Mortal Temptations Read online

  23

  AHMED drove the jeep to the end of the track at first light, and they proceeded on foot over the dunes. Ahmed had a stick that he kept running over the sand, swearing that it would point their way to the ruins.

  Nico wasn’t sure he believed that, but he let Ahmed lead the way. The brothers had grown up in this country and knew it, and Nico hadn’t been this way in thousands of years, since Roman times. Amazingly, it didn’t look much different.

  After about half an hour of searching, Ahmed’s stick thumped on something hard under the sand. He broke into a grin.

  “It’s here.”

  Nico and Faisal joined him on their knees to start scraping away sand. Nico’s pulse quickened with sickening fear. Patricia couldn’t be buried in a ruin here. She’d never survive.

  The land was covered with sand as far as the eye could see, no outcroppings or man-made edifices poking through. If Patricia was under here, she’d have no way to breathe.

  They dug quickly, the sand sliding and spilling back as fast as they moved it. Faisal had brought a shovel, which helped, but the final uncovering they had to do by hand. What they found was a square, flat stone that had obviously been hewn by an ancient chisel.

  “You see?” Ahmed said. “I know where all the ruins are.”

  Nico lay down and put his ear to the hot stone. He could hear nothing, feel nothing. It was too damn thick.

  “How big is this place?” he asked.

  Ahmed shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never uncovered all of it.”

  “I need to get inside this. I need to find her.” He broke off in fear and frustration. “She might not even be here.”

  Yesterday, he’d heard her voice loud and clear, echoing across the emptiness. I love you, Nico. Love you so much.

  He’d thought he’d imagined it, but now he wondered again. Patricia was psychic. What was to say she couldn’t project strong psychic energy that his own magic picked up?

  Ahmed suddenly screamed. Nico jerked his head up in time to see Ahmed leap from the top of the building, his face white with fear.

  Nico and Faisal stepped hurriedly back into the sands, Faisal holding his shovel high. From the corners of the building, dozens of snakes had emerged: desert vipers, thin and deadly. Their yellow, slitted eyes beamed hatred.

  “Stay back,” Nico told the two men.

  His first beat of fear turned to one of grim satisfaction. Hera had just signaled loud and clear that Patricia was here, unless this was another decoy.

  He didn’t think so. The snakes began to coil on the hot rock, then one by one rose into the forms of Dyons.

  “Demons,” Ahmed cried. He unshouldered his rifle, bringing it up in his hands. Faisal stepped behind him, eyes wide, shovel ready.

  Nico wasn’t quite sure of their odds against an army of Dyons, even with Ahmed’s rifle. Dyons couldn’t kill Nico, but they could tear him apart enough that he would be a bloody, useless wreck for some time, and of course they could kill his human companions.

  Wind whipped up behind him and the two men, sand rising in a deadly cloud. But this was no ordinary sandstorm. It was something malevolent, a whirlpool of sand with the three men and the Dyons in the vortex.

  “Go back to your jeep,” Nico shouted at Ahmed and Faisal. “You’ll die here. Go back.”

  Both men looked like they wanted to run but held their ground. “I’ll not leave a friend to die,” Ahmed said.

  It would more likely be Ahmed who died, but Nico had no time to argue. The Dyons attacked at the same time the sands whirled to swallow them up.

  Nico fought, reverting to his true form as the Dyons reached for him. His true form was mostly light, the shape of the winged man solidifying it. Nico was at his most powerful in this form, able to fuse the magic of his divine half into something deadly.

  But keeping that form took its toll. He tired more quickly, which would leave him vulnerable, and the slave chain made everything more difficult.

  Nico heard Ahmed and Faisal both cry out, and he did his best to defend them. The Dyons swarmed him, and sand stung and scoured him. The sand would rip his flesh from his bones, and the Dyons would finish the process. Only a god could kill Nico, but when the Dyons finished, he knew he’d wish himself dead.

  Ahmed’s cries turned to shouts. Dimly Nico heard the whirr of an engine, and he wondered who could have driven out here amid the sand cyclone.

  Then new shapes entered the fray, a lithe, white snow leopard followed by a huge tiger rippling with muscle. Nico laughed, getting sand in his mouth, but he fought through Dyons to stand side by side with his friends.

  “Join with me,” he yelled over the storm.

  Andreas and Demitri couldn’t answer in their animal forms, but he felt their surge of magic. He joined his to it, and the Dyons closest to them crumbled into dust before the onslaught.

  The other Dyons, mindless beings, converged for another attack. The three demigods struck again, breaking the first line.

  But they’d keep coming, again and again, until Nico, Andreas, and Demitri were worn down. He couldn’t see Ahmed and Faisal anymore and hoped they’d had the sense to run for safety.

  The three demigods continued the battle without speaking, their magics fused into one. Nico loved the feeling, having his two best friends part of him, a bond unlike anything else. Sometimes the three of them got close to this during sexual play, their power flowing into one another through hands, tongues, and cocks, but mortal bodies were limited. This joining was joy.

  He marveled that his mortal body and Patricia’s could come together with the same joy. That’s what love did, he decided; it expanded what was physical into something magical and powerful.

  He needed that with Patricia even more than he needed his godlike powers, his immortality, and his wings.

  Nico heard a grinding sound and gleeful shouting, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ahmed’s jeep break through the sands of the cyclone. The jeep landed on a line of Dyons, breaking them down into their snake forms, which hurriedly crawled away.

  Andreas and Demitri leapt forward, their big-cat forms taking down the last two Dyons. The whirling sand suddenly stopped, the last particles raining down on the gathered group and the jeep. The blue sky arched serenely overhead as though nothing had ever happened.

  The jeep was full of sand, and sand piled on the heads of the grinning Ahmed, Faisal, and Rebecca.

  “Whew!” Rebecca called, brushing sand from her face. “I didn’t think that would work.”

  THE next problem was how to get into the ruin beneath their feet. The storm had dumped most of the sand they’d labored to sweep from the top of it back on.

  With Andreas and Demitri to help, they cleared it again, only to be faced with a slab of blank stone.

  “We could drill,” Ahmed suggested. “Or get explosives.”

  “No!” Rebecca cried before Nico could. “This is an artifact. It needs to be properly excavated.”

  “Patricia might be in there,” Nico snapped. “No explosives—or an excavation that could take two years,” he added, looking pointedly at Rebecca.

  “Of course I want to get Patricia out safely,” Rebecca returned. “But if we could disturb this as little as possible?”

  Faisal ruined that idea by banging on the top of the stone with the point of his shovel. Little chips of stone flew out, to Rebecca’s distress, but it didn’t make much of a dent.

  “It will take too long without the proper tools,” Faisal concluded.

  “We’ll have to dig down the sides,” Ahmed said. “Find a door below the sand?”

  “I could send for a backhoe,” Demitri offered. He and Andreas had resumed their human forms and their clothes, which Rebecca had brought in the jeep. Rebecca winced at the word backhoe but kept silent.

  “Could heavy equipment get here on these roads?” Andreas asked.

  “I have to admit I don’t know.”

  Ahmed looked off to the west and sighed. “It lo
oks like another sandstorm coming. A real one.”

  Nico stood staring at the slab of stone, bright in the sunshine, his heart like lead.

  Was this his test? What would he do in order to retrieve Patricia? Endanger his friends and strangers who tried to help him? Endanger Patricia herself trying to get to her?

  “You need to go,” he said abruptly.

  Andreas started to snarl, his eyes flashing dangerously, and Demitri broke in. “Why?”

  “Because this has to be me, alone.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “I saw the wall. You should be helped by a tiger and a leopard—”

  “And I was. You helped me defeat the Dyons and Hera’s defenses, but I can’t endanger you any more for this. Please go.”

  “What happens if you can’t?” Andreas asked. His eyes betrayed his worry.

  “Then Hera destroys me.”

  “Like hell,” Andreas said.

  Nico faced him, his friend for an eternity, the man who’d struggled by his side all these years, never leaving him.

  “I stay here until I find a way to save her,” Nico said. “I won’t walk away. If that means I stay here forever, chained to this place, then so be it.”

  “She’ll never set you free,” Andreas said. “That’s the real point, isn’t it? Hera will make you search forever, enslaving you forever.”

  “I don’t care about that anymore.” Nico put his hand on Andreas’s shoulder, squeezing. “I want to make sure Patricia is all right. Hera can do what she damn well pleases: keep me a slave, kill me. I don’t care anymore. I just want Patricia safe.”

  Andreas started to speak, then he saw what was in Nico’s eyes and subsided.

  He put his hand on Nico’s shoulder and pulled him close for a brief, hard hug.

  “Take Rebecca out of here,” Nico said. “Go on.”

  Andreas nodded. He turned away, but not quickly enough for Nico to miss the tears in his eyes. Andreas reached for Rebecca and led her down into the sand.

  “Yell if you need us,” Demitri said. He gave Nico the same kind of heartfelt hug.

  “I won’t.”

  Demitri only nodded and followed the others, but Nico knew they’d wait for a long time before they gave up and went home.

  Ahmed and Faisal were much easier to convince. If the story said the winged man had to save the great lady by himself, then he did. You didn’t mess with a story.

  They left him water and wished him luck, then spun the jeep around and ambled down the dune.

  Once they were gone, Nico knelt on the top of the stone slab. He spread his wings out, fanning the hot air, sweat trickling down his face and half-naked body. He crossed his wrists in front of him, as though offering himself to be bound.

  “All right, Hera,” he said in a conversational tone. “I’m here. I’ve found her. Do whatever the hell you want with me. Just let her go home and be all right.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. He felt only the soft breeze touching his hair, the threat of storm gone, heard only the slither of sand as it settled on the dunes.

  He waited, knowing Hera could make him kneel there for years, but as he suspected, she was too impatient for that.

  A shaft of light manifested from the sand, and Hera stood in its protective glow, her robes and dark hair not even stirring.

  “Do you mean that, shallow demigod?” she asked. “You’d sacrifice yourself to me to save her?”

  “Yes.”

  Nico refused to meet her eyes, refused to grovel and plead like she wanted him to. His only concern was saving Patricia, and to hell with anything else.

  “Your life for hers?” Hera prodded.

  “If necessary.”

  The goddess put her hands on her plump hips. “Well, I can’t do that. Your father has made it clear that I am not to kill his offspring, even though he has followed the rules and not interfered with my vengeance.”

  Dionysus had always been an indifferent father as far as Nico was concerned, paying little attention to him after he’d fathered him. Nico wondered if things would have turned out differently if Dionysus had cared, or if Nico had tried harder to make him care. Lessons learned.

  “Then do whatever you want,” Nico said. “But let Patricia go safely home.”

  Hera watched him, her head tilted to one side, dark eyes curious. “You truly think you would do anything to save her, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Nico said quietly. “I love her.”

  “You love nothing. This is a game. I am making you feel what you feel. Me.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Hera straightened up, her face softening into a smile. “He thinks he’s learned something after all.” She leaned to Nico, the glow still surrounding her. “What if I let her go, and she doesn’t remember you? What if she’s indifferent to you and doesn’t love you? Would you still want me to save her?”

  Nico knew in that moment that he’d lost Patricia forever. Hera had never intended to let Nico have her. She had spun out this test because it amused her, and because she’d wanted to remind Bes that she was far more powerful than he was.

  “Yes,” Nico said, his throat tight. “It doesn’t matter what Patricia thinks of me.”

  “Hmm.” Hera studied him a few moments longer, her eyes alight with glee. “Very well. She goes free.”

  She pointed her finger at the corner of the slab, and it broke open to reveal a dark hole beneath. As Nico dove toward it, Hera vanished.

  THE walls around Patricia started to shake. The music ceased like someone had flipped a switch, and the dancer vanished.

  She gasped and clutched the bench she rested on, staring at the ceiling in terror. Was the whole thing about to explode, like the tomb? Was it going to come down and crush her?

  The silent dancer had been boring and unhelpful, but at least he’d been company. Now she was going to die alone.

  The bench vanished, and Patricia plopped onto the floor. She huddled into a ball, covering her head with her hands.

  The beautiful tiles disappeared as did the bathtub and the table laden with food and drink. The candles dissolved, leaving her in darkness.

  Her heart hammered. Why was it all being taken away? Had she not been appreciative enough? Was she supposed to have set up a shrine to Hera and groveled before it?

  “You heartless bitch!” she shouted. Not a way to placate the goddess, but it made Patricia feel better.

  She heard the walls close in on her, stone grinding against stone. The building rocked and moved for an excruciatingly long time, and then just as abruptly, it stopped.

  Patricia rose. She put out her hands, her whole body shaking, and started to walk across her prison. She nearly cried when she touched a wall right away, realizing that she was again trapped in the six-by-six cell.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Maybe she’d been asleep and dreamed the food and water, the bath and the bed. Maybe none of it had been real, and her mind had conjured everything up to keep her from going insane.

  Except she still wore the silk robe, her own clothes having disappeared.

  “Damn it.” Patricia rested her head in her arms and let herself go. She choked on sobs, crying like she’d never cried in her life. She was lost here, and she’d lost everything.

  A sudden light pierced the darkness, and she winced at the pain of it.

  “Patricia?”

  She didn’t recognize the voice, but she didn’t care. She dashed the tears from her eyes, trying to see.

  “Here!” she shouted, her words strangled from weeping. “I’m down here!”

  “Thank all the gods.”

  The man exuded relief, although Patricia still couldn’t place him. Andreas’s friend Demitri, maybe?

  A block of stone not far above her slid out of the way, and blue sky appeared, sunshine pouring down through the hole.

  “Is this real?” she asked shakily. “Not more weirdness?”

  “This is real.” The man reached down for her. He had dark
hair and eyes and a sinfully handsome face, but she’d never seen him before.

  She wasn’t certain he could pull her out, but he caught her wrists and lifted her, then grabbed her under the shoulders and hauled her the rest of the way out. She landed facedown on top of a stone slab, sand all around her. Dunes marched to the horizon beyond the slab, knife-edged and perfect.

  For a moment, all she could do was lie still and breathe the dry, ovenlike air, enjoying seeing sky above her and true sunlight. The breeze, though hot, spoke of freedom.

  She sat up, pushing her curls from her face. “Where the hell am I?”

  “The Great Sand Sea,” her rescuer said. “West of the Dakhla oasis.”

  “Oh.” She thought about the fact that she was literally in the middle of nowhere rescued by someone she’d never seen before. Everything she knew was so far away, but that hadn’t sunk in quite yet. “You speak English,” she said.

  The man smiled a little. “I speak many languages.”

  He certainly was a looker. His skin was tanned from bright sunshine, and his eyes were coffee-dark. He was wearing blue jeans and no shirt, letting her get a good look at his hard chest dusted with black hair. The sleek, oiled dancer in her cell had nothing on this man.

  When he turned to fetch water, she saw that a tattoo of wings covered his back, the ends disappearing under his waistband. Nice.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked. “Not that I’m not grateful for you pulling me out, but how did you find me?”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and she was startled to see his eyes moisten. “Your friends came looking for you. They’re not far. They have a jeep.” He pointed down a dune that looked like all the other dunes.

  “That’s good news.” Patricia pushed her hair from her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Sand in my eyes, is all.”

  “Is everyone else all right—Rebecca, Andreas?”

  “They’re fine. They’re waiting for you. Do you feel up to walking?”

  Patricia started to climb to her feet, then winced as her bare soles touched the stone. “I lost my shoes.”