Sacrifice

by N. Isabelle Blanco

As a Nymph’s body should be.

  Damn it all.

  Turning away from her, I follow her example, switching to dark jeans, black tactical boots, and a long-sleeved shirt in the same shade.

  She makes a sound under her breath and I know she’s bothered by the fact that I matched my outfit to hers.

  Tough shit. This is about practicality.

  “This place is as guarded as any army base,” I tell her, mapping out where I sense each trained fighter in the vicinity. “Perhaps even more so.” It occurs to me as I continue my mental scan that maybe this is part of what Hades meant.

  Listening to what the voice of Power has to say.

  How it yearns to grow. To gather more force.

  But also how it’s capable of showing me what I need to win any battle. How many people. What they’re capable of.

  What their weaknesses could be.

  “I know,” Megara comments; I’d forgotten that as an Erinye, she’s able to sense the possible threats in our surroundings. “And we’re supposed to stay out of mortal affairs.”

  As in: stay the hell off the human radar.

  If there’s one thing we’ve all agreed on since the “modern age” began, it’s that humans are much better off believing we’re fiction. “We can dematerialize inside.”

  “Still won’t know where to go, exactly. Also, if Cyclops truly is down there, are we sure these humans are clueless to our world? Or that he doesn’t have some other type of contingencies in place to keep our kind out?”

  All valid questions. The kind a fellow warrior would, and should, ask.

  As I said, her mind always was highly intelligent. Analytical. These questions, however? They come from experience. Eons spent at battle.

  Hate how she came upon this knowledge, what it cost her; fucking admire the shit out of her for what she became in the midst of it all.

  Hades would’ve never chosen her as an assassin simply to hurt me. Even if that’s his goal, he still had to have seen something in her that made her worthy of such a prestigious rank.

  Of course she was.

  “Our best chance is to risk it. At least in short spurts once inside. Bypassing all forms of security on the outside is best.” I point to the West, where the edge of the facility sits on a stretch of private beach. “There’s an entire barracks off to that side. They’re expecting possible infiltrations.”

  Meg curses in a low breath. “Which means the camera surveillance is going to be even worse than we imagine.”

  “Camera surveillance?” I chuckle wryly. “Try sensors. The works.”

  Our stares meet as soon as the last word leaves my mouth and it’s like we’re sucked into the past at the exact same time.

  My fourth labor: Capture the Erymanthian Boar.

  Centuries are stripped away. This area of California is replaced with the Grecian countryside. In the background, the Erymanthus mountain looms over it all.

  And us, in that little town, the one terrorized by that angry, giant pig every single day, brainstorming what my best approach to cornering the animal would be. Megara’s brilliant idea that I lay in wait to ambush it from the back.

  The beast had been wild, without a shred of sentience, yet it had followed the same fucking path down that mountain on a daily basis. Picking the spot to hide and wait for my moment to come up behind it hadn’t been hard.

  Staring at Meg in that flowing, white peplos--the traditional women’s attire of the time--and the way it dipped low at her breasts. Later, Theseus had mocked my lack of concentration, my inability to tear my eyes away from those mouthwatering tits.

  By then, I’d seen them, of course. Had felt them. Tasted them.

  Had held them along each side of my dick and thrust against them.

  Who the fuck could have ever blamed me for being obsessed?

  My eyes drop to them now, visible through her dark gray tank top and open leather jacket, and the memories become razor sharp once more.

  The taste of her skin never did stop haunting me.

  “So yeah.” Expression shuttered, Meg turns away to stare over the facility’s sprawling grounds. “We have to dematerialize straight to the lowest floor and hope they don’t have too many sensors in place. Also that we end up in the right spot to avoid cameras.”

  “I’m not too bad hacking into systems, just in case.”

  That earns me an appraising glance over her shoulder. “When you say ‘not too bad’, does that mean ‘human genius’ level? Because that’s what we’ll need to shut off their kind of alarm systems quick enough to hide our presence.”

  “There are other ways to hide ourselves even if I can’t do it fast enough.” The shield that Hades somehow instantly taught me how to make, for one.

  “What do you--”

  I walk past her, cutting her off. “Let’s do this, Meg. Something tells me standing out on this road isn’t too smart either. I don’t sense anything close by, but for all we know, they’ve already caught us on camera.” Hoping she’ll simply follow, as she did when I was hellbent on getting to Catoblepas, I break apart my molecules, envisioning the inside of the facility.

  Seconds later, we’re reforming in a small, brightly lit stairwell. Hand on her chest, I ease Megara against the wall, eyes bouncing throughout the entire space.

  “Don’t see anything resembling a camera,” she mumbles, slapping my hand away.

  Okay. Get it. She doesn’t want me to touch her. Understandable perhaps.

  Infuriating nonetheless.

  Ours, the rage growls in my mind.

  Easy there, buddy. This female hasn’t been mine in a very, very long time.

  FIX IT!

  Shit. Those aren’t instincts. Maybe they never were. One thing’s for sure. That’s definitely a secondary voice of its own I’m hearing.

  Actually, the third of its kind. I’ve recognized the voice of Power since the gift was granted to me.

  So what the fuck has also been in me this whole time? What is it that I’m about to allow to take over me?

  “You might want to try hiding those marks in case we are caught.” Meg does her own cursory check of the stairwell and puts more distance between her body and mine. Her eyes dim to a regular purple shade--which isn’t regular in the human world at all.

  Something I feel compelled to remind her of. “Violet eyes aren’t the norm in their realm, either. Only like six-hundred people on this entire planet have them.”

  Brows scrunched, she turns her head toward me. “And how in the hell would you know that?”

  Obsession.

  A compulsion that’s ruled my life for too long.

  Not that she needs to be informed of this. “Forget it. We can’t afford to be caught anyway. And, no. I don’t think I can hide this.” I motion to my jaw. While lost in the fog of my wrath and need to kill Catoblepas, that was one of the few things I was conscious of.

  The sensation of yet another mark appearing along the back of my neck and side of my face.

  “Whatever, then. Let’s just do this.” Brushing past me, Megara eases open the door of the stairwell slowly, peeking her head out. “Lucky fucking us. We ended up in one of the maintenance areas, I think. It’s dark out there, no cameras that I can see.” She steps just outside the door.

  I follow after her. “Won’t last for long. We probably should’ve tried getting our hands on the plans for this place.”

  “No time. The sooner this is over, the better.”

  I’m left trailing in her wake after that cold comment, chastised and feeling stupid about it.

  Come on. What did I expect? I’d waltz back into her life, ready to be her hero again, and she’d fall into my arms like that first time we met?

  It doesn’t take us long to reach where this tight hallway ends--a plain door marked “Corridor 2549” with a regular push bar handle.

  Meg pauses with her hand on the bar. “There’s cameras on the other side.”

  “Yup.”

  “And those senso
rs.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Cameras are the bigger issue, though.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  No doubt suspicious about the level of enjoyment in my tone--but fuck me, just being with her once more is a hell of a high--she throws me a narrowed side-eye look. “I’m assuming you’re fast enough to avoid camera detection, at least, God of Power?”

  “Likewise, assassin. Let’s do this.”

  Just like that, she sends the door open in a fast blur, rushing out to the other side. I’m right on her tail, making sure to close the door just as quickly.

  Then we’re running. Dematerializing. Alternating the two as we rush down a much larger, sterile, white hallway. On a hunch, I visualize that invisible shield Hades created, the one he said could hide anything.

  Meg nearly trips as it circles her, head twisting side to side while she looks around. That narrowed glare is thrown my way once more, but she doesn’t stop nor slow down.

  Good, good. She understands. Maybe the shield is effectively hiding us from the cameras, maybe not, yet we’re here for one of the most famous, supernatural beings in history.

  The Cyclops.

  Or one of them, anyway.

  Shit. I hope it’s just one of them.

  Right as it’s sinking in how woefully unprepared we might be for this mission—information is power, after all—the lights above our heads flicker once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  A fourth, this one longer than the last.

  They aren’t the only things reacting.

  Every piece of technological hardware in our vicinity glitches as we rush by.

  “It’s the shield!” Meg calls over her shoulder, skidding to a sudden, violent stop in a semi-circular . “Lower it. Now. Cyclops will know what it is!”

  I drop the shield instantly, eyes on the deep skid marks her heels left in the floor—

  Megara and I spin in tandem, glancing at what seems like thousands of small, glowing red orbs twisting in our direction.

  Focusing on us.

  The fucking cameras.

  “No idea where to disable them. Go! Just go!” she shouts, dematerializing toward the hallway directly in front of us.

  The one that seems to be made of glass panels.

  Ignoring it, I flash right behind her, my mind on the fact that the alarms haven’t begun ringing yet. They have us on camera by now, no doubt, but for some reason, the call-to-arms hasn’t sounded.

  No visible reaction to our presence.

  Which can only mean one thing: we were either expected, or whoever is running this place isn’t bothered by us here.

  I’m so busy analyzing either possibility, that I don’t realize Meg’s reformed and come to yet another stop--

  Plucking me from the air with what most be a skill granted to her by her Erinye side, she forces me to gain form next to her, halfway down the glass hallway we rushed into.

  The one that’s actually a cell block of sorts, with shit on the other side of those glass walls that scrambles my mind instantly.

  CHAPTER 8

  – ANAXE Corporation

  Inceville, California (USA)

  HERAKLES

  “What in the actual fu . . .” Herakles can’t even finish his sentence.

  Don’t blame him.

  On the other side of the glass we’re facing, a grotesque, unnatural scene is playing out.

  After thousands of years in the immortal world, even while spending most of my time in Hades, I can safely say I’ve seen weird shit to top all kinds of weird shit. Things that baffle the most educated and imaginative minds.

  And the sickest.

  I’m a freaking succubus, for the gods’ sake. Freaky is an everyday thing in our world.

  Yet what I’m seeing on that other side . . .

  Can’t hear anything going on in that cell, but as a mechanical, see-through tentacle attaches itself, suction-cup style, to the writhing, humanoid mass beneath the owner’s body, my mind has no trouble supplying the soundtrack to what I’m seeing.

  The tentacle juts out of a man’s back, the skin around it red and inflamed.

  An open wound that never fully healed.

  His head’s turned in our direction and I see the perfection of his face. The unmarked, muscular planes of his body. That back wound and attached appendage are the only thing’s off about him.

  Well, that, and his extracurricular activities.

  The humanoid mass under him is definitely female. Her long blonde hair gives her away. But just as the tentacle coming out of the man is see-through, her skin has a damaged, translucent quality to it.

  Like her too-thin skin is in danger of melting off.

  Which it is. The end of the tentacle is a suction cup, one that’s hard at work. Layers of the woman’s skin shoot through the transparent tube.

  Layers that instantly grow back, replaced even quicker than an immortal’s ability to regenerate.

  The skin stripped away hurtles through the tentacle . . .

  And directly into the man’s back.

  That isn’t the weirdest part of all. With each chunk of her flesh that enters his body, the pleasure on his face multiplies and his thrusts become faster.

  Because that’s the thing. He isn’t just “feeding” off her.

  He’s fucking her while he does it, one large hand pressed to the back of her blonde head roughly, keeping her face smashed into the floor.

  The other beneath her, pressed to her pussy, holding her ass arched in the air.

  I can’t tell if she’s willing, or being forced, but my mind shatters in two directions at the scene.

  My Succubus side focuses on his cock, definitely engorged, definitely wet from the woman’s body, pistoning in and out of her.

  Every other aspect of me recoils at the disgusting abnormality of it and I stumble backward into Herakles, heart pounding.

  It’s that move—the sudden contact of his warm, tempting body—that sets off enough panic to get me moving.

  Need distance again. Now. Before I give into the hollow hunger that mutated male’s actions reawakened in my gut.

  I make it a few steps from Herakles when my attention shifts to the other glass walls.

  The other cells within.

  The occupants that have turned, one by one, to take in the two new intruders in this hallway.

  A girl rushes the glass of her enclosure, slamming into it. She can’t be more than a teen, perhaps fourteen at the most. She’s completely naked. Unabashedly, uneasily so. Head tilted to the side, chin-length white hair laying across her cheek, she studies us with her mismatched eyes—one fully black, the other iris a glowing, yellow shade, the pupil covered by a milky film in the same color.

  Trailing from each eye, along her cheeks, are marks reminiscent to the new ones Herakles has on his jaw, nape, and the backs of his hands. Except his are black with gold specks throughout. Each line on this girl’s cheeks is the color of the eye it’s leaking from.

  One black, one bright yellow.

  Her thin hands are pressed to the glass. The skin is parted along the palm lines, exposing the layers of muscle within. Those cuts expand and compress like a chest breathing.

  Or a heart pulsing.

  In the cell next to her, a young boy, around her age, skin black. Eyes lit up with light gray energy. Dots and lines of it reflecting under his skin, as if he’s a walking embodiment of the night sky.

  Tendrils of power in the same light gray color snake off his head, more smoke than beams of light.

  Another man in one of those glass cages, curled up on the floor. Shaking. Twitching. Skin changing between a rotting, vile-inducing texture to a silvery, mirror-perfect gleam. Back and forth. Back and forth. Each new quiver from his body triggers the puzzling shift.

  I’m in a state of shock I haven’t experienced in a long time, lost to the mutated humans in each of those cells. A few more of them sport extra, technological appendages like the
first man—the one fucking the female into the floor—but most of them are simply creatures out of their realm.

  Mortal flesh and blood, mutated into things it was never meant to be.

  A large hand wraps around my waist and I jump with a gasp; it’s Herakles, taking much needed control and leading me away from the cells.

  Away from that visual proof of the “scientific” desecration this fucking place is involved in.

  “It’s fucking ridiculous. I know. But so is their lack of alarm at our presence.” Ginger brows furrowed in concentration, he begins dematerializing us in spurts, dragging me along with him. “I’m starting to think Cyclops was expecting us and wants us here. And that he holds way too much power here.”

  On our fifth pause, bodies coming back together in front of more glass cages, I tear myself from his grasp. “What are we looking for?”

  “A clue as to where Cyclops fucking is.” That bright blue, narrowed glare continues its scan of our surroundings, and I hate how I’m momentarily fascinated by the angles of his face; loathe how the Nymph in me strips him down to nothing but his flesh and those new markings, already imagining his dick throbbing beneath my tongue. “Maybe a computer I can try to access information from.”

  Swallowing the lump in my throat, I ease further away. “You’re right. We should’ve been rushed by now. Cyclops definitely—”

  A single light at a time shuts off, darkness creeping in our direction. Inside their glass containers, those once human creatures react to the sudden change with cries of different volumes. My stare meets Herakles’ a mere second prior to the darkness fully enclosing us.

  And even then, those eyes glow, casting enough blue light to illuminate his features.

  A sinister, evil male is in his place, those angles made harsher by the shadows.

  By the mark cutting along his jaw.

  We’re going to fuck him.

  Eat him.

  Own every part of him.

  Oh, no we are fucking not. No. No. Plus, now isn’t the freaking time.

  It’ll never be the time.

  Blood rushing in my ears—pulsing viciously between my legs—I shove that voice away from the forefront of my mind and let my own eyes change back to their true form.

  A purple glow joins in with the one coming from his eyes.