LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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