Poisoned Kisses (5 page)

Fortunately, Marco didn’t ask her how she knew. He was too pissed. “My father didn’t understand and neither do you.”

“I understand that you cause wars.”

“Gunrunning doesn’t
cause
wars. It simply prolongs them.”

Ug!
He sounded like Ares himself. Wrapping her blanket more tightly around her, Kyra wondered if he knew how chilling his words were. “And that’s better?”

“It
is
better,” Marco said, turning to face her at last. “You see, there are some things civilians don’t
get.
”

Civilians? Did he still think of himself as a soldier? Even now? Fighting some war the rest of the world had forgotten? “Why don’t you educate me, Marco.”

“Sometimes the only thing that keeps people alive is war. In some places in the world, ‘peace’ only comes after a massacre. Fighting isn’t the worst thing that can happen, especially when it means you live to fight another day.”

“How can you say that? You used to be a UN peacekeeper.”

“Because when I was a peacekeeper in Rwanda, they killed eight hundred thousand people in one hundred days. Which is how I know peacekeeping is a
joke.
”

Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but the fire and his temper weren’t the only things burning; where his blood had dripped onto his collar, smoke rose from the cloth. She recognized
the potent scent of it and it immediately reminded her of how Marco’s blood had literally stopped her heart. Kyra pretended not to notice, but he caught her glance.

“I need to get cleaned up,” was all he said.

W
hile Marco showered, Kyra took his clothes into the small laundry room off the kitchen, and put his shirt and slacks in the dryer—his jacket was a lost cause. He’d told her that once his clothes were dry, he’d hike through the storm to find a phone. Kyra thought he was a menace to himself and society for even considering going out in this weather—wet clothes or dry—but she didn’t know how much longer she could keep him here unfettered.

The accident had left him confused and unsteady, which should make it easier to tranquilize him and drag him into the cage in the basement. It also made it easier for her to lie to him about not having a phone. She was lucky her purse had been thrown clear of the wreck, and that he hadn’t opened it and found the cell phone inside. Now she flipped it open, made sure it was still working, then tucked it, snug in her ruined coat, into a laundry basket.

Then she went to check on him.

He was in the bathroom with nothing but a towel around
his waist. The first thing she noticed was his muscular back—broad, shower-damp shoulders above a perfectly curved spine. The second thing she noticed was that he had a sewing kit on the bathroom countertop, and a needle in his hand.

As he lifted the needle to his face, she gasped. “What are you doing?”

“A bit of quilting,” Marco said through clenched teeth. “What does it look like?”

He was giving himself stitches. He was actually sewing together the cut skin over his cheekbone as if he’d done it a hundred times before; as if he had no one else in the world he could trust to care for him when he was hurt. And maybe he didn’t. Kyra couldn’t help but let her eyes drift down to his hand—the one she’d slashed open with her knife in Naples. She wondered who healed him then. He was mortal, after all; his wounds didn’t close up the way hers did. Kyra reached tentatively for the needle. “Let me help you.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I told you, my blood is poison.”

She hadn’t forgotten, and yet, she still wanted to help him. Was it just her natural inclination as a
lampade
to guide him? Or did she really have a death wish, after all?

At that moment, their eyes met in the mirror, and before she could guard against it, she briefly glimpsed right into him. She saw him with her underworld nymph’s eyes, shedding light on forgotten corners of his soul. She saw his grief over his father. Again, she saw his need to know and be known, to understand and be understood. That same need echoed inside her and, for reasons she couldn’t explain, tears welled beneath her lashes.

“Aren’t you going to argue with me?” Marco asked, breaking eye contact as he cut the end of the thread. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s not possible to have poisoned blood?”

Kyra shook her head. “No.”

“I’m HIV positive,” he said.

“You don’t have to lie, Marco. When you told me your blood was poison, you meant it literally. I saw your blood burning your shirt. I just want to know…why.”

“Why?” Marco’s dark eyes met hers again, his voice thick with emotion. “I guess it’s because sometimes, in war, you see things so horrible, so unforgivable, so
toxic,
that it gets into you…it
poisons
you.”

Kyra understood this better than she could admit. With Ares came the vultures and anguished cries of the dying—cries that Kyra endured as part of her duties in the underworld. Like all the war gods, her father fed on bloodlust and brutality. It wasn’t just Kyra’s family legacy, it was in
her
blood. She could have let her violent instincts destroy her, but she hadn’t. She could have given in to her father, but she hadn’t. At least, not yet. “It doesn’t have to poison you. You can use it to find your purpose.”

“I
have
found my purpose,” Marco said bitterly. “It’s just a darker one than I ever imagined. You see, nobody cares about what happened in Rwanda anymore. It’s over, they think. The world has moved on, but I haven’t.”

He was struggling. Kyra could taste it. She understood it. While Kyra was born to darkness, struggling to live a life of light, for Marco, the reverse was true. “What I mean is that you can use what’s happened to you, to change.”

“Oh, I change,” he replied.

And then he did.

Kyra watched with fascination as his face reshaped itself. She saw the skin age and wrinkle before her eyes. She watched his hair shimmer with gray until he looked like his father. Then, in a horrifying display of malleable flesh and popping cartilage, Marco changed into a series of men Kyra did not recognize until he finally settled upon the face she knew. She
startled, captivated by the sight of the lips she had kissed in Naples only moments before stabbing him.

Kyra didn’t have to pretend to be upset. No matter which face he was wearing, her inner torch revealed such exquisitely mortal pain, that it shamed her. She’d tried to
kill
him in Naples, like he was only a creature, like he was some sacrifice on the altar of her good intentions. She’d seen only the monster in him, not the man. Maybe she wasn’t so different from her murderous immortal family, after all.

With that thought, she turned and fled the bathroom.

In the living room, she stared out the front window. Shadowy tree limbs arched gracefully under the freezing rain, encased in moonlit ice. She’d never seen a storm like this and she couldn’t stop shivering, but this time not from the cold.

She heard Marco come up behind her. “Ashlynn, look at me.” It wasn’t her name, so she didn’t turn around. She just pushed her hands against the windowpane and let the cold seep into her. “Ashlynn, it’s just me. It’s Marco. I promise. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He wrapped his arms around her, holding her, trying to comfort her, when she should be the one apologizing. But she couldn’t speak. “I think I just wanted someone to know about me,” he said softly as the fire in the fireplace crackled behind him. “To know that I can change into people who’ve hurt me in some way. I’m some kind of… I can’t explain it.”

Was it possible that he didn’t even know what he was? “You’re like a hydra,” she whispered, suffocating under the weight of her own deceit. He was not
like
a hydra; he
was
one. But how to tell him?

He turned her around so that she was looking at him. “A hydra?”

“Your parents are Greek,” she whispered. “Don’t you know the old stories?”

“I know them,” he said, tilting his head.

Kyra stole a glance up at him from beneath her lashes. “The ancients said that the hydra was a poisonous monster. And it had a thousand heads. If a warrior cut off its head, two more would grow in its place.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said impatiently. “Unless the warrior used a torch to cauterize the wound.”

How innocently he said it. How guileless. He didn’t suspect he was holding a torchbearer in his arms. Nor that she was fated to destroy him. And yet, she couldn’t pull away. “I think you’re like that, Marco. Like a hydra.”

She hadn’t meant her words to wound him, but he fell back as if struck. “You think I’m a
monster.
” His face reddened. Then, finally, he nodded with grim resignation. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a monster.”

Kyra’s stomach clenched, as if she could feel his pain as her own. She was only trying to help him to understand what he’d become. “Marco…what happened to you?”

To her surprise, he told her.

He told her about Rwanda. He told her about how he had been shot. He told her about the villagers in the ditch, slaughtered while he stood by. And he told her about the day he buried them. The way his voice flattened broke her heart. Even now, he made fists of his hands as if to keep them from shaking as he finished his tale.

“When I returned to base camp, I looked in a mirror and, instead of my own face, I saw the face of the militiaman. I saw the face of a murderer and somehow it made perfect sense who shot me, because I’m just like him.”

Kyra listened to his story in silence, but couldn’t contain herself any longer. How could she have been so wrong about him? “You’re nothing like those men.”

He leaned back against the arm of the sofa, unable to meet her eyes. “I stood by and just watched that massacre happen.”

“No, you didn’t,” she argued. “You tried to stop it and got shot for your trouble.”

Reminded of his old injury, his hand went to his bare shoulder. “Well, that’s what soldiers are supposed to do. We’re there to take the bullets if we have to. We’re there to protect people who can’t protect themselves. But in the end, we just
observed
.” He said the word with venom.

“You were just following orders.”

He winced. “Bullshit, Ashlynn. Since when has that been a defense for anything? But I’m trying to make up for it now. Now I help people fight back. I make damned sure they’re
equipped
to fight back. I give them all the guns and the ammo they’ll ever need.”

He was just like her—trying to do the right thing, and making every conceivable mistake along the way. He was all but naked and she could read it on his skin. He carried inside him a terrible grief, and not just for the mother he’d lost to madness or the father he’d buried today.

She wished she could take it away, make it hurt less somehow. The cords on Marco’s neck were tight with emotion and Kyra couldn’t stop herself from tracing his chest with her fingers. He watched the path of her touch as if mesmerized, and it encouraged her. Her heartbeat picked up the pace of his. Kyra stroked the scar on his bare shoulder, knowing a bullet fragment was still there in the bone. And yet, that bullet had caused less damage than the things Marco had done, and the things he’d failed to do. He wanted someone—anyone—to understand. And she did. He was only a mortal, so she couldn’t imagine how they were so much alike. But there was no denying it. He was a reflection of her. It made her want him.

And why not? She could give him pleasure without having feelings for him, she told herself. She’d done it with countless mortal men before. She was a nymph of the underworld; she
could use her skin to soothe his pain. It didn’t have to mean more than that.

She drew his hand to her and kissed the still-angry scar. Her lips upon the sensitive skin made him twitch. “Don’t,” he finally choked out. But Kyra stepped closer and kissed the scar on his shoulder, too. At first, he was still as a stone, but the heat of his skin and the soft hair of his bare chest against her cheek reminded her he was no statue. “I have an open wound,” he whispered. “I’m not safe to touch.”

No, he wasn’t safe to touch. And that, in itself, held a powerful allure. “You’re bandaged. It’s not dangerous to touch your skin, is it?”

“No,” he admitted, sheepish longing in his eyes. “I just…don’t want to hurt you.”

Mortal men never
wanted
to hurt nymphs, but they always did. And yet, Kyra couldn’t turn away from him. Not when he needed her. “Your kisses aren’t poisoned, are they?” she asked, lips trailing up to his mouth, achingly soft. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever kissed a man so softly. But the scent of his clean skin and the taste of salt upon his lips made her sigh. He’d been holding his breath, and now his lips parted as he exhaled into her kiss. She took that breath into her with all its stain and sorrow and kissed him again, giving that breath back to him cleansed with her inner light.

Then it happened all at once.

The way he groaned. The way he took her hands, clasping them at the small of her back. The way he crushed her against him, his teeth scraping along the hollow of her throat. It was the grief that drove him, she thought. Mourners often sought solace in physical connection, as if to prove to themselves they were still alive. But she didn’t mind. She knew how to make her body malleable for a man’s pleasure.

She let him pull her onto the sofa in front of the fire where he laid his body atop hers, pulling her clothes off piece by piece. There was some fumbling with his wallet on the end
table where he’d left it, and he sheathed himself in a condom. Then it was all skin and sweat and sighs.

The feel of his arousal hard against her sent little shocks along her skin. The sudden forcefulness of his body as he pinned her wrists over her head made her senses spark like the fire in the hearth. Kyra was no shy maiden nymph in the face of a man’s need. No coy Daphne, to flee from Apollo’s lust. This was a threshold that Kyra
wanted
to cross.

Her thighs parted and their eyes locked as he sank all the way into her. She’d done this to comfort him and sate his needs—but it stoked a fire inside her, too. She loved his thickness and the way she stretched to accommodate him. She loved the feel of his muscles as his back arched. She arched, too, to meet him.

He was looking into her as she looked into him; he was inside her just as she was inside him. There was nowhere to hide—and for one magical moment, she was certain that he knew her, that he saw her true face, that he saw her for herself.

But then he closed his eyes.

Gods above and below,
she loved the feel of this mortal. The scratch of his beard, the light scrape of it on her cheek that reminded her he was man and she was woman. She loved the rough texture of his scars. How must it feel to have marks that so boldly told the story of his pains right there on the surface of his skin? And she loved his strong arms. Arms long enough to wrap all the way around her. Arms that made her feel as if she were not too wild to fully embrace.

She’d had many lovers before. She’d worshipped the perfect bodies of ancient gods. She’d admired the well-oiled muscles of Olympic athletes throughout the ages. But for some reason, Marco’s body, battle-hardened and scarred as it was, suited her perfectly. He
fit
with her, and every time he pushed inside her, the sensation of completion was renewed.

She wanted to make him come—fast and hard. She wanted
to move her hips in just the way he liked, and make him forget everything else. But as they moved together, it was
her
arousal that spiraled higher and higher, out of control. The couch scraped against the floor, his chest scraped hers, and it went on and on, as if every stroke exorcised some demon. As if every caress were a confession. She kissed him as they strained together, a kiss broken finally by her own gasping climax. Flickers of light danced beneath her eyelids and she couldn’t believe it had happened so quickly or so intensely. His followed soon after, a groan at the back of his throat. He buried his face against her chest as his body convulsed in orgasm, his legs straining between hers. Beneath him, Kyra lay nothing short of astonished.