Poisoned Kisses

by Stephanie Draven

  The key fit and he shoved the door open with his foot. He set her down on the living-room couch, but there was only a throw blanket to cover her with. Whoever’s house this was, it was remarkably spare. “Ashlynn, are you all right?”

  “You’re the one who is bleeding,” she murmured with half-lidded eyes, reaching up to touch his cheek where he’d been cut.

  He caught her by the wrist. “Don’t touch it,” he barked. “My blood is poison.” He hadn’t meant to say it, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to believe him. But she visibly recoiled—as if she knew how afraid she really should be. She blinked in wordless terror and he worried she might actually have a concussion. “Is this your house?”

  She still blinked rapidly—too rapidly—but then nodded.

  “Where’s the phone?” he asked.

  “I—I don’t have one,” she stammered, her wrist still locked in his grip. “I just moved in. The service hasn’t been turned on yet.”

  Something about her answer didn’t seem right. Maybe it was the way she stammered or the way her eyes slid away from him, but Ashlynn had never lied to him about the small things. Taking a quick personal inventory of his sodden belongings, Marco found that he still had his gun, but his cell phone was gone. If he was going to call an ambulance, he’d better go find it. Letting go of Ashlynn, he started for the door.

  “You’re leaving me?”

  His steps came to an abrupt halt. She’d asked him that once before, when he was just eighteen. It had been an accusation then, cloying and immature. As if enlisting in the military was something he’d done to ruin their wedding plans. This time was more of a plea—something desperate, and resigned. “I’m just going to look for my phone, Ashlynn. I’ll be back.”

  Kyra hadn’t meant to cause such a horrible accident. She’d only been trying to cause a little fender bender. At most, she’d hoped for a broken axle—something that would incapacitate his rental without doing any real damage. She’d never intended to total the car. And no matter what Hecate would say, this time she really hadn’t been trying to kill the hydra.

  The problem was that Kyra had never encountered a storm like this; she hailed from a warmer part of the world. It was the ice that hadn’t figured into her plans. Now, she deeply regretted that oversight. Why, she’d been so disoriented after the accident that she’d nearly touched the poisoned blood on Marco’s cheekbone!

  Fear of death didn’t come naturally to Kyra; it was still a reflex she was learning. If he hadn’t stopped her from touching him, what might’ve happened? But he had stopped her. He’d even told her the truth about the poison in his blood—at least, he told Ashlynn the truth.

  She should be healed by now. But ever since the poisoning, her powers of recovery were decidedly slow. She actually felt too weak to get up and follow Marco. He said he’d be right back, but she was afraid he’d just disappear again into the snow, and every day he was free to sell weapons was another day of death and destruction. Every day he was free made it that much easier for Ares to find him, and bend the hydra to an even darker purpose.

  At least, that’s the reason she told herself she was afraid Marco would disappear when he walked out that door. But there was another reason, too; she was shaken. Shaken by the accident, and even more shaken by the way he’d pulled her out of the ditch and carried her to safety in a strong and protective embrace. Why had he been so tender with her? Not with her, of course. With Ashlynn. She must remember that he was seeing a woman he once cared about. Even so, if a man could behave that way, could he still be a monster?

  Marco usually traveled with a driver, but he hadn’t wanted Benji or any of his employees nosing around his hometown, so he’d rented the car. Now, as Marco climbed over the twisted metal and fished his ruined cell phone out of the icy water, he counted that decision a mistake. There’d be questions about the wreck when the authorities found it. Meanwhile, he was in the middle of nowhere, alone with Ashlynn Brown for the first time in years and without a working phone. How in the hell had this crash happened, and why couldn’t he remember?

  He found her purse in the snow and carried it inside. She was still on the couch, but she’d found another blanket. That was probably a good sign—that she’d been able to get up on her own—but she still looked stunned. They were both shivering, soaked to the bone, but he said, “I’m going to have to walk to a neighbor’s house and call you an ambulance.”

  “In this weather?” she asked. “My closest neighbor is a mile away.”

  Marco glanced out the window with frustration. The snow was really coming down. He’d planned to be well on his way to Toronto by now. But that was before he nearly killed his ex-fiancée in a car wreck. “I don’t have a better idea.”

  “You’re not dressed for a hike through a storm,” she said, eyeing his ruined dress shoes and sodden overcoat. “And I don’t need an ambulance. I’m okay.”

  “You looked dead out there,” he said, the memory of it still churning like bile in his stomach. “You looked dead,” he repeated, unable to fathom how quickly she seemed to have recovered.

  “But I’m fine. I just have a few bumps and bruises. Besides, in your profession, I’m sure you’ve seen people hurt much worse.”

  He stooped in front of the hearth to start a fire. “My profession?”

  Kyra watched him, noting the way his shoulders tensed. His emotions were like a tinderbox just waiting to flare up. She remembered the dark expression on his face in Naples and the way he’d frightened her, and she wondered what the hell she was doing. This wasn’t the way to lure him into the basement dungeon. Still, impulse control had never been her strong suit. “They say you’re a gunrunner. I’ve seen your name on the news.”

  “Since when are you interested in the news, Ashlynn?”

  Kyra sighed inwardly. Just her luck to have chosen to impersonate the one clueless woman from his past who wouldn’t care about his illegal enterprises. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

  Marco arranged a few logs in the grate. “Maybe we both have.”

  “So, is it true?” she pressed. “Are you an arms dealer?”

  He lit a match and started the fire. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It mattered to your father,” Kyra countered.

  He rolled his muscular shoulders, but didn’t turn to look at her. Still, she knew her arrow had struck true. “You know, Ashlynn, I do what I do so that people like you can live your safe little lives and never have to think about the horrors of the world.”

  “You broke your father’s heart,” she said bluntly.

  Marco silently stabbed into the fireplace with a poker. Then he exploded all at once. “What else is new? You remember how he was. I wanted to do something with my life so that other people wouldn’t have to suffer like my mother suffered, but he couldn’t get over the fact that his only son didn’t want to work in the family business. The only thing he cared about was that stupid restaurant.”

  That’s crap, Kyra wanted to say. But instead, she kept Ashlynn’s sweeter demeanor. “No. Your father just thought he’d escaped a world of war. He didn’t want to see his son back in it. But at least he was proud of you when you were a soldier. It was when you amassed your own private arsenal to sell to criminals—that’s what he couldn’t forgive.” Kyra knew this, because these were among the last things Mr. Kaisaris had said before she led him to the entrance to the underworld.

  Fortunately, Marco didn’t ask her how she knew. He was too pissed. “My father didn’t understand and neither do you.”

  “I understand that you cause wars.”

  “Gunrunning doesn’t cause wars. It simply prolongs them.”

  Ug! He sounded like Ares himself. Wrapping her blanket more tightly around her, Kyra wondered if he knew how chilling his words were. “And that’s better?”

  “It is better,” Marco said, turning to face her at last. “You see, there are some things civilians don’t get.”

  Civilians? Did he still think of himself as
a soldier? Even now? Fighting some war the rest of the world had forgotten? “Why don’t you educate me, Marco.”

  “Sometimes the only thing that keeps people alive is war. In some places in the world, ‘peace’ only comes after a massacre. Fighting isn’t the worst thing that can happen, especially when it means you live to fight another day.”

  “How can you say that? You used to be a UN peacekeeper.”

  “Because when I was a peacekeeper in Rwanda, they killed eight hundred thousand people in one hundred days. Which is how I know peacekeeping is a joke.”

  Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but the fire and his temper weren’t the only things burning; where his blood had dripped onto his collar, smoke rose from the cloth. She recognized the potent scent of it and it immediately reminded her of how Marco’s blood had literally stopped her heart. Kyra pretended not to notice, but he caught her glance.

  “I need to get cleaned up,” was all he said.

  Chapter 7

  While Marco showered, Kyra took his clothes into the small laundry room off the kitchen, and put his shirt and slacks in the dryer—his jacket was a lost cause. He’d told her that once his clothes were dry, he’d hike through the storm to find a phone. Kyra thought he was a menace to himself and society for even considering going out in this weather—wet clothes or dry—but she didn’t know how much longer she could keep him here unfettered.

  The accident had left him confused and unsteady, which should make it easier to tranquilize him and drag him into the cage in the basement. It also made it easier for her to lie to him about not having a phone. She was lucky her purse had been thrown clear of the wreck, and that he hadn’t opened it and found the cell phone inside. Now she flipped it open, made sure it was still working, then tucked it, snug in her ruined coat, into a laundry basket.

  Then she went to check on him.

  He was in the bathroom with nothing but a towel around his waist. The first thing she noticed was his muscular back—broad, shower-damp shoulders above a perfectly curved spine. The second thing she noticed was that he had a sewing kit on the bathroom countertop, and a needle in his hand.

  As he lifted the needle to his face, she gasped. “What are you doing?”

  “A bit of quilting,” Marco said through clenched teeth. “What does it look like?”

  He was giving himself stitches. He was actually sewing together the cut skin over his cheekbone as if he’d done it a hundred times before; as if he had no one else in the world he could trust to care for him when he was hurt. And maybe he didn’t. Kyra couldn’t help but let her eyes drift down to his hand—the one she’d slashed open with her knife in Naples. She wondered who healed him then. He was mortal, after all; his wounds didn’t close up the way hers did. Kyra reached tentatively for the needle. “Let me help you.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I told you, my blood is poison.”

  She hadn’t forgotten, and yet, she still wanted to help him. Was it just her natural inclination as a lampade to guide him? Or did she really have a death wish, after all?

  At that moment, their eyes met in the mirror, and before she could guard against it, she briefly glimpsed right into him. She saw him with her underworld nymph’s eyes, shedding light on forgotten corners of his soul. She saw his grief over his father. Again, she saw his need to know and be known, to understand and be understood. That same need echoed inside her and, for reasons she couldn’t explain, tears welled beneath her lashes.

  “Aren’t you going to argue with me?” Marco asked, breaking eye contact as he cut the end of the thread. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s not possible to have poisoned blood?”

  Kyra shook her head. “No.”

  “I’m HIV positive,” he said.

  “You don’t have to lie, Marco. When you told me your blood was poison, you meant it literally. I saw your blood burning your shirt. I just want to know…why.”

  “Why?” Marco’s dark eyes met hers again, his voice thick with emotion. “I guess it’s because sometimes, in war, you see things so horrible, so unforgivable, so toxic, that it gets into you…it poisons you.”

  Kyra understood this better than she could admit. With Ares came the vultures and anguished cries of the dying—cries that Kyra endured as part of her duties in the underworld. Like all the war gods, her father fed on bloodlust and brutality. It wasn’t just Kyra’s family legacy, it was in her blood. She could have let her violent instincts destroy her, but she hadn’t. She could have given in to her father, but she hadn’t. At least, not yet. “It doesn’t have to poison you. You can use it to find your purpose.”

  “I have found my purpose,” Marco said bitterly. “It’s just a darker one than I ever imagined. You see, nobody cares about what happened in Rwanda anymore. It’s over, they think. The world has moved on, but I haven’t.”

  He was struggling. Kyra could taste it. She understood it. While Kyra was born to darkness, struggling to live a life of light, for Marco, the reverse was true. “What I mean is that you can use what’s happened to you, to change.”

  “Oh, I change,” he replied.

  And then he did.

  Kyra watched with fascination as his face reshaped itself. She saw the skin age and wrinkle before her eyes. She watched his hair shimmer with gray until he looked like his father. Then, in a horrifying display of malleable flesh and popping cartilage, Marco changed into a series of men Kyra did not recognize until he finally settled upon the face she knew. She startled, captivated by the sight of the lips she had kissed in Naples only moments before stabbing him.

  Kyra didn’t have to pretend to be upset. No matter which face he was wearing, her inner torch revealed such exquisitely mortal pain, that it shamed her. She’d tried to kill him in Naples, like he was only a creature, like he was some sacrifice on the altar of her good intentions. She’d seen only the monster in him, not the man. Maybe she wasn’t so different from her murderous immortal family, after all.

  With that thought, she turned and fled the bathroom.

  In the living room, she stared out the front window. Shadowy tree limbs arched gracefully under the freezing rain, encased in moonlit ice. She’d never seen a storm like this and she couldn’t stop shivering, but this time not from the cold.

  She heard Marco come up behind her. “Ashlynn, look at me.” It wasn’t her name, so she didn’t turn around. She just pushed her hands against the windowpane and let the cold seep into her. “Ashlynn, it’s just me. It’s Marco. I promise. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He wrapped his arms around her, holding her, trying to comfort her, when she should be the one apologizing. But she couldn’t speak. “I think I just wanted someone to know about me,” he said softly as the fire in the fireplace crackled behind him. “To know that I can change into people who’ve hurt me in some way. I’m some kind of… I can’t explain it.”

  Was it possible that he didn’t even know what he was? “You’re like a hydra,” she whispered, suffocating under the weight of her own deceit. He was not like a hydra; he was one. But how to tell him?

  He turned her around so that she was looking at him. “A hydra?”

  “Your parents are Greek,” she whispered. “Don’t you know the old stories?”

  “I know them,” he said, tilting his head.

  Kyra stole a glance up at him from beneath her lashes. “The ancients said that the hydra was a poisonous monster. And it had a thousand heads. If a warrior cut off its head, two more would grow in its place.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said impatiently. “Unless the warrior used a torch to cauterize the wound.”

  How innocently he said it. How guileless. He didn’t suspect he was holding a torchbearer in his arms. Nor that she was fated to destroy him. And yet, she couldn’t pull away. “I think you’re like that, Marco. Like a hydra.”

  She hadn’t meant her words to wound him, but he fell back as if struck. “You think I’m a monster.” His face reddened. Then, finally, he nodded with grim resignation.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a monster.”

  Kyra’s stomach clenched, as if she could feel his pain as her own. She was only trying to help him to understand what he’d become. “Marco…what happened to you?”

  To her surprise, he told her.

  He told her about Rwanda. He told her about how he had been shot. He told her about the villagers in the ditch, slaughtered while he stood by. And he told her about the day he buried them. The way his voice flattened broke her heart. Even now, he made fists of his hands as if to keep them from shaking as he finished his tale.

  “When I returned to base camp, I looked in a mirror and, instead of my own face, I saw the face of the militiaman. I saw the face of a murderer and somehow it made perfect sense who shot me, because I’m just like him.”

  Kyra listened to his story in silence, but couldn’t contain herself any longer. How could she have been so wrong about him? “You’re nothing like those men.”

  He leaned back against the arm of the sofa, unable to meet her eyes. “I stood by and just watched that massacre happen.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she argued. “You tried to stop it and got shot for your trouble.”

  Reminded of his old injury, his hand went to his bare shoulder. “Well, that’s what soldiers are supposed to do. We’re there to take the bullets if we have to. We’re there to protect people who can’t protect themselves. But in the end, we just observed.” He said the word with venom.

  “You were just following orders.”

  He winced. “Bullshit, Ashlynn. Since when has that been a defense for anything? But I’m trying to make up for it now. Now I help people fight back. I make damned sure they’re equipped to fight back. I give them all the guns and the ammo they’ll ever need.”