January in Atlantis, Alyssa Day [read any book txt] 📗
- Author: Alyssa Day
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For the first time in his entire life, Flynn entered Atlantis by way of a ship. To be fair, it was the first time he’d ever actually entered Atlantis. He’d been born there, he’d grown up, and then he’d left and never returned. Now he had to come by ship. The portal hadn’t answered his call, not that he’d been all that surprised. He was sure High Priest Alaric, the Holy Board Stuck Up His Ass-ness, had tuned the portal’s magic to keep riffraff like him out. So here he was, the prodigal child, coming home by boat. To Atlantis, now proudly in the world again, and on the surface of the ocean instead of beneath it.
It was a spectacular sight.
The marble and crystal spires of the palace rose high over the magnificent structure, and the human tourists beside him on the deck oohed and aahed in appreciation. He ignored snatches of chatter about the handsome king and the American queen and focused on his home, suddenly stabbed by a sharp ache of homesickness that surprised him. He hadn’t expected to miss Atlantis as much as he had, and by now he thought he’d gotten past it.
But she was beautiful. Even an Atlantean who’d run away from home had to admit that.
From this approach, the palace was the centerpiece of it all. He knew from playing there as a child that the palace was surrounded by magnificent gardens filled with flowers that smelled like the inside of a dream. Nowhere else in the world had he encountered flowers with such sweet scents.
After the flowers, the garden’s second set of jewels was its fountains, with sculptures that put to shame anything Rome had to offer. Atlanteans had always created art on a much grander scale than elsewhere in the world, perhaps because Atlantis had never had rivals to fear, not for thousands of years. His ancestors had been advanced in every way—in technology and the arts, in learning and scholarship. Atlantis had been a paradise for men and women of learning and culture until, as always happened to paradise, someone stronger grew greedy enough to want to possess it and strong enough to try.
They’d tried to fight, those early Atlanteans, but Atlantis had always prized learning over warfare and art over battle. Her trained soldiers had been laughably few and, when they’d been in immediate danger of being overrun by the soldiers packed onto the ships bearing down on them, the high priest at the time and all of his acolytes had worked the greatest magic in the history of the world.
They’d enclosed the entire continent and all her people in a magical dome and taken her down—far, far down—beneath the sea.
Only a few years ago, after eleven thousand years of being lost to the annals of time, then-prince Conlan and his brother, Lord Vengeance, had worked with Alaric to find a way to bring Atlantis back into the world. It had almost been too late though. The dome’s magic had been failing, or so Flynn had heard.
But here it was again. Atlantis. Unimaginable beauty. The white-sand beaches where he’d played with his friends, spending hours watching the sea creatures outside the dome. Sometimes the sea creatures had looked back at him. The gloriously green trees that even now, in January, would be heavy with fresh fruit. The soldiers…
The soldiers?
He looked again. Yes. The soldiers. They were checking people in through some kind of bureaucratic process. My, how things had changed. He shrugged. He was an Atlantean citizen, after all. There wouldn’t be any problem.
There was a problem.
Nobody knew who he was.
He leaned against the damn sign where they’d told him to stand and scowled.
non-Atlantean visitors please wait here
What a joke.
“Look. It’s easy enough for me to prove it. Find one of my brothers. I hear Liam is one of Poseidon’s Warriors now, and Dare might be in port with the Luna.” He glared at the sign and considered shaping water into a club and bashing the damn thing into little sign-shaped pieces.
Instead, he blew out a long-suffering sigh and tried again. “Flynn. I’m Flynn. Somebody must remember me. It’s only been ten years or so.”
“Maybe Marcus?” one of the guards said, scratching his head and then putting his hat back on. The blue-and-gold braid on the new Atlantean guard uniform was a bit much if anybody asked Flynn, but sadly, so far nobody had. He felt practically underdressed in his jeans, T-shirt, and beat-up leather jacket.
The head-scratching guard pointed. “There he is now.”
An older man who looked familiar to Flynn was headed down the path from the direction of the palace. The man walked in that ground-eating pace of an old soldier and wore plain black pants with a deep blue shirt—no gold braid in sight. He’d probably been one of Poseidon’s Warriors for a long time. Yes. It was definitely Marcus. He’d had little patience for Flynn and Dare’s pranks back when they were kids. Suddenly Flynn wasn’t all that sure he wanted to be recognized, at least not by Marcus, who was clearly still the captain of the guard.
Marcus’s sharp gaze studied Flynn as he reached him, and a hint of recognition crossed his face. Surprise was there, judging by the way the man’s eyes widened.
But recognition too.
He stopped in front of Flynn. “I’ll be damned. Dare and Liam’s brother. Flynn. We thought you were dead.”
Flynn, who’d been about to say something, he didn’t know what, just stood there with his mouth hanging open. “Dead? You thought I was dead?”
Marcus shrugged. “You’ve been gone with no word for a long time.”
“I saw Dare just five or six years ago,” Flynn began hotly but then realized it was the height of stupidity to argue with the captain of the guard about whether or not he was dead, when he was clearly standing right there. Instead, he’d get some useful information. “Are either of my brothers around?”
Marcus’s eyes widened again, just that slight fraction. “Right. Of course you wouldn’t know. Your brother Dare and his wife Lyric are off on another sea voyage, and Liam’s on a mission. His wife Jaime—I guess that’s your other sister-in-law—is probably in the palace. She’s the queen’s official event planner now, or some such thing.”
The crowd was building up behind them though, so Marcus waved him through without any further bombshells, and Flynn walked off toward… what?
Where?
Did he even have a family home any longer?
Sister-in-law. Sisters-in-law, plural. He hadn’t thought—hadn’t realized—but of course his brothers would have moved on without him. And they thought he was dead? True, it had been years since he’d tried to contact them. At least five or six years since he’d run into Dare, back in Dare’s pirate days. Flynn had heard things about him though. Dare and Luna were visible, especially since he carried a sea spirit on board with him. And now, evidently, a wife.
Flynn had always thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he and his brothers would be reunited one day. He’d known that his parents had died years before, both from complications stemming from their love of drink. But he’d wanted to come back and be part of his brothers’ family again.
We thought you were dead.
Either they’d forgotten about him or didn’t care. It would have been easy enough to track Flynn down. Not a lot of men traveling the world called themselves Flynn of Atlantis, after all. You’d think that when a man got married, he would at least try to track down his brother.
Maybe not so much when the brother had abandoned both of them to the caring attentions of a violent father and useless mother.
He shoved the thought away. No use to speculate now. Probably at least one of the happily married couples was living in the old house, so he sure as the nine hells wasn’t going to visit there. What did that leave him?
A pub.
Seemed like nobody knew who he was anymore, so he could catch up on some news or gossip or sailor talk—sailors loved to talk—about what exactly had been going on since Atlantis joined the world again, without having to answer difficult questions about his own whereabouts. Sounded just about perfect, and a beer wouldn’t hurt either.
Mind made up, he decided on the Sea Shanty. It had always been one of his favorite hangouts and had the added advantage that his old man, the ever-so-particular drunk that
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