Poisoned Kisses

by Stephanie Draven

  It was all starting to come together now. This was the war Marco couldn’t stop fighting. The war that he’d promised to fight. But look where it had led him. “Are you giving them justice, Marco, or revenge?”

  “Maybe a little of both,” he said, prying the top off a crate to reveal a row of Kalashnikov assault rifles. AK-47s. Cheap to make. Easy to use. The gun of choice in civil wars around the globe. Kyra knew because she had seen them in Daddy’s armory. Hell, these guns could have actually come from one of Ares’ warehouses. And the thought made Kyra sick.

  “Ogun isn’t interested in justice and you don’t have to give him these weapons. He’s blackmailing you and you don’t have to give in to it.”

  “What options do I have? Can I defy a god?”

  “I do it all the time,” Kyra said, but Ares was her father. He’d only torture her; he wouldn’t kill her even if he could. They might not have the most loving father-daughter relationship but they were kin. The same couldn’t be said for Ogun.

  “Can Ogun be killed?” Marco asked. “Maybe with my hydra blood?”

  Kyra shook her head. “No. Your blood only affected me because my mother was a mortal woman. Ogun is a god. The worst thing you can do to him is deprive him of the forces that he feeds upon. War. Violence. Wrath…”

  She might as well be asking him to ensure world peace, and he knew it. “Can Ogun be captured, then?” He couldn’t look at her while saying the word. “Can he be chained?”

  Kyra bit her lip. The fact that she’d once intended to lock him up was still a fresh wound between them and she wondered if it would ever heal. “Perhaps, but not forever. And not by us. He’s a god of Africa. This is his realm. He’s most powerful here, and his bloodlust is obviously well nourished. Maybe if another god opposed him, or an army came against him…”

  Marco threw the crowbar on the floor and it bounced on the cement with an angry clatter. “Then I have to do what he wants. I have to get him the weapons.”

  “He’ll only use them to escalate the civil war.”

  “I have no choice, Kyra.”

  “Yes, you do. You could run. I know places in the world that Ogun would fear to go. And you can wear a thousand different faces. He might never find you.”

  “Run? If it was just my life on the line, that’d be one thing. But he has Benji and he has Ashlynn.” Right. Ashlynn. She took a deep breath knowing that Marco was going to blow his one chance to escape, because of the woman Kyra had all but single-handedly brought back into his life. He could run—he could even run away with her—but instead, he was going to go back for his simple mortal woman. Kyra tried to make her nymph’s heart cold and hard. “So you still love her.”

  He didn’t confirm or deny it. “Ashlynn’s an innocent in all this. I can’t let her be hurt because of me. I can’t live with that.”

  And Kyra couldn’t live with Marco becoming the minion of a war god. If he gave in to Ogun this time, he’d have to give in to him the next time and the time after that. Kyra knew how the gods were. She’d gone after Marco in the first place to keep Daddy from using him. She couldn’t give up just because another war god got there first. “Marco, I could infiltrate Ogun’s stronghold. I could free Benji and Ashlynn.”

  He looked dubious. “You can sneak into an armed encampment?”

  “I’ve done it before,” Kyra insisted. “As long as I’m careful and paying attention, I can make mortals see whatever I want them to see. Or nothing at all. I can fade so that none of the mortals would see me even if they looked straight at me.”

  “What about Ogun? He’s not mortal. Can he see you?” She didn’t want to lie to him. She didn’t want to lie to him ever again. So she said nothing. “No. It’s too dangerous,” Marco said with a note of finality. “You said yourself that you’re not as strong as you used to be. In the morning, we’ll load up the plane and I’ll fly it in to Rwanda. And I’ll need you with me.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there,” Marco said before leading her out and pulling the warehouse door shut. “If we’re going to save Benji and Ashlynn, we have to leave at dawn, so we’d better get some sleep.”

  In truth, Kyra was exhausted. She was hot and sweaty and wanted nothing more than a bath and a soft bed. But the closest thing to be had was a hammock in one of the empty barracks. She settled into the coarse net, not liking the way it suspended her body in the air. She let Marco find her a blanket and pillow, then watched him take a seat on an empty crate. His hands came to rest loosely between his knees, and in one of them was his gun. “No good-night kiss?” he asked.

  She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Do you want a good-night kiss or are you just trying to find a way to handcuff me to the door again?”

  He smirked. “Which would you prefer?”

  Kyra didn’t dignify that with an answer. “Aren’t you going to sleep?”

  “I’ve got too much to think about. But I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

  She pulled the blanket over her, ignoring its musty scent. “Why would anyone bother me?”

  “You didn’t disguise yourself on the way in. You’re an exotic, scantily clad woman surrounded by a bunch of soldiers. They’d be all over you if they didn’t know that you came with me, and that I’d put a bullet in any man who touches you.”

  It was a possessive and territorial thing for him to say—and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. But she might have liked it. “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

  Marco let his irritation show. “They all eyed you like wolves eye a sheep.”

  “Well, this sheep bites back.”

  “I remember.” He leaned back on the wall behind him, ejecting a magazine from his gun, then replacing it with another he fished out of his shirt pocket.

  “I can handle myself, you know. It’s not like I’m some wide-eyed virgin. I’ve had plenty of men before you.”

  Marco tapped the discarded magazine against the wood crate a few times, as if it was a habit. Then she realized it was annoyance. “Why would you throw that in my face?”

  Had she thrown it in his face? Maybe she had. She couldn’t say why. Maybe it was because the memory of Ashlynn, his sweet ingenue, kept tap-dancing on Kyra’s last nerve. “You started it.”

  “When?”

  “Back in Niagara Falls. The morning after we—” She stopped herself. What was it they’d done? It had felt like making love… “The way you accused me of tricking lots of men into bed. You’ve taunted me about it several times—as if you’re some paragon of purity.”

  “I was angry.” Marco tilted his head back, eyes on the industrial ceiling. “I was a jackass. I was just trying to hurt you.”

  He was actually admitting that he was wrong? Kyra couldn’t quite believe it. “No, I remember the way you looked when the vulture was taunting us about all my mortal lovers. What she said bothered you.”

  “No. It bothered you.”

  Kyra held her breath. Try as she might, she couldn’t come back with a smart-mouthed reply. There had been men, yes, many. But she’d lived for more years than she could count. It was foolish to wish he’d been the only one.

  “Kyra…you don’t owe anybody an explanation for who and what you are. You’re wild. Primal. Beautiful.”

  She didn’t want to hear him say it because she’d heard it all before. This is what all men loved about nymphs but it never held their attention for long. Once a nymph let a man do everything to her that he could’ve dreamed of, he inevitably returned to a woman like Ashlynn. Kyra glanced away, her emotions a jumble.

  “Look at me.” His tone demanded obedience, so she met his eyes. “On the rooftop, when we were dancing…the way you moved against me. The way your face looked when you came. You didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. I’ve never seen anything sexier, and nobody has any right to want you to be different. Not even me.”

  “But would you want me to be different?” Kyra asked. “If I could be?”

>   He didn’t even hesitate. “No. But I wish I was different.”

  “You can be…you weren’t always a gunrunner.”

  “I wasn’t always some face-shifting, doppelganger monster, either. My blood wasn’t always poisoned.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin and they were both silent until he said, “You said I was war-forged, Kyra. Is there a way to…to unforge me? Or is killing me the only way to get rid of my poisoned blood?”

  Again, she was silent because she didn’t want to lie. But neither did she want to tell him the truth. If she tried to explain to him about her inner torch—about how she might be able to use her powers to destroy the hydra within—she’d have to tell him about her mother, and she wasn’t sure she could bear it. But Marco’s eyes were so intently searching hers that she had no choice. “There might be one way.”

  He sat up straighter, his boots flat on the floor. “How?”

  “In the ancient stories, the only way to destroy a hydra was with a torch and a blade. The hero would chop off the monstrous heads and cauterize the wounds with a torch. I’m a torchbearer. I might be able to use my powers to illuminate your soul, to step inside you and cut away the poisoned parts and sear them shut with my flame.”

  That sent him to his feet. “So do it!”

  Kyra shrunk down into the hammock, sorry she’d mentioned it. “Don’t you remember what happened the last time I shined my torchlight into your eyes?”

  “Yeah. I blacked out and crashed the car. But we’re not on the road now and if I fall unconscious the worst thing that’ll happen is that I’ll bump my head on the cement floor.”

  “That’s not the worst thing that could happen. I caused that accident with just a short burst of light into your eyes—and reflected light at that. If I shined directly into your eyes for as long as it would take to find your inner hydra and vanquish him, it would…” She couldn’t say it. She just couldn’t say it. She fingered the peridot choker at her throat and tears welled in her eyes. “Look, I’ve tried this before and it ended badly.”

  “Given the alternative, how much more badly could it end?”

  Kyra sighed. “There are worse things than death, and you know it.”

  He didn’t believe her. He wasn’t going to listen; he wasn’t going to understand unless she told him the whole truth. So she did. She told him how Ares took her mother as a war prize, how he raped her, how he made her carry his child. She made Marco understand that if he was war-forged, Kyra was war-born in every sense of the word. “I only wanted to help her,” Kyra finished. “I only wanted to burn away the pain, but instead I left my mother blind and alone in the darkness of her own mind. She never recovered. She wasted away, a screaming wraith of herself, so lost and afraid. And I did that to her. Now the only thing I have left of her is this peridot choker.”

  She realized that Marco was holding her hand. The silent aftermath of her story stretched on so long that her tears had dried in salt streaks down her cheeks. She hadn’t even remembered crying them, and it embarrassed her that he should have seen them.

  “That’s why you were so compassionate with my mother at the funeral home.”

  Kyra bobbed her head in answer. She’d like to think she’d have been compassionate either way, but she couldn’t deny how much Marco’s mother had reminded her of her own. “I don’t know which mental illness has your mother in its grasp, but even if I vanquish your inner hydra, you may end up just the same way.”

  He nodded quietly. They both knew that a proud man like Marco would rather die than go mad.

  The hot sun sliced into the horizon over Rwanda as the soldiers finished loading the belly of the small cargo plane with weapons. Marco gathered an envelope full of materials that Kyra assumed were the necessary documentation they’d need at the border. He also made a point of asking for two shovels.

  She could see the tension in his shoulders and the terrible resolve in his eyes as he walked around the craft, checking the fuselage. But it probably wasn’t the olive-green-painted plane he was worried about; they both knew that by returning to the Congo, Marco was walking right into Ogun’s clutches.

  Finally, Marco slapped the side of the plane. “Time to go.”

  It was the first thing he’d said to her all morning. She’d discovered a lot of things about Marco since that first night she tracked him down in Naples. But almost none of them surprised her as much as learning that he knew how to fly a plane. Strapped in next to him, she tried not to show her unease at the array of gauges and switches in the cockpit. She watched Marco go through his takeoff checklist, calm and levelheaded, but it was only a veneer over the stress. He was chewing gum again, the muscles of his jaw bulging with every bite. “Do you need a smoke?” she asked, pretty sure she’d seen a pack tucked behind her seat.

  Marco put on an aviation headset and handed her a pair. “I quit, remember?”

  Kyra didn’t argue. Instead, she put on her headset and watched him press buttons and turn knobs with crisp efficiency. “What are you doing?”

  He squinted. “Calibrating the instruments.”

  A few moments later, Kyra wondered, “Why did you have them load shovels into the plane?”

  “Can you just—can you let me concentrate?”

  Kyra’s lips drew closed and she nodded. Then he turned on the engines one at a time, running them high. But they weren’t yet moving and the plane started to shake. This was so much worse than a passenger plane. It couldn’t be normal for a plane to shake this much. She knew she was supposed to be quiet but she asked, “Now what are you doing?”

  “Kyra!”

  She shut up, but as the plane rumbled its way down the pitiful excuse of a runway, Kyra had to squeeze her eyes closed for takeoff.

  “You really don’t like heights, do you?” Marco asked, once they were up in the clouds. His voice came loud and clear in her headset, over the noise of the plane, and it soothed her. It may have been the only thing that could. Gods above and below, his voice was a thing of wonder.

  When Kyra thought of Africa, it was the desert browns and hard-baked soil that came to mind. But peering over the propeller, she saw nothing but lush greens and blues. The clear water of Lake Kivu was nothing short of astonishing, and Kyra rapidly blinked as if she could not quite take in so much beauty all at once. Verdant mountains sloped gently into the water and palm trees swayed along the shoreline.

  She realized that he must have done this before. He must have made flights into war-torn countries hundreds of times before. But never like this. Never with the knowledge that he was trading with a war god. Never with the certainty that the lives of two people he cared about hung in the balance. She admired his steadiness, because her own palms were sweaty.

  “I don’t belong up this high,” she said. “The sky is for the gods. For the winds. Not for nymphs like me.”

  “You belong wherever you want to be,” Marco said.

  As the sun kissed the mist-covered jungle mountains below, Kyra asked, “Should I be worried about being shot down over Lake Kivu?”

  “The DRC doesn’t monitor their airspace. That makes it easy for people to fly in with weapons and fly out with diamonds, or other precious minerals. Like the stuff that goes into your cell phone. They’re stripping the country.”

  “Who is?”

  “Everybody,” was Marco’s reply.

  “It’s a shame. It’s beautiful.”

  “Looks like heaven,” Marco said. “But it feels like hell.”

  “That lake is so peaceful, though.”

  “Looks can be deceiving. It’s volcanic. It’s sitting on top of toxic gas. The whole lake could erupt any time…just like the Congo.”

  And they were going to be a part of it. By bringing these guns to Ogun, they were going to set off a man-made eruption and they both knew it.

  Chapter 18

  Marco’s gaze was on the airplane graveyard below where carcasses of abandoned and crashed planes rose up from the tall grasses. Cracked steel and brok
en glass littered the ground. It was a wasteland of bent propellers, rusty turboprops and twisted landing gear. And unless everything went according to plan, the plane he was flying now would probably join them. The strip should be just over the horizon so he banked the plane to the left, into the wind, then lowered the flaps.

  “What are you doing?” Kyra asked. “I don’t see an airport.”

  “You think the DRC is just going to let me land a plane full of weapons in one of their airports?” he asked. “We’ve gotta land here.”

  Kyra’s lips trembled behind the mouthpiece of her headset. “But it’s just a—a field!”

  “Look a little closer and you’ll see the dirt road if we’re lucky. Otherwise, I’m going to have to put this tub down in the grass.”

  “Are you insane?” Kyra asked, legs tensed in anticipation.

  “Keep it together, Angel.” Marco angled the nose up and pulled back on the throttle. He wanted to slow the plane down as much as possible, and he didn’t like how muddy things looked. If the ground was too soft, if a wheel hit a hole, they could be in real trouble. They descended and Marco tilted toward the wind. The plane began to rattle. The wind buffeted the plane madly, as the ground rose up before them.

  It was a close call. The wheels hit the mud and skidded, an eruption of smoke and dirt billowing behind them. He brought the plane to a jerking stop, and then there was silence. “I told you I’d never let you fall,” Marco said, feeling smug.

  To Kyra’s credit, she never screamed. But now her eyes were glassy and dazed, as if she were sick with fear. “This was revenge for the car crash, right?”

  “No, I forgive you for that.” He thought, in that moment, he might have forgiven her anything, but she had to push her luck.

  “What about pretending to be Ashlynn?”

  “Still working on it. Now, listen,” Marco said, once he’d shut down the plane. “I need to hike into Goma, and I want you to stay here with the plane. I don’t think anyone saw us land, but if you hear anyone coming, don’t do anything brave. Just hide.”