Gods on Earth: Complete Series (Books 1-3): Paranormal Romances with Norse Gods, Tricksters, and Fated Mates

by Andrijeski, JC

Her mind detailed the realities of her current position, and somehow that connected in some part of her subconscious with her training.

  She moved at the end of that silence.

  Marion threw her whole body up into the air, using both her weight and muscles to swing up and back, to get as high as she could, rippling her whole body to throw the man off-balance. She came back down and he bent his back, allowing her feet to touch the ground.

  She landed, hard, on her heeled shoes, and immediately twisted sideways, angling herself towards the open part of his arm, where his hand was.

  The combination allowed her to twist free.

  She didn’t wait.

  Leaving her purse, she ran, as fast as she could, for the door at the end of the hall.

  She had to get to the main floor of the club.

  She had to get to Mike, the head of her Secret Service detail.

  Slamming her whole body into the silver bar across the middle of the door, she flung the door forward so that it banged into the wall, and flew through the opening.

  She ran until she reached the middle of the club, then stopped to look for Mike, skidding across the tile in the direction of the bar. Even with her attempt to slow down, she didn’t manage to get control over her speed or her body… or her shoes on the slippery flooring… not before she crashed into a group of partiers in clown wigs and negligees.

  They half-caught her.

  One nearly went down with her, and nearly dragged a third down with them.

  The rest of the twenty-something women in the group burst out in drunken laughter.

  Still gripping the one woman’s arm, Marion smiled back at them, trying to keep her expression together.

  When they resumed walking in the direction of the back booths, she disentangled herself, looking around again for Mike and Don, her security people.

  Her panic button was still in her bag.

  Her bag was in the corridor.

  She had to hope they’d seen her burst through that door.

  She had to hope they would be looking for her.

  She knew they were both here.

  She’d definitely seen Mike Rostroe, the head of her Secret Service detail, sitting at the bar earlier, drinking soda water with lime. The blond, forty-something, ex-Special Forces Marine tipped her a short salute when she motioned to him via hand-signals that she was going to the dressing room backstage to change.

  She’d already told him and Don that she’d be doing a dance routine for Charlie.

  Don Gerald, Mike’s younger, black, handsome-guy partner hadn’t been thrilled Marion would be doing what he muttered amounted to a “strip tease for a bunch of idiots,” but they’d agreed to wait for her out here, versus following her backstage.

  They’d talked about getting her a female agent who could more easily follow her into places men were less likely to be welcome, as part of Marion’s dad’s recent paranoia about her safety. They hadn’t done it yet, partly because Marion insisted it wasn’t necessary.

  Anyway, as Mike put it, “Marion could take care of herself.”

  Marion couldn’t take care of herself right now, though.

  She knew when she was wholly and completely out of her depth.

  She scanned faces at the bar, looking for Mike’s blond crew cut, his weather-worn face. She wanted to get the hell out of here. She didn’t feel safe, even though the guy hadn’t yet followed her out onto the club’s floor.

  Even surrounded by people, she didn’t feel remotely safe.

  Adrenaline spiked through her blood, telling her to run, but she didn’t want to go out on the street either, not by herself.

  She glanced to her left, saw the table by the stage filled with Hollywood types, the kids of rich people, young tech entrepreneurs, social media personalities. Joanna sat on the lap of the Irish actor, Harry, who still wore the Santa hat he’d nabbed when Marion threw it off the stage.

  She wondered if she should go to them.

  Safety in numbers.

  Plus, a fair-few of them had bodyguards too, including the Irish actor who grabbed her. She could go over there, hide amongst their fame and riches, eventually find her Secret Service guys, get the hell out of here.

  She’d just started walking in that direction, when a hand caught her arm from behind.

  Marion didn’t think.

  She spun around.

  Instead of using her leg this time, since the person was standing, she yanked her captured arm back and down, using the momentum and her waist to slam her other palm upward, throwing all of her weight behind the strike.

  The man standing there slid easily, gracefully, effortlessly out of the way.

  Disturbingly effortlessly.

  His evasion was so precise, so completely calm, Marion might have been moving in slow-motion.

  She was used to being able to move pretty fast compared to most men.

  That, and the length of her legs, were about the only advantages she had.

  With this man, apparently, she only had her legs, and likely not even that.

  She stared up at him, panting, unable to look away from those coal-black eyes.

  She recognized him immediately.

  It was the man who’d been watching her while she danced on stage. Now that she could see those obsidian-black eyes close up, they seemed to burn with an inner fire, like hot coals glowed subtly inside his pitch-black pupils.

  Something about those eyes struck her as deeply strange.

  Not just strange––otherworldly.

  Not quite frightening, but there was power there, an intensity that made her suck in a breath. She stared up at him, and his expression didn’t move for what had to be a few seconds.

  She realized he might not know who she was.

  Now that she wasn’t wearing the furred bikini or the six-inch heels with knee-high stockings, he might not even recognize her from earlier that night, at the club.

  She was wrong about that.

  She was wrong about both things.

  When he spoke, his voice was shockingly, jarringly deep.

  “Marion,” he said. “You’re not safe.”

  She blinked, her lips parting slightly.

  She was about to say something back––hovering between asking him what he meant, asking him how he knew her name, asking him who the hell he was, and telling him to let her the fuck go, right now––when someone else grabbed her arm from Marion’s other side.

  As the hand on her bicep wrenched her backwards, a second person, a bald mountain of a man with a tattoo across one side of his face, wrapped a thick arm around the throat of the big guy with the coal-black eyes who’d just told her she wasn’t safe.

  Everything happened fast after that.

  Marion twisted sideways, trying to free herself from the new hand holding her…

  …right as something pricked her neck, making her gasp.

  She felt a hard pressure.

  Something got pushed forcibly into her skin.

  A syringe.

  Someone emptied a syringe of something right into her bloodstream.

  Terror exploded in her mind, spiking her adrenaline.

  It probably only carried the drug through her bloodstream even faster.

  Marion couldn’t feel the effects of whatever they’d given her, not yet, but she already knew it was too late.

  It was too late.

  A clock ticked over her, telling her it was too late.

  She glanced over at the black-haired man with those odd, volcanic eyes, just in time to see him flip the tattooed bald guy up and over his head as he jumped up and then fell to one knee, throwing his weight backwards to land the bald, tattooed mountain onto the tile with a sickening crunch.

  The black-haired man with the deep black eyes straightened, rising to his full height as the bald man fell forward, landing like dead weight onto his broad back.

  Marion stared down at the bald man’s face.

  She wondered if it was the same person wh
o tried to get her in a sleeper hold in the corridor, who called her “kitty,” who threatened to snap her neck… and decided it was.

  She was okay with him dying.

  She was okay with the dark-eyed man taking care of him.

  Even as she thought it, she leapt over and past the bald man’s inert form, trying to get to the dark-eyed man herself, trying to get away from the man with the syringe.

  Then she saw a fourth guy go after the big guy with the obsidian-black eyes.

  She felt fingers grip her arm, dragging her backwards.

  She turned to her left, and now she saw Mike Rostroe, head of her Secret Service detail, running towards her, his mouth open in a shout as he touched his ear. She saw his partner, the handsome Don Gerald, running towards her from the other end of the bar.

  The drug was doing its work now.

  Everything was slowing down, turning dreamlike.

  She leapt past the bald guy, only to be jerked backwards in midair, falling on her back.

  She stared up at the lights rotating overhead.

  People shouted all around her.

  She heard screams.

  Marion looked up, fighting to focus as she was dragged back, across the slick floor, two men on her now, one on each side…

  She saw him, then.

  The black-eyed man stood over her, staring down at her on the floor.

  She saw him grab his current attacker by the wrist, twist it down and sideways, forcing the man’s body to follow with it, until he had the guy face-down on the floor.

  Her two Secret Security guys were running towards her, too.

  They were running for her, but somehow, Marion couldn’t look away from the man with the obsidian eyes, watching the flame there grow brighter as he stared at her.

  She saw rage there, in his face, despite the stillness of that gaze.

  Somehow, that didn’t frighten her, though.

  Truthfully, she found it strangely comforting.

  That was the last thing she remembered seeing as everything grayed around the man’s face, all of it darkening and leaving colored spots, screams, shouts of panic and confusion––

  ––until there was nothing left but silence.

  7

  A Cold Wind

  S he came back to consciousness slowly.

  It felt like wading through Jell-O at first, like she might be stuck inside some kind of sticky, gelatinous void. Marion grew aware that some part of her was hearing and seeing things, but she had no idea where she was, or what was happening to her.

  Something vibrated her skin, bones, teeth, flesh.

  She heard a voice speaking.

  She was cold.

  Shivering, she lifted her head from something semi-soft, blinking at the light from a low, round window just above eye-level. She squinted into the sunlight shining there, then realized she was looking at clouds. She was in an airplane. She wasn’t in the passenger cabin of a commercial airline, not even in coach.

  She definitely wasn’t riding in a private jet.

  She was in the cargo hold of something a hell of a lot bigger.

  Glancing down at where she’d laid her head, she saw blood on a dark coat she didn’t recognize. A heavier coat had been wrapped around her shoulders and back, and she pulled it closer as she sat up, shivering even more violently than before.

  It felt like she was turning to ice.

  Looking down at herself, she realized she was still wearing the gold dress.

  She even had on the matching shoes.

  Staring down at her bare legs, then at the blood stain and black marks on the front of the dress, she looked around at the rest of the cargo hold, bleary-eyed.

  A few things were finally sinking in.

  It was sinking in that this wasn’t good.

  Marion didn’t quite put the rest of it together until she turned her head to the left, hearing a screeching sound of metal that somehow penetrated the thick, grinding hum of engine noise, and the freezing cold wind whistling through the enormous hold.

  By then, she’d noted half the cargo hold was filled with crates, filling much of the cavernous space on both sides. In the center, she saw what looked like five covered cars, likely luxury vehicles, from the lettering on the covers, along with a helicopter tied down on one side of the ramp, its propellers bouncing lightly in the wind and mild turbulence.

  She looked back at where she’d heard that screeching noise.

  Someone was coming down a ladder.

  They descended from a catwalk above the main floor.

  Marion saw broad shoulders, thick arms in a black, form-fitting shirt, dark pants, and overall expensive-looking clothing and shoes.

  His black hair already had her holding her breath.

  His outline had her staring, waiting for him to turn.

  She remembered the bald guy from the club, her two Secret Service guys, at least three other guys who grabbed her––men with faces blurred by dim lighting, the drug they’d injected in her neck, flashing colored lights. None of those faces had been distinctive enough for Marion to recall their exact features, apart from the mountain-sized bald guy, whose face was half-covered by a tribal tattoo.

  She had only flashing impressions of most of them.

  Blue eyes on one, red hair.

  Blond hair on another, brown eyes, a cruel smile.

  Marion was pretty sure he’d been the one with the syringe.

  But the man who reached the bottom of the stairs and turned around wasn’t any of those people. He wasn’t one of the three or four men who’d been dragging her, drugged, across the sticky floor of the club.

  He wasn’t one of her Secret Service guys, either.

  It was him.

  It was the guy with the strange black eyes and that incredibly still face.

  His somber expression looked exactly how she remembered it.

  He walked directly towards her across the metal floor of the hold, his balance unaffected by the jerks and dips from turbulence. His mouth looked like it was carved out of stone, his high-cheekboned face as difficult to read and unmoving as she remembered.

  His dark eyes burned with that dense, coal-like, inner light, even in broad daylight.

  She watched his eyes longest of all, still staring up at them as he approached.

  He looked her over, his expression as still as glass.

  Then he motioned towards his temple.

  “Your head,” he said, speaking over the sound of the plane’s engine. “Does it hurt? How do you feel?”

  Frowning, Marion reached up, mirroring what he’d done with his hand and touching her own temple. She winced, feeling the lump there, and a sticky feeling. Remembering what she’d seen on the jacket someone gave her as a pillow, she swallowed.

  She should have realized those stains came from her.

  When she withdrew her hand, her fingers had spots of still-wet blood on them.

  She was staring at her red-stained fingertips when the tall man with the broad shoulders sat down beside her on the metal bench.

  She jumped, but again, he seemed unfazed.

  “I tried to wake you,” he said, still speaking over the engine. “I was not comfortable with you sleeping… not with a head injury. Then I found the syringe mark. Once I realized they’d drugged you, there was little I could do but wait for the effects to wear off.”

  He studied her temple, frowning.

  Reaching under the bench, he pulled something out from under it.

  Marion watched as he pulled out a leather bag, what looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel, or even a men’s toiletries kit. Whatever it had inside it, the design of the satchel, with its zipper across the top and a silver and bronze buckle, struck her as utterly dated.

  He held it towards her almost as an offering.

  “I can clean it now,” he said, still speaking louder than what felt natural, but not as loudly as when he’d been standing over her. “The wound. I didn’t want to disturb you before.
Other than to make sure whatever they’d given you wasn’t dangerous.”

  Thinking about the face of the man who drugged her, Marion winced.

  Still looking at the black-eyed man, she laid a hand on her throat in reflex. She was hours too late to protect herself, but some part of her wanted to try anyway.

  “You fought well,” the man remarked, giving her a faint smile. “I should have reacted more quickly, but it turned out, you were quite skilled…”

  His eyes shifted to the hand she had pressed to the side of her neck.

  That shadow of a frown crossed his lips.

  “Not much you could have done against that,” he said. “You were still struggling even when you were only half-conscious––”

  “Where am I?” she blurted.

  He fell silent, his dark, silent eyes locked on hers.

  She released her neck, lowering her arm to her lap.

  “Who are you?” she pressed. “Why did you take me? Where’s my protective detail?”

  The tall man with the obsidian-black eyes didn’t move at first.

  Then, setting the leather satchel in his lap, he unfastened the buckle, and unzipped the top. He pulled out a small, soft-looking piece of cloth, squirting some kind of gel on it.

  The gel smelled like alcohol.

  Marion felt herself stiffen anyway, staring down at it.

  She had visions of being overpowered and chloroformed, of having him press that cloth against her mouth and nose until she fell back unconscious.

  Setting the leather bag down by his feet, the man held up the piece of cloth cautiously, almost as a form of asking permission.

  “May I?” he said politely.

  Marion swallowed, staring at those dark, fathomless eyes.

  “What is it?” she said, although she already knew.

  “Alcohol,” he said promptly. “To clean the wound you sustained when one of the men hit you in the face, trying to get you to stop struggling.”

  Pausing at her flinch, the man added,

  “If it helps, I hit him shortly after. He fell to the floor. He fell much harder than you did, and sustained a much more serious injury. I wish I’d gotten to him sooner, but I was busy fighting off two others in their group.”

  “Who are you?” Marion said, still with no hostility, only bewilderment. “Are you going to tell me? Why did you take me? Where are you taking me?”