Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  "I have heard of such a monster only in the oldest legends my great-grandmother used to tell. We thought she tried only to frighten the children.” Cejno's voice was shaky. “Killing this thing, you have done something very good."

  Zack nodded, but didn't stop until he'd run over the thing a dozen times.

  When he decided the monster was sufficiently two dimensional, he drove the conversion van toward where the tip of the Cross extended from—nothing. At least nothing he could see.

  "Where is Miss Ivy?” Cejno demanded. “Could another of these monsters have eaten her?"

  Zack could only hope that scattered sheep corpses and the blood on the beast's teeth and fleece had been evidence that only one monster had survived the battle for supremacy. If there were more, that was very bad news for their future, and for this part of Turkey.

  Ivy answered one of the questions as she popped into visibility, one Kalashnikov strapped around her shoulder and the other in her hands, ready to fire.

  She checked out the dents in the van. “Did you kill it?"

  He nodded. “But bring along the rifles. With the luck we've been having, we're going to need all the firepower we can get."

  She slung the Kalashnikovs behind the front seats, then yanked the Cross pieces out of the Temple.

  Cejno gasped as Ivy did what could only appear as a magic trick—pulling long sections of timber from nothing.

  It was magic. Increasingly, Zack was forced to concede it wasn't a trick.

  Zack shifted the van into park, popped the rear hatch, and helped Ivy load the Cross.

  "Someone might have heard the gunshots,” she said. Let's get out of here."

  Zack didn't wait to be asked a second time.

  * * * *

  Fortunately, Cejno's partners kept him informed about police and army roadblocks and the van had a GPS loaded with detailed maps of eastern Turkey, because they had to detour frequently. By escaping their paddy wagon, they'd raised the Army's state of readiness by two notches.

  It took them a couple of days to make it out of Kurdish highlands and to the Mediterranean coast where, Cejno insisted, they could blend with the rich European tourists.

  "Do you speak any German?” Ivy asked Zack as they neared the outskirts of Anamur. It would help.

  He shrugged. “I was stationed in Mannheim for a few months. I picked up a little German. My accent is horrible."

  "With a lot of luck, we won't have to convince any real Germans. I might be able to order a beer but that's the extent of my German so I'll play dutiful wife who lets her husband does all the talking."

  "Wouldn't be any German wife I've met."

  And she wasn't good at dutiful. “Maybe the Turks won't know that."

  "Let's hope not. We've got to go in. We need supplies. And I'm desperate for a shower and a bed to sleep on."

  "What about it, Cejno?” Ivy demanded. “We don't have any money. Do you have enough to put us all up in a hotel tonight?"

  The young Kurd blushed. “I may have some American hundred dollar bills."

  Ivy suppressed a laugh. So the Army hadn't gotten all of their money after all.

  "In that case, maybe you can rent us two rooms. Zack and I could use a bit of privacy."

  Cejno stuttered something and turned an even darker red.

  "I couldn't hear that, Cej."

  "I think such would be the good idea. The two of you have not had much chance for the, uh, making of baby"

  "We have been busy,” she admitted.

  Zack's knuckles had whitened a bit on the steering wheel but there was no way he was getting off the hook. They were committed to playing the husband and wife thing in public. If Zack wanted to back out now, that was his tough luck. She wasn't going to spend however long it took to get across Turkey with Cejno thinking she was available.

  Anamur was an attractive coastal town with a couple of beachfront hotels.

  Zack picked the more run-down of the hotels on the theory that it would cost less and be less likely to be filled with actual Germans flush with the high value of the Euro.

  The shower, room service, and a nap were definitely what the doctor had ordered and Ivy promised herself she could luxuriate for a while, soak up a bit of bliss after all they'd been through.

  About four hours after they'd arrived, though, she felt an itch to flee.

  "Grab the keys, Zack. We've got to move."

  He was on his feet in less than a second. “You sense someone homing in on us?"

  She shrugged. The feeling wasn't quite the same as when that Predator had nearly blown them up. “Can't tell. But something is telling me I need to be somewhere, and that this hotel isn't it."

  "Let's get Cejno. He won't be happy if we drive off in his van and leave him behind."

  An unhappy Cejno wouldn't turn them over to the police. But he probably would notify his contacts in the Turkish underworld. Ivy wouldn't have bet a nickel that the Turkish drug smugglers weren't infiltrated by the CIA. Not that getting tortured by the Turkish Mafia for stealing a vanload of hashish would be much better than being tortured by the CIA for stealing the True Cross.

  Cejno wasn't happy anyway. He had just discovered pay-per-view and had tuned into an Italian movie where slightly overweight and significantly over-endowed women ran around looking for reasons to lose their bras and flash their tits.

  It didn't look like much of a movie to Ivy and the soundtrack was horrid, but Cejno was enthralled and she noticed even Zack's eyes quickly got glued to the set.

  "I'll buy you some DVDs when we make it to Byzantium,” she promised. “Both of you."

  "Istanbul,” Zack corrected.

  Cejno shook his head sadly. “My father is a good Moslem. He would not allow such material into his home. And I think perhaps Mijgul would not like to see this either."

  "You think?"

  Cejno missed the sarcasm. He considered, then shook his head sadly. “I am quite certain."

  "We need to move,” she said. “Now."

  "The hotel will charges me for this movie yet I have seen only a small piece."

  "Hey, we're near the ocean,” Zack said. “Lots of German girls go topless. Maybe we'll see something even better than the movie."

  That cheered Cejno up and he grabbed the keys he'd taken from Zack—unaware of Zack's talents as a car thief—and tromped down the two flights of stairs to where they'd left the van.

  The Cross was undisturbed, and Ivy let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

  "West,” she said when Zack had started the engine and looked at her for direction.

  She'd opened her mind to her senses when she'd gone looking for a hiding place near Simak—and found that nasty temple. She wasn't looking now, though, but the power was still pouring through her, guiding her as they traveled the coast road along the Mediterranean.

  "Perhaps such a bikini would look attractive on Miss Ivy,” Cejno suggested when the road took them close to the beach and the young Kurd spotted a blond girl wearing a thong that Ivy wouldn't have been caught dead in.

  "Perhaps Cejno should keep his dirty mind to himself unless he wants to have his balls extracted,” she said.

  "Play nice, children."

  "And keep your eyes on the road, Zack,” she fired back. “I don't want to end up in the ocean because you couldn't help looking at some bimbo."

  About six miles outside of Anamur, they rolled up to the broken stone wall surrounding an abandoned city. Flickers of power, mostly red and blue, arose from buildings that looked as if they had been left untouched for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

  "What the heck is this?” she demanded.

  "An old city?” Cejno guessed.

  "Good thing we brought our native guide. I'd never have been able to guess that."

  It had once been a huge place. Crenellated stone walls surrounded the city: in places pristine, in places shattered by time or ancient battle. A long row of arches stretched to the nearby mountains showing t
hat an aqueduct had once brought fresh water into the city. Houses and larger buildings crowded up against the walls and stretched block after block inside.

  "Keep driving.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  "This is so cool,” Zack said as he eased off the brakes and approached the walls. “The entire city is just sitting here, not covered by mud or anything. If we had anything like this in America, there would be a line ten miles long to see it and you'd have to pay fifty bucks to get inside."

  Cejno shrugged. “We have plenty of old things in Turkey. We need more new things."

  The coastal road veered away from the abandoned city, but Ivy gestured to go straight, onto a gravel road that might, possibly, have been the remains of a road the Romans had built before Peter and Paul had walked these pathways spreading the word of the miracle on the Cross.

  The pathway led through what Ivy thought had once been city gates but might have been a breach in the walls that invading armies had used in some ancient sack of the city.

  Both inside and outside the walls, olive trees and scraggly bushes grew among the ruins of what had once been houses, an amphitheater, and Roman-style baths.

  In a few places, the Crescent moon of the Moslem faith had been hacked into the stone over older signs of fish and the Cross. These, in turn sometimes obscured still more ancient signs of the various pagan faiths that had mingled in this crossroad to the world. Ivy couldn't tell if the most recent marks had been made by Turkish tourists the previous week or by invading Arabic armies in the years after Mohammed's death when it looked like the armies of the Jihad would sweep the remnants of Rome before them and conquer all of Europe as easily as they'd conquered North Africa, Persia, and the northern half of India.

  The gravel path Zack drove on ended, with only footpaths extending in three directions before them. “End of the road, Ivy. Is this a tourist outing, or do you have some particular destination in mind?"

  "I'm sorry I disturbed your nap, Zack. But I trust my feelings."

  Zack had the grace not to argue with that—her feelings had kept both of them alive during the past week.

  "Perhaps I should walk to the beach,” Cejno offered. “I maybe could learn something there."

  What he was likely to learn was whether pretty northern-European tourist girls would go for a drug-smuggling Kurd. Ivy couldn't guess whether they'd be interested but she didn't figure that, like him or not, any German girl was going to turn him over to the police. Unlike Americans, most Europeans had a relaxed attitude toward drugs.

  "Go,” she said. “Be back in an hour."

  "But if I—"

  "One hour,” she repeated.

  "You're a bit rough on the kid,” Zack observed as Cejno high-tailed south the quarter mile or so from the abandoned ruins to the nearby beach.

  She ignored him. Cejno had saved their life from the Turkish Army, but that didn't mean it was her job to get him laid.

  "Help me unload the Cross. We'll have to go on foot from here."

  He stared at her for a moment, his weirdly blue eyes giving him an almost evil look. “Right."

  The compulsion abandoned her as soon as she touched her section of the Cross, as if its power could not penetrate through the energy field the Cross itself generated. But when she closed her eyes, the blue energy glow was easy to spot.

  "This way."

  Zack followed her down a narrow alleyway past tumbledown houses, through the remains of a substantial cathedral whose walls resonated red with the Cross, and then finally into a narrow grotto-like structure.

  Although its roof had fallen centuries before, the overhanging walls provided some protection from the elements and, aside from a thick layer of dirt on the floor, it was surprisingly clean. Where the remains of the roof had gone, Ivy couldn't guess.

  Zack knelt down and brushed at the floor until he revealed a complex Roman-style mosaic. “Hey, check it out. This should be in a museum."

  She studied the intricately worked image of a naked woman stepping from the sea. It could have served as the inspiration for the famous Botticelli painting of Venus in a half-shell.

  But Ivy didn't think it belonged in a museum. It belonged here, where it was.

  "It is pretty amazing that no one has scooped that up to decorate their patio back home in Nebraska or something,” she said.

  "Is this where we are supposed to be?"

  She nodded. “It feels right."

  "So, what do we do?"

  That was the question, all right, but now that she was here, she had no idea about what came next. She put down her Cross section to see if its energy field was blocking out any psychic suggestions.

  The Cross's red glow interacted with the blue of the long-abandoned temple, bathing her in a healing purple aura.

  Zack jerked at the heavy thunk of wood against stone. “You sure that's a good idea? Last time we touched the Cross to a Temple, some really evil things happened."

  "Does this feel dangerous to you, Zack?"

  He shrugged. “I'm blind to whatever messages you get, Ivy. And if I could pick those signals up, I wouldn't trust them. Who says feelings can't lie?"

  He was right, of course. They'd already proven that ancient power locked up for hundreds, or even thousands of years could be dangerous. From what had happened near that temple in Simak, whoever had locked up those evil powers had known what they were doing—and their handiwork shouldn't be disturbed. In fact, she and Zack had gotten lucky. Bad as things had seemed with that monster-sheep, only a remote hayfield and some sheep had been sacrificed. What if that evil force had caught a carnivore like a wolf? What if humans had wandered into that power and been transformed? What if the temple had been in the middle of an active city rather than a deserted field?

  Still, she needed to do something here.

  "Give me your section,” she said.

  He shrugged, then passed over the long beam of the Cross.

  * * * *

  She didn't have a clue what she was doing.

  Although Ivy had been raised a Catholic, as he had, Zack felt certain her church, and her upbringing, had been vastly different from his own. His grandmothers and his priests preached the warnings of pagan churches, pagan beliefs. Hers probably emphasized the Good Shepherd aspects. And Zack had seen enough lately to know that the warnings reflected real dangers.

  Still, dying on the Cross had transformed Ivy. He couldn't doubt that she saw things, knew things, which no human agency could explain. Despite his priests’ warnings, he couldn't believe Ivy had succumbed to any sort of satanic spell. She was trying to do what was right.

  But that didn't mean she couldn't be making a horrible mistake.

  Ivy laid the long section of the Cross on the ground facing north/south, the tip almost at the head of the mosaic goddess, then stepped back, studied what she'd done, and made a microscopic adjustment.

  Although the Beretta hadn't done much against the sheep-monster, Zack suddenly wished he'd thought to bring one of the Kalashnikovs with him rather than leaving them in the van where they couldn't help anyone.

  "Can I—"

  She gestured him to silence and then set the cross-piece at right angles the long piece, in the center rather than at the end so that it made a sort of compass diamond.

  Zack had thought he was immune to the sensations Ivy experienced. He couldn't detect the colors Ivy saw, but something hit him like a hard kick in the gut.

  The force was internal rather than something physical, but it still bent him over, rocked him back on his heels. “Wow!” He shook his head hard to clear it.

  "Do you have any idea what the hell—"

  His mouth fell open, his question only half-asked when he got a good look at Ivy.

  She looked the same, but also completely different.

  She was still the tall, more muscles than curves, woman she'd been since he'd first seen her in the killing zone in Mosul. But now she radiated a sexual appeal that any Hollywood movie star would have given
her firstborn child to achieve.

  "There was power there that had been locked up too long,” she said. “It needed to be set free. Don't worry, I don't think we're going to see any transformed animals here."

  "You're beautiful,” he breathed.

  She squinted at him. “Huh?"

  He stepped closer to her. “I don't know how I could have missed it before, but you're, like, a sex goddess."

  "Zack, get real."

  He got real. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.

  For a second, he thought he'd misread the situation, that she was going to resist him. It would have broken his heart if she rejected him because she was the ultimate woman. Ivy embodied what he'd searched for until he'd become convinced it was a myth, one of those fantasy dreams that keep men from accepting what they have, leave them miserable no matter what they found. But Ivy was real.

  And she was going to reject him.

  To his surprise and pure bliss, she didn't.

  Her lips, soft and warm, met his.

  Her kiss was sweet wine, intoxicating, powerful, filling him with a rush of emotion he didn't want to analyze, only savor.

  "I don't understand what's happening,” he admitted when he came up for breath. “I've never wanted anyone like I want you right now."

  He kissed her again, let his arms roam down her back, enjoying the sensual delight of the hard muscles of her shoulders and the firm roundness of her bottom.

  She kissed him back, then slowly pushed him away.

  "I don't think this is a good idea, Zack."

  Talk about a mistake. It was a terrific idea.

  "Why?” He brushed a knuckle against her cheek. Simply touching her sent a wave of power through him, made him feel like he could climb a mountain naked, stand at the top, thump his chest and challenge the gods.

  "You feel the power of the temple, not anything that comes from inside yourself. I was wrong about there being no transformation. Remember that sheep that changed into a monster? That's you."

  He shook his head. “I'm not a monster, Ivy. I've just had my eyes opened. How could I have missed seeing that you're an angel?"

  "I'm not an angel, and you're not yourself. Come on, Zack, wake up."