Savannah crawled through the window to their assigned room in the Humanity Prime compound, both relieved and amazed that, in fact, nobody had looked up. None of the H Prime thugs or the rogue shifter had gotten even a glimpse of one exhilarated girl from Ohio flying.

She'd managed to keep from shouting out the pure, exhilarating joy bubbling up inside her, but only just barely. Somehow, she'd left the terror of her immediate future—and maybe even her forever future—far down on the ground below them.

Now, though, back in the room that smelled like moldy concrete and broken dreams, the weight of their situation crashed down on her like an anvil off a cliff in an old cartoon. She stumbled a little when her feet hit the floor, but Jake was there to catch her.

Jake. Her personal Atlantean hero—a warrior who looked like a surfer boy—hair in wild waves of sun-streaked brown, skin tanned so dark from his adventures on that ship, and those brilliant green eyes that stared out at her from an incredibly gorgeous face.

"It's not fair that you're so beautiful," she blurted out.

He blinked, and then that sinfully sexy grin of his slowly spread across his face. "Pot, cauldron."

"What?"

"You calling me beautiful is the pot calling the cauldron black." He shrugged. "It means—"

"I know what it means. It's just that we say pot calling the kettle black. Or skillet."

"The skillet calls the kettle black?" He glanced back over his shoulder as he roamed the room looking for more listening devices.

She sighed. "No. The pot calls the kettle—never mind. What are we doing now?"

Those brilliantly green eyes iced over. "I'm going to search for Griffin. You're going to stay here, safely out of danger, with the door bolted."

Not a chance.

"Bzzzt! Wrong answer. You will not collect two hundred dollars or pass Go, my friend. Where you go, I go. Now let's find your friend." She started for the door, but he leapt across the room in one bound and stood, blocking her path.

"You are in danger here. I can't even believe I allowed you to return with me. If it hadn't been for the possibility that Griffin can help you, I wouldn't have--"

"Let me? Let me?" She poked him in the chest. "You're lucky you're gorgeous and make me have multiple orgasms, or I'd be forced to punch you. First, you don't let me do anything. Second, we're wasting time. You said Griffin was probably badly hurt. Are we going to help him now or argue about how Atlantis somehow missed all these centuries of women taking care of themselves?"

He grinned. "Multiple orgasms?”

She threw up her hands and blew out a breath. "I'm going. Now.”

Jake's grin disappeared, but then he got that faraway look on his face that usually meant the others were communicating with him telepathically. She wasn't sure she'd be a fan of people being able to beam their thoughts directly into her brain, but she couldn't deny it came in handy sometimes.

Like now, apparently.

"He's in a storage room on the main floor. He's been shot and he's wavering in and out of consciousness. For Griffin to be incapable of healing himself, he must be suffering from severe blood loss. I—" He glanced down at her and sighed. "We need to get there. Now."

He quietly opened the door and scanned the hallway. "All clear. They put one guard on our door, but he's asleep and probably drunk. Let's go."

Savannah took a deep breath and told her courage it was time to match her bravado. "What if he wakes up?"

Jake was already out the door. "He won't wake up."

She followed him just in time to see him land a powerful punch to the guard's jaw that knocked the man out of his chair and onto the floor.

"He might not wake up for days," she agreed, edging past the sprawled form. "And he's going to have the headache from hell."

"He'll blame it on the booze, probably, if he's still here to blame it on anything," Jake said, grabbing her hand. "Hopefully our P-Ops backup will get here soon, and we can take these shifters down."

They ran quietly down the stairs, watching for guards or anyone else up and about, but apparently the man at their door hadn't been the only one partying. Everyone else must have retreated to their rooms to sleep it off or else rest up to build their energy for another day of mayhem and murder.

Jake stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put out a hand to stop her forward momentum. "Griffin is over there, behind that door marked storage. We need to get to him, fast. He's losing strength as fast as he is losing blood."

A grim expression carved lines on his face and Savannah felt a sudden pang of sympathy. "Have you been friends a long time?"

"Two months."

Before she could respond to that puzzling reply, Jake released her hand and sprinted across the courtyard. She started after him, but then she remembered his claim that nobody ever looked up, so she raised her gaze to the rooftops and was instantly glad she had. One of the guards patrolling on the walls of the compound was staring down in her direction. She froze in the shadows by the wall for several long seconds until the guard tossed a cigarette down and turned to call out to one of his companions.

Savannah's breath escaped in an explosive sigh, and then she looked across the courtyard to see that Jake was opening the door. She glanced up again and then made a run for it, reaching the door just before Jake closed it behind him.

"I thought you weren't coming."

"The guard looked down – never mind. Oh, no. Griffin." She dropped to her knees next to the huddled form of the Atlantean mage. He was lying on his side, and she could see the bullet wound in the back of his shoulder. "Jake, here. He has a head wound, too. If they shot him in the head –"

But Jake was way ahead of her, already examining Griffin's injuries. "This isn't a bullet wound in his head. He must've struck it on something when he fell. Head wounds bleed a lot, so maybe this looks worse than it is."

Hopefully that was true, because it looked awful. Griffin's long, white hair was stained red, and blood was still dripping from the cut on his forehead. As for the shoulder…the shoulder wound looked like it might kill him.

Savannah gulped in a breath of air. "What can I do?"

"I have a small amount of healing magic. We all do. Not enough to heal this entirely, but I'm hoping I can get him to a place where he can help. Griffin has enough magic to easily heal these injuries, so I'm hoping that, with a little help from me, we can get this done."

Savannah didn't know how to heal anybody with magic, but she knew basic first-aid. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head, folded it into a small thick square, and used it as a pad to put pressure on the shoulder wound. "His head. Can you start with the head?"

Jake nodded. "I'm going to start with that. If I can heal the head wound, the odds are better that he can help with the shoulder."

He placed his hands, palms down and fingers splayed, a few inches above Griffin's head. A shimmering silver-blue light began to glow in the space beneath his hands. Savannah sucked in a breath and then held it, not wanting to make a sound that would disturb the process. As she watched, the injury to Griffin's forehead closed right before her eyes. She began to breathe again, relief and hope combining to make her almost dizzy.

"That's a miracle," she said, shivering a little in the thin t-shirt she'd worn under the sweatshirt.

"That's Atlantean magic, and I don't even have that much of it. Now for the hard part. We need to wake him up enough to help me with the shoulder, and when he comes back to consciousness he's going to feel just how much he hurts."

Again, Savannah didn't know what to do –how to help--so she did the only thing that came to her instinctively. Continuing to hold pressure on his shoulder with one hand she took Griffin's cold hand in her other. She didn't have any magic, but she had reassurance and comfort to offer. Maybe it wouldn't help at all, but she had to try something.

Jake grasped Griffin's arm, gently at first and then more firmly. When the mage didn't move, Jake shook him a little bit.

"Griffin. Griffin, come on, man," Jake repeated urgently. "You have to wake up and help me with this. Healing is not one of my talents, and I can't get a bullet out of your body."

Griffin's eyes opened, his lids fluttering closed again within reopening. "Damn you, mermaid boy. I was getting my first real sleep in more than two months," he croaked out, his voice rusty. "My head – that was you?"

"That was me. I hope I didn't screw up the healing process too badly in the attempt."

Griffin's muscles suddenly tensed as he tried to sit up, and his grip on Savannah's hand tightened to the point of pain.

"Hey, Griffin. We're glad to see you," she said, trying to smile. "Lighten up just a little on my hand, or you're going to have to heal crushed fingers after you fix that bullet wound in your shoulder."

Griffin hissed in a breath and tried to pull away, but she tightened her own grip.

"Not a chance, buddy. I'm holding onto you until you're completely recovered, and there's not much you can do about it right now. So, help Jake heal you, and we can get on with saving the day."

Griffin fixed her with his unnerving silver gaze, and then he nodded. "Understood and appreciated. Jake, push as much healing magic as you can into my shoulder while I work from within. I'm still… not at my best due to loss of blood, so I could use the help."

Men. Savannah could tell how much it cost Griffin to admit that he needed help. She guessed Atlantean men weren't much different from human men in a lot of ways.

"Now, then,” Jake said, leaning forward.

Griffin nodded, and then a bright silver-blue explosion of light surrounded Griffin with a glowing nimbus of color, and she amended that thought. Atlantean men were a lot different than humans, if they could do this.

Jake had said healing magic wasn't his forte, and now she understood why. Comparing what he'd done to what Griffin was doing now was like comparing a kitchen sink to Niagara Falls. Power thrummed through the room so intensely that even Savannah, who had no magic at all, could feel it vibrating in her bones. Reverberations of the healing magic traveled through Griffin's body, down his arm, and into his hand and then jumped into Savannah's hand with a powerful shock. She gasped, but she didn't let go. She had one job, and she'd be damned if she'd stop doing it just because of a little magic overspill.

The light and the magic both dimmed after at least a full minute, and Griffin drew in a long deep breath. Savannah heard a tiny metallic clink and glanced over to see that the bullet—the one that must have been in the mage's now-healed wound--had fallen to the concrete floor.

"Are you better?" She squeezed his hand. "Do you think you can walk?"

Griffin sat up, and this time his expression was free of pain. "I am well. Thank you for your assistance. Ideally, I would now eat an enormous meal and then sleep for two days. However, as we've all seen, nothing about this particular corner of the world is in any way ideal."

"We need to get you out of here," Jake said, standing. "You can at least fly out, get something to eat, and rest a little bit while we wait for our P-Ops backup to show up at noon."

Griffin started shaking his head before Jake could even finish the thought. "No, I can't. What if the guard comes to check on me? If anything – anything at all – goes wrong or seems strange to them, they may move up their timetable and start attacking humans now. We can't take that chance. I will remain here until the arranged time."

Savannah started to rise, too, but before she could release Griffin's hand he caught her gaze. "I am in your debt, Savannah Hastings. I will not forget this."

She shook her head. "You don't owe me anything. I just held your hand, like any friend would do. Let's concentrate on getting you better. If you really need to stay in this damn room, I'm going to at least go find you food and water."

She started toward the door, but Jake stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Wait a moment, please." He looked at Griffin, who was leaning against the wall focusing on taking slow, even breaths.

"Griffin, we need to know what happened to Lucas. I've been trying to reach him, and there's nothing. Nothing at all."

Griffin's face twisted into a terrible expression, somewhere between a scowl and a sneer. "Maybe he has deserted us. Maybe he's just like his father."

"If we judged people on their father's actions, we would have sorely misjudged Flynn. You know better than that, mage."

Griffin silver eyes glowed hot, but then he nodded. "Perhaps. If so, he's in trouble. But there's nothing we can do about it right now. We must hope that he figures something out and gets word to us. Right now, we have no way of even knowing where he is."

"Worse,” Jake said. "The mental communication with Atlantis has gone silent.”

Griffin closed his eyes for a moment and then nodded, looking troubled. "I've never felt that before. It's as if Atlantis didn't exist.”

"We'll find Lucas," Savannah told them. "We're like the Marines. We never leave a man behind. And then we'll find out why you can't contact Atlantis and we'll save the day. Easy peasy."

Griffin looked at Jake. "Marines?"

"Don't ask. It probably has something to do with pots and kettles and skillets. Griffin, there's something else. Something important. We need to know –"

Griffin turned to look at Savannah, and she could've sworn his silver eyes were filled with regret. "I would give anything if I had the ability to stop the Transition and save you from this fate. But I don't have the knowledge or the ability. In truth, I've never heard that even Alaric has this ability. It's an answer we've been hunting for a very long time. I am truly sorry.”

Savanna's heart plunged into her stomach, and she suddenly wanted to throw up or hit something. She didn't have time for either option, though, and she'd be damned if she'd spend her last few hours as a human—or last few hours alive—feeling sorry for herself.

"Okay. Wings for me it is," she said, swallowing hard. "We'll worry about that later. Right now, I'm going to find you some food and water."

Right there and then, in front of Griffin, Jake caught her in his arms, hugged her tightly, and kissed the breath out of her. "You're the bravest woman I've ever known, and we are not going to give up. We will find a way to fight this."

She gazed into his eyes, seeing his strength. Seeing his need to protect her. Seeing the love he had for her.

But sometimes, love wasn't enough.

"And if we don't?"

"Flying lessons." He grinned at her, and her heart filled with so much love that it shattered into a million pieces and landed on the ground in sparkly shards at his feet.

"Flying lessons. I like it. You in, Griffin?"

The mage stared at them with narrowed eyes. "You do realize that you're both crazy, do you not?"

Savannah couldn't help it. She started to laugh.

He wasn't wrong.