perfect, shining spears that rained icy death onto the vampire. Each glittering spear arrowed into the vamp’s neck, one after another, with unerring accuracy. None a whisper off, none posing the slightest danger to Tiernan, and none missing its mark.
    In a split second, the vampire was down, dissolving into a nasty pool of slime on the forest floor, only the ice spears standing to mark the spot where they’d pinned him to the ground.
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    But Brennan had gone far, far past the point of reason. He was drowning in the rage—no longer a man, or a warrior, but a being of anger, fury, and madness. He yanked Tiernan into his arms—his woman, only and forever his woman, how had they dared to try to touch her—and held her so tightly that she could never, ever get away from him. She struggled a little, and he threw back his head and screamed his defiance into the night, a