January in Atlantis, Alyssa Day [read any book txt] 📗

Bruce’s Cave, Ireland

Flynn twirled the sword in his right hand and the dagger in his left and sauntered toward the three dragons blocking the entrance to the cave. Just outside the entrance, the waves crashed and thundered into the rocks, but at the moment, water was not really concerning Flynn.

Then again, water never did.

“Boys, boys, boys. I’m not planning to tell anyone about your lair, or your treasure, or even that unfortunate tendency you have to dress up in pink skirts and dance in the moonlight.”

The largest of the three, a good twenty feet tall from toes to the top of his crested skull, reared back and roared, and the cave itself seemed to shake. Anyone who has ever heard a dragon roar would be amazed that Flynn wasn’t flat on the ground, trembling in his boots.

Flynn was from Atlantis though. He wasn’t the trembling kind.

Still, maybe not the best idea to taunt three of Clan Fury’s most powerful warriors. They were lethal in human form, and like this—in their natural shape—they were Death itself.

Nobody had ever accused Flynn of having a lot of best ideas though.

“How about you come on down from your flying-lizard forms so we can have this out like men? Or just move aside and let me go, and we’ll call it quits. I don’t even want a share of your treasure, even though I helped you… let’s just say collect, shall we?… some of it.”

The largest and fiercest of the bunch, the one who once had been Flynn’s best friend in the world, shot a bolt of searing dragon fire straight down the cave at him. It should have incinerated him.

Would have incinerated him if he’d still been standing there.

Flynn, though, had been goading the dragons into precisely this response. By the time the smoke in the cave cleared, he was traveling in mist form down the coast of Ireland.

He’d had his fun. It was time to go home.

January was as good a month as any to return to Atlantis.

1

The Copper Cantina Bar and Grill, Early, Nevada

Eva Calandar was having a damn bad night.

The cantina after-work rush came in right on schedule, and soon she was so busy she didn’t have time to think about anything but mixing drinks and serving bottle after bottle after bottle of beer to the happy, laughing patrons, all of them glad to be done with the week’s hard work and pleased to be relaxing and spending a bit of their paychecks with their friends.

Because Eva was so slammed, it took her longer than it should have to realize when things went wrong. By the time the changing mood in the room started to scratch at the edge of her awareness, the instigators were already installed in a corner table by the jukebox. Some sprawled