Goddess of Fate

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Luke opened his eyes and looked out at the water and was hit by a sudden vision of the moon spilling a shimmering path over the bay...and three female figures walking across the water...

  Walking across the water?

  Yeah, right. That was all part of that crazy dream.

  And yet the image was so strong, so...

  Real?

  He turned to Aurora, tensely. “Did you give me something last night? Drugs?”

  Her eyes widened. “No. No, of course not.”

  “I’m not going to be angry,” he said patiently. “That was good work you did on...” He indicated the bandages. “I just need to know why I’m seeing some of the things that I’m seeing.”

  As he said it, he remembered some bizarre conversation they had had as she was fixing him up.

  “Last night...” He looked at her. She looked back with that incredible clear blue gaze. “Last night you said...”

  There was a knock at the door. Luke instantly tensed, reached for his Glock. She saw his reaction. “It’s just room service,” she said quickly, reassuringly. “I thought you’d be starving.”

  Actually, he was.

  The bellhop brought in a table with half a dozen covered plates, a pot of coffee and a pitcher of orange juice, plus a huge spread of an omelet, fruit, sausage, bacon and steaming muffins in a basket.

  “All for me?” He grinned, but there was something touching about the excess.

  “You need to get your strength back.”

  He sat and dug in, while she poured him coffee and juice and buttered a muffin for him and passed him dish after dish.

  He flipped quickly through the newspaper as he devoured the omelet and a side of sausage, but there was not a word about a police shooting or any kind of incident down at the pier.

  He checked his iPhone, which was working again. In fact, the clock above the fireplace had started again, too, which was odd for no reason he could pinpoint.

  Pepper had texted: Mars, where the hell are you? Get back to me.

  And the lieutenant, several times, all variations of the same message: Check in NOW.

  Luke sat back, frowning.

  All of these calls and texts...after he’d gone in on his own and gotten shot.

  Why did no one show to back him up?

  His nagging thought from the night before returned.

  My CI phones about a shipment. I show up and none of the rest of the team is there and I’m shot, nearly killed.

  He suddenly turned over his iPhone, pried open the SIM card tray, and removed the card. Without the card, no one could track his movements through his phone.

  “What?” she asked. She’d barely eaten anything; she was just watching him.

  Someone’s dirty. Someone a lot closer to me than my CI.

  He stood, too agitated to stay seated, although his leg protested. She looked at him, wide-eyed, waiting.

  “I think someone in my department wants me dead.”

  And he looked at her, and for a moment a wave of paranoia washed over him. But at the heart of it he couldn’t believe she was any kind of enemy. She’d saved him, fixed him up, fed him, and seemed nothing but sweet and helpful, if evasive. Even so, too many weird things seemed to happen around her, and he had work to do. Enough was enough.

  He pushed back his chair and stood. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. You actually have been an angel. But I’m on the job, and I need to get to the bottom of this. So I’ll be leaving now.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said softly.

  “So you did kidnap me?” he said, only half-serious.

  “No. You can go, you just can’t... I have to be with you.”

  “Or what?” Luke pressed.

  She took a breath. “I’m afraid you’ll die.”

  This again. He ran his good hand through his hair. “All right, look. Last night, you said some pretty weird things. Something about...Norns,” he said, and waited.

  She blushed so beautifully he wanted to lean over and take her face in his hands, taste those red lips...

  “Well, maybe I should just say I’m here to help and leave it at that,” she said.

  “So you’re here to keep me out of trouble,” he said, amused in spite of himself. “You haven’t been doing that great a job.”

  She flared up. “You haven’t been making it easy.”

  Despite the craziness, he was amused, and touched. “I bet I haven’t,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  She seemed breathless again, blushing. “It’s worth it,” she whispered, and he had a sudden strong desire to take her in his arms. She caught her breath, as if she knew, and there was suddenly a magnetism between them that made his own legs weak. She stood and looked at him, and he swore he could feel her heart beating.

  “I’m taking a shower now.” He turned and walked toward the bathroom, then he paused at the doorway. “I’m going to need some help.”

  She turned a deep crimson, and he felt himself go hard as a rock. Oh, yes, this is going to be fun.

  He walked into the bathroom.

  Aurora stepped into the doorway.

  Luke had already turned on the glass-walled shower and the room was steaming up.

  He turned and looked at Aurora. “These pants are going to have to come off,” he said, his voice low and rough.

  She moved up to him and stopped in front of him, looking into his face, while her hands found the button of his jeans. He could feel her fingers on the taut muscles of his lower belly, her nails grazing his flesh as she unbuttoned him and slid the zipper down, her fingers tracing the path of the zipper.

  She slipped her hands into the waist of his jeans and slid the denim down over his thighs, her hands lingering to cup the taut cheeks of his ass. He sprang loose from the cloth, hard and already throbbing.

  He bent and kissed the hollow of her throat, his tongue teasing her flesh. She gasped and shivered, but her fingers were reaching for him, touching tentatively, then stroking until he growled into her neck.

  “I’ve...never done this before,” she said softly.

  “Because you’re a Norn.”

  “Yes. No. I...”

  Luke reached for her and pulled her against him, his hardness pressing into the thin silky cloth of her dress, between her legs. She breathed in and he bent to kiss her neck again, as his hands moved up her waist to the fullness of her breasts.

  “You feel like a woman to me.”

  Her nipples were hard in his hands and he stroked them as he bit his way up her neck and then covered her mouth with his own, teasing and then demanding with his tongue. Her hips moved rhythmically against his as he kissed her harder, deeper, and now one of his hands moved down to her thigh, sliding up the satiny skin to the enticing cleft between her legs. She was wet on his hand, making soft noises in the back of her throat that made him stiffer, harder; the blood was pounding in his head.

  He kicked off his jeans and backed her into the shower, where the water instantly soaked her dress, making everything transparent. He bent his head to her breasts and tongued her nipples; she was moaning now, bowed under him, her nails digging into his ass.

  He raised his head and crushed his mouth down on hers again as he pulled up her wet dress, lifting one smooth thigh to wrap around his waist as his ready cock sought and found her center, teasing...and then plunging. She cried out and arched against the tiles of the wall, wrapping her legs around him and riding the waves of pleasure, and what he smelled was honey, and what he felt was honey, and the sweetness made him explode in heat.

  Chapter 8

  Afterward, Luke realized he had never felt so sated and so comfortable all at once. They were both in a daze. They had managed to make it into the bedroom for a second round and now lay skin to skin. Even in repose, every curve of Aurora’s luscious body seemed to mold perfectly into Luke’s.

  Making love with her had settled the human versus Norn question for him. She might be delusional, but she was all woman.


  “Is that your idea of ‘taking care of’?” he asked, and her face flushed even more prettily than it had been.

  I could get used to it, he thought, startling himself.

  He bent and kissed her so thoroughly he almost lost himself again, but then he kicked back the blankets and stood up from the bed.

  “You are some kind of goddess,” he said, his voice husky. “But I have a bad guy to find.”

  He went around collecting his clothes. Every piece of clothing he had been wearing had some kind of bullet hole and bloodstains.

  “There’s a general store in town that sells clothes,” she said, sitting up with a sheet pulled across her. She did look like a goddess, wrapped in white robes.

  “Good, I’ll stop by there,” he said, trying his best to focus on the task at hand.

  “I’ll get dressed,” she said before he could argue, and scrambled out of bed, pulling the sheet around her. Which considering everything that had just happened—twice—was rather charming. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, looking at him before she ducked into the bathroom.

  Well, all right, so he had an assistant and driver for the day. Maybe she was a nut, but for whatever reason, she wanted the job, and she might come in handy. It was better than alerting the department to his nondeceased status.

  Besides, he felt good with her. More than good—she seemed to be good luck.

  * * *

  In the bathroom, Aurora found her legs were so shaky she could barely stand, and not just because she’d just been so thoroughly...tended to. She was weak with desire, flushed and, incredibly, hungry for him again. She didn’t want to do anything but lie with him—in bed, in the shower, on the balcony, wherever he wanted.

  But they only had one day and it was already slipping away.

  Luke was on a mission and it was Aurora’s very long experience that when fate needed adjusting, it was never by miles, but only by a step, or a breath, or a millisecond. Humans were amazingly able to find their own way. His obvious instinct was to follow the case. She needed to let him pursue the case where it led, go where his instincts took him and make sure that she was there when he needed her.

  She grabbed for her wet dress and reached for the blow-dryer.

  * * *

  Dressing was harder than Luke expected. He used his Swiss Army knife to cut the crusted blood and bullet rip from his jeans, rolled up his useless shirt to take with him so that the maid wouldn’t have a heart attack when she came in to clean and just put on his less-damaged windbreaker over the jeans. As he looked in the mirror and saw the bloody holes in his clothes, the thought that he really should have been dead floated through his mind. But he wasn’t dead and he was feeling fine, so he dismissed it, and stepped out on the balcony to get a good look at where they were.

  He looked around him at the vast, ancient trees, breathing in the clean smell of the air and ocean. He could almost believe all that oxygen and chlorophyll had worked a healing magic on him overnight; he had no right to feel as good as he did. He might as well have been in an ancient forest, long before the idea of cities and machines. And the thought was surprisingly thrilling. Luke considered himself a modern man but he felt most himself when he was using his body and his hunting skills. It was why he had become a cop to begin with—the thrill of the hunt and the simplicity of avenging evildoing—or at least capturing the evildoers and hoping for the best in the legal system. On the deck, with the forest around him and the ocean at his feet, he felt powerful, and powerfully at home, like a warlord in his castle, with his woman in his bedroom...

  His woman?

  He didn’t even know who she was, or whose side she was on. Well, all right, she was pretty clearly on his side. But someone tried to kill you last night, remember? Luke told himself. Let’s try to focus here.

  He looked out on the shining water...and had a sudden flash of the three women (his mind refused to say “Norns”) arguing around his bed, just as they had done since he was a child. Then the doors had opened behind them and they had walked out onto the balcony and out on the moon path, out over the water...

  Luke gripped the railing of the deck and looked down.

  Impossible. The ground was a good twenty feet below.

  But he had seen them walk straight out toward the water...

  Impossible.

  Then what had he seen?

  He stared down at the ground and saw the light catch something glittering. He frowned, and suddenly was seized with a need to know.

  He glanced around at the perimeter of the deck and spotted a narrow trail that started under the deck, below the one he was standing on. He made a quick mental calculation of the distance, then impulsively he dropped into a crouch and slipped under the railing, grasping the edge of the deck and lowering himself off. His full body length, with his good arm extended, just got him to the railing of the lower deck, but he’d forgotten for a minute that he was wounded and the pain was excruciating— he had to scrabble for balance and nearly fell.

  As he landed, he knew he’d hurt himself worse than he thought. He found himself short of breath and so weak the world seemed to be going dark around him.

  And then he heard a cry from above. “Luke!”

  He opened his eyes, and through the grayness he saw Aurora looking down from the upper deck, stricken.

  He fought another wave of dizziness, and suddenly she was right there beside him, kneeling and holding him from behind.

  How did she get here so fast? Did I pass out? I must have...

  She propped him against her body and held him tightly. Her arms felt so good around him...and he could breathe again.

  “I told you, I told you, you can’t leave me.” She was crying softly and he had no idea what she meant, or really any idea what she was saying; he just wanted her to keep whispering against his neck, stroking his hair.

  He felt better by the minute.

  * * *

  Aurora was weak with relief; she’d thought for a moment in the room that Luke had gone off without her. The Eternals had given her the day, but even if Aurora completely trusted Val to obey, which she didn’t, she wasn’t about to let Luke out of her sight. Once a mortal’s thread was cut, as Val had done, or half-done, it made them vulnerable to someone else finishing off the job. Not to mention the fact that she had just crossed a major line by making love with her mortal charge, and she had no idea what kinds of repercussions that could bring.

  Anything could happen, really, and she had to make sure it didn’t.

  “What were you doing?” she asked, and shook him.

  Luke reached out beside him in the dirt for the shining thing he’d seen from the balcony. It was a necklace, a silver chain with an ivory pendant, and the disc had two simple sticklike figures carved into it, like a sideways W plus an S made of three sharp slashes. He recognized it: a rune stone. His grandmother used to throw them sometimes to tell fortunes.

  He held the chain up to Aurora. “It’s yours, isn’t it?” He’d seen her wearing something tucked into the bodice of her dress last night when he was—well, looking at her breasts. And the fact that she had a rune stone was not just a coincidence, he was sure.

  She looked at it, and then at him, as if she didn’t know how to answer.

  “You must have dropped it when you went out last night,” he said, watching her face.

  She avoided his eyes. “I guess it fell off when I was out on the balcony...looking at the water.”

  She was a terrible liar; she was looking to the left again. And then, of course, there was that blush, a dead giveaway.

  Luke looked up at the building behind them. They were quite a distance away from the deck. “Dropped it? Threw it, maybe.”

  Or maybe it was when you were walking across the bay. On the moon path, he thought. And then shook his head.

  Or maybe you drugged me. That would explain a whole hell of a lot.

  But Luke knew that wasn’t enough to explain everything that he was experienci
ng.

  He reached for her hand and she caught her breath. But he opened her fingers and dropped the necklace into her palm.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said aloud.

  I’m watching you, Red, he thought.

  * * *

  The nearest town was really just a cluster of rustic shops, a gateway pit stop for the national park. They stopped at the Trailhead Market and Gift Shop to buy a set of hiking clothes for Luke, and coffee and deli sandwiches for the road; after their lovemaking Luke was starving again. He put on the new clothes in the dressing room, and indulged in a brief fantasy of Aurora coming in to “help” him and ending up naked against the wall in the narrow mirrored room...

  He took a glance in the mirror and laughed; he looked like he had just fallen out of an LL Bean catalog. But when he pushed through the curtain, and she turned to look at him, he was rewarded by an admiring, desirous appraisal that stripped him bare. If she was as inexperienced as she’d claimed to be, she was learning fast.

  In the internet café next door Luke put cash down for a terminal. Aurora pulled up a chair beside him; clearly she assumed they were in this together.

  Luke sat in front of the screen and typed in his user name and password—and found himself staring at an Invalid User screen.

  “What the hell?” he said aloud.

  He tried logging in again—only to get the same screen.

  He’d been blocked.

  Aurora looked at him.

  Luke frowned and tried calling up Autotrack, a searchable database that had residential and telephone records, bankruptcy and lien information, and sometimes criminal records.

  But he was locked out of the departmental account there, too.

  He sat back in the chair, unnerved.

  “I’m locked out of the systems,” he answered her inquiring look. “Either they think I’m dead, or someone doesn’t want me poking around.”