Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

after Grace shot a narrow-eyed glare his way.
    “The world is changing, and this is only a discover-and-report mission. No danger,” Grace reminded him. Alexios scowled down at her, but the heat in his eyes belied the ferocity of his expression.
    Again, something inside Brennan twisted—just the smallest of twinges, but enough to drive him to conclude the meeting. “Shall we reconvene at the portal in an hour?”
    “One hour,” Alexios said.
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    Brennan gestured for everyone to precede him out of the room. Riley glanced back at Brennan over her shoulder as Conlan took the baby and walked ahead, laughing. She hesitated for a moment, biting her lip, but then she offered a brief smile and followed her husband and child as they left the room.
    When the last of them had gone through the door, Brennan picked up the folded paper and carefully tore out Tiernan’s photograph and put it in his pocket. For recognition purposes, of course. He’d need to recognize her when he saw her.
    Or at least that’s what he tried to convince himself.
    It had nothing at all to do with needing to see her face.

Chapter 2
    Yellowstone National Park, the road to Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel “I don’t like it.”
    Tiernan, lost again in the memory that had resulted in far too many nights of frustrated arousal and tangled sheets, rolled her eyes as if the man at the other end of the phone could see her.
    She tightened her fingers on the steering wheel of the midsized piece-of-crap rental and sighed.
    Driving down unknown roads in the middle of the wilderness—in the dark—was just not the time or place to get into fights with her boss.
    “Tiernan, ignoring me is not going to get you what you want this time,” he warned, his voice in her earpiece little more than a growl. “There is no way this shindig is going to be just like a party. Security is bound to be on high alert after they find out we hacked into their database.”
    Tiernan counted to twenty-four beats under her breath, one for each month she’d worked with Rick Lawrence.
    “Are you doing the counting thing again? You know I hate it when you do the counting thing.”
    She sighed again, but figured she’d better answer him before he did something drastic like pull the plug on the whole thing because he sensed danger to her. He’d done it before.
    “Rick, I am an investigative reporter. I was an investigative reporter long before you appeared from nowhere and joined the Boston Herald as my editor,” she said, her voice calm in spite of the fact that this was the tenth time they’d had this discussion, at least. “I do not need babysitting, or a big brother, or a bodyguard. This is my story, and unless you plan to hire someone to tie me up and stuff me in the trunk, I am going to this party, and I am staying for the conference.”
    There was a long silence over the increasingly staticky connection. Then he swore softly, a long Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    stream of fairly inventive invective. She smiled grimly at the phrase. Inventive invective.
    Nice. Had a headline kind of ring.
    “Look, the new intel says that one of the most dangerous vamps in the country is planning to make an appearance. If we’d known that when we set this up, you damn sure wouldn’t be going on your own,” he said, his frustration coming clearly through the line.
    But nothing was going to stop her now. People were dying, and it was only going to get worse if somebody didn’t stand up. Somebody like her. Like the Atlanteans. She hoped.
    “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing,” she countered, editing a little as she scanned the road and her surroundings. The moon filtering through the trees looming on either side gave the drive a Stephen King-like quality, and her overactive imagination half expected monsters to jump out at her at any moment.
    Bet King was surprised when all those monsters he’d written about for all those years turned out to really exist. Or was he? Maybe he’d always known . . .
    “Don’t quote Burke to me,” Rick snapped, cutting off her mental wanderings. “You’re on your way to a weekend that you’re hoping will be filled with the worst kind of evil—vamps, possibly enthralled shifters, and sick and twisted scientists and neurosurgeons who love nothing better than to dissect brains while the brains’ owners are still