A.K.A. Goddess

I owe thanks to many people for this book.

Thanks to Leslie and Stef and Lynda and Cheryl and Julie at Silhouette Books, and to Paige at Creative Media Agency. Thanks to friends who critiqued or brainstormed, especially Maureen McKade and Pam McCutcheon and Deb Stover, and to Toni and Sarah and Jenn and Christine. Thanks to Matt and my friends at TCC for double-checking my technical elements, and to inspirations like Maggie Shayne and Lorna Tedder and the Sisterhood of the Scribes.

This book is dedicated to all of them and more, and to the spirit of sisterhood that, as far as I’m concerned, is the most constant and wonderful manifestation of Goddessness.

The Grail Keepers’ Bedtime Story

Long ago, before accepted history began, there lived a Great Queen with nine powerful daughters. Their powers lay in their beauty, in their truth, in their abilities to heal and create and protect. Their powers lay in their skill at dance and art and sports and poetry.

But their greatest power lay in being women.

Because the world needed them, the Great Queen sent her daughters in nine different directions to be queens in their own right. And she gave them each a finely crafted cup.

“Pour your powers into these cups,” she instructed, “and share them as you will. But if ever you find yourselves in danger, a victim of fear or envy, hide the cups so that your powers can live on, even though you be forgotten.”

Her daughters agreed, and off they went. For a long, long time they ruled as beloved queens—queens of the North and the South, of the East and the West, of the Heaven and the Earth and the Underworld. They married and loved and bore children. But all things change, wheels turn, and eventually, as the Great Queen had predicted, men began to fear and envy their powers.

One queen was imprisoned by soldiers.

One queen was denounced by priests.

One queen was outlawed by a senate.

One queen was erased by scholars.

One queen was exiled by her father-in-law.

One queen was overthrown by her stepson.

One queen was betrayed by her lover.

One queen was forgotten by her son.

One queen was deserted by her husband.

As each queen found herself in danger from fear and envy, she asked her own daughters to do as her mother, the Great Queen, had instructed. She had them hide her cup, so that the powers she had poured into it could survive, waiting to be found and shared if ever the world again became ready for them.

The cups wait to be discovered.

The cups wait to be united.

The cups wait to change the world.

They are waiting still…perhaps, my daughter, for you.

The light over my front door was out again. I noticed it as I carried my damp gym bag up the shadowy outer stairs. I’d have to call the landlord.

Then I climbed high enough to see that my door stood open several inches.

I knew I’d locked it.

Someone was in my apartment.

For a long, dumb moment, I just stared. Then I backed down the steps as quietly as I could. Don’t get me wrong. I come from a long line of strong women—WACs, suffragettes, ladies who disguised themselves as boys to fight alongside soldier husbands in ancient wars. And, trust me, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my family and woman power.

But there’s a huge difference between strength and stupidity. Our brains are our best weapon, or so my sifu—instructor—used to say. I reached and unlocked my car, and all but dove inside. I hit the lock button, only then using my cell phone to call 911.

Then I sat there on the phone, fumbling my key into the ignition in case whoever was in my apartment might force me to flee by automobile.

Or maybe to run them over. Who can say with hypotheticals?

The cops got there barely ten minutes later—not a bad response time—and I disconnected from the nice emergency operator. I cracked my window, but the two officers only nodded in my direction before heading upstairs to check matters out. I waited, staring unfocused at my faint reflection in the car window—late twenty-something, long brown hair pulled into a wet ponytail, eyes too serious. What felt like forever later, a second blue-and-white cruised into my parking lot. As its female officer got out, I could hear her radio crackle. A male voice said, “Someone’s trashed the place, but it seems empty. We’ll look around to make sure.”

Trashed the place? My place?

Weirdly, instead of feeling hurt or violated, I simply felt…disbelief. My apartment was safe. How could someone trash it?

The policewoman tapped on my car window. Despite having watched her approach, I still jumped. “Ms. Sanger? Officer Sofie Douglas. Could I ask you some questions?”

I was still tense—so much for the relaxation benefits of swimming thirty laps at the gym. But her being female made her more approachable. She was black, shorter than me and about my age.

As a gesture of confidence, I climbed out of the car.

“Is your name really Margaret Sanger?” Officer Douglas asked. “Like the lady who made birth control legal?”

“No,” I said, not for the first time. “Not Margaret.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Dispatch said you identified yourself as Maggie.”

I saw her writing it down. “No e.”

She scratched out the e. Hey, at least I don’t dot my i’s with hearts or smiley faces.

“Maggi’s short for Magdalene,” I said.

Officer Douglas blinked at me. “You mean like Mary Magdalene?”

Lights appeared above us, from my apartment’s bedroom window, and my head came up to track it. “That’s the one.”

“So what do you do?” she asked. “For a living, I mean.”

“I teach comparative mythology at the college.”

She stared. “You can major in that?”

I was rolling on to and off of the balls of my feet, like a Tai Chi form about to escape. “When can I go up there?”

I wanted to see the damage for myself. I had to know if this really was random. I kind of hoped it was.

Static crackled on Officer Douglas’s radio. Then a voice: “Nobody’s here. It doesn’t look like they took anything.”

I jogged up the stairs without waiting for Sofie Douglas’s permission.

The place was trashed, all right. Sofa cushions slit. Drawers overturned. Plants uprooted in dark spills of potting soil. In some corners, my carpet had even been torn off its pad. Stunned, I headed for the bedroom, which was just as bad. All my clothes…!

“Can you tell if anything’s missing, Ms. Sanger?” asked a burly, red-haired officer. “Anything of value?”

“It’s all of value,” I said, more softly than I would have liked. “It’s mine.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean—”

But I held up a hand to cut him off. I knew what he meant. As a test, I checked my jewelry box. There never had been a lot there—even when I was engaged briefly, I used to wear the too-expensive diamond—I had few family heirlooms.

“Nothing’s missing.” I turned and noticed my bedroom TV. It was portable, but it hadn’t been, well, ported. I returned to my living room—the TV and stereo remained there, too, though they’d been upended—and looked into my office. My computer hummed steadily, monitor facedown on the floor. But…

“The CPU’s running,” I said. “I turned it off before I left home this morning.”

Officer Douglas, who’d followed me upstairs, went to look more closely at my computer. The redhead, whose shield identified him as Officer Willis, said, “Does anybody have a key to your home?”

“My parents,” I said. “Two—no, three of my friends.”

He exchanged an amused glance with the other male officer, a tall, graying guy with a mustache.

“And the lady who cleans up for me once a week,” I added. “Oh, and my dog walker.”

Willis looked concerned. “You have a dog?”

As if I would’ve hidden in my car if any dog of mine had been in jeopardy! “Not anymore. She died last fall. I just never bothered to get my key back. I’ve also given a key to my neighbor, so she can check on things when I’m gone. But she’s trustworthy. They all are.”

“Maybe I should’ve asked who doesn’t have a key.”

There were a few.

“I prefer not to empower fear,” I murmured, turning in a circle, and he snorted with male superiority. At least he didn’t use that old line about “a woman as pretty as you,” as if a decent appearance begs for trouble.

Trouble doesn’t wait for invitations.

That’s when I noticed what was left of my curio cabinet. The cabinet itself had been destroyed—lying on its side, the door yanked completely off, cherry wood splintered and every pane of glass smashed. And my collection of statues, inside…

Little more than rubble.

I took a step forward, unbelieving. Chunks of white marble were all that remained of what had once been a twelve-inch Pallas Athena, which I’d bought in Greece. Shards of lapis lazuli had been my Isis-and-Horus statue. My obsidian Shiva was many-armed rubble. My glossy, ceramic Virgin Mary had been smashed to shiny dust. Even the wonderfully fertile Venus, similar to the famous Willendorf figure and carved from granite, had been reduced to round and jagged bits.

There was no way the Venus could have broken like that accidentally. Someone must have pounded on her, hard. Repeatedly. Purposefully.

And in anger.

I’d recently read a news piece about a goddess artifact being similarly destroyed, in a museum in India, and the similarities—as well as my sudden conclusions—unnerved me.

“Wow.” Willis whistled. “What were those?”

“Goddesses,” I said. “I collect statues of ancient goddesses.”

“Were they worth a lot?”

Monetarily? Some more than others—none were originals, thank heavens. But emotionally…

Officer Douglas, from my study doorway, said, “Goddesses? Are you one of those Wiccans?”

“Not exactly,” I told her, fingering the amulet I wore under my shirt. It wasn’t a pentagram, but two interlaced circles called a vesica piscis. I wasn’t technically Wiccan. But our beliefs have surprising similarities.

It’s like I told you.

I come from a very long line of very strong women.

The police all but moved in. They made phone calls and questioned neighbors. Specialists showed up to photograph the wreckage and to dust for fingerprints, more backup than I’d ever expected for a simple break-in. When I asked if this was normal, Officer Willis said, “We’re just trying to be thorough, ma’am.”

I put up with it for insurance reasons, but mainly I just wanted to clean up. Did you know recent studies have shown that while men have a fight-or-flight response to stress, women have a hormone that prompts them to tend-and-be-friend? I hated to see Officer Sofie go, despite her leaving her card with me and telling me to call anytime. But I also wanted space in which to mourn my statues, to put things as much to right as I could…and to consider who could have done such a thing…and why.

I couldn’t help thinking this break-in might somehow be related to the recent destruction of an ancient goblet, the Kali Cup, a week before it could go on display. But that meant things I couldn’t face. Not yet.

I’d barely managed to start straightening the mess, alone at last, when a knock at the door startled me. I don’t like being scared. It goes against almost everything I believe in.

Checking the peephole and catching a glimpse of brown hair, and a familiar face in its usual impersonal mode, didn’t do a lot to improve my mood…or my lingering disorientation.

Lex.

Alexander Rothschild Stuart III and I go back. Way, way back. Worse, he makes me question my life choices almost every time our diverse paths collide. See, he’d be the dream catch for almost any woman—wealthy beyond his unimaginable inheritance, quietly handsome and, despite nearing thirty, still something of a brooding bad boy. Hard to resist, huh?

Hell, even I have a terrible time resisting him, as our roller-coaster history attests to. And I have different views on money and power than a lot of women. At least—I try.

I could also no longer trust either him or his family as far as I could comfortably spit them.

Still, there was that lack-of-resistance thing, and the intimate-history thing, along with no small amount of curiosity. It had been months since I’d so much as glimpsed him, yet there he stood, too self-possessed to even look impatient while I checked him out. Him showing up on the night of my break-in couldn’t have been a coincidence even if I believed in coincidences.

I don’t. But I opened the door.

“Are you all right?” The question came out vague and polite, as if he were making bored chitchat at a cocktail party. Lex has always had that coolness about him—he supposedly can trace his family line back to the Royal House of Scotland, by way of England, so it’s probably all that blue blood chilling in his veins. But the fact that he was here at all, much less this late, belied his nonchalance. So did the powerful energy that instantly roiled between us. “I heard about the break-in.”

“From the police?” I asked. That might explain all the special treatment, mightn’t it? “Or are you a part of the criminal grapevine now?”