As she pulled herself up like a specter from a grave, Marco recoiled. “What—what the hell are you?” he stammered, staring, his tone more loathing than fear. In their struggle, she’d become so enraged that she’d stopped projecting the shape she wanted him to see. He saw her real face now, the depthless blackness of her nymph’s eyes, and he seemed as horrified as if he’d glimpsed three-headed Cerberus.
Taking advantage of his surprise, Kyra rolled to her feet with the grace of a cat and crouched on tiptoe behind a desk for cover, realizing that her high-heeled boots may not have been the ideal choice for an assassination. “The real question, Marco Kaisaris, is, what are you?”
At hearing his real name, Marco’s expression turned murderous. Later, she’d have to admit that he frightened her. He was stronger and faster than she’d anticipated and now this entire mission had gone awry. She could try to fade—try to disappear before his very eyes—but her concentration was broken. Perhaps she ought to escape and try again another day. As these thoughts raced through Kyra’s mind, Marco rushed toward her. She lifted the knife—this time in self-defense—and he flipped the elegant desk behind which she’d sought refuge as easily as if it were dollhouse furniture. Papers and knickknacks exploded through the air and the desktop slammed her, knocking her back where she smashed her head on the wall and slumped to the floor.
Kyra lay there for a moment, stunned. Had she blacked out? Scrambling out of the wreckage of the desk, she realized that the penthouse was quiet.
Damn it to Hades! The door was open and Marco Kaisaris was gone.
She wondered why he hadn’t tried to kill her when he’d had the chance, but then she felt the sickening burn. She was smeared with Marco’s blood and it stung like fire. It was ever-deepening agony. Rushing to the bathroom, she hurriedly scrubbed her arms clean. Too little, too late. The hydra’s blood wasn’t just burning her, it was also seeping into her skin and making her sick. Waves of nausea flowed over her; she sank to her knees and tried not to retch.
If she’d been a mortal, the poison of his blood might have been enough to kill her. As it was, her world started to spin. Marco Kaisaris was no trickster god. His blood wasn’t divine ichor. His wounds hadn’t closed up on their own. And even from the bathroom she could see that where his blood had pooled on the penthouse floor was now a sizzling mess, as if someone had poured acid on the carpet. His blood was poison. Deadly poison. There could be no doubt now that he was a hydra and needed to be stopped.
If only she could get up from the floor.
She’d cut him deep. Crouched in an alleyway, Marco tore his shirt off and wrapped it around the wound like a makeshift bandage. With his uninjured hand, he fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone to call an ambulance. The woman in his penthouse would need one. Yeah, she’d tried to kill him, but she had no idea who she was dealing with. By now, his blood would be soaking into her skin and eating her alive. He wasn’t sure what the hospital could do for her, but he wasn’t eager for another dead body on his conscience.
“Si prega di identificare se stessi,” the dispatcher squawked into the phone.
Identify himself? Under other circumstances, the question might have made Marco laugh. Who exactly was he? He wasn’t the guy who rented the penthouse. He wasn’t the guy he looked like now. He wasn’t a soldier anymore and he wasn’t even the do-gooder son of a Greek immigrant—not according to his father or his sister. “I’m nobody,” Marco said, then hung up.
The blood coursing from the cut on his hand had soaked through his wrapped shirt and dripped down his battle-hardened stomach in a deadly scarlet rivulet. Every time a drop of it spattered on the ground, it hissed and sizzled where it fell. Marco hated to leave his blood anywhere, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. His breathing was still erratic—partly from the pain of his wound and partly from the shock of what he’d just seen. What the hell had he just seen? An angel, a demon or some creature with powers like his own?
One thing was clear: his enemies had obviously tracked him here and sent the woman to assassinate him. This identity—this borrowed face he wore—was thoroughly compromised now. He’d have to change his appearance and there was no time to wait for a more private moment. Pulling himself deeper into the shadows, Marco braced against the brick wall and steeled himself for the transformation. He closed his eyes and remembered the face of a blond haired, blue-eyed Russian smuggler who’d once tried to steal a shipment of shoulder-mounted rockets from him. Marco had long since dispatched the Russian to hell, but he’d been wounded in the struggle—which meant that now Marco had a useful but grisly souvenir; he could assume the face and identity of his old enemy. It was his curse; he could take on the form of anyone who wounded him. A power he could neither explain nor fully comprehend. Perhaps it was a madness—inherited from his mother. Whatever it was, he couldn’t stop himself from quivering with disgust at the slow creep of flesh as his face began to transform. Marco didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that his eyes were now blue, and his hair like yellow straw. Except for the wound on his hand, his enemies wouldn’t know him.
No one would.
Chapter 2
Kyra found herself in an ambulance, squinting into the peculiar light. Her arm was caught in the grip of a blood-pressure cuff and she realized that her heart must have stopped because a stunned paramedic loomed over her with paddles.
For one moment, she understood mortal fright. It used to be that the dying would take comfort to see her by their bedside with her torch in hand. Now, if they opened their eyes to see a dark nymph like Kyra standing beside the men with the paddles, they feared her as an evil harbinger. Sometimes they screamed in terror.
These days, dying mortals only wanted to see angels. Some of her fellow nymphs of the underworld played along, pretending to flap ridiculous feathered wings, singing, “Follow the light!” But Kyra refused. She was a lampade, a guide, a warrior for men’s souls. If mortals didn’t want her to attend them at death, she still had a heroic destiny to fill. Which is why she’d gone after the hydra, and how she ended up on this gurney in the first place.
She was shocked at how wretched she felt; her skin was clammy, yet she felt as if she were being boiled alive. Under normal circumstances, she’d have already recovered, but the hydra’s poisonous blood had weakened her somehow. With difficulty, she tried to sit up. It was then that the emergency medical technician reached for her peridot choker, perhaps with some foolish notion that removing it would help her to breath. His mistake. Kyra’s choker was the only keepsake she had of her mother’s. Anger that this stranger should try to take the precious stone gave her a surge of strength. Kyra stared into his eyes, trying to see if he was an enemy, or perhaps one of her father’s minions. But when she couldn’t illuminate his soul, her insides flailed in fear. Had the hydra poison extinguished her powers altogether?
It took her more than three attempts before she was able to pull the needles from her arm. All the while, the paramedic tried to restrain her. Again, his mistake. Self-preservation gave her the power to pin him against the vehicle wall. “Don’t make me hurt you,” she growled.
The paramedic shrank away, the whites of his eyes showing like a horse about to rear up. He seemed to have realized all at once that she was no ordinary mortal woman. There was a chain at his throat upon which dangled a little golden cross, and he held it up as if to ward against evil. Just what did he take her for? Angel or devil? The mortals could never decide! Muttering a curse at him under her breath, Kyra leaped out of the back of the ambulance before he could stop her.
The rising sun knifed through the lavender cloak over Lake Avernus, its light cutting a thin