The Virgin Goddess and the Alpha

by Rita Stradling

  “You’re . . . welcome,” he said slowly, sounding hurt.

  Tears pricked my eyes, so I grabbed at the door handle and climbed out of the vehicle. Immediately, I grabbed my bow and quiver from the bed of the vehicle and slung them over my shoulders. Their familiar weight was what I needed to wake up and realize what an idiot I was being.

  Damn.

  What was wrong with me? I was an immortal goddess with unimaginable powers, and I was completely undone by one kiss from a mortal man. Furthermore, we were supposed to be focusing on the hunt.

  I heard Jackson’s door open and close, but I didn’t look up until I knew he was right beside me. I peered into his concerned expression.

  “We have to stop distracting each other,” I said. “This is only going to get more dangerous for all involved, and if we want to win, we have to focus.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re right. Damn it. You’re so right. I’m sorry, I–I’m an asshole, and I shouldn’t have kissed you. Let’s just forget it ever happened.”

  His words might as well have been knives for the pain they sent ripping through me. I was unprepared for the intensity of the feeling. I barely knew Jackson, why did he already have so much power over me?

  “Unless . . . you don’t want to,” he said, studying my face.

  “Of course—of course, that’s what I want.” I lifted my chin and cleared my throat. “We need to focus. So, Jackson, if the crime happened over there, why did you park here?”

  “Uh.” He shook his head, maybe needing to clear his mind himself. “We’re here because this is my best guess for the way that the killer got in. These two complexes . . .” he pointed to the complexes to either side of the one where the murder had taken place, “ are owned by corporations and have high-tech security systems. These corporations have the street-side entrance to this complex covered at all angles. This complex has a minimal security system, and it’s the only way I can work out that there would be any access. It would be difficult, but if you timed it just right you would be able to gain access to these buildings without being caught by any cameras.” He looked back. “Sorry, are you following me?”

  As I listened to his speech, the definitions came to me and then sub-definitions, and then definitions of those words, like a web of small word explosions in my mind. But in the end, I had no idea what he was talking about. I wasn’t about to admit it, though, so I said, “How do you know she didn’t use magic to gain access undetected.”

  “We hired the local witch coven; there were no magical traces.” He raised his hands. “I’m not saying it’s not possible. And just like all of the other locations, we only found the killer’s scent in the room they killed in.”

  I examined the high walls of the warehouse.

  “Can you tell me if I’m in these . . . cameras’ view?” I hesitated before the word camera, not knowing if I was using it contextually correct. I had somewhat of an idea of the function thanks to my translation abilities, but no concept of what a contraption of that sort might look like or how it would function. “I mean, can you judge from where I’m standing?”

  “I can do better than that,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket. It was a small glowing object, and he pressed its glowing glass exterior several times before pressing the contraption to his face. “Yeah, pull up the camera feed from the D street warehouse complex.” He paused. “Yeah, we’re here, standing in the dead zone. Text me if either Artemis or I move into the camera shot.” He pocketed the object and turned back to me. “Jamie will alert us if we move into the view.”

  Magic had evolved in very strange ways in the many years I had been absent from the world. When Jackson had contacted his sister with his voice alone in the vehicle, I had assumed that there was a scrying mechanism inside the vehicle itself. But it seemed he kept it in his pocket—or perhaps there were two.

  Jackson stopped at the fence that divided the properties and turned back. “You want me to give you a boost over?” He closed his eyes, snorted a laugh, and then said, “Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to for a minute. What I meant to say is: do you want to go first?”

  I couldn’t help but smile back. “No, you go ahead. Take me on the path you think she took in.”

  Without waiting for another second, he grabbed the top of the fence and hoisted himself over. His body touched the post three times as he did it.

  “Wouldn’t she have left a scent for you if she grabbed the fence post?” I asked.

  His brows rose. “She might have been wearing gloves.”

  “It’s possible, but I doubt it very much. Would you transform into a wolf wearing gloves?”

  He thought about it. “No, they’d get stuck on my paws.”

  “It’s possible that she may have still been human—but I’d guess she was either a lioness already or ready to become one.” I backed away from the gate.

  Jackson grabbed the bars, looking like he was ready to jump back.

  “Stay there. I want to check something. You see, a Nemean Lion has the same abilities in human or lion form, meaning that she can jump over thirty feet across and twelve feet high—how high is that fence? Did you measure it?” I’d guess at something near eleven feet, but I wanted to know the exact number.

  “Ten feet, ten inches.”

  I backed up a little more. “She’d have to be here.”

  A buzzing sound, sort of like a bee, came from Jackson. His hand patted the outside of his pants. “Jamie can see you in the cameras.”

  I stepped over further down and stopped. The buzzing came again.

  “He stills sees you.”

  I walked the length of the fence, Jackson tracking me from the other side. Each place I stopped, Jackson’s pants buzzed.

  “You don’t think she came in this way,” Jackson said when he reached the end.

  I looked up, examining the gradation of the roofs to every side. The one behind me appeared to be entirely flat. “If a big cat is hunting me, I always make sure to look up.”

  “There’s no roof access on any of these buildings. This one here is pretty much a concrete cinderblock.” He gestured to the building behind us.

  “There may be for a lion.” Crossing over to the warehouse walls, I ran my hands over the smooth surface. It was hard as solid stone. Halfway up the forty-foot wall, a row of small glassless windows interrupted the smooth surface. Even with the possible handhold, it would have been an impossible climb.

  “I’m going to see how she climbed up. Will you wait here for me?” Not waiting for an answer, I jogged up the length of the wall.

  I heard what sounded like grumbling behind me, but as I headed down the length of the warehouses, he stayed put. I started to doubt my theory as I rounded the building. There was no way that she could have jumped up onto this roof from the outside, and the inside appeared to be secured from the outside entirely. But halfway up the original route we had used to drive in, I saw something that could just be what I was looking for.

  Just above one window, about eighteen feet up from the ground, part of the wall had eroded leaving cracks and divots that led from the window to the edge of the roof. It was very unlikely that any human alive could climb it—I wasn’t sure even I could manage it—but a Nemean Lion just might have been able to.

  I backed into the roadway until I could see Jackson. He stood at the gate, arms crossed. I could barely make out his features at this distance, but I felt his glower. Obviously, he didn’t like standing and waiting. I could understand that, I would have flatly refused to do so.

  “See if I’m on the cameras from here on out,” I called down the road, trusting his enhanced hearing to carry the message over the distance.

  He signaled me back by making a fist and lifting his thumb into the air. I took that for acquiescence and turned back to the wall. The rough, hard surface looked like a great place to knock your teeth out. If I didn’t manage this just right, the wall and I would collide in the worst way. I knew the experie
nce well—and it was one I hoped to avoid forevermore. But yet, I was too far in this to get squeamish now.

  “At least they’ll grow back,” I whispered, and then I ran straight at the wall. About four feet away, I lunged and launched myself upward, stretching up my arms. The wall scraped along my arms, and I was sure I’d misjudged the height when I just managed to hook my fingers at the window ledge. I thrust my arms down to propel my body upward. Throwing my weight forward, I caught the small ledges along the cracks with my toes and propelled myself up the remaining twenty-feet and over the ridge of the roof.

  The moment I managed onto the roof, I knew my theory was correct. Central on the flat, smooth surface, claw marks gouged into the concrete. From the definition that had floated into my head at the word, it would take indestructible claws to manage such clean, deep gouges into a surface as hard as stone. The gouges led from the center of the space to the side where Jackson still waited. I didn’t need Jackson’s confirmation, but I jogged down to the end of the building and called down to him all the same, “Did your pants buzz?”

  Probably hearing my approach, he was already looking up with his hands crossed over his chest. “Nope, the cameras didn’t spot you.”

  Backing up once more, I ran for the edge of the roof and leapt off.

  “Holy . . .” I heard Jackson say as I passed over him.

  Halfway between the warehouses, I landed one foot on the top of a lamppost and kicked off to slam into and roll onto the neighboring warehouse’s rooftop. Immediately, I tumbled down the slope to one side. Kicking out, my boots dug into roof tiles, and I managed to get the traction needed to stop my fall. My face and arms burned as gashes and scrapes knitted closed as soon as they opened.

  “Hey, you okay?” Jackson’s voice came up from right beneath me. “I smell blood.”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said, trying to sound calm, though my heart was racing. Obviously, that hadn’t been as impressive as I’d hoped it would be. Not that I was trying to impress anyone, because I wasn’t. But several non-healed gashes had splattered my blood across the tiles. “She would have done that much easier than I,” I called down.

  “I’ve never seen anything so amazing.”

  A grin forced its way onto my face. Yes, a surge of happiness may have overtaken my body at his words, but I still hadn’t done it to impress him. I rolled over and climbed back up the slope. The gouges led in both directions in a straight path down the ridgeline of the roof, up to a closed window set into the roof. It was one of many long rectangle windows that must give a view skyward.

  Careful not to touch anything, I peered down through the glass. What I saw there—I needed to get no closer to it. Most monsters, I found, were very like the animals they resembled. They were similar to animals, but the combination of their magical abilities and increase in aggression made them a worthwhile foe. More often than not, monsters ended as the tools of the gods—proving that even they sought to be useful and needed—perhaps even loved.

  It was very clear that the creature who killed here sought none of those things. This was no act spurned by instinct and aggression. This Nemean Lion had killed her prey slowly; I could see it in the pattern of her claw marks on the floor. She’d paced around, over and over, before lunging in toward where her victim must have lain. They had thankfully cleaned up the blood, but my guess was that the lion had bathed in it before hopping back up out of the window. Due to the slope, it was only a ten-foot jump up to the lowest edge of the window. She’d have jumped right out.

  “Hey.”

  I spun to find Jackson’s head poking up over the edge of the roof. He grabbed onto the edge and pulled himself over.

  “I pulled my truck around,” he said as he climbed up beside me. His gaze moved past me to the path of claw marks that led to the window. “This is how it got in. I can’t believe we missed this. How the hell did we miss this?” His brow furrowed as his eyes filled with what I thought looked a lot like guilt as if in failing to notice this he’d failed in some big way.

  “It’s almost impossible to track a predator if you don’t know what species it is. No one came up here?” I asked.

  “No. These windows don’t open; they’re sealed into the roof. We didn’t see how it was possible. I can smell that thing; this place still lingers with its scent.”

  I pointed around the outside of the window. She jumped over here as a lion. See these scrapings along the sides?” I kept my finger an inch from the scratches alongside the window.

  “She separated this with her claw. But to put it back together, she had to have been human.” I pointed to the white line around the edge that was clearly holding the window in place.

  “She caulked in the window.”

  “Meaning she handled the jagged metal around the window in her human form, her vulnerable form.”

  “You think she . . .” His gaze went to the window. Digging his fingers into the white substance, he wrenched it out in long strips.

  Around the edge, the window had been sliced into in an uneven line. Without that thick layer of what Jackson pulled, the window slid down an inch, sending out a loud metallic screech as it did.

  Jackson grabbed the window at each side and carefully turned it over. We both leaned in to inspect the edge.

  “There,” I said, pointing to the faintest discoloration just along the very tip of the cut metal.

  Jackson leaned his head down, his nose hovering just over the spot. Closing his eyes, he took a deep inhale through his nose.

  His head reared up, and gray eyes found mine. A snarl rippled across his full lips. “It’s from Christina, the oracle of Los Angeles.”

  Chapter Ten

  Artemis

  We careened around another corner, our vehicle letting out an ear-piercing screech as the smell of burning filled the air.

  “You need to calm down, Jackson, and think,” I called across the bench seat for perhaps the hundredth time since we’d hopped back into Jackson’s truck. But as before, he didn’t listen to me.

  “The Nemean Lion is not an oracle; you said you had known about the oracle of Los Angeles' existence for years.” I had managed to get that much out of him before he had grown silent and so determined that I was sure I was seeing an entirely different side of Jackson. So far what I had seen of him was sweet, funny, and approachable. Even when he’d restrained and held me outside of his house for attacking one of his men, I’d felt like I could have reached up and kissed him if I wanted to.

  But this Jackson, he wasn’t at all like the person I had grown close to in the last twenty-four hours. I thought I had perhaps glimpsed one moment of this before when he was telling me about the killings in my meadow. He was cold as winter, and if I reached over and kissed him, I’d be lucky to receive a glare.

  Not that I was ever going to kiss him again, because I wasn’t.

  “She’s a shapeshifter. It’s more likely she took Christina’s shape and met with you.”

  He took another turn at full speed, pulling up to a gated drive. He didn’t slow at the gate and rammed straight into it.

  Seeing the gate fly back up at us, I twisted and wrapped my body around his. I covered him as much as the horrid seatbelt would allow. But the gate whipped back, hitting the wall it was attached to.

  “Sorry,” I said as I pulled my body away, but still, Jackson made no reaction as we flew up the road to screech to a halt before a beautiful two-story villa.

  “Stay here,” Jackson said as he threw open the door.

  Unlike when I had given him the same order less than an hour ago, I didn’t listen. I threw open my door and followed him up the front stoop. He grabbed the doorknob and yanked, sending wood shards exploding out from the door frame as the wood broke apart.

  A woman screamed from inside. She stood halfway to the door. Long black hair fell in wet strands around a youthful round face. She had big dark eyes widespread on a face so beautiful that it likely had been more of a hindrance than an advantage in her life
. She wore a thick white robe, tied with a sash around her waist.

  Bare feet peeked out from beneath, revealing toenails painted in a bright blue color.

  “Get out of my house!” she yelled. Her hands fumbled over the table beside her and wrapped around a vase.

  Jackson stalked forward, a low inhuman growl rumbling from his lips.

  “Stop, Jackson! She’s not the lion,” I tried, but he didn’t listen.

  His growls grew in volume as he advanced.

  The woman backed away, lifting up a heavy clay vase in shaking hands. Flowers flew in all directions. “Get out of my house, werewolf!” She chucked it at him.

  He dodged the vase easily, never breaking stride.

  As I was standing just behind him, it flew past him and straight for my face. In the moment that it flew past Jackson’s shoulder, time seemed to slow as I decided whether to dodge. Cringing, I braced for impact and took the vase full in the nose. It exploded out, clay shattering in all directions.

  My bones snapped with a loud crunch that had Jackson wheeling around. Blinking through the sudden sharp pain, I found his gaze fixed on my nose. The throbbing was immediate. I’d broken almost every bone in my body countless times, and my nose was the one I hated the most. It wasn’t the pain so much as the invasiveness of it and how disconcerting it felt.

  From Jackson’s expression and the amount of pain, it looked bad.

  His hands came up to cup both sides of my face. His gaze moved rapidly over my features. “Why didn’t you dodge, Artemis?” His voice still held a remnant of growl, but the coldness in his expression had dissipated and the Jackson I’d spent my day with returned.

  “I wanted to get your attention.” Reaching past his hands, I pressed my fingers into both sides of my nose and straightened the bones. My hands came away bloody.