Hotter Than Hell (17 page)

Vincent looked at the major and clenched his jaw with a nod. “Clear. Just as long as I don’t have to cut my hair.”

The major smiled and accepted Vincent’s surly peace offering in good humor. “No, you can leave the mane—will probably help you blend in on the job up there, anyway.” He took another swig of his beer and stared at the French barmaids with appreciation. “I’d be mad at me, too, you ornery SOB. But duty calls.”

“It’s not a mane, they’re dreadlocks,” Vincent corrected with a mutter, but the major’s attention was slow to return.

What else was there to say? The man had always been fair and wasn’t a bigot he’d give him that. But after living underground, hustling through the damned Everglades after drug dealers, the last thing he felt like was a wilderness job. His nerves were raw and the accusation leapt from disappointment. Not to mention, oil fat cats, mining and logging robber barons were the antithesis of victims to his mind’s eye. They had been the enemy as far as he was concerned. The things they did to the environment, and their ever-present threat to it, made him sick to his stomach. As it was, he’d come home to help vote on the proposed water quality standards for Neah Bay for submission to the Environmental Protection Agency. But now he couldn’t even do that and he’d have to chuck his personal philosophies to get the job done.

“What do you need in terms of resources, Vince?” The major finally looked at him, the tension relaxing from his weathered, bronze face as he put the arrow tip back in his pants pocket.

“Top squad, Bravo commandos,” Vincent grumbled, his gaze on his drink. “Five men.”

All his dreams of going back home to the Makah Nation where he grew up were evaporating as he sat, his mood darkening by the second. All he wanted was a few weeks to return to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State…the small town of Neah Bay was calling his name…so was home cooking, and the beaches flanked with red cedar and pristine wildlife. He wanted to find a place of solitude that the people who lived by the rocks and sea gulls had known for thousands of years before invasion…to sit in the wilderness to stare across the Straight of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island. All he’d wanted to do when he walked in this bar was to relax, finally tie one on, and get laid—now this. “And a brunette.”

The major gave a start and then caught the joke and laughed. He downed his beer and slapped Vincent on the back. “You always get me, D’Jardin. I can never tell when your surly ass is serious or not. I’ll see you at o-eight-hundred in Anchorage. There’s a Black Hawk waiting for you at the military hangars here.” He shook his head and ran his fingers through his close cut hair as he slapped down a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and stood to leave. “You kill me, D’Jardin—I swear.”

Vincent watched his CO thread his way through the bar toward the exit. “Who was joking?” he said, polishing off his drink as he stood.

At least he didn’t have to go through a bunch of crap with rookies. The squad that assembled were familiar faces, and slow smiles crept across each one as recognition was made.

Lou, short for Lu Chen, everybody respected as a fighting machine despite his wiry, compact size. It was good to have him on the team, and his explosives expertise was undeniable. He offered Vince a slow, confident nod and Vince nodded back, feeling much improved as he quickly assessed the group. Dutch, the crazy Swede, was six feet, six inches, of blond destroyer. Having a solid artillery man was a must. Good. Jermaine, an insane brother from Brooklyn who was an unparalleled communications whiz, stood with sinew-cut arms folded over his cinder-block chest, attitude raw, and cornrows glistening. Cool.

Vincent laughed to himself as Donovan walked up and gave him a Cuban brotherhood embrace. Like him, Rodriguez could track anybody and find the wings of a fly in the middle of a hurricane, if he had to. They’d both survived Miami.

Jesse, one of the best snipers in the unit, stood back, chewing on a toothpick, his shock of red hair blowing from the force of the chopper blades as he pushed his lanky frame off the side of the craft. “Howdy, all,” he said with a wide grin and a distinctive Midwest drawl. “Good day for huntin’, ain’t it?”

Indeed it was.

SHE SPIED THEM FROM THE TOWERING TREE TOPS,
she and her nymphs blending into the thick canopy watching, their eyes keened like hawks to each male form that walked through the wilderness. These hunters carried weapons that no animal would stand a chance of survival against. Even their method of hunting was unbalanced, unfair. They made war against the innocent—her forests.

If they came in search of their missing generals of destruction, they would be trapped by their own folly. Those decimators of green places had been turned into stags as her great legends prophesized—
he who befouled Artemis’s wilderness would be transformed and then hunted to his death
. Was the edict not clear? Had they forgotten over the eons? The thought of such disrespect enraged her. She only wished she could deliver to them the fate that had befallen Actaeon, whom she’d turned into a stag and beset his own hounds upon!

Seething, Artemis followed the men with soundless footsteps, her nymphs taking strategic positions. They had employed mercenary Titans against her! These men were of no mere mortal proportions. Their height and stature, like her own, was surely a Titan blend, if not of pure blood.

Closely studying them, she keened her eyes, taking each in as she steadied her bow. One had hair like a flame and loped as he strode, another was thick and tall, his hair like sunburned wheat. Another was clearly of Nubian origin, perhaps Ethiopian, she couldn’t be sure. One had hair as dark as Egyptian onyx, his frame smaller, but his agile speed noteworthy. Another was hard to judge…Persian, Asiatic?

The most magnificent one in the lead had a mane like a lion’s…he walked with a royal cat’s agility, his aura almost stroking the trees with uncommon reverence as he passed them. Splinters of sunlight glinted off his tawny hue. His eyes were intense, that of a seasoned hunter…his shoulders broad and sure. He was at least two hands higher than her, and she stood as a goddess at six feet tall. Her bow lowered slightly, but then she reset her stance. She would not be tricked. This was no immortal, and certainly not one with reverence to her pristine lands.

Yet their mission intrigued her and she almost laughed aloud. Were they so foolish as to be searching for the missing? They already had them, the dead stags, that was the laughable thing. She had no real interest in slaughtering soldiers who simply followed orders—she had gotten to the generals who gave the orders. Once she’d conquered them all, no more orders would be given to harm the dear land. However, there was so much to learn…

Strange customs, strange palaces, buildings with lights that rendered no flame. Odd lifts that carried people away in fast-moving boxes higher than the tallest trees she’d ever witnessed. Chariots without horses…throngs of pedestrians more dense than all of Rome’s populace it seemed, and underground dragons that roared so loudly they shook the ground. All of this she’d seen quickly in her mind as she’d acclimated to the new time…some of it she’d seen as she’d dropped an errant stag in the high palaces. But the roaring, wide-tooth monsters that ate at land and trees had broken her heart. She had to understand this assault against the beloved earth, for it seemed to be everywhere, even against the seas. If there was one source to negotiate with, one king of all these lands, she’d have his head. Otherwise it could take years of battle to bring it all to an end, and she feared most deeply within her very being that time was running out for the wild.

“It’s like they’re ghosts,” Vincent said, shaking his head as he stooped with Donovan to study the ground. “There was a recent encampment here,” he added, feeling the heat off the small, charred remains of a campfire and hunting through the leaves to find where tents could have been pitched. “This is the only viable hiking path to the main pipeline outpost buildings, and all roads leading to it have roadblocks checking IDs, reporting nothing…no helicopter—”

His words were cut off by the whoosh of an arrow that tore through his fatigue jacket at the bicep, grazing his arm and then lodged deeply in the trunk of a tree. The squad immediately fell back, took cover behind trees, and open fired in the direction of the arrow.

Automatic weapon report rent the air. Flashes of bullets sprayed the terrain blasting away ground cover, bark, setting birds in flight, the stench of spent ammunition eclipsing the fresh forest air.

Completely appalled by the woodland destruction, Artemis gave a hand signal for her nymph warriors to wait. The Titans had harnessed the lightening of Zeus? How could they have? These were strange Titans indeed. Infuriated, she dropped down from the top of a tree landing in a crouch in the center of the glen, so startling the soldiers before her they began squeezing lightening from their weapons before she could speak.

But she was immortal.

Her flips defied the bolts that took down trees, and she heard one yelling, the magnificent one shouting for the others to hold their fire. Winded, she stood erect, and leveled her bow at his forehead. He had the expression of awe on his face that was sufficient enough to possibly spare his handsome life.

“Who dare penetrate my forests and defile them so!” she demanded.

Six stunned pairs of male eyes looked at her.

“Are you deaf? Mute? Speak and you shall live. Who is your general?”

For a moment, no words came to Vincent’s dry throat. He had watched a woman back flip through dead-aim AK-47 gunfire, miss M16 rounds, and the shells from a Glock nine millimeter pass through her, all after dropping from a seventy-foot-high branch above. But there she stood, unmarked…not a scratch on her radiant, caramel skin. She didn’t even have leaves or refuse from the tumbles in her thick, velvety hair.

He locked gazes with her dark eyes, witnessing how fury seemed to actually cause them to smolder in a hypnotic way. Rage and adrenaline made the bow she gripped slightly tremble, and his line of vision ran the length of her athletic arm to capture her breathtaking face and full, lush mouth. Six feet tall, built like an Amazon, half naked except for a gossamer of sheer white silk, everything male in him couldn’t help but appreciate her firm, round breasts, or the way her flat waist cinched in only to give rise to a slim swell of hips…and man, oh, man, the broad was all legs.

In a standoff, he stared at her, she at him. Even if she had guns behind her, if she let the arrow go—he’d dodge it and she’d be dog meat. If not him, one of his men would put her down, single shot. Lou already had a grenade on standby, pin in his teeth, to lob behind her toward her soldiers.

“What do you want with the hostages?” Vincent said, his tone even and controlled as he began to negotiate. “No demands have been made. State your purpose. Who are we dealing with?”

“You are not in a position to question the great Artemis!” she said through her teeth. “You are their leader?”

“I’m the one talking, sis,” he said. “Put down your weapon and we won’t fire.”

“No one dares presume to tell me when to disarm.” Without even blinking she let her arrow go.

Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Vincent dodged the tip of the spiraling arrow; Lou pulled the pin on the grenade and lobbed it over the crazy chick’s shoulder. The blast felled several trees as more women rained to the forest floor. The arrow that was destined for Vince hit Dutch dead in the chest, knocking his shot that would have entered the female attacker’s forehead off center. But instead of the huge Swede dying, he fell and began screaming as his clothes burned away and his body contorted. The men beside him tried to quickly grab him to pull him to safety behind a tree, but fell back in horror as he began to change into an animal.

Running forward, Vince heard the panic-laden shouts of his men, but he was not about to let the terrorist suspect get away. He couldn’t understand what they were screaming—something about a stag. Then all of a sudden as he neared her, nine millimeter drawn, something grabbed his feet and his world snapped upside down.

She slowed down as he bobbed from a vine, and then smiled. But he hadn’t lost his grip on his weapon, and he held it with both hands and fired at her.

Dodging the wicked things that flung from his lightning rod like hornets, she watched in amazement as he cursed, steadied himself, and did a sit-up, then had enough upper-body strength to grab the vine, extract a huge knife from his boot, and cut himself down.

“Who the hell are you people!” he bellowed, whirling around in a bull’s rage.

Admiration tried to thread itself through her, but she fought it as she stepped out from behind a tall tree. “Well done, Titan. But your weapons are no match for immortals, even if you did steal Zeus’s lightening rods.”

He blinked as she sashayed forward and placed one graceful hand on her hip. The fact that there was no more weapon report behind him, but he could hear his men yelling, made him take aim at the center of her forehead. An eerie chill slid down his spine and he spoke through his teeth.

“What do you people want, where are the hostages, and what the fuck are the terms?”

She cocked her head to the side, growing amused. His fear was beginning to become palpable, yet his courage was starting to awaken something else within that had been dormant for centuries. She lifted her chin in an attempt to make the coiling flame in her belly recede.

“We want peace. We want your people to stop pillaging the forests, to stop desecrating the land, to stop poisoning the lakes and streams. This demand is non-negotiable. The terms are simple—do what I ask, or die.”

The urge to pull the trigger was so great that his arm bounced from repressed emotion. “The hostages…where are they?”

“Stags,” she said calmly, moving closer to him and studying his body from head to toe. “And you have them already.”