by Addison Fox
“Look.” She pointed to the vast sky, stars blanketing the top of her viewing screen. “The zodiac, in all its glory, Zeus. It is innately balanced; no matter where you start, you always complete the circle.”
He watched her as she named off various constellations. He followed her hand as she pointed out the entire circumference of the skies, twelve equal houses that completed a full circle.
Themis sighed, wiping the lingering tears from her cheeks. “Perfect balance.”
“And you think twelve warriors are enough to protect your humans?”
“Twelve times twelve. They will cover the entirety of the globe, protecting man no matter where he roams.”
He had to admit, her plans had merit. He could give her this indulgence and alleviate the horrible guilt that wracked him every time he thought of her. Each moment he spent with their children—the Fates, the Hours and assorted others—only reminded him of his great failure to her: his inability to deny his great love for Hera, no matter what it cost others.
But could he capitulate that easily?
And what if Hera found out as she surely would? There was no end to the price he’d pay for granting Themis this request.
A no formed on his lips, nearly put to voice when the image in his mind’s eye of his wife changed, morphing into the visage of their daughter Enyo, goddess of war and his wife’s favorite child. As the image of his daughter took shape, an idea swiftly followed.
“I require an additional form of balance in order to grant you this.”
“Ah. The price. I knew there would be one.”
“Not a price.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Balance.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you propose?”
“My daughter Enyo. She will be empowered to fight you.”
“You can’t be serious. Her power is broad enough. Give her any more and she’ll destroy all humanity.”
Oh yes, this plan had merit. Despite his love for his youngest child, he recognized that Enyo had become a bit of a problem. This would get her out of his hair, while protecting his pride when Hera found out about his deal with Themis.
“Enyo will provide balance to your warriors. Take it or leave it.”
“Then grant me three things.”
A thunderbolt resounded as a sharp flash of lightning struck outside her door. The dark, dangerous smell of ozone wafted in through the open windows of her servant’s cottage. He narrowed his eyes, barely holding back the second bolt. “You’d do well to remember who is in charge.”
Her eyes stayed level on him, her spine straight as an arrow. “Three things.”
“Give me your list.”
“I require twelve more warriors.” At his raised eyebrows, she continued. “Gemini must have his twin.”
He quirked a brow. “An oversight in your grand plan?”
A slim shoulder shrug gave away nothing. “Additional resources, nothing more.”
“Second?”
“They are bound by common rules. Enyo is a goddess; my warriors are simply immortal. She can have no oversight into their plans. She will learn information like any other. She will have to ferret it out as others would. And if they must operate in secrecy, so must she.”
Although he knew this second rule would limit his beloved daughter’s fun, he had to admit it was a fair one. “Done. And third?”
“For every battle she loses, her power will diminish.”
Zeus ignored the sinking feeling in his gut that when Hera found out about his deal, he would have more than a few nights on the couch. He was too far along to give up his bluff now. “Then it is only fair that for every one she wins, her power will grow.”
Themis nodded. “Of course.”
“How many battles will she be given?”
“One for each of my warriors.”
“One hundred fifty-six battles? For all eternity?”
“Then she’ll have to select the ones that really matter.”
“And when these battles are over?”
“My humans will be left to their own devices. Either they will have learned how to live in the world in harmony, or they will deserve what the Fates have procured for them.”
“And what of my daughter?”
Themis’s eyebrows shot up. “What of her?”
“Upon the completion of these battles, will she be banished back here, to Mount Olympus, potentially in shame? Her mother would never allow it.”
“Her mother shouldn’t have birthed such a demon. Not only did she do so, but she proudly calls her the goddess of war.”
“She is still her child.”
“Well then, I’ll leave it up to you to tell Hera you don’t believe Enyo can succeed.”
Another thunderbolt dropped as the skillful trap Themis had laid snapped closed over his ankle.
His pride would not allow him to back out; nor would it allow him to truly acknowledge his concern that his daughter might not succeed.
“Make it so.”
The mirror winked out to darkness. He moved for the door, unwilling to engage in any more debate that might lead him even farther down a path he’d regret.
As he approached the door, a question came to mind. Why he’d even care, he couldn’t quite say. “And what of your warriors? Will there be no joy for them? No reward? The love of humans is your domain, not necessarily theirs.”
She leveled her gaze on him, the directness of her stare jolting another twist to his stomach. “Love, you mean? The joy of love?”
“Yes. Everyone seeks it. Even your beleaguered humans”—he tossed a hand at the now-dark viewing panel—“seek love.”
“I won’t stop it.”
“But you won’t encourage it, either?”
“Why should I? My warriors have a job to do and I want them to be strong.”
Zeus thought of Hera and the glorious need he felt for her that beat in his veins. “There is strength with love, Themis.”
Her gaze never wavered, but an odd darkness came into those glorious blue orbs. A death, of sorts. “There is only pain with love of an equal. Yet there is no love with anyone other than an equal. If my warriors can find a way past that dilemma, I will not stand in their way.”
Zeus wasn’t sure how long he stood outside her door, absorbing the bright sunshine of Mount Olympus. He knew only that long after he returned to the mansion he shared with Hera, long after joy illuminated Enyo’s face as he told her of her new challenge, long after the days had faded into years and years into millennia, he would never forget the look in Themis’s eyes—the darkness that had descended into them at the mention of love.
It was a death that rested solely with him.
Chapter One
Two Months Ago, the Tomb of Thutmose III, Egypt
Brody Talbot hit the desert floor with a thud and a muttered oath.
He hadn’t been this clumsy since his turning, millennia ago. While he didn’t love porting, he knew how to arrive without making an announcement of it. If he hadn’t flipped his body backward just as his molecules reassembled, he’d have landed on a napping dig worker.
As much as it galled him to admit, Quinn’s berating lecture had gotten to him. Damn their Taurus and his self-appointed, dictatorial approach to everything. Even now, the Bull’s words echoed in his ears. Get your head in the game, Talbot. You’ve been in Egypt for two fucking weeks and you haven’t found it yet.
Brody got to his feet, his gaze on the back of the still-sleeping form of the hired help—help he recognized from memory from the oh-so-catchy phrase LEAVE THEM WET emblazoned on the back of the man’s T-shirt.
Help, Brody admitted reflectively, was a subjective term; this guy had spent far more time ogling the bare-legged female archaeologists than doing his job of carrying waste and already-panned dirt from the tomb.
The temptation to shake the lazy shit awake nearly overtook him, but Brody fought the urge, instead moving toward the man to wake him up with a bit more finesse. After all, if he weren’t such
a sound sleeper, the worker would already have been running for the hills, screaming in all his superstitious glory about a man who had appeared out of thin air.
Brody reached the man’s side, a knife-edge of awareness skating up his spine. What exactly was this guy doing asleep back here behind the pyramid? And . . . shit.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Dark red colored the sand underneath the man’s chest. As Brody rolled him over, a low, breathy moan and the sight of a large gunshot wound greeted him. The wound was gaping, with congealed blood and clumped sand over the words emblazoned on the front of the guy’s ratty old T-shirt, FIND THEM HOT.
It was an old fireman’s joke the scrawny punk probably barely understood; his body did not scream I rescue people from burning buildings and his English wasn’t good enough to get the language’s odd nuances.
“Who did this to you?” Brody spoke in rapid Arabic, assessing the man’s injuries and seeking as much information as he could.
The man let out another low moan, his words coming in fits and starts. “The prophecy . . . has been . . . put . . . into motion.”
“How did you get back here? Who did you meet?”
Another gasp of air. Another keening wail. “They will not lose.”
They?
Brody knew he needed to go for help, but he also knew from the worker’s gurgled breathing he wasn’t long for this world.
“Who won’t lose?” The name Enyo was on the tip of his tongue, but he held back. “Or do you mean she?”
Brody accepted that the question was rhetorical as the dig worker exhaled his last breath. The brown depths of the man’s gaze, so full of pain mere moments before, grew peaceful in death, their sightless focus now on the blazing sun above.
As Brody stood to alert the others, he had to give Quinn his due. Their Taurean Bull might be a stubborn pain in the ass, but he sure as shit knew how to call them. Quinn had an eerie sixth sense when something was brewing.
What that something was exactly, they were all racing to figure out.
The bigger question at the moment, however, was who’d put a bullet in this guy. As a Warrior, Brody had been trained to suspect Enyo’s influence in every act of evil he encountered. But something was off. The goddess of war enjoyed the weapons of her own making far too much to put her stock in modern firearms.
Brody eyed the gaping chest wound again.
Nope. Not the bitch’s style.
What could this guy possibly know that got him killed? Brody did a quick scan of the area for something—anything—to give him a clue to what had happened. The weight of his Xiphos, concealed on his calf, provided a small measure of reassurance as his gaze swept the base of the pyramid.
Damn it, nothing.
The attack had to be recent. Brody had ported no more than thirty minutes before from this very spot. But desert winds had already eradicated any footprints, leaving no clues to who had accompanied the dig worker.
Another shot of awareness hit the base of Brody’s spine.
How could this guy have found his way to the back of the pyramid, engaged in something, got shot and already had a seriously congealed chest wound, all in under a half hour?
Brody lifted his gaze from the body to the endless stretch of the pyramid’s perimeter. He knew violence could wreak horrific damage incredibly quickly, but this murder smacked of a deal gone bad.
But how?
Neither he nor his Warrior brothers put a lot of faith in coincidence, but Brody’s predatory leonine senses screamed on high alert. Even without his predator’s sixth sense, it didn’t take a blinking sign to put the timeline together.
The worker must have followed him when he snuck off the dig, and then been followed by someone else.
Or maybe he was met by someone else—someone who possessed the same powers of interdimensional travel Brody did.
But who?
After thousands of years spent battling Enyo, he knew the rhythm, the feel of her influence. The execution was all wrong. The worker’s death was too clumsy, too . . . male. Someone had used an actual weapon on the scrawny mark, not the violent electrical current that pointed to Enyo’s Destroyers.
But why?
Brody leaned down and lifted the dead guy’s wallet. With one final glance at the body, he took off for the team assembled on the dig site. If he was lucky, the stolen wallet would throw everyone off the scent of what had really happened and give him a few extra days to continue his investigation.
He just hoped like hell he figured it out first.
Although the dig site buzzed with the news of the worker’s death, things returned to normal relatively quickly. Ahmet hadn’t been an integral part of the dig. Add to that his lazy attitude and barely there attendance, and few—if anyone—actually missed him.
The stolen wallet had helped. Although anyone who thought hard enough would know pickpockets weren’t exactly haunting the back sides of pyramids looking for random, easy marks to stumble upon them, it diverted everyone else’s attention and bought him a bit of time to investigate the real culprit.
But twenty-four hours later he wasn’t any closer to an answer.
Brody wiped his face on a rag and looked around at the assembled team, running again through a mental checklist of who might have had the motive to put a bullet in the team slacker. Just as with the last twenty times he’d gone through the exercise, he came up empty.
Add to that his being dog-tired from pulling an allnighter, roaming the slums of Luxor and then porting to ask more questions in the even shittier slums of Cairo, and frustration was ramping up faster than he’d like to admit.
The dig team members were deep inside the pyramid of Thutmose III, and all were engaged in their work. Some took photographs; others used the finest brushes to move thousands of years’ worth of earth; still a few others had pedestaled pieces they were working on, moving dirt away from the artifacts they wanted to study.
The luscious Marguerite, the chief graduate student on the dig, caught his eye over her brush and pail. He’d heard the rumors she’d broken up with her boyfriend. The hot stare and come-hither smile ghosting her lips confirmed it.
He smiled back, the response as natural as breathing. He might not have been Brody the Meek for the last ten thousand years, but the memories of his first eighteen years of life haunted him still.
He never turned down a willing woman.
Ever.
Even if he’d been enjoying the loveless interludes less and less of late.
As the promise of a very enjoyable evening shaped up, he shifted his attention to his work. His own pedestal had come together in the last twenty-four hours, a piece of funeral text coming into focus as he slowly brought it to full visibility out of the detritus of age.
He was actually enjoying himself. Every one of the Warriors contributed differently in their quest to save humanity. Brody knew his contribution—seeking out and dismantling the power of the tools of the ancients—had real value.
Relics had power. In times gone by, the command of the elements and the ability to channel their power had ruled the world. As superstition increasingly gave way to science and technology, those influences had waned, to the point that the average person no longer believed in the power of inanimate objects.
But he knew better.
The power that had been channeled into those inanimate objects wasn’t simply reversed by lack of belief.
Only by finding them and destroying them—as the equivalent of supernatural land mines—would he fulfill his role as a protector of humanity.
So what paranormal land mine were they currently sitting on?
Brody refocused his attention on the chamber. The undiscovered chamber had been missed during the tomb’s original discovery in the late nineteenth century.
“Dr. Talbot, as always, your work is excellent.”
Brody glanced up from the funeral text, directly into the dull brown eyes of Dr. Wyatt Harrison. As the resident patron of their dig sit
e, Wyatt made sure everyone knew it was his money funding their discovery efforts. The little toady roamed the dig, playing the charming, old-world scientist, encouraging everyone and building up the team, but Brody wasn’t buying the bullshit the doctor was peddling.
Something about the doctor rang entirely too false.
His pudgy body was out of place among the lithe forms of the dig team. Long days of hard labor had created sculpted bodies, well used to the work. Wyatt Harrison looked as out of place as a candy bar garnishing a salad.
“Thank you, Dr. Harrison. I should have it fully removed by later this afternoon.”
“Your assistance on this dig has been invaluable. I am so glad you managed to fit us in.”
I’ll just bet you are.
Brody had nearly missed the opportunity to join the dig, his lack of published papers almost losing him a spot on the team. It was only because of Quinn’s quick thinking—and a sizable donation to the other entity funding the dig—that Brody had managed to land a position. “I’m honored to be a part of history.”
Wyatt gave a small sigh as he made a production of looking around the room, mopping at the beads of sweat on his forehead. “I feel my brother when I’m in this tomb. He loved his work, but this tomb held a special place in his heart.”
“Your brother’s reputation and his work here are the stuff of legend.”
“I’m only sad he had but one season here at the tomb.” Wyatt’s dishwater gaze roamed the cavernous chamber. “Clearly, there would have been enough work to keep him busy for years.”
“His death has left a hole in the field that still hasn’t been replaced.” While Wyatt Harrison was the epitome of slime, his late brother had been his polar opposite. A refined scholar with a passion for archaeology, Russell Harrison was gone before his time.
“My niece tries, but her fieldwork is sorely lacking. Sadly, she doesn’t have her father’s gifts. She’s much better suited to her work at the museum.”
Brody tried to conjure up an image of the renowned archaeologist’s equally renowned daughter but failed. Anna? Amy?
Harrison wiped his forehead again. “Yes, Ava’s calling is definitely more scholarly.”
