She hoped she’d have an entire future ahead of her with Nathan to find that out.
But right now, his injury needed tending, and across the room, Zael was standing over the corpses of the two Atlantean warriors.
Nathan broke contact on a low moan. As he raised his head to regard Zael, he brought Jordana under his arm in a protective stance. “Will more soldiers come?”
Zael gave a sober nod. “Once it’s determined these men have failed and are lost to her, Selene will send out more. She’ll keep sending out more. The queen does not accept defeat easily. She forgives even less.” Zael’s gaze slid to Jordana. “The best place to elude her is in the colony.”
“Or through a blood bond,” Jordana pointed out.
“If you remain in the mortal world, that’s all that would protect you. But only if Selene’s legion doesn’t find you first.”
“And she has me.” Nathan said it like a vow: firm, unwavering.
“True,” Zael acknowledged with a level glance, but his grave tone stopped short of encouragement. “Unfortunately, nothing can be as certain as the asylum the colony can provide. It’s hidden, known only by a small few outside the realm. I am one of only a handful trusted with its location, aside from the exiles who live there in seclusion under the colony’s protection.”
“What kind of protection?” Nathan asked.
Zael indicated the silvery crystal he wore on the leather thong at his wrist. “This is crafted from a larger source of energy belonging to our people. The colony has one, and so does Selene. At one time, very long ago, the realm had five of these crystals, much larger than this small, harvested piece. The crystals are sacred to the Atlantean people. They shielded us from the world outside and kept the realm safe from enemies who would want to destroy us.”
Beside Jordana, Nathan studied Zael’s bracelet with narrowed scrutiny. “That material’s nothing found on this Earth.”
“No,” Zael said. “My people, like the Ancients who fathered your kind, the Breed, were from somewhere else. The two races were at war, in fact. Even before fate brought them here.”
Nathan swore under his breath. “Is that why another of your kind, Reginald Crowe, recently boasted before he died that the Atlantean queen has been plotting a new war—one against both mankind and the Breed?”
“Selene is a bitter queen.” Zael grunted. “Worse, she’s a scorned woman. I can’t say what she’s plotting, but it’s rare that she’s not looking for reasons to fight or enemies to destroy. It wasn’t always that way with her.”
“What happened to make her that way?” As much as Jordana feared the woman who had driven her mother to suicide and ordered her soldiers to hunt down and execute Jordana’s father, she felt compelled to try to understand something about the queen if she could.
“Selene changed after our first settlement was destroyed,” Zael explained. “Two of the realm’s crystals were stolen, and our enemies—your Ancient forebears,” he said to Nathan, “used the crystals’ power to annihilate us. Selene fled Atlantis with as many of our people as could escape the destruction of all we’d built and the giant wave that swallowed up the rest.”
“Just like the myth,” Jordana whispered. “That story has been in place for thousands of years.”
Zael gave an acknowledging shrug. “More or less. And Selene’s had little but mistrust or hatred for anyone since that day.”
Nathan frowned. “So the colony has a crystal, and the queen has one also. Two were stolen before the attack by the Ancients. And the fifth?”
“No one knows for certain. It vanished about twenty-five years ago.” Zael glanced at Jordana. “There were rumors Cassianus had taken it with him when he fled with you …”
“But you don’t believe that?” she asked.
Zael’s brows lifted in contemplation. “Cass would’ve had the balls, that’s a given. But to make off with an object with that magnitude of power? To keep it hidden all this time would’ve been quite a feat. He’d have had to shield it somehow.”
“The way he wanted to shield my power with a blood bond,” Jordana said. “Would he have any reason to take something like that with him when he left the realm?”
“Anyone who understood how valuable the crystal was would have reason to want it for himself.” Zael thought for a moment, then chuckled softly as he looked at Jordana. “Or for someone else, if he thought it might prove useful in some other way.”
“A bargaining chip,” Nathan suggested. “Leverage against the one other person who wanted it the most. Wanted it maybe more than anything else.”
Zael grunted. “Well, even if Cass did take it, he can’t tell anyone where to find it now. The missing crystal is most likely lost forever.”
Regardless of whether Cassianus escaped with a valuable Atlantean treasure or not, and regardless of any motivation he may have had to do so, Jordana felt a wave of renewed sorrow for the father she never knew. She mourned her mother too, for the love she lost and the family she never had the opportunity to enjoy.
There was even a small part of Jordana that pitied her grandmother. After all, what kind of lasting emotional pain must it require to turn a woman into the kind of unfeeling, destructive monster Selene seemed to be?
Nathan looked to Zael in question. “If Cass worried so much about Jordana and her safety, why not take her to the colony as an infant and stay there with her? Why would he risk her future—Jesus, why risk her life—by leaving her to grow up among the Breed and mankind?”
“Because if he brought her to the colony, Cass understood that like the others who live there, she’d have to remain under its veil for her entire existence. He didn’t want to make that choice for her. Exile to the colony was a last resort, only if the worst should happen and time was running out. Cass wanted to give his daughter the chance to find her own path.”