Medusa's Heart: A Contemporary Paranormal Erotic Romance Novel

by Joey W. Hill

  “Fortunately for them.”

  “I cannot imagine you would be more irritating than one of them.”

  “Ah, a challenge.” He nudged her, then stroked a lock of hair from her brow.

  “They had to live with them every day. And they were married, bound forever.” She paused, realizing she’d stepped into a topic that might be uncomfortable to them both.

  “I promised you forever, didn’t I?” John said lightly, but she caught shadows in his eyes. “Until you don’t want me. I plan on putting a lot of effort into that not happening. Want to go swimming before we hunt up some dinner?”

  Rising, he offered his hand to help her up. She put hers in it, liking as always the strength and gentleness in his grasp, the way her hand looked in his keeping.

  She knew what marriage was like in Athenian society. Sometimes there was love, but often it started with no more motivation than money or political connections, and the most basic courtesy between the couple. She and John had far more than that, yet she had an idea that marriage meant something different in his world than it did in hers, with far deeper expectations. Perhaps that was what had her hesitating to proclaim her feelings as strongly as he’d proclaimed his.

  But what would happen if something terrible occurred before he knew what feelings she thought—she hoped—she was harboring for him? “John—”

  A piercing cry interrupted her. Looking up, she spotted a bird of prey with a brown and white speckled breast angling toward them. John Pierce glanced up with her, but Medusa looked down first, and it saved his life.

  Grabbing his arm, she jerked him out of the way as the arrow sliced past him, narrowly missing his arm.

  No mortal could reach her home on foot, at least not without an arduous climb supplemented by ropes and hooks like John had. Yet here they were. Five of them, coming from different directions. John ran the two steps to the sledgehammer and picked it up as she went aloft.

  “Don’t depend on your eyes working,” he bellowed at her. “And Medusa?”

  When she met his gaze, she saw a fire in his that matched the rage being triggered inside herself. “Don’t hold back on that anger this time, sweetheart.”

  “I want to love you,” she said. “More than anything.”

  He grinned. Then they turned their attention to what was closing in on them.

  The first thing she noticed was they all wore uniforms of a peculiar mix of browns and greens, as if they intended to blend into a forest. They also wore ovals of red-colored glass over their eyes, encased in dark rubber frames that clung to their faces.

  “Wart, no!”

  She tore her gaze away to see the merlin dive, screaming, its claws extended to attack.

  In a blink, she understood John’s alarm. The men bore crossbows with modifications she didn’t understand but knew could end the bird far too easily. She dove sharply, swooping down on the man angling his cross bow upward. He spun in her direction, away from the bird, but she was faster. She slashed his face with one set of talons, the other swiping upward and hitting an exposed part of his throat. The fountain of blood told her she’d hit the vital artery, but her motion had dislodged the eyewear. As his dying gaze met hers, she saw his fate sealed.

  “Without the red mask they cannot protect themselves from my gaze,” she shouted to John, doing a somersault to avoid the next arrow shot. She dove down upon another assailant, Tunneltrap and Waterlight startling the male by striking at his face and giving her the chance to tear into flesh.

  John had grunted his acknowledgment. She saw him swing the sledgehammer and take out the knee of another opponent. The leg folded in half like a broken stick, a sight she wished to never see again. The male he’d just crippled howled in agony, but his suffering was short-lived. As he pulled out something she did not recognize but which he obviously intended to use as a weapon, John followed up with a killing blow to the skull. The weapon spun out of the man’s hand, but it made a loud noise, like a clap of thunder, with a brief flash of fire.

  The noise startled her such that she propelled herself backwards, a flight instinct, and two arrows whizzed past where she would have been. She wheeled. They’d fought their way out of the falls area and closer to the side garden by her house. She saw more men coming over the edge of the precarious ascent with various weapons. Too many men, still coming from too many directions.

  She soared into the air, dropped below the ledge and saw even more coming. Well, until she plucked them away from the rock, slashed their ropes and let them drop, screaming, down into the gorge. The snakes helped, though she kept them clear of two males who’d come prepared, swiping out at them one-handed with machetes in her grip.

  She flew upwards to the top again, all-too-cognizant of the numbers who had made it to where John Pierce was fighting alone.

  He’d taken down three, but the others were closing in and one had another cross bow. He spoke to John in a harsh language. John sneered, his bloody lip curled, body braced to continue the fight. Her battle instincts, roused by the attack upon them, took visceral pleasure in John’s bravery, his obvious strength and skill that was making them hesitate. One man saw her coming and yelled a warning. As they spun toward her distraction, John charged.

  He knocked two to their backsides and scattered the others, but his intent wasn’t combat. He was headed for the cliff edge. As he met her gaze, she understood.

  She twirled in the air, reversing course and leveling back out. As John launched himself out into the open air, no hesitation, his faith in her absolute, she caught him under the arms. Her injured wing protested, but she had enough survival energy pumping through her to compensate, and she strained to stay aloft with as much will as strength.

  “The beach,” he called to her. “Maddock left us an exit portal there.”

  She counted no less than twenty armed men converging on her home. They must have landed on the back side of the island, a far more dangerous approach with few good beach options, but screened from her view.

  The beach was clear, but she made a pass over it to be sure, and gave John the chance to scope it as closely. When she descended, she dropped him a foot above the sand and landed next to him, her wing screaming in relief. His hands were on her immediately, his eyes roving over her. Checking that she wasn’t hurt, she realized. She was doing the same. He had a wound in his shoulder, an arrow he’d likely broken off and pulled out. It wasn’t causing him problems right now, but she knew one didn’t often feel that kind of pain in battle. There was only the surge of energy, anxiety and readiness for the fight, until the fight was done.

  He took her hand. “We have to leave,” he said.

  JP hated doing this to her, but there was no time to prepare her for what lay on the other side of this portal. They just had to get her off the island now. Obviously, MyTech had overcome the portal blocks Maddock had set. Bastards.

  Maddock had taught him how to open an exit portal. The path he’d left open for JP was the easiest, but the end destination was not. Not for her. He ran to his lean-to, and retrieved the earpiece that would give him a direct communication with Maddock once they were back in the same world. Maddock could remotely retrieve everything else in the pack, and the contents were all practical items, nothing compromising. JP had sent back the notebook with portal entry info the day after MyTech’s first attack, for the purposes of security. As he switched on the earpiece, he registered the double beeps that told him it had retained its charge in the no-power state.

  Returning to her side, John took Medusa’s hands in both of his. Her beautiful eyes were wide with apprehension.

  “I’m going to need all your trust for the next few moments,” he said. “Where we land, it’s going to seem strange and scary, loud and chaotic, but it will be okay. Trust me, it’s a world I know and, as scary as it seems, it isn’t. Can you do it, trust me for just a few minutes?”

  Her hands on his forearms were cold. “Why can we not face them? Fight them?”

  �
�They came with a magic greater than yours, with a number greater than I can overcome. They’ll take you. I don’t know if they want you dead or alive, but either way, they can’t have you.”

  He could hear the men approaching, crashing through the forest. “When we get through the portal, your eyes have to stay shut until we see Maddock.” He pulled the eye mask he’d worn for her out of the pack. “Will you let me blindfold you, my lady, and allow me to care for you?”

  She met his gaze. She was trembling, but he could tell she was thinking. She wasn’t making a rash or impulsive decision, which made her conclusion all the more humbling to him. “I will trust you, John.” Her voice held that strained plea that he be worthy of such a gift. He’d burn down the world to make it so.

  Putting the blindfold on her, he secured it and gathered her close. “Hold onto me,” he ordered. “Keep your face against my chest and don’t let go. If we get separated, we won’t be far apart, I promise. It feels like falling off the same cliff. A jarring impact, but we won’t land far away from one another. I’m going to do my very best to hold on.”

  Her arms tightened around him. “Me, too.”

  He pressed his lips to her forehead. “Don’t let anything scare you, my lady. I won’t leave you. I promise.”

  Not letting either of them have another moment to think about it, he recited the words, released the magic. A phalanx of armed men broke through the bushes and began to run across the beach to them. There was a snarl on the lips of the leader, a big red-headed bastard probably as well-trained as John was. Well-trained enough to know they were going to be too late. John sneered at him when he was still thirty yards away.

  Yeah, you lose, you prick.

  Then the vortex sucked them in and her world disappeared.

  Maddock’s cosmic vacuum always felt like it could tear atoms apart, but for the first time the destination was worse than the ride itself.

  JP was going to kill the scientist-wizard, never mind it wasn’t his fault. The blaring horns, the heated exhaust, the wall of noise, told him they were just where he’d expected, but anticipating Medusa’s reaction, it all seemed magnified. Times Square was intimidating to plenty of modern-day NY visitors, not merely those who came from ancient Greece. And something in the portal was off, probably because he’d mispronounced a single syllable. They weren’t on the sidewalk.

  They were in the middle of the fucking street.

  He had a breath to do what instinct told him was needed. He threw his body over hers, covering her in some futile attempt to keep a cab or bus from crushing her.

  Traffic was in gridlock, thank God, but the muted roar of honking cabs, cars, buses and whatever the hell else made up the cacophony of New York City was smothering them. He understood why the NYC portal was the best, because the most crowded and public ones were. There was no chance anyone would think they’d appeared out of nowhere. But fucking Christ…

  Nothing he’d said was going to help an initial fight-or-flight response. He couldn’t blame her. She was freaking out. Which meant the snakes were, too. They were the advance warning and sometimes reflection of her state of mind, and they were in full aggressive panic mode. They were thrashing, striking, darting. In this state they would bite indiscriminately, even each other, and he gritted his teeth as their fangs sank in, tore, struck again, against his biceps, forearms, neck, ears.

  He grimaced and bore the pain, both arms banded over her, protecting her face and keeping her arms locked to her sides so she couldn’t take off the blindfold. Thankfully, he’d pressed his own face against her head to protect it, for however long that would do any good, but it gave him time to bark into the communicator of the ear piece.

  “Open the Circus portal.”

  “Christ, John, what the hell…” Maddock’s voice was crackling with static interference.

  “We’re in Times Square. We need to get her to the Circus.”

  “I need to clear that. You know how pissy Reese gets—”

  “Damn it, Maddock.”

  Medusa was flailing, shoving at him. Even in this state she was a formidable opponent. He would have let her go, but he didn’t sense anything but mindless panic and pain from her. If he hadn’t decided the blindfold was necessary, she might have been able to handle all this—maybe—but she was on overload.

  He somehow maneuvered them to the curb and used all his strength to move her to the relative shelter against a building, but there was no alleyway to be found. He heard a stream of curses following him, one of the million different dialects of cabbies that flavored the streets of NYC.

  He couldn’t take her into the Starbuck’s, Christ Jesus. It looked like midmorning coffee rush in there, as big a crowd as what was on the street, only packed in even more densely.

  “Hey, dude. Let her go. No means no.”

  Hands were on him, pulling, some idiot good Samaritan thinking Medusa was fighting to get away from him. And she was, but not for the reasons they thought. As he fought back, he took her down to her knees, molding her body inside the shelter of his own with sheer strength and will. He roared into the communicator.

  “Now. Maddock. Goddamn it.”

  Somebody went by with a blaring boom box pounding “Jenny, Jenny, Tommy Tutone 867-5309.” Really? Who the hell carried a boom box anymore?

  She snarled and this time her thrust was powered by a warrior’s skill and strength and augmented by the pull of several sets of hands, separating them. A shriek, high pitched and girlish, came from the deep voice that had called him dude.

  “Snakes! Bitch has got snakes in her hair!”

  Don’t remove the blindfold, don’t remove the blindfold. He chanted the prayer. He had to hope her awareness of the destruction her eyes could wreak would overcome even her panic. For a moment his vision was obscured by a crowd of bodies, but at the shriek they parted so he could see a straight path to her.

  They’d knocked him back on his ass, but the hands holding him were uncertain, distracted, and their owners’ attention was captured by the arresting sight before them.

  She’d gone to a defensive half-crouch, her sharp teeth bared, wings half spread, the tips scraping the concrete, sharp enough to leave marks. Every muscle was taut and prepared to spring. She wore the belted short skirt with its embroidered sash and the sleeveless top that showed off the lean beauty and strength of her body. Truth, if he wasn’t distracted by the utter peril in which they found themselves, he would have considered her awe-inspiring. Something of legend and myth, so obviously magical and filled with an “other” quality that was captivating and completely unforgettable.

  The blindfold had slipped, he saw with a trip of his heart. He was afraid she’d lost all sense of him entirely, but he noticed she had her head ducked low, her eyes down.

  The snakes were keeping everyone at bay, all in dodge and weave strike positions, a clear warning to stay back. With them swarming around her head, she looked like every dramatic emblem of Medusa he’d seen.

  “John.” She spoke in a hard, high voice, but he was glad to hear her acknowledgment of him.

  “I’m here. Tell them it’s okay. They think I’m trying to hurt you.”

  “He is mine. Let him go.”

  Only he heard the tiny tremor, because otherwise she sounded as commanding as a queen. The hands on him loosened, uncertainly at first, and then she straightened to her feet, reaching out in his direction, keeping her eyes tightly closed. Her hand was shaking but she held her ground.

  Behind her, he saw the milling crowds shifting, parting for a pair of mounted police and one on foot, come to see what was happening. One had already unholstered his Taser.

  “Okay, you’re going to get my ass in a sling, but the portal’s opening.” Maddock’s voice, welcome as a mother’s. “Get out of there now. Fifteen seconds.”

  It was the longest and shortest fifteen seconds in his life. John lunged forward and seized her hand. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we have to go back into the street for jus
t a second. Trust me one more minute. Next stop will be much better.”

  She wrapped her wings tight around her body and put her arms around his neck, which let him scoop her up in his arms in the same motion. Gridlock had eased up but he darted out, praying that NY cabbies were as quick in reflexes as they usually were. The blaring horns and screeching tires stopped his heart, but when only heated exhaust collided with his pumping limbs, he sent a silent prayer of thanks toward them. No matter that they were raining another hailstorm of colorful invective upon him and his precious burden in twelve different languages.

  He could see and feel the wavy energy of the portal. He heard the deep-voiced Samaritan with the girlish scream pronounce, “That’s some kickass street theater, yo,” followed by a barrage of “Fuck mes” as the portal closed over him and Medusa and he knew they were sucked through and out of sight.

  That wasn’t going to be an unnoticed exit, but hell with it. It was done. The tabloids would have some new alien visitor fodder for their next issue. Maddock kept the security cameras at that entry point always on the fritz, so no chance of someone doing an instant replay. Cell phones were a different matter, but not his problem. Maddock would probably inflict a magical EMP throughout the block and fry everyone’s smart phone.

  Her arms were still around him, and things had gotten blissfully quiet. The swirling, dryer-on-tumble heat and chaos of the portal transport was gone, as was the matching chaos of the New York street.

  Yet they didn’t seem like they’d arrived anywhere. Everything around them was gray and peaceful, but there was nothing else. They weren’t standing on anything. It was as if they were in the center of a box with no windows or doors, only without the sense of claustrophobia, for this felt open, endless.

  “John.”

  If he could be sure of their next stop, what awaited them there, he would remove the blindfold so they could look upon one another. After the fright of the past few moments, he wanted her to have some sense of orientation and personal control. But they needed to take precautions, so he re-secured it. She allowed it, though her lips were pressed together, her fingers locked on his arms. Her snakes wove restlessly through her hair, but they were no longer in full attack mode. Just uneasy.