Poisoned Kisses (19 page)

Ares wasn’t a god used to defeat and, deprived of his prize, he turned on his vulture in a vicious fit of anger. “And you’ve failed me one too many times. You’re useless to me, too.” He caught the redhead with one hand, his meaty fingers constricting around her throat.

The startled creature gave one squawk before he closed off her airway, and in spite of everything the vulture had done, Kyra shouted, “Stop it! It’s me you’re mad at, so leave her alone.”

But the big god of war had already hoisted his hapless minion into the air, shaking the vulture like a rag doll as her eyes bulged and she fought for breath. It was only a moment before Ares gave a snort of satisfaction and the vulture’s neck cracked in his palm. As she died, the redhead’s human form gave way to the scraggly buzzard beneath. Black feathers fell from Ares’ hand, then he dropped the dead bird at his feet.

At last, his eyes fastened upon Kyra. She knew he wanted to punish her, to torture her, but nothing he could do to her would hurt more than losing Marco. What she’d told him wasn’t a hollow threat. Without Marco, Kyra could already feel her heartbroken self spreading in the night breeze like the seeds of a wildflower. She could already imagine her bones turning to stone. Feathers growing from her skin. Yes, she would have angel wings, after all, she thought to herself with a bitter laugh. She’d turn into a bird—to fly in those skies she had always feared, above a world in which she no longer belonged. She’d fly away high.

She had only to choose the time and the form.

But for now, Kyra saw the vulture’s shade rise from the corpse, bewildered and lost—and she knew she had at least one more soul to guide.

A
s Marco felt his way through the tangled madness, memories tore into him like the thorns and nettles of a blackened jungle. Vines of nightmare wrapped around his throat, insects stung, and sometimes he felt the eyes of a predator upon him. The whites of Ogun’s eyes, the gleam of Ogun’s teeth.

He tasted filth and dirt in his mouth as if he’d been buried alive, and maybe he had been. He could no longer remember. Perhaps Kyra had stabbed him in the heart or buried him alive.
Kyra.
He said her name into the darkness. Once, far in the distance, too far to reach, he thought he saw a green spark. But then it winked out like the glow of a lightning bug suddenly smashed between two murderous hands. Still, he went toward it, swimming through the inky misery, knowing he might never see it again.

Kyra sat perched on the edge of the small bed in the guest room over Hecate’s shop. It’d been months since she brought Marco home from Africa, but on the mattress, he continued
to writhe, eyes rolling back in his head. If he knew she was there, there was no sign of it but for the occasional thrash of his arms.

“Stand down, soldier!”
Marco cried as his clenched fist arced through the air. Kyra ducked out of the way just in time, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he struck her. She wasn’t sure she’d feel it anymore.

“We should strap him down before he hurts someone,” Hecate said.

“Never,” Kyra replied. “Never.”

“I’ll sit with him,” the goddess offered. “It’s the least I can do after my part in all this.”

“Don’t feel guilty. I know what Ares must’ve done to you to make you tell him where to find us.”

“Not all the torture in the world would’ve loosened my lips if I hadn’t known you’d escape him. I just didn’t foresee the price you’d have to pay. Now, you look so tired, ambrosia notwithstanding. Let me sit with him, and you can get some rest.”

It was true that Kyra was tired—not as a mortal woman, but as a brokenhearted nymph. More tired than she could say. “But what if Marco tries to come back and I’m not here to guide him?”

“You can’t sit beside him forever,” Hecate said.

Kyra rubbed the spot where she’d hoped for a scar and found only smooth immortal skin. “Yes, I can. Forever is the one thing I still have.”

For Marco, finding his sanity wasn’t like climbing out of the murky deep. It was more like breaking the surface, taking a few gasps of air and sinking down again. The first thing that seemed tangible and real was Kyra was sitting at his bedside.

“Marco?” she whispered. “Do you know me?”

He knew her, but he was raw inside. Shamed. She’d seen
everything. She’d seen him steal weapons, kill his enemies and profit from the bloody business. She’d seen his triumphs, his flaws and every failure, great and small. Now they’d both have to live with that knowledge…forever. And he couldn’t bear to have her look at him.

When Kyra tried to embrace him, he shied away. A furtive glance showed him her hurt expression. “You hate me,” she said, quietly, with a terrible acceptance.

He didn’t hate her. He didn’t blame her. He just didn’t know who he was now, and when he tried to explain, he couldn’t. He had it in his head that if he spoke one word, it might shatter the sanity and send him back down into the darkness. And besides, she was so unspeakably beautiful. So perfect. He was unworthy of her in every way. She had to know that. She had to have seen it when she put him to the torch.

It bothered him that she fretted over him. He’d somehow turned a wild creature into something tame. And he himself had become something different, too. His scars were gone. All of them. The bullet wasn’t in his shoulder anymore. Even the scar on his hand from where Kyra had slashed him the first night they met was gone.

When Kyra brought a tray with dinner, he took the knife and pressed its edge into his palm. The blade bit down and a line of crimson blood rose to the surface. He watched with astonishment as the flesh wound itself together, mending the gash as if it’d never been there at all. “It will still hurt,” Kyra said, as if to reassure him. “But it’ll heal.”

That’s not why he’d done it, though. He’d done it to see if his blood would bubble and burn with poison and was gratified beyond words that it did not. She’d vanquished the hydra inside him. His blood was no longer toxic. Now he was immortal.

But he felt as vulnerable as a newborn babe.

She told herself to be grateful. Even if he never looked at her again, he was regaining his sanity. He was coming back
to himself. That alone was a miracle. She’d be a fool to wish for more. Yet a fool she was.

She sat beside him as he obsessively scanned the newspapers.

Marco was presumed dead and Ashlynn’s kidnapping had been big news in the West, bringing renewed attention to the problems in Africa. Meanwhile, Benji was cooperating with the international community, but the general had escaped, and this made Marco furious. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that Ogun would come again and again. The best he could do, the best anyone could do, was make the world a less hospitable place for war gods. To help deprive them of the forces they fed upon.

“He won’t speak,” Kyra complained to Hecate.

The goddess nodded. “Maybe he needs to write it down.”

So Kyra gave Marco a pen, and watched him write a letter to his mother and one to his sister. Then he filled page after page with all he’d learned about how to stop the genocidaires in the Congo. After that, it was all he wrote about. Maybe all he thought about. Kyra knew he was never going to give up on the people of Rwanda. He was going to spend all his long life trying to make things right.

When Marco was finally well enough to leave the bed, he made his first foray into the streets of the Mediterranean town. Kyra went with him. She watched as he lifted his head to the sunshine, breathed in the salty air and turned down a side street toward a vendor where he bought a pack of cigarettes.

She didn’t chastise him—they both knew it wasn’t going to kill him.

Marco leaned back against a brick building, lit the cigarette, brought it to his lips and took a deep drag. Then, to Kyra’s surprise, he offered it to her. She wasn’t a smoker, but she reached for the little cancer stick with trembling hands, letting her lips curl over the end, savoring the lingering taste of his
mouth on the wrapper. The familiarity of it made her knees weak, and she had to lean against the wall to keep from making a fool of herself.

He took the cigarette back from her, inhaled sharply, then let it out in a long slow stream of smoke. Whatever weakness had driven him to it seemed to pass. He nodded as if resolving an argument with himself and threw the rest of the pack away.

Then he spoke his first words—his very first words—since returning from madness. “Show me where you live.”

She led him a few blocks then opened the wrought-iron gate. They walked into the courtyard together, then down a small flight of stairs to her door, which squeaked on rusty hinges as she opened it. Then he walked in, an expectant look on his face. The silence between them went on and on until finally he asked, “Are you going to turn on the light?”

“Oh!” As a
lampade,
she’d never seen the point of paying an electric bill. She fumbled around in the drawer for some candles and lit them. He picked up one of the candles and held it out in front of him like a torch, navigating the passageways of her small apartment, and nearly tripping over a stone marker in the living room. “You collect gravestones?”

Kyra winced. This was one of the many reasons why she never brought anyone to her home. She felt exposed, but after what she’d done to him, she didn’t dare complain. “I don’t take the famous tombstones. Just the really old ones from people I once knew that no one remembers anymore.”

Friends who were no more. Lovers who had died. Mortals she’d helped over the threshold in a time when they still called for her, instead of angels. It helped her feel connected to the world, but she didn’t know how Marco would feel about it, or any of the other ancient oddities in her apartment. “I know it’s strange, but—”

“You made your life a memorial to the dead.”

Kyra nodded.

“So did I,” Marco said, his face illuminated by the flicker of the candle. She saw in it all the grief that still remained, for the people he’d buried. She wanted to take it away. She wanted to use her nymph’s wildness like she did the first night they spent together, to bring him pleasure and drive away the hurt. But when she reached out to touch him, he stopped her.

“No,” he said, his mouth a grim line. “It’s not going to be like that anymore.”

She pulled her hand back as if she’d been burned. And she supposed she had been. He didn’t want her anymore. And why should it come as a surprise? “I understand,” she said, struggling with her pride, and turning abruptly in her haste to get away.

“No, you don’t.” He grabbed her hand, holding her fast. “You
don’t
understand, Kyra. It’s not going to be about my being lost and you finding me anymore. It’s not going to be about the righteous nymph and the misguided man she’s taken up with—the same man she’s convinced is going to walk out on her. You know damned well that I’m in love with you. You know damned well that
nothing
is ever going to take me away from you. You
had
to have seen that inside me along with everything else. So if we do this, you need to trust me to stay. You need to trust me to guide
you
when you need it. I don’t want you to take away any of my pain unless you’re willing to let me do the same for you.”

It might’ve been the longest string of sentences he’d put together since they’d met, and though she treasured every word, there was nothing tender about his tone. He was serious, intense and demanding.

“You think you can be happy with me?” Kyra asked, glancing up at him from beneath her lashes. “I’m complicated, you know.”

He drew her closer, eyes heavily lidded. “Thanks to your father, I have a really long time to figure you out. Forever, in fact. So are you going to trust me or not?”

It should’ve been easy to give this trust that he asked for. But it felt, to her, like asking him to put
her
to the torch. That way might lay the ruin of her, but right here, right now, there was no other path she would take. “I love you…and I trust you.”

As soon as she said the words, he blew out the candle and they stood together in the darkness. Then he picked her up into his arms. “What are you doing?” Kyra sputtered as she felt herself, once again, plucked up from the earth and suspended on high.

“I’m carrying you over the threshold,” Marco replied, groping his way toward her bedroom. “It’s about time someone did that for you for a change.”

It seemed odd. Antiquated. Like she was some damsel in the arms of a knight errant. “I’m not some delicate lady, you know.”

“That’s okay,” Marco smirked. “I don’t plan to be a gentleman tonight.”

R
enata forced the cutting edge of her blade against the war criminal’s cheek, just below his eye. The man didn’t tremble with fear the way she wished he would—not the way she still trembled when she remembered the explosion. Neither did his cruel mouth quiver the way hers did when she remembered being engulfed in flames. No, the war criminal’s expression didn’t change.

Even though she held his fate in her hands, he wasn’t afraid of her. He was cold, stony and remote—even as she brought her hammer down and drove the sharp chisel into his face, for he was made of marble and knew this was as close as the sculptress would ever dare to come.

In the quiet of her studio, Renata slowly came back to herself. She realized that it was dark; she had been carving with nothing to guide her fingers but moonlight and her own depthless rage. And now her dust-covered hands were shaking. Her mind reeled with memories of the war that had killed her father and little brother. Her throat swelled with grief like it
had when her mother was abducted by an enemy soldier. Tears burned beneath Renata’s lashes and she knew she had to stop working, if only for a moment. She wiped her eyes with the back of an aching forearm, smearing her cheeks with grit and reminding herself that the war was long over.

It was one of those notoriously hot summer nights in New York City, and Renata’s unruly tresses were already coiled with perspiration, wet against her neck. Her cotton tank top clung damply to the small of her slender back, perspiration tickling the scars along her spine. It was sweltering.

Renata considered turning on the air conditioner, but she hoped the heat might bring her pet snake from its hiding place. The snake could be anywhere amidst the boxes, stone chips and art magazines that littered Renata’s studio, and she sighed, knowing that her foster family would scold her for letting Scylla escape her cage and slither off. Then again, they had never liked her pet snake. True, Scylla wasn’t cuddly like a cat or a dog, but Renata knew that just because a snake—or a person—didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve didn’t mean she didn’t have one.

It was already midnight, though; Renata had no time to search for runaway serpents. She had to put her obsessive final touches on The War Criminal in time for the art exhibit tomorrow.

Steeling her courage, Renata took a deep breath and lifted her tools to work again, but as she did so, she heard rustling in the draperies over her window. “Is that where you’ve been hiding, Scylla?” she asked, and before she could turn around, she felt a cool breeze lift the downy hairs at the nape of her neck.

Was she imagining she heard someone lifting the sash? Had the emotion that always gripped her while working on this sculpture finally driven her mad? Even over the thumping of her heart, she heard a small tearing sound, like fabric being snagged on a latch. Someone was breaking in!

Renata’s mind reeled with disbelief and fear. She was alone; she had deliberately rented a studio off the beaten path. It had seemed like a good idea because she prized her solitude, but now she wondered if anyone would even hear her if she called for help.

In the stillness of her studio, Renata gripped her wooden mallet in one hand and the chisel in the other, her knuckles going white. Her instinct was to not make any sudden movements, so she turned slowly, and she glimpsed a dark figure shadowed under the sweep of the drapes. A large lumbering man was silhouetted against the moonlight. Renata forgot to breathe. She saw a gun in his hand. Her heart forgot to beat. She was too afraid even to scream.

The last time someone had pointed a gun at her, she was just a little girl in war-ravaged Bosnia, but the man aiming the cruel barrel of his weapon at her now didn’t look like a soldier. “I won’t hurt you if you come with me,” he said, his voice thick with some accent that Renata didn’t immediately recognize.

At his words, Renata went weak all over, terror rushing through her veins like a hot, withering poison. Who was he? What could this hulking stranger possibly want with her? And why should she believe that he wouldn’t hurt her when he was pointing a gun at her?

Since she was a little girl, she had been a victim, as her sculptures attested. But Renata wasn’t a little girl anymore, and this wasn’t Bosnia. Something inside Renata snapped—like the angry strike of a whip—and she decided then and there that unlike her mother, she wouldn’t be taken. “I’m not going anywhere with you!”

With nothing but anger to direct her hand, Renata launched her hammer through the air towards her assailant. In slow motion, she watched the tool hurtle towards the intruder, cartwheeling end over end.

The hammer struck him square in the forehead.

It was only a wooden hammer—not one of the metal ones she sometimes used—but it made an audible and satisfying crack against the intruder’s skull. Shocked, the man staggered back, his arms tangling with the curtains. Only then did Renata cry out, but it was the intruder who screamed the loudest.

A gyrating tangle of scales and fangs had slipped from the draperies and coiled around the man’s shoulders.

Scylla had been hiding there after all, and—as hostile to intruders as its owner—Renata’s pet python constricted around the assailant’s neck. Perhaps scenting the man’s fear, the python pulled into strike position. “Get it off!” the intruder shrieked, fumbling with his gun.

Renata could see that the man was genuinely terrified, but her survival instinct was stronger than her compassion so, seizing the opportunity, she turned for the door and ran.

Only after the detective showed her his NYPD badge for the third time did Renata accompany him inside her studio. Even then, she crossed her arms over herself and tucked her fingers under so that he wouldn’t see her tremble.

There was no sign of the intruder or the snake.

Dark, swarthy, and clad in a black leather jacket, the detective took a brief look around the studio. “This is the scene of the crime?”

Renata merely nodded; even under the best of circumstances, she was guarded with strangers, and these were not the best of circumstances.

Still, there was something familiar about the detective’s shadowed eyes. He’d introduced himself several times, but she found that she just couldn’t remember his name. Maybe it was because she was in shock, or perhaps it was because she couldn’t stop staring at his startlingly handsome face.

Renata had nearly been kidnapped, so now was not the time
to notice a handsome man, but as a sculptress, she revered chiseled cheekbones and strong jawlines like his.

“Let’s go over this one more time,” the detective said.

“I’ve already told you everything,” Renata snapped, fixing her cool gray eyes on him. With practice, she had perfected that classic New York City bitchy-but-beautiful stare that drove most men to take a step back, but the detective didn’t seem cowed.

“With repetition, sometimes an extra detail or memory comes to mind,” the detective insisted. So they sat together on her old beat-up college futon with the denim cover, now as threadbare as her calm. He wrote Renata Rukavina at the top of a page and took careful notes as she told him all over again what happened.

When she finished telling her story, she noticed that the detective was sitting too close to her, and when he leaned forward she worried for a startled instant that he might try to kiss her. But instead, he exhaled a great breath, and fleetingly, she smelled the aroma of freshly baked bread. It was the middle of the night—no one was baking—but the scent somehow relaxed Renata enough to let the detective take her hand.

There was a strange tugging sensation as her skin came into contact with his. She wondered that she allowed it; with friends and lovers—even with her foster family—there was always a struggle between her need for intimacy and her fear of it. Yet she was letting this stranger hold her hand.

“You just had a scare, but you’re okay now,” he added.

And somehow, she was.

“You’re sure you don’t know the guy who tried to break in here?” The detective’s mop of dark hair softened the intensity of his gaze. “You’ve no idea why anyone would break into your studio this hour of night?”

Renata shook her head again. If she’d testified before the war tribunals, someone might have had cause to try to shut
her up, but that’s why Renata hadn’t testified. Why she would never testify.

The detective finally went to the windowsill to dust for fingerprints. Meanwhile, Renata searched for her pet python. As she checked all of Scylla’s usual hiding spots, she realized the detective was examining her work. “These are some powerful pieces,” he said of the statuary adorning her studio.

“Thank you,” Renata said politely. “They’re not to everyone’s taste. One of my critics said they were nightmares brought to life.”

The detective circled a black marble sculpture of a man with a gun strapped over his shoulder, his clenched fist pulled back to brutalize an unseen victim. “Not a nice guy, I’m guessing.”

“He was charged with crimes against humanity,” Renata said, feeling a well of rage rising as she remembered his deeds. “He died before they could convict him, though.” What she did not tell the detective was that the soldier had died the very night Renata finished his sculpture, and thus joined her collection of ghosts.

When she was a fledgling artist, Renata carved the faces of children felled by sniper fire outside Sarajevo. Even now, after years of experience, the only living person in her art collection was The War Criminal, so she watched warily as the detective approached the almost-finished statue and ran his hand over the stone. “This is the guy on trial at The Hague right now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Renata replied, impressed. It seemed unlikely that an ordinary police detective would know anything about it; in Renata’s experience, most people chose to forget the war that had destroyed her childhood. That this man seemed to care made Renata willing to talk. “The War Criminal was going to be the centerpiece of my exhibit at the gallery tomorrow
to coincide with the expected verdict against him, but now I’m afraid I won’t finish in time.”

“But you must finish it,” he insisted, a ripple of anger passing across his shoulders beneath his leather jacket. His sudden vehemence startled Renata, and seeing this, he measured his tone. “I’m just saying that you can’t let anything stand in your way. An art exhibit is a huge deal, isn’t it? You’ve worked hard for it, haven’t you? You can’t let someone scare you from finishing important work like this.”

Renata was flattered that he thought her work was important, but she was terribly unsettled. She wished he would tell her that they had her would-be kidnapper in custody. She just wanted to feel safe—but then, hadn’t she always? Renata shrugged apologetically. “I can’t do the delicate finishing touches with shaking hands.”

“Look,” the detective said. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll keep my squad car parked right outside tonight and make sure nobody bothers you. Meanwhile, you should just take your fear from tonight, turn it to anger, and finish your sculpture.”

Renata tilted her head at the curious phrasing he used. “I don’t think you should be encouraging that. My therapist thinks I have anger issues.”

He gave a mirthless smile, a gleam of savagery in his eye. “No doubt. Sounds like you clocked the perp. Did you throw the hammer because you were scared or angry?”

“Both,” Renata admitted.

“Then it seems to me that your anger is what kept you from being kidnapped tonight and it’ll help with your art, too.”

Renata couldn’t help thinking, yet again, that this was no ordinary police detective. Once again, he took her hands in his. She felt something tug at her emotions and she realized she was no longer shaking from fear.

Only rage.

Someone had broken into her apartment. Someone had pointed a gun at her and tried to take her. Someone had come
into her world, uninvited, and tried to rip apart her life just like the invading soldiers had done all those years ago. And someone should have to pay for that.

Anger roiled and coiled inside her, twisting upon itself with venomous purpose. It was past midnight.

Renata picked up her tools and began to sculpt.