Vampire in Atlantis Read Online Free PDF

them in a vortex of spinning light, and he prayed to any god who would listen. He couldn’t lose her again.
    Never again.

     
    Serai fought against the pain ripping through her insides as the vortex swallowed her and Daniel. It was the Emperor. Someone had it and was trying to work its magic. Someone not Atlantean—someone who didn’t know what he or she was doing. That must be why she’d awoken now, off schedule, and had been able to escape.
    The fluctuation in the gem’s energy seared through her and doubled her over. She thought instantly of her fellow maidens, still trapped in stasis, and wondered how this would affect them. If they would survive it. Another burst of pain wrenched through her, and she wondered if she would survive it. What a great joke the universe would be playing if she survived millennia in stasis only to die in the first short hour of freedom.
    The portal’s light warmed around her in a magical caress, as if it felt her pain and wanted to comfort her. At the same moment, Daniel’s strong arms wrapped around her. She rested her head against the hard muscles of his chest and sent a mental thank-you to the portal, just as it opened again and deposited them in the torch-lit darkness of what looked like a smallish cavern. Stumbling a little as her bare feet touched the cold stone of the floor, though she was still safely ensconced in Daniel’s embrace, she had a mere second or two to register the small cluster of humans surrounding them before the tiger attacked.

Chapter 4
     

     
    Serai screamed and Daniel pushed her behind him, putting his body between her and the tiger and yelling at it.
    “Jack, no!”
    Jack? He knew the tiger’s name?
    The tiger ignored Daniel and charged, leaping through the air in full feline fury, its mouth opened in an earth-shattering roar. If she hadn’t been so terrified, Serai might have admired its feral beauty. Daniel leapt up to counter the tiger’s attack, and the two of them met in midair with a crash that resounded like thunder.
    The tiger caught Daniel in its deadly embrace and swiped at him with paws the size of dinner plates, each tipped with long, sharp claws. Daniel’s nightwalker strength was a match for the tiger, though, and he shoved the beast’s forearm away from his face and then hurled it across the cavern, where it smashed into the wall.
    A woman yelled at Daniel, by name, and Serai’s eyes narrowed as she examined the human female. Scruffy, small, and tough, with a waiflike exterior that covered a steel core, if the look in the woman’s dark eyes told true.
    “Daniel, leave Jack alone. How dare you blast in here and hurt him?” the woman shouted in one of the landwalker languages. English. Serai knew it, of course. The Emperor had taught her all languages.
    “Quinn, he attacked me, in case you didn’t notice,” Daniel replied, with what Serai believed to be admirable calm, under the circumstances.
    “What do you expect, you idiot?” Quinn snapped, hands on hips, as the tiger shook its massive head and staggered to its feet.
    Serai’s fear vanished and anger took its place. Lovely, warming anger, which stiffened her spine and reminded her she was a princess of Atlantis. She stepped forward until she was standing next to Daniel and gave Quinn her haughtiest glare.
    “Stand back, female, or face my wrath,” Serai declared in English, holding her hands out to her side in the ready position.
    Quinn’s mouth fell open, and the impudent woman began to laugh. At Serai. Anger heated up, became rage.
    “Seriously? ‘Face my wrath’?” Quinn shook her head. “Daniel, where did you get her? Melodrama R Us?”
    Serai’s face flushed. It had sounded a little over the top even as she said it, but she wasn’t exactly experienced at facing down humans in combat. The tiger paced forward, snarling at Daniel, until it stood next to Quinn.
    “I’m out of practice at issuing warnings, human,” Serai snapped. “But how is this for something