Poisoned Kisses (2 page)

There was nothing for Kyra to do but struggle. He couldn’t kill her with that knife, but he
could
hurt her. Even for an immortal, pain was pain. Suffering was suffering. And Kyra was afraid of it even though she didn’t have to fear for her life. So she brought her knee up hard into his stomach.

He grunted with the impact, but didn’t let go of her wrist. Instead, he used his leverage to flip her to the ground. She thudded to the carpet, her body splaying awkwardly. And before she could scramble to her feet, he threw himself on her, forcing the air from her lungs. He had her wrist in his grasp, twisting it to the breaking point.

“Drop your weapon!” Marco shouted like the soldier he’d once been. But Kyra bucked under him, clenching her free hand into a fist and punching him in the jaw.

Marco rocked back from the blow. “Bitch!”

Then he backhanded her in retaliation. Kyra tasted blood in her mouth—her own, she hoped. The sting of his slap had made the entire right side of her cheek red-hot. In thousands of years, few mortals had ever dared to strike her, and those who
had
tried paid for it with their lives. All the forces of the underworld bubbled up inside her. She was the daughter of Ares and rage was overtaking her, boiling out of control. She remembered the armory she’d blown up, where her father’s guard had confused her with a human and tried to rape her; she’d shown him with fatal accuracy how mistaken he was. Now she’d show Marco Kaisaris!

As she pulled herself up like a specter from a grave, Marco recoiled. “What—what the hell are you?” he stammered, staring, his tone more loathing than fear. In their struggle, she’d become so enraged that she’d stopped projecting the
shape she wanted him to see. He saw her
real
face now, the depthless blackness of her nymph’s eyes, and he seemed as horrified as if he’d glimpsed three-headed Cerberus.

Taking advantage of his surprise, Kyra rolled to her feet with the grace of a cat and crouched on tiptoe behind a desk for cover, realizing that her high-heeled boots may not have been the ideal choice for an assassination. “The real question, Marco Kaisaris, is, what are
you?
”

At hearing his real name, Marco’s expression turned murderous. Later, she’d have to admit that he frightened her. He was stronger and faster than she’d anticipated and now this entire mission had gone awry. She could try to fade—try to disappear before his very eyes—but her concentration was broken. Perhaps she ought to escape and try again another day. As these thoughts raced through Kyra’s mind, Marco rushed toward her. She lifted the knife—this time in self-defense—and he flipped the elegant desk behind which she’d sought refuge as easily as if it were dollhouse furniture. Papers and knickknacks exploded through the air and the desktop slammed her, knocking her back where she smashed her head on the wall and slumped to the floor.

Kyra lay there for a moment, stunned. Had she blacked out? Scrambling out of the wreckage of the desk, she realized that the penthouse was quiet.

Damn it to Hades!
The door was open and Marco Kaisaris was gone.

She wondered why he hadn’t tried to kill her when he’d had the chance, but then she felt the sickening burn. She was smeared with Marco’s blood and it stung like fire. It was ever-deepening agony. Rushing to the bathroom, she hurriedly scrubbed her arms clean. Too little, too late. The hydra’s blood wasn’t just burning her, it was also seeping into her skin and making her sick. Waves of nausea flowed over her; she sank to her knees and tried not to retch.

If she’d been a mortal, the poison of his blood might have
been enough to kill her. As it was, her world started to spin. Marco Kaisaris was no trickster god. His blood wasn’t divine ichor. His wounds hadn’t closed up on their own. And even from the bathroom she could see that where his blood had pooled on the penthouse floor was now a sizzling mess, as if someone had poured acid on the carpet. His blood was poison. Deadly poison. There could be no doubt now that he was a hydra and needed to be stopped.

If only she could get up from the floor.

She’d cut him deep. Crouched in an alleyway, Marco tore his shirt off and wrapped it around the wound like a makeshift bandage. With his uninjured hand, he fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone to call an ambulance. The woman in his penthouse would need one. Yeah, she’d tried to kill him, but she had
no
idea who she was dealing with. By now, his blood would be soaking into her skin and eating her alive. He wasn’t sure what the hospital could do for her, but he wasn’t eager for another dead body on his conscience.

“Si prega di identificare se stessi,”
the dispatcher squawked into the phone.

Identify himself? Under other circumstances, the question might have made Marco laugh. Who exactly was he? He wasn’t the guy who rented the penthouse. He wasn’t the guy he looked like now. He wasn’t a soldier anymore and he wasn’t even the do-gooder son of a Greek immigrant—not according to his father or his sister. “I’m nobody,” Marco said, then hung up.

The blood coursing from the cut on his hand had soaked through his wrapped shirt and dripped down his battle-hardened stomach in a deadly scarlet rivulet. Every time a drop of it spattered on the ground, it hissed and sizzled where it fell. Marco hated to leave his blood anywhere, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. His breathing was still erratic—partly from the pain of his wound and partly from
the shock of what he’d just seen. What the hell
had
he just seen? An angel, a demon or some creature with powers like his own?

One thing was clear: his enemies had obviously tracked him here and sent the woman to assassinate him. This identity—this borrowed face he wore—was thoroughly compromised now. He’d have to change his appearance and there was no time to wait for a more private moment. Pulling himself deeper into the shadows, Marco braced against the brick wall and steeled himself for the transformation. He closed his eyes and remembered the face of a blond haired, blue-eyed Russian smuggler who’d once tried to steal a shipment of shoulder-mounted rockets from him. Marco had long since dispatched the Russian to hell, but he’d been wounded in the struggle—which meant that now Marco had a useful but grisly souvenir; he could assume the face and identity of his old enemy. It was his curse; he could take on the form of anyone who wounded him. A power he could neither explain nor fully comprehend. Perhaps it was a madness—inherited from his mother. Whatever it was, he couldn’t stop himself from quivering with disgust at the slow creep of flesh as his face began to transform. Marco didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that his eyes were now blue, and his hair like yellow straw. Except for the wound on his hand, his enemies wouldn’t know him.

No one would.

K
yra found herself in an ambulance, squinting into the peculiar light. Her arm was caught in the grip of a blood-pressure cuff and she realized that her heart must have stopped because a stunned paramedic loomed over her with paddles.

For one moment, she understood mortal fright. It used to be that the dying would take comfort to see her by their bedside with her torch in hand. Now, if they opened their eyes to see a dark nymph like Kyra standing beside the men with the paddles, they feared her as an evil harbinger. Sometimes they screamed in terror.

These days, dying mortals only wanted to see angels. Some of her fellow nymphs of the underworld played along, pretending to flap ridiculous feathered wings, singing, “Follow the light!” But Kyra refused. She was a
lampade,
a guide, a warrior for men’s souls. If mortals didn’t want her to attend them at death, she still had a heroic destiny to fill. Which is
why she’d gone after the hydra, and how she ended up on this gurney in the first place.

She was shocked at how wretched she felt; her skin was clammy, yet she felt as if she were being boiled alive. Under normal circumstances, she’d have already re covered, but the hydra’s poisonous blood had weakened her somehow. With difficulty, she tried to sit up. It was then that the emergency medical technician reached for her peridot choker, perhaps with some foolish notion that removing it would help her to breath. His mistake. Kyra’s choker was the only keepsake she had of her mother’s. Anger that this stranger should try to take the precious stone gave her a surge of strength. Kyra stared into his eyes, trying to see if he was an enemy, or perhaps one of her father’s minions. But when she couldn’t illuminate his soul, her insides flailed in fear. Had the hydra poison extinguished her powers altogether?

It took her more than three attempts before she was able to pull the needles from her arm. All the while, the paramedic tried to restrain her. Again, his mistake. Self-preservation gave her the power to pin him against the vehicle wall. “Don’t make me hurt you,” she growled.

The paramedic shrank away, the whites of his eyes showing like a horse about to rear up. He seemed to have realized all at once that she was no ordinary mortal woman. There was a chain at his throat upon which dangled a little golden cross, and he held it up as if to ward against evil. Just what did he take her for? Angel or devil? The mortals could never decide! Muttering a curse at him under her breath, Kyra leaped out of the back of the ambulance before he could stop her.

The rising sun knifed through the lavender cloak over Lake Avernus, its light cutting a thin golden gash across the dark waters. Kyra didn’t like mornings. It was
night
that protected her—it always had. Luckily, it was still dark enough that she didn’t have to obscure her true form. Escaping from the
ambulance had seemed like a good idea, but as Kyra staggered toward the little villa apartment that was her lair, she feared she’d collapse before she could make it home.

Marco Kaisaris’s blood had done this to her.

Things that killed humans rarely affected immortals this way. Then again, the poison in Marco’s blood was no ordinary kind of poison. It was the poison of a hydra. Achilles, the great warrior of the
Iliad,
died when he was shot in the heel with an arrow dipped in hydra poison. And he wasn’t the only demigod to die this way. Hydra blood had also killed mighty Hercules. The thought sobered her. Hercules was the son of a god, but his mother was mortal. Just like Kyra’s.

Surely she was nothing like those legendary heroes. They had died young, whereas Kyra had lived for thousands of years. They had walked among the living, whereas Kyra drew breath with shades in the underworld. She’d never thought of herself as vulnerable. She’d lived so long, and so recklessly, that death was nothing she’d ever contemplated for herself. Was it possible that Marco Kaisaris’s blood could actually kill her?

She needed to get to Hecate. Perhaps her old mistress had just enough magic left to brew a curative potion. Even if she didn’t, who else could guide Kyra over the threshold from this life into the next but the goddess of the crossroads? Yes, Kyra had to get to Hecate. Nothing else was as important. She kept going on pure adrenaline, feeling vulnerable, naked without her powers. It was disorienting to rely on normal human sight—luckily, she found the street where Hecate’s shop was illuminated by a swinging lantern at the end of a rusty hook. The worn and faded sign over the door read
Notte Incantesimi: Tè e Chiromanzia
.

The Night Enchantments Tea and Palm Reading shop was the last refuge of the once-powerful goddess who had—for centuries now—been reduced to fortune-telling and serving herbal infusions. Hecate’s black hounds bayed in greeting
and the goddess appeared in the parlor doorway wearing an absurd embroidered gypsy robe, a sprig of yew berries in her luxurious silver hair. “My best little nymph has come to call on her old mistress,” the once-mighty goddess crowed.

Then Kyra collapsed at her feet.

T
here was no point in disguising himself here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a place Marco still thought of as Zaire. The militias knew him. Some even feared him. And though the corrupt government called Marco the Merchant of Death, many of the locals said he was their salvation. And that’s why he kept coming back. Why he would keep coming back as long as they needed him.

Marco’s driver—a dark West African named Benji—was waiting for him at the jungle airstrip. “That’s quite a bruise on your jaw, Chief,” the kid said, glancing at him from beneath the sweaty bandanna on his brow. “And your hand doesn’t look good, either. Trouble at the border?”

Marco didn’t answer; after all, he didn’t want to tell anyone about the she-devil that attacked him in Naples. Instead, he put his sunglasses on, retreating behind the shades as they rattled along the dirt road.

Their vehicle was a patchwork of rust, duct tape and white paint. It made a fat, slow-moving target. With all the money
he made selling weapons he should be able to afford a better ride. He should be less vulnerable to his enemies…enemies like the siren who had tried to stab him.

Reminded of her, Marco flexed his hand around the disintegrating bandage. It was a deep cut that would scar, but meanwhile his blood was eating through the cloth. He couldn’t risk going to a hospital, so he’d stitched it himself in the back of the cargo plane and now it hurt like hell. It was no consolation to him that his attacker was, no doubt, hurting worse—if she was even still alive.

Who was she?
No, more importantly,
what
was she? In the club, he’d taken her for just a rich party girl looking for a quick hookup. But in his penthouse, she’d literally transformed into another woman—one with ethereal skin, raven hair and unnerving black eyes. She’d been like an angel of death, knife at the ready. Until that moment, he’d always thought he was the only person in the world with this…affliction. But now he knew he wasn’t the only one who could change faces. The woman had the same power, and she’d used it to hunt him down like prey.

They stopped at a jungle checkpoint. These government soldiers should have tried to halt the spread of weapons throughout the Congo, but that wasn’t how things worked here. Benji simply paid the customary bribe to the guard who waved them through. Then they veered away from the city, heading into rebel territory, winding up steep roads into the mist-soaked mountains.

Africa was a furnace, even at this higher altitude. A little bit of hell on earth. A cluster of gun-wielding boys dressed in camouflage marked the entrance to the stronghold on the road up ahead. They were playing some kind of game with rum and matches and Marco growled. “How many times do I have to tell him that they’re just little kids?”

“They’re little
killers,
” Benji muttered under his breath.
“And the general doesn’t listen to anyone anymore. I tell you, the
devil
is in him. He’s become the devil!”

When Benji was just a teenager, Marco had rescued him from a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. Since then, the kid had helped Marco steal more guns than either of them could count, but Marco had never asked him to fight. Even so, Marco felt defensive. “The general means well. These orphaned boys have nowhere else to go. At least if they serve in his army, they get fed.” It was a sad and all-too-familiar story in this part of the world. But giving children guns and calling them soldiers was evil, and Marco knew it.

Benji knew it, too. Parking the vehicle, he muttered, “Think what you want, Chief, but he’s the
devil
.”

The encampment was a primitive mountain fortress surrounding grass-roofed huts. Even so, with the weapons Marco supplied them, these rebels held their own against the Hutu militiamen—and sometimes even the government. Wearing green camo and military boots polished to a mirror shine, the general approached Marco sporting a brass-tipped baton. A pack of dogs barked at his heels and all his boy soldiers saluted as he passed. His ebony face warmed with a smile of greeting. “Ahh, the Great Northern Warlord has arrived!”

Marco’s old friend seemed leaner, gaunter, with a hint more mania in his eyes, but the two men embraced like comrades. They’d been together in Rwanda and seen the horrors of genocide. Now it was an obsession for both of them.

“What did you bring for me this time?” the general asked.

“Ammunition.” Marco motioned toward the crates of bullets being unloaded. “We’ll parachute the weapons in, but…your soldiers are too damned young.”

The general waved away Marco’s concern with his baton. “I know it displeases you, my friend, but what can be done? We’ll talk business later. First we drink!”

In the general’s hut, they sat on patio chairs. Marco almost
took a cigarette until he remembered his close encounter with an angel of death. She’d challenged him to quit and he’d said he would. For some reason—maybe because of what he was sure his blood had done to her—it was an unspoken promise he felt compelled to keep. “I’ll take a beer instead.”

“I stole this from Hutu militiamen,” the general bragged, handing Marco a bottle. “It is good, no?”

Marco took several gulps before asking, “What happened to the militiamen?”

“You don’t want to know what happened to them.” There was an awkward silence. Then the general leaned forward. “Benji, your boss is from this place of mists and rainbows…this Niagara Falls, where everything is soft and covered with dew. He sometimes forgets what life is like in Congo. He forgets what it is to fight for survival in Africa, what it is to make war. But we know, don’t we?” Benji looked as if he might crawl out of his skin. “He is scared of me.” The general chuckled, poking Benji with the end of his baton. “Boo!”

Marco flexed his bandaged hand. “Leave him alone.”

The general smiled enigmatically and blew a ring of smoke. “Have you never told your boy here how we met?”

Marco wasn’t much for show-and-tell when it came to his employees, but the general was intent on telling tales. He pulled an old photograph from his pocket, where it must have been positioned for just this occasion. “Ahh, Benji! You see that soldier in the picture, so proud under his blue beret? That was your boss, upright as a Mountie. In those days, Marco even kept a letter from his betrothed for luck.”

Benji stared, amazed, though whether it was at the idea Marco had once been a UN peacekeeper or that he’d once been engaged, Marco couldn’t tell. “And do you see that skinny black man standing next to him in the picture?” the general asked. “That is me. I was a teacher then, and twenty little Tutsi children came to my school to learn. The Hutus swore
they would kill us all. But Marco promised he would keep my students safe.”

Marco stood abruptly, nearly tipping his chair in the process. Several beer bottles clinked together and fell at his feet. “That’s enough reminiscing. I need to find a bed.”

Marco hadn’t had to feign exhaustion; he hadn’t slept since the night the woman attacked him in Naples. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of her. That night, he’d just learned about his father’s prognosis; the knife-wielding vixen had taken advantage of a weak moment, his yearning for an easy connection. He remembered the feel of her under his hands, the way she gave back as good as she got. She’d been perfect, crafted for sex. It made him break into a sweat just to remember.

But it hadn’t just been that. There’d been something about the way she looked at him—the way she looked
into
him, as if she could see into every little hidden crevice. It’d made him feel as if one person in the world might finally understand him.

And then she’d tried to kill him.

That night, Marco dreamed of Rwanda again. The Hutus were coming with their machetes, but United Nations forces had been ordered out of the area. The evacuation convoy raced down the dirt road, away from the grenades, which sent plumes of soil into the air. Marco had the wheel when they saw a group of militiamen herding villagers into a ditch.

Stand down, soldier!

He was supposed to keep driving, but Marco jerked the truck to the side of the road, tires shrieking to a stop. He was out of the vehicle, weapon drawn, in one smooth motion. Behind him, another truck stopped and his commanding officer jumped out. Marco had halted the whole convoy. “Get back on the goddamned road!” his commander bellowed.

“They’re killing the whole village right in front of us,” Marco argued. The murderers hadn’t even hesitated at the sight of the UN convoy. Instead, the militiamen opened fire on the civilians with the few guns they had and hacked and dismembered the rest with machetes. From the ditch came the horrific screams and the stench of death.

Marco lifted his service pistol and aimed it at the militiaman giving the orders. He thought his commander might do the same. The villagers were unarmed. They called out for help, reaching for mercy. Blood was in the air like a fine mist of a waterfall, and for a moment, Marco couldn’t hear anything but the roar.

Stand down, soldier!

Marco pulled the trigger. Damn the rules, Marco shot first, and a burly Hutu militiaman returned fire. Marco was hit in the left shoulder, but it didn’t knock him down, so he lifted his pistol and aimed again.

Stand down, soldier!

His red-faced commanding officer was shouting. “We’re observers!”

Observers
. They’d been ordered to
observe
while the world did nothing. On the news somewhere, politicians dithered over the definition of genocide and the world was busy with other matters. Citizens didn’t want to hear it. So, standing there bleeding while his fellow soldiers tried to haul him back into the truck, Marco
observed
as the killers finished their grisly business. He watched until the last little hand of a village child twitched in its death throes. Then he watched as the militiaman who shot him turned and smiled.

Stand down, soldier!

Later, Marco returned to bury what remained of the bodies. In the empty eyes of a dead woman, he saw his fiancée, her lips twisted in a rictus. In the bloodied face of an old man, Marco saw his father. He saw among the dead even his own
face. He was one of them. He was the brother, the lover and the son of the dead.

But he had not been their savior.

Marco woke in a cold sweat, his stomach churning and the taste of vomit in his throat. These were his sins, his crimes, and how he’d come to be the way he was. He wondered what sin the shape-shifting woman had committed to give her the same powers. She was probably dead—his blood had almost assuredly killed her. There was no point in thinking about her either way. Whoever she was, no matter how he had felt about her when they were kissing, she could be nothing but poison.