January in Atlantis - Alyssa Day (red white royal blue .txt) 📗
- Author: Alyssa Day
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Flynn traded glances with Griffin, who looked at Eva and then shook his head. “I don’t know what we could have that they want. Jake did his part though. When the cops came in, he took the heat and said he started it all. Kept the Angels out of jail as far as I could tell. They were already talking about taking up a collection to bail him out.”
“That’ll help. That’s the kind of stupid gesture that impresses them,” Eva said, pacing back and forth in the small space. “I’m sorry. I’m rude. Have a seat and I’ll grab you some water.”
“Water would be welcome,” Griffin said, taking a seat on her couch. The mage was so thoroughly out of place in her living room; it was like watching a panther sit down at a tea party. She got him a bottle of water and then took a seat on her chair, and Flynn sat on the other end of the couch.
“Where were you?” Flynn stared at the mage. “I didn’t see you inside.”
“I was looking for their headquarters, and then I was on the roof of the building when you and Miss—” He inclined his head toward Eva.
“Calandar. Eva Calandar. Please, just call me Eva.”
“As I said, I was on the roof of the building when you and Miss Calandar exited. I stayed around long enough to listen to what was going on, and I saw local law enforcement haul Jake off in handcuffs.”
“Too bad there wasn’t a mermaid around to rescue him,” Flynn said, momentarily amused.
Griffin almost smiled—the equivalent of a belly laugh in anyone else—but Eva gave Flynn a funny look, and he shrugged. “Nothing. Something Poseidon said. There’s no such thing as mermaids anyway.”
“That’s too bad,” Eva said, looking wistful. “Now that we know demons and shapeshifters and vampires exist, and even Atlantis and mages, it would be nice if something as beautiful as mermaids existed too.”
Griffin’s eyes widened, but before he could scoff at Eva, Flynn jumped in. “Well, there are sea Fae. But they’d just as soon bite your face off as look at you. They are beautiful though. Maybe I’ll introduce you to one someday. There’s a princeling who owes me a favor.”
Griffin’s odd silver gaze snapped toward Flynn. “Sea Fae and dragon shifters. Nothing about you screams trustworthy, does it?”
“More so than mysterious mages who float in midair and bang on a woman’s window in the middle of the night, don’t you think?” Eva said pointedly, making Flynn very happy.
Except, no. Not that happy at all. Those girls were still prisoners. He and Griffin needed to be moving…
Flynn suddenly had an idea. A terrible, horrible idea. But it was the first one he’d thought of that had even a fraction of a chance of helping them find the girls before they were harmed beyond any possibility of rescue. He hated himself for even thinking it and hated himself even more because he knew he was going to tell the two of them about it.
It would put Eva in danger.
But he would be damned if he would ever let Eva come to any harm, even if she agreed to go along with this insanity of a plan. He stood, needing to move, and started pacing as much as he could in the tiny apartment.
“I have an idea,” he finally told them, regret and self-disgust making his voice hoarse. “Eva, you’re going to hate it. I hate it too. But it’s all I can think of.”
She looked at him, her eyes widening, and then she slowly started to back away from him. “You want to use me as bait. I told you that you can’t get in unless you have something to offer them, and the something you want to offer them is me. Because of Scott.”
Her eyes were wild, and he despised himself for terrifying her like this. But the girls…
“Because of Snake, and I swear to you I can keep you safe,” he said, feeling his gut curdle at the risk in that statement. After all, look at his track record. “Nobody will harm one hair on your head unless I’m already dead.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” she hurled at him.
Griffin studied them both. “What are you talking about?”
Eva shot him a withering glance. “Isn’t it obvious? Flynn wants to give me to Snake and the Dark Angels. He wants to trade my life for the girls.”
“That’s not it at all. I said I can protect you,” Flynn said hotly. “I’d give my life—”
Eva cut him off. “I don’t want your life. I’m fine with my own, thanks. And protect me against this Oriax, the high demon? I don’t even know what being a high demon entails, and I still know you’re either a liar or a fool.”
“Eva,” he pleaded, reaching for her hand, but she recoiled and gave him a look filled with so much accusation he actually flinched.
Griffin just watched them, anything he thought hidden behind that eerie silver gaze.
Eva threw her hands in the air. “Fine. I figured I wouldn’t live past spring anyway. Apparently I’m not even going to live past January.”
Eva closed her suitcase and looked around the tiny apartment. It never took her long to pack because she’d shed possessions like she’d shed lives while running from place to place across the country. She only rented furnished rooms. She didn’t see the point of owning much in the way of clothes beyond a few pairs of jeans and a few different tops. A couple of sweaters and one jacket for the cold weather. Boots, sneakers, and sandals for shoes. What more did a girl need?
And now she had a dilemma. Should she go to the bar while Flynn and the others worked on finding where the girls were being held? Noel had already called her six times and left five voice mail messages. She hadn’t listened to any of them because she could pretty much guess what he had to say and the decibel level at which he’d say it.
It didn’t matter anyway. When she left this place, she’d smash her burner phone and leave it in a trash can at a highway rest area, or better yet, she’d do what she’d done the last time and use duct tape to affix it to the underside of the bumper of a semi truck heading in the opposite direction. If they were tracking her by technology, she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
She’d already made it too easy for Scott to find her by way of magic. When he’d ripped a handful of hair out of her scalp, he’d laughed at her. On that last night, just before she finally got the courage to run, he taunted her with it.
“I can find you anywhere with this. Locator spells are among the simplest magics. So don’t even think about running.”
But back then, he hadn’t been nearly as powerful at magic as he’d liked to think he was. Even Eva, who had none, had known that. And she’d had just enough courage left that he hadn’t yet beaten out of her to make a plan and carry it out. She’d crushed several sleeping pills into his tequila and coaxed him into getting very, very drunk. When he passed out, she packed up everything she owned and started running.
In hindsight, she supposed she was lucky that he hadn’t died from the combination of alcohol and pills. Scott was slime, but he wasn’t worth facing a murder charge or jail time. She wouldn’t shed a tear if he died, but she also wouldn’t be the one to kill him. She kept hoping that one day he would cross the line somewhere, somehow, and go to jail. Whatever kind of jail they could keep black-magic practitioners in these days. She’d read something about special cells that P-Ops had constructed with the help of white-magic practitioners and experts from the shifter, vampire, and magic communities, but she didn’t know exactly how they worked.
It was true, though, that most of the supernatural communities’ citizens were good people who just wanted to live their lives. They tended to react very badly when one of their own kind went rogue, because it looked so bad for all of them and probably brought back fears of mobs with torches.
Beauty and the Beast took on a whole new meaning once you knew shapeshifters existed.
She’d been in Phoenix when the local shifter population had delivered the dead bodies of three wolf shifters to the local police station after the three had turned feral and attacked a family who’d been out camping.
She remembered thinking how horribly ironic it was that the three wolf shifters had turned human in death, and yet two of their four victims—the only two who’d survived—had turned shifter at the next full moon.
When she had shifters in her bars, she made sure to keep any
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