Medusa's Heart: A Contemporary Paranormal Erotic Romance Novel

by Joey W. Hill

  He learned many of the items she’d secured for her comforts here had come from the larger boats, the ones who’d come from longer distances.

  “Those were the ones after glory for their names. But there have not been too many of those. I think I am not quite the achievement that a war or the random hydra can be.”

  “I’m not sorry they’re dead, either.”

  “I felt that way at one time, but now there is no one in this garden I am sure deserved their fate.” A cold note came into her voice. “Except one.”

  They’d reached the back of the garden. As he came to a halt, her arm extended past his, one sharp-tipped finger pointing. JP saw a tangle of briars that formed a thicket. An access path cut into it, so narrow the thorns scraped his skin and caught on his shorts as he passed through it sideways.

  The briars formed the illusion of a cage for this last statue. The man had been broad-shouldered and tall, uncomfortably similar in stature to John. His intimidating size was evident despite him being on his knees, his hands forever frozen in a helpless flailing motion. Unlike the others, she hadn’t changed anything about his final position in death.

  He’d had a silken, thick mane of hair. There were long gouges on his chest and arms, his clothes appearing to have been torn front and back before they were petrified. But even with that and the evidence of his pre-mortem wounds, he was handsome as a god. JP saw a combination of arrogance, hate, fear and pain in his face. His anguish was such stark evidence of self-awareness during her fatal transformation process it was disturbing to look upon it.

  But he looked, because JP knew who this had to be. Not only from his placement and her unwillingness to empathize his features in any way, but from the turbulent waves of energy she was emitting against his back. They were a dark complement to the negative aura pulsing from the statue.

  “I do not know what compelled him to come and find me,” she said. “But his intent was to destroy me. Perhaps others started to blame him for the perceived danger of my existence and he was determined to rid himself of that blight on his name. Or he refused to let me go, and the only way to completely possess me was to kill me.”

  Her tone transformed to a flat deadness. “He thought I’d be as weak as when he first took me. He didn’t realize how the spell had enhanced my strength and quickness. He had no chance against me, even less than the veteran soldiers who took nothing for granted. His helplessness gave me such visceral pleasure I have nightmares about it.”

  “My lady, you don’t have to—”

  “Yes. I do. If you think I am worth serving, I have to be certain your conviction is based on truth. I tore open his flesh. Not just one or two times. I dove down on him again and again, like a vulture tearing pieces from a carcass. I disarmed him, drove him to his knee and made him beg.”

  JP swallowed. “Did it help?”

  “It only fueled the rage in me,” she said. “Because his begging was goaded by fear, not remorse. In the end, his true nature came forth. He despaired and all of the ugliness within him could not be contained. He called me names. He said fucking me was the best thing that ever happened to me. That if I could do it over, to avoid this fate, I would have gotten on my knees to him every day and…”

  JP’s hands closed into fists and she stopped, telling him how closely she was watching him.

  “Despite the beauty of life here, I have faced despair many times,” she said. “Because of what I’ve become, there are times I wished he’d killed me that day. Or that I had accepted my fate and become his slave, with the hope of finding a way out of it someday. There is no way out of what I am now.”

  “No.” He unlaced the mask and set it aside. Her snakes hissed, a warning, but he didn’t care. He turned to face her. She moved faster than he could follow, a flash of cloth and hair in his peripheral vision, and she was behind him, her hands cupped over his eyes. He put his fingers over hers. “I want to see you. I will look upon you, my lady. I’ve had enough of denying myself your face, the beauty of your eyes and all the truths they can tell me.”

  “No. Not right now. Cease, or I will leave your company.”

  He ground his teeth but subsided. “You don’t know that there’s no way out of what you are now. Maddock thinks...”

  “It does not matter. Because what I am outside is now what I am inside. No one can change that. I do not wish to speak of it. It was when he said that, about serving him every day on my knees, I turned him to stone. He is the only one I've ever hoped is still alive inside it." The weight of it was in her voice, on her heart.

  “It’s why I’ve never destroyed him.” She pressed her face once again against JP’s back. Her arms looped around his waist. He would have been heartened from the contact, but it felt more like a desperate attempt not to face him, rather than a desire for contact between them. “I will leave you here to think on that, John Pierce. What it says about the woman you think I am. You are welcome to stay up here and enjoy my home as my guest. But if you wish to leave…I will take you to the beach whenever you are ready. I will be within calling distance.”

  A rush of wing noise and, once again, he was deprived of her company.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He’d put the blindfold back on for her comfort when she returned, but it had been awhile before that happened. And when she did, she hadn’t come into the house. She’d taken up residence in her nest above the patio, not encouraging further contact or dialogue. He sat below her, thinking about the incomparable view he couldn’t see and everything she’d shared with him.

  She’d told him the story of everyone in that garden, and yes, many of them had come with the intent of doing her harm. But she’d given herself no quarter. “This one was barely out of boyhood. I could have disarmed him, snatched him up and dropped him in the sea, and it would have been enough to send him scampering home.” Or “This group was merely cruel, here on a bet to prove that they could spend the night with the monster.”

  He couldn’t deny that it did change his view of her. No matter how idealistic it was or how competent he knew she had to be to survive this long on her own, he’d seen her as a damsel in distress when he arrived on her beach. His image of her had been wholly painted by stories and his own hopes and desires. The past couple of hours had sculpted off those shiny edges, but he didn’t regret that. How he felt for her might have a different, leaner, shape, but it was more real, while the core remained the same. Unshakable.

  That reassured as well as grounded him, no matter that it had no basis in experience, only in the way he’d always felt about her, even before knowing her. Now he knew more about her, and the feeling was only stronger. That had to mean something. Fate sometimes dictated who you loved more than any other factor. That was the whole basis of Maddock’s theory, after all.

  “When did it happen?”

  “My lady?”

  Her voice was hard like asphalt, baking in the sun. She perched on the chair next to him, a puff of wind telling him she’d settled her wings. “That moment when you had to reconcile who you were with who you’d become.”

  He chided himself for the cowardice that had him hesitating to share it with her. He could fear that she’d see him differently, but he couldn’t shy from it, not when she’d opened all of herself to him. He wasn’t going to deny her the same dubious gift.

  “I had to kill a family sympathetic to a terrorist faction. It was critical that no one blew my cover. The intel I’d gathered and was still gathering…a lot of lives depended on it. And the fucking hell of it was that it was just bad luck. The son-in-law figured out who I really was and confronted me in front of his family, because he figured that would protect him, that his father-in-law would know how to handle the situation.”

  It was as vivid to him now as it had been then. “I killed all of them. The son-in-law, his father-in-law. The eldest daughter and her mother. The daughter was pregnant, pretty far along.” He stopped. She didn’t touch him, and he was glad for it. He’d never been ab
le to handle the comfort of another when relaying it, and he’d told damn few people.

  “I imagined that baby dying inside her, not knowing what was happening…”

  “Entirely innocent.”

  “Yeah. My grandmother, who died before I was born, left my mom this framed quote, done in needlepoint. It was something about hoping her children would know only times of peace and happiness throughout their whole lives.”

  “She would have been sad that you went through that.”

  “At least it was my choice, being in covert ops and traveling outside of the country to do most of the things I did. Not sure how much a choice that family had, being born in the middle of all that shit with limited options to get away from it.” He paused. “Kind of like you and the soldiers that came here to attack you. They had far more of a choice than you did.”

  “I think in your case it is not so simple. You have never mentioned doing what you did for glory, as they did. For the trophy of a Gorgon’s head.”

  “No. But when you get into something like I did when you’re young, there’s a certain amount of adrenaline and heroic stupidity.”

  “Yes. I saw that in some of them.” She paused. “How did you…come back? From killing the family.”

  “You don’t come back. You just go forward.” Now he wanted to touch. He found her hand and was glad when her fingers curled around his, held tight. “There was no other way I could have done it without more loss of life. I understood that. But it told me what a fucked-up world it could be, when killing a pregnant woman and her unborn baby was a necessity to save other lives.”

  “Yes. That makes sense. But I guess I meant, how did you…” He heard her draw an unsteady breath. “Do you have nightmares about it? Like on the beach, when you seemed so…haunted?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. The same scene, over and over, though sometimes she’s holding the kid in her arms, already born. How about you?”

  “I see the stone come to life, only their faces are horrid, distorted. They are laughing at me, pointing, still cruel and violent. But this time I can do nothing. I am bound up in a net, and the more I scream and rage, the more they laugh, and they pick up sticks and start hitting me, like I’m some type of…game.”

  His fingers tightened on her, but she continued. “I want the nightmare to be something different, I want to see their faces as kind, or laughing, or something that tells me I killed them unfairly. Somehow that would be better and make more sense. But they are as horrible in my dreams as I imagined them in life, and yet I still wake with the guilt.”

  “Hey. Come here.” He tugged her hand. “Come over here and sit with me.”

  “I am sitting with you.” But she shifted and then made a surprised noise as he guided her into his lap with a little thump as he tugged her off her feet.

  He wound his arms around her. When she might have stiffened, wondering at his intent, he let out a sigh and laid his head on her breast. She went still, and then her arms crept around his shoulders to hold him as well. Her chin touched his hair, and she rested her head on top of his.

  Though the touch brought her comfort, her distress was palpable in her silence. Their time by the falls had been marked by pleasure and discovery, a breakthrough of sorts. While he understood why she’d wanted him to see the garden as a natural result, it had brought back her melancholy.

  John had had enough of not being able to register all levels of her distress, and address them however was needed. “Medusa, I know you said no in the garden, but let’s really talk about me taking off the mask, once and for all.”

  “No.” She spoke sharply.

  “I’m done arguing about this,” he said firmly.

  “So am I.”

  He tried to hold onto her, but she wormed out of his lap. “No more of this…intimacy between us. It leads to bad things.”

  Intimacy? “You mean what happened at the waterfall?

  “Yes. It made me speak of things I should not have. Encouraging you to be closer to me than you should be.”

  She was out on the open air patio. If he pushed it, she’d just fly off, but so be it. He wasn’t backing down this time. “What things?”

  “I do not need to explain. If you wish to stay, there will be no more discussion of this.”

  “Medusa.”

  “Do not say my name. It means monster to the world now. I…”

  He moved toward her, kept moving purposefully even as she dodged him again. It was a calculated risk, but as she seized his arm with a startled oath before he could walk off the edge and tumble over, he turned and slid an arm around her, bringing her close. Her wings beat at him, and the snakes hissed, but didn’t bite. She didn’t straight arm him, but she did go rigid, her fists closed against his chest. He pressed his face against her hair, the snakes bumping his jaw and neck, one coiling against his nape.

  “I don’t want to frighten and upset you,” he said. “But I can’t bear not to look at you anymore. Not when I know it will be okay and that it will be better for both of us.”

  Her fingers crept up his chest and joined the snake at his neck. It slithered away so she could curl her fingers against his flesh.

  “If I had to add you to my garden, my heart could not bear it. You have said you have no magic to overpower me, but you do. I need to banish you from my island. To protect you. To protect myself. I cannot risk being this…weak.”

  The surge of victory came with a tearing pain in his chest, because of the anguish in her voice. “If I do possess such a magic, my lady, it is only because you have the same magic hold over me,” he said roughly. “That’s the way love works.”

  “Love.” She said it as if it was an unfamiliar word and perhaps it was, in this context. She’d loved a Goddess who’d ultimately seemed apathetic to her. She’d had no family but priestesses who pointed their devotion and loyalty in mostly one direction, upward. Though he reminded himself they’d cared for one another in their own way, because they’d given Medusa the dubious escape method from her attacker.

  “I will not speak of love,” she said. “How can you be sure the contacts work?”

  “Because I’ve never known Maddock to screw that kind of stuff up.” Yeah, there was a first time for everything, but he wasn’t going to point that out.

  She was still as stiff as a board, so he made a soothing sound. “Easy. And you’re not a monster, my lady. Did you know your name means protector, guardian? I think it’s a beautiful name. Listen to how I say it. Medusa.”

  He purred it, bending to find her throat with his lips. For the first time he did it without calculation of her reaction, and instead followed desire and instinct. He gave it full effort, using the heat and moisture of mouth and tongue to stroke her pulse, taste and nip her tender flesh. He paid close attention to the pocket of her collar bone, the slender line of her throat up to the sensitive spot below her ear, and then made his way back down to tease her carotid again.

  When her hands clutched him, he knew he’d made the right call. Her lips parted on a sigh, and her sweet nipples he’d kill to suckle peaked against his chest, her body moving restlessly against him. He could detect the heady musk of arousal gathering between her thighs.

  “I want to taste you again,” he said against her pounding pulse. He was testing the edges of the passion they discussed, seeing if she would panic or respond in kind to his demand. “I would willingly stay between your thighs for hours, bringing you to climax over and over.”

  Her nails dug into him, summoning a growl from his chest. What would have sent her startling like a flock of birds not too long ago only had her drawing away from him now. Not too far. Not far enough to let him go.

  “It was unexpected, what happened at the falls,” she said slowly. “The pleasure, the desire to give myself to you completely. I felt like I was surrendering to the Goddess’s power, riding that bliss one cannot describe to those not in a spiritual ecstasy.”

  He knew she spoke of things in the framework of her exp
erience, but he couldn’t help teasing her. “I’m going to have you write that ‘surrendering to a God’s power’ thing down and sign it. I want to show it off to my buddy Lot Lakeney, who thinks he’s God’s gift to womankind and always giving me shit.”

  “I said a Goddess’s power.”

  “Yeah, I edited it to impress him more. He’s kind of a sexist old school bastard.”

  She made a little huffing noise he took to be a chuckle. “He dislikes you? Or you dislike him?”

  “No. He’s one of my best friends. Insulting one another is kind of the way men bond.”

  “Oh.” The puzzlement vanished from her voice. “When we were permitted to attend the festival competitions, I witnessed this among the male competitors.”

  “Yeah, I expect male razzing has been around since ancient times. We don’t change much.”

  “I may consider letting you use the contacts,” she relented. “But let us not test them this moment. Please.”

  “All right.” He agreed reluctantly, but cupped her face with both hands so she knew he was looking into her face, even with the blindfold in the way. “You know, if you ever give me permission to look upon you, I’m not going to be disappointed or repelled. I know it makes you uncomfortable for me to say these things, but I’m going to think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing you can show me of yourself that would make me think otherwise.”

  “You have not seen the look of horror on their faces at the end. All of them.”

  “Well, let’s think about that. Maybe that’s not because of what they see in front of them, but what’s happening inside. I was gut shot once. When the pain and reality hits, everything you’re reacting to is inside, wrapped up with this sudden realization you might be about to die. The whole world narrows to that. I barely registered who the shooter was.”