Battlefield Love

by Skyler Andra

  I folded some of my hair over my ear. “Where were you stationed?”

  Headlights reflecting on his face showed his distant eyes. “A few different places.”

  This time there was a clear shutdown in his voice, and I nodded. I had fielded more than a few calls on the phone sex gig from veterans, and the ones who wanted to talk really wanted to talk. The ones who didn’t, well, they sounded like Rane did.

  I was ready to let well enough alone, but after a moment, Rane spoke up again.

  “It comes with the territory,” he said, and this time there was a reflective tone in his voice. “I don’t think any of Ares’ avatars haven’t been fighters of one sort or another. I get flashes of their lives sometimes.”

  Alarm flashed through me, leaving me wondering if I was going to start getting those too or if my weird situation would prevent it. Oh, god. I rubbed my forehead. Visions of naked bodies in sexual embraces were the last thing I needed.

  I glanced under my raised arm. “Are they bad?”

  Rane laughed again, and this time there was a mirthless sound to it. “I’ve got my own bad memories. Now I have a bunch of other people’s as well. The Battle of the Somme, Gettysburg, something I don’t even understand in Mongolia maybe.”

  He shook his head, banishing those memories back to wherever they lived within his mind, where it was best they stay.

  My heart pinched for him. I could only imagine the horrors he must have witnesses not only in this life, but having to relive those of others.

  “It’s a strange life to say the least,” he mused. “I assume it’s similar for all of us.”

  Something propelled me to touch his arm to bring him what little comfort I could, but I held back, unsure. “But maybe you wish that you hadn’t drawn god of war when they were handing out lots?”

  “Better me than someone who can’t cope,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve had bad days, and I know what those bad days would have looked like on someone else.”

  For some reason, that matter-of-fact response made me ache. Impulsively, I reached my hand out to rest it on his. We both felt it at once, a warmth that shaded towards heat, that was languorous and sweet.

  Without warning, Rane pulled the car over and turned towards me. His blue eyes were dark with a sudden strangeness, and for the life of me, I couldn’t take my eyes off of his lips.

  “Rane,” I said.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said softly, and he leaned in to kiss me.

  Okay, so I’d been kissed before. I was your basic red-blooded American early twenty-something, and I’d had my share of kissing and groping and sex. Believe me when I say that I’d never had a kiss like this one. It was fireworks on a hot and still July night. The pure relief of plunging into a cool pond on a summer day.

  I kissed Rane back and something opened up inside myself, something that stretched and smiled and needed him just as much as he needed me. I leaned towards him, and before I knew what I was doing, my hands came up and wound in his dark hair, holding him close and refusing to let him go.

  God, he tasted so good, and when his tongue came to trace along my lips, I opened my mouth to savor him better. I ended up slithered around the gearshift, almost in his lap, unable to get enough of his body against mine. I’d never had a man like him before, never felt a body that strong and that taut, as if he waited for me to give him permission to do something.

  His hands landed on my waist, pulling me closer, and I gasped a little when his body responded to mine. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to reach down and to measure the length and girth of his cock in my hand, but that would mean letting go of him, and I couldn’t do that.

  Chapter 8

  We might have tumbled out of the car to have sex in the cornfield if a vision hadn’t appeared in my head. One moment, I was touching Rane, kissing him as if I drank something I had never known, and the next, I was in a dark stone temple lit by torches. I stood at the foot of an enormous statue, one that was strange and entrancing all at once, completed with pendulous breasts and wide hips, the arms, legs, and head that were merely a suggestion. The musky sweet sense of incense burning everywhere suffocated me, and a rising chant echoed from the walls. I didn’t understand the words, but then, I didn’t need to. Somehow I knew it reflected the beauty of love, of sex, of the vulnerability needed to lie your body down with that of another person and the power that could come from it.

  I turned to see a pale body laid down in the darkness draped in strands of pearls and nothing else. That person, that sacrifice was all for me, and I wanted him so badly.

  With a shout, I pulled away from Rane, shaking like the last leaf on the tree in autumn, and I stared around me, pressing my body against the opposite side of the car again.

  The vision was so intense that I expected to wake up in my apartment as if this had all been some kind of weird dream. Nothing would have been real and I would have gone back to my life the way it had been before all of this madness.

  Instead, I was in a crappy car with the avatar of the god of war, who stared at me with wide eyes. For a moment, I was so confused that I almost reached for him again. I felt as if the world spun out of control, and I needed something to stabilize myself.

  “What the hell was that?” Rane’s voice was as harsh as the desert wind, and I jerked back.

  No, this was all real. The autumn sun heating the interior of the terrible car, the stolen clothes I wore with no ID or cash on me, and I had just kissed Rane.

  “I… I don’t know,” I panted. “One moment, we’re kissing and everything is okay, and then the next I’m in this temple, and there’s this man all covered in pearls and then…”

  “That’s a flashback,” Rane said impatiently. “They happen. You’ll get over it. I meant what the hell happened before that?”

  That felt pretty damned unfair when he had kissed me just as hard as I kissed him. “Um. That seems fairly self-explanatory, doesn’t it?”

  If anything, Rane’s expression grew darker. “What the hell kind of game are you playing?”

  “Game? What are you on about?”

  “You used your power on me. You manipulated me.”

  “I did not!”

  My first instinct was to deny it, because it sounded so damned sleazy, but then I had a moment where I wondered if he was right. I had put my hand on his, and then something had happened. We were being possibly chased by archetypal men in black, so why had we pulled over to neck like high school seniors skipping school?

  “I…I don’t know what happened.” I stared out the window.

  Rane took a deep breath, and in the reflection of the glass I saw him running his fingers through his dark hair. A small part of me murmured at his soft hair, how it was just long enough to get a good grip on, but I told that part of myself to shut the hell up. It had certainly gotten us into enough trouble.

  Growling something I couldn’t quite parse, he pulled back onto the road with quick, jerky movements. Even if he was as weirded out by what had happened as I was, he drove without letting it affect him.

  After a few awkward moments of silence, he said, “I’ve never spent a lot of time with the other avatars,” his voice calmer now.

  He didn’t look over at me at all, and that relieved me because it left me wondering if this was his cheap attempt to move on from what had just happened between us.

  “No?” I turned back to face the front of the car.

  “I think some of the others might be more sociable.” He squeezed the steering wheel for some reason. “I mostly prefer being on my own. Hermes, Mads, is the one I see the most, and we’ve never really gotten along all that well.”

  My body was just beginning to calm down from the experience with Rane, and it left me edgy and twitchy.

  “Troubled loner, got it,” I muttered, not entirely graciously.

  Instead of taking offense, Rane laughed a little. “You’re not wrong. The war…it changed me…along with Ares when he chose me. My patro
n’s the same way, from a lot of the stories I’ve read. Maybe all the god infighting is why he’s so full of anger.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know what it’s like for the other avatars. How they channel the powers and the wills of the gods.”

  “How does it look when you do it?” The moment I said it, I knew that I’d walked into something dark and buried.

  Rane went as still as that stone statue I had seen, and even if he looked straight ahead, there was something blind in his gaze. “It feels like fire,” he admitted. “Suddenly, I know what’s wrong with the world, and I know that if I just show them how strong I am, how I can hurt them all if they don’t do as I say, I can fix it.”

  That was a messed up view of the world. Ruling with a dominant hand. But I knew it didn’t come from that place within his heart. Something within me interpreted it as a solution to a problem with all the world’s conflicts.

  Tentatively, I reached my hand to his again, and this time, only a human warmth flowed from it. Rane flinched slightly at my touch, but he nodded as if he realized that there was nothing godly about it at all.

  “And that feeling is,” he told me, “is the most amazing feeling in the world. I’m lit up with power, and I know that everything will be right or made right when I’m done.”

  I winced because I had an idea of where this was going. “But it isn’t?”

  He grinned, all sharp teeth and grief. “Never.”

  Conflicts solved with violence were never the way. Where had it gotten humanity? Over thousands of years? Just more hatred, intolerance and cruelty.

  “You know,” Rane said, leaning his head across to me. “Ares doesn’t always use a heavy hand to resolve conflict. Nowadays he prefers other means, like treaties and negotiations. But they don’t always work when there are dick leaders involved. My patron only reserves the fire and brimstone for when shit hits the fan.”

  That was somewhat comforting to know, and I appreciated hearing this other side to his god of war, because that would have been the way I’d have dealt with things if I were in Rane’s place.

  We tried to get back onto the freeway exactly once, and were on it for about twenty minutes before we both spotted a pair of dark cars with tine windows behind us. The vehicles stayed close enough to us that my stomach bunched with nerves just looking at them. A couple of times Rane slowed the car, as if checking whether they would overtake us, but they didn’t. Those nerves exploded with fear as the cars paced us for another ten minutes.

  At the next freeway exit, Rane cursed softly and then swerved the car so hard, my stomach felt as if it had been left behind on the asphalt. Our car went off the exit so fast that the two other cars had no time to follow suit.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, driving us off into the countryside somewhere.

  I tugged at the seatbelt that had dug hard into my chest. “You don’t think those were the guys after me, do you?”

  He shrugged, but I could tell from the apprehension in his eyes that he did. “Better safe than sorry. We’re going to be on the backroads for a while.”

  “All the way to Seattle?” I asked, rubbing my chest.

  Rane looked troubled. “Yes. If I can get in touch with Mads sooner rather than later, he might be able to fix things for us, get us some fake paperwork or some untraceable tickets for a plane. It’ll just take us a little while, that’s all.”

  I might have looked dubious about traveling the longer and slower route. What if the dark cars got off at the next exit and found us again? There’d be less traffic around to conceal us. A greater ease to trap us. Less witnesses to deter them from pulling out their guns and Tasers. Knowing the potential that existed in Rane for destruction, I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave some poor person’s property charred ruins after he was finished with the men in dark suits.

  Rane offered me a slight smile. “It won’t be so bad. The going’s a bit slower, but I won’t get us lost. I know this part of the country like the back of my hand.”

  He did, too. We stayed on the backroads, and despite the strange circumstances surrounding us, I couldn’t stop myself from enjoying the trip. Fall was setting in, turning green to gold and orange, and sometimes, once in a very long while, it was easy to pretend that Rane and I were on some kind of fun road trip.

  We didn’t talk about the kiss. He prickled whenever I came close to bringing it up, and the idea of making the kiss happen without his consent made me pretty queasy. Once or twice, though, I caught Rane touching his lips and looking at me out the corner of his eye. When I glanced at him, he turned back to his driving, leaving me wondering if he didn’t mind it happening again.

  ****

  We spent the first two nights sleeping in the car, and each time I woke up feeling like my bones had been filled with gritty sand. On the third night, however, we crossed through the vastness of Wyoming, and Rane reckoned that parking at a motel would be less obtrusive than leaving the car on the shoulder of the road or a rest stop.

  “Wow, do you think the murder comes free with the room?” I asked, examining the long low row of rooms with a flashing sign overhead, reminding me of every horror movie I’d ever watched.

  Rane just gave me a look before entering the dimly lit reception where a clerk behind a desk smoked a cigarette and watched the football.

  The bored clerk took Rane’s forty dollars without bothering to get either of our names and gave us both two keys without glancing from the TV screen.

  In spite of my reservations, the room was startlingly clean and smelled of cleaning products and air freshener. As I roamed the small space, looking for blood on the walls, behind the bedhead and in the bathroom, Rane turned the air conditioning up and pulled the blinds down.

  I raised an eyebrow when he tucked the room’s only chair under the doorknob. “Paranoid?”

  “Beats realizing that the clerk walks around to rob people at four a.m,” he replied.

  “This is really the best time,” I said, jumping on the bed. “Thank you so much for bringing me along.”

  Rane grinned. “Only the best for you, pretty girl.”

  I’m sure he had meant it as a throwaway line, but it made us both freeze, as if there was something that was meant to come after it. Rane coughed, and for some reason, I didn’t want to hear him recant it.

  “I’m taking the first shower, all right?” I said before he had the chance to. “Decide what you want to do with the bed. I’m okay sharing, but if you’re not, we’re going to have to flip for it.”

  I left without giving him a chance to challenge that. In the shower, I stood under the blast of cold water and willed it to wash everything away. All the panic of being chased out of my home by intruders, the cops on the lookout for me, the black suits crawling all over the diner. After the few days of travel, sleeping in the car without a shower, I felt so grimy and tired that it was a miracle that Rane even called me pretty. I wondered if everything that had happened was just some kind of delusion. It all sounded ridiculous. Rescued by a godly avatar, stealing clothes from a penthouse, meeting a god in a cornfield, and now traveling to Seattle to find out what the hell was going on with me.

  That white light I’d seen in my apartment could have been a stroke. This could all be some kind of dream. Stuck in a hospital bed in a coma seemed a more likely reality than inheriting the power of an ancient Greek god. C’mon!

  Somehow, though, everything felt incredibly real. It was as if the life I had had before was false, and this was the real world, blossoming with potential and extra vividness, and I wasn’t sorry to be where I was. This was good, and I didn’t know why.

  I hung up my dress to air on the back of the door. No way was I leaving that behind. Not after all the effort Mads went to, to steal it for me. I rinsed out my underwear in the sink and hung it over one of the towel racks. It might be damp in the morning, but it was better than nothing, and I didn’t care if Rane saw it.

  Of course that left me with nothing to wear in
front of Rane, besides a towel wrapped around my body, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. Then my own practicality stepped in, and I was almost angry. The avatars had dragged along on this ridiculous journey, and if Rane had a problem with me, he could damn well help me get some more clothes.

  When I came out of the bathroom, he blinked and gawked a little as if he hadn’t seen a naked woman in quite a while.

  “Sorry, no clothes,” I said. “Had to leave my place in a hurry.”

  “Ahh,” he said. “You should have said. I would have stopped to get you something.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing we can do about it right now. Your turn for the shower.”

  Rane wasn’t leering at me by any stretch of the imagination, but I caught him sneaking a peek at me as he passed by on the way to the bathroom. A spark stirred in my chest. I certainly didn’t mind the admiration.

  Stretching on the bed, I stared at the cracked ceiling overhead. Seriously, what was my life right now? Destined to be on the run for the rest of my days? I hoped now.

  In a few moments, the water started to hiss, and I imagined Rane stripping out of his jeans and T-shirt, revealing a body hard with muscle. From what I’d felt of him, he didn’t have the overdeveloped gym body I had seen a lot of guys get. You could tell that all of his muscles and all of his strength came from actual work.

  It occurred to me that I probably should have been at least a little afraid of Rane. He had already proved that he was quieter and faster than I was after he’d tracked me down in the cornfield. The man moved through the world like a shark, utterly sure of what he was doing and what was going to happen. I couldn’t tell whether it was something that came from being the avatar of Ares or if it was something that was just inherent in him. But for some reason, the sense of danger that seemed to crowd around Rane wherever he walked didn’t bother me. Instead, I was beginning to realize that that danger was something that drew me to him, like a needle pointing towards true north. A strange sensation engulfed me, apprehension blended with excitement.