Medusa's Heart: A Contemporary Paranormal Erotic Romance Novel

by Joey W. Hill

  “Asshole,” John murmured without rancor.

  “Yeah, the asshole that might just save your ass.” Maddock propped his head against the Dumpster and closed his eyes. Drawing in a breath, he spread his hands out loosely on his knees as if he were centering himself for a meditation. He wasn’t the Zen type, but JP guessed it was indicative of the effort Maddock was about to expend. “Once we leave this cover, I’ll break the protections. You two just keep moving forward. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Yvette commented. Maddock made a rude gesture at her, but it was absent-minded, his focus obviously still internal.

  “I’ll cover you in whatever way is needed,” he added to John.

  “Sure you can keep up?” JP asked.

  The wizard’s teeth flashed in the darkness. “I’ll do my best. Just for the record, Lot was pissed he couldn’t come. He said having to secure other portal perimeters against MyTech is cutting him out of all the fun.”

  “Yeah.” However, as John looked at the light filtering through the warehouse’s upper windows, his humor died away. He wished Lot was here, too. He would have felt better having the SEAL watch his six with that assault rifle.

  Christ, John didn’t know how she was doing or what she was enduring. He was going to lose his fucking mind.

  Maddock put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Hey. We’re getting her back, JP.”

  “Yeah. Goddamn right.” He hefted the assault rifle and got ready to move. Just please God, let her be in one piece.

  “I’d intended to do this in more controlled conditions, but this way we get what we want much faster, and it will be better for you, too. I fear our time is very limited.”

  This man, the one obviously in charge, had arrived about a half hour ago. His voice was smooth and accented, his words broken into crisp syllables. He sounded calm and kind, which was what made him more frightening to her than the others. There was a detachment to his kindness, as if everything being done to her was an unavoidable necessity, and nothing she could say or do would convince him otherwise.

  She still had the bag on her head, but they’d removed the other bindings and strapped her down to a cold metal table.

  Now he gripped her arm. She fought down the panic as he inflicted a sharp pain upon it. She was helpless to whatever they wanted to do to her. The sharp thing was still in her arm, and he put something over it, something sticky to hold it in place. “You see?” he said, pleased. “If you give me what I want willingly, it increases the power of the gift. You probably know that, don’t you? Most women do.”

  “What…do you want?” Suddenly, her head was swimming and felt so heavy. Her snakes were sinking down, their coiled bodies piling up on either side of her head. When the rope loosened and the head covering was pulled away, they thumped limply onto the table surface. No. She wanted to gather them up and cradle their insensate bodies in her arms.

  She felt a suffocating moment of fear, thinking they were dead, but then she realized she could still feel their hearts beating in time with her own. They were alive. Whatever thing he’d just done to make her feel so dizzy and confused, teetering on the edge of sleep, had affected them even more quickly. She struggled to stay conscious, terrifyingly aware she was losing that battle. She couldn’t tell where she was. It was a large room, the ceiling far above with crisscrossed metal beams and high rectangular windows lining the upper walls. There was an acrid smell to the place, as if animals had inhabited and abandoned it long ago.

  The man continued speaking in that nightmarishly reasonable voice.

  “The spell that turns people to stone manifests through your eyes, but it is driven by a part of your brain. That’s where the coding for the ritual is based, and I can lift out that programming and inject that programming into other brains. A set of protective goggles for those soldiers, and some lucky general will have a small army of men who can turn their foes to stone.”

  “You want to use it to hurt others.” She didn’t understand everything he was explaining, but that was clear enough.

  “You have hurt others. You know it is often justified. It does not have to be your concern. A beautiful woman should not be involved in such matters. I can take it all away. You can go back to before Ukrit came into your life, and I can change that timeline so he never does. Even better, you will have no memory of anything that was ever done to harm you. Or that you did to harm others. How would you like that? To see your sisters alive again? All of them.”

  His tone became more soothing, and there was a clicking noise, a slight discomfort as he seemed to adjust the sharp thing. “There we go. Just imagine it. Seeing your sisters…”

  Her vision swam. She tried to keep her eyes open. Her eyes were open, weren’t they? But she was no longer in that large room with the smell of disuse.

  She was in the temple.

  She knew this had to be a trap, but how could it seem so real? She swayed on her feet. The priestesses were all there, beckoning to her, smiling. It was morning prayer time, which happened right before breakfast. Callidora’s eyes were dancing as if she had some particularly good gossip to share with her.

  Oh Goddess. She didn’t feel it… That oppressive weight of memory, of something beyond her awareness or recollection, but something she knew was bad. Had been bad. But it had never happened. Bad things happened to other people, not her.

  The feel of it, of never having experienced whatever it was she couldn’t remember, swept her with ebullience. How could she have not realized how heavy that weight had been? The pieces of her fragmented mind twirled together like dancers at a festival. She was laughing, squeezing Callidora’s hand, seeing Klotho’s admonishing but fond look for both of them. Her friends. Her family. Her life, before it was all taken away. She could have it back.

  “Yes, you can. All I need is that.”

  She looked toward the smiling, pleasant-faced bald man. He was standing at the entrance to the temple, on the steps. He had eyes like a raptor and a strong body. He was gesturing to her hair. Putting her hands up into her thick tresses, she felt five braids. He wanted her hair?

  He shook his head, pointed again. Lifting the braids, she saw she had several ribbons twined around them. “Just those,” he said. “A favor from a pretty girl. And you can have everything else and never lose it again. Ever.”

  She fingered the ribbons. Priestesses gathered around her, young ones who had been here not much longer than she had. They giggled at the man’s attention as he smiled in such a charming, intriguing way.

  But two others were pulling on her hands as if they wanted to take her away from him. They were her friends, her sisters, but different from the other priestesses. One appeared to be blind. The other wore bangles on her wrists and a pretty gauzy skirt that flowed around her ankles, like a traveling gypsy. She liked their differences. They wanted her to come play.

  “You can’t go play, you can’t have any of this, unless I can have the ribbons. It’s the price, you see. For happiness. Just those ribbons, freely given.”

  Something was missing here. Something niggling at her. Pulling the ribbons free, she held them in both hands, tangling them over her fingers, twining them over her wrists. The man had taken a step closer. His smile had not wavered. He smelled good, like open fields and baked bread.

  “It’s festival day,” he reminded her. “The day you sing to the city people, eat sweets and dance. Let me have the ribbons, pretty girl, and you can dance for the rest of your life. No cares, no fears, no worry. Only laughter and dancing and happiness.”

  Yvette made short work of the two guards on the western side of the warehouse. Maddock muttered something about her being a show-off, and breached the double doors with a quick flash fireball that knocked out another two inside the threshold.

  As they moved swiftly down an echoing corridor, the concrete floor recorded the slap of their hurried feet. Yvette moved past them, a blast of air. Three men rounded the corner ahead. John dropped to a kne
e to take aim and make a lower target, but Yvette was already there. She knocked one’s head into the wall, swept the leg of another and punched the third in the face hard enough he crumpled where he stood.

  “Why am I here?” John complained to Maddock.

  “You’re here to get the girl.” Maddock said grimly. “Don’t worry. Save your energy. You’ll likely need it. This battle isn’t going to be won with brute strength.”

  There weren’t many places to hide a captive, especially one who had to be kept sedated. They found her quickly, if the six guarding a hallway that led to a far more substantial door were any indication. The warehouse had apparently once had a refrigeration area.

  This time Yvette used John’s help. As she took on four, he met the other two, using the butt of his gun to take one down, but the other had to be dispatched with the combat knife, no help for it.

  They progressed to the door, and Maddock took care of it, ripping it off its hinges with barely a pause and a wave of energy that felt like being on the sidelines of a storm surge. It reminded JP exactly why he liked the guy so much.

  Yvette went in high, he went in low, but the muscle had been focused outside. It was a temporary lab, populated by two techs and a man in a suit.

  John snarled his rage at the sight of Medusa and her snakes, all of them lying far too still on a table. She was hooked up to blinking machines and surrounded by a variety of medical equipment. The man in the suit was between him and her, not a safe place to be, but he pivoted toward them with a calm look on his face that warned John to lead with his wizard and vampire sorceress, not his emotions. Yvette and Maddock, in accord, spread out to flank the man, John standing at ready for whatever opportunity they provided.

  “Tyrone, get the fuck away from her,” Maddock said with a calmness that held the fury of compressed hellfire.

  “Considerable reinforcements have arrived.” Yvette spoke in a low voice to JP, her expression tightening at some communication she was receiving within. “Merc and Marcellus need help to keep casualties to a minimum.”

  “Go to it,” Maddock said shortly, showing he’d heard her as well. “We’ve got this.”

  She was gone in a blink. “Marcellus and Merc could kill all of them where they stand,” Maddock said. “Believe me, it’s tempting.”

  John understood that all too well. He wasn’t above putting the three in front of them into early graves. There was something wrong with Medusa’s face. He couldn’t tell if blood was on it, or something else, but he had to get to her. Now. The techs weren’t fighters. They were looking from him and Maddock to Tyrone, showing their nervousness. He could scatter them like birds with one stream of gunfire.

  The man in the suit spoke, his voice grating with a patronizing mildness. “Maddock. Concede defeat on this one. Walk away. You lost this pawn.”

  “It’s not a fucking chess game, you British ass. She doesn’t belong to you. To anyone, unless it’s this guy right here. And that’s just because she wants to belong to him. You try to keep her, he’s going to end you.”

  John leveled the assault rifle at him and Tyrone’s lip curled in derision. “Such weapons mean nothing to you and me, Maddock. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but it gave me a moment to re-charge my batteries.”

  John had been within the blast zone of IEDs. Recognizing the swelling of energy preceding the big boom, he dropped and rolled away from Maddock without being told.

  As that force exploded from Maddock, Tyrone was ready for him, shielded against the onslaught, and hurling his own back against him. It was the firestorm Yvette had feared, but at least not producing fallout a forensic lab could trace.

  Ducking a fiery hail of projectiles lethal as bullets, John was gripped by terror, but not for himself. Then he realized there was some kind of force field over Medusa, protecting her. The techs had scampered for cover.

  He didn’t know who was providing the force field. If it was Tyrone’s it could knock him out if he tried to clear it. He rolled and then crouched at Maddock’s side, debating whether to just rush it and take the chance. Maddock was a little busy to answer questions. Or so he thought.

  “Get in there,” Maddock snarled. “Put your hands on her and I’ll take you the rest of the way into her mind. You have to talk her out of what he’s doing to her. He’s excising a part of her brain. Consider it a magical lobotomy. If he gets her past a certain threshold, she’ll give up what he wants and she stays a happy vegetable the rest of her life.”

  A crash jerked John’s attention to the upper windows. Three guys rappelled down, armed to the teeth the same way he was. He sprayed them with the assault rifle, sending a mental apology to Yvette for abandoning the low profile idea.

  He got those three, but more were coming in. Fuck, they had to be special ops, because they were as well armed as he was and they weren’t hesitating under fire. But almost as soon as they landed, two of those were yanked off their feet and casually tossed into walls, where they bounced off like a kid’s stuffed animal and collapsed.

  Merc slowed to a speed that could be detected by human sight and did a somersault, giving JP a quick salute. “Yvette and Marcellus have the perimeter,” he called out. “I’m your muscle for whatever Maddock can’t do while you handle your shit. Just get it done so we can get out of here.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. Dashing forward to Medusa’s side, John set aside the rifle and put his hands on her face. As he looked at her, it felt like a lightning bolt went through his chest. Tears of fury clogged his throat. “Christ…”

  They’d burned out her beautiful eyes, leaving charred sockets. The remains of viscous fluids still stained her cheeks. What the fuck?

  He was going to murder that fucking British prick. For a second, even what Maddock had told him to do was swallowed by the rage, the desire to charge right into the fray between the two wizards. But everything wavered like a TV losing signal. He swayed on his feet.

  “Hold onto her with both hands,” Maddock bellowed. Another explosion of light made him and Tyrone disappear. John didn’t know if that detonation came from without or within. But he held tight to Medusa. He wasn’t letting go. He wasn’t…

  Medusa loosened the ribbons from her hand and began to offer them to the nice man.

  “No. Those are mine.”

  She frowned. From the shadows of the statue of Athena, a man shuffled forward. A hideous-looking man, cloaked in foul clothes, hunched over. A beggar. The priestesses cared for beggars. Ostensibly, because they could be gods in disguise, but humans in such need also deserved compassion and care. Perhaps he was hurt and needed tending.

  While the nice man wanted the ribbons, he was well-to-do. Surely he wouldn’t deny charity to a beggar.

  “I will buy him clothes and give him a place in my household,” he assured her. “He will value that more. Give me the ribbons and I will give him the care he needs.

  “Those are mine.”

  She gasped. The beggar morphed into someone else. Someone tall and straight, who made her afraid. He stepped forward, his hand out, his cold eyes pinning her in place.

  “They are mine. You are mine. You must trust me. Come with me.”

  “No.” As she started to back toward the nice man, darkness gathered around the man who’d been a beggar. He’d turned into someone she feared. Though she couldn’t remember why she feared him, words came to her lips she didn’t understand. “I can’t go with you. You’ll hurt me. I’m not yours. I was never yours.”

  The darkness loomed up over him like a waiting monster. “Look into my eyes, Medusa. See the truth.”

  “Do not look into his eyes,” the nice man said sharply. “You know what happens when you look at someone.”

  She heard the distant wailing of female voices and recoiled from the shadows that closed in around her, as if the sun had disappeared in full daylight. “The truth is fearful and painful,” the nice man scoffed. “Why would you wish that on her? Why do you wish to cause her pa
in, to take from her?”

  “I have no desire to take from her,” the man who frightened her responded. “Only to give to her. And I would never cause her pain. But I know she is strong enough to endure pain, to face truth, because she is strong enough to love.”

  The nice man tried to step in front of Ukrit. She knew his name now, and it filled her with loathing, but that voice…she knew that voice. It didn’t remind her of Ukrit.

  “Everything you are belongs to you, Medusa,” Ukrit with the non-Ukrit voice said. “It is yours, to give or take. I am yours too. Do not let anyone take any of it away. You promised yourself you’d never let anyone take what you did not willingly wish to give.”

  “She willingly wishes to give me the ribbons,” the nice man pointed out.

  “She has not decided. It is her choice. Look into my eyes, Medusa. Don’t be afraid.”

  She didn’t want to look in his eyes. She never wanted to look in his eyes again. Even as a statue in her garden, she never looked into his eyes. Because she had, when he’d raped her, and it was like looking into the soul of all evil. “No,” she whimpered.

  “Don’t look with your eyes,” he said. “Look with your heart.”

  The nice man was struggling to block her view, to stand in front of the other man. She saw a white snake slither between her feet, followed by two black ones. One rested around her throat, a slim collar with a light flickering tongue. She started as another, its skin rough like tree bark, coiled around her calf.

  Ukrit couldn’t move either, or was choosing not to move. Yet he was there, suddenly closer as if she’d summoned him, as if she wanted him closer. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

  She slowly, slowly lifted her lids, fighting the part of her that screamed at her not to do it, not to face the pain and shadows. She wanted to be a girl who ran through the temple hallways with her friends forever, who would never know pain or fear. Who had not killed her friends and family. Who had listened to an elderly woman before she turned her grandson to stone.

  But if she did that, she would also never know love. She hadn’t realized that before, but she did now. Love that grew out of suffering and hard-earned wisdom was the strongest kind there was. And the worthiest of treasuring.