CHAPTER 3
THEY HIKED HARD FOR WHAT FELT LIKE CLOSE TO an hour, going further into heavily forested terrain until they reached a grouping of nearly inconspicuous tents. The semi-circle of crude dwellings surrounded a small charred plot of ground where a campfire had recently been.
Vince kept his senses keened, looking for signs of more terrorists, looking for the males, and each man exchanged a glance as they were separated off from one another and forced into a tent with several female captors. Oddly, though, he noted, Jesse and Dutch still looked dazed, if not drugged. But he was counting on Lou, of any of them, to be able to get away. Lou was so damned flexible and double jointed, he could escape from almost anywhere like Houdini. He didn’t need his hands free to kill you, just had to get close enough.
Then Vince looked at the gun in his hand. Bizarre. They hadn’t bound him or stripped his weapon. And although Artemis’s female soldiers had an indefinable but palpable sense of anticipation sweeping their group, their leader trudged ahead of him unconcerned. There was almost a weary resignation about her, a sadness that worried him, despite the fact that he was still armed…and all the chick had on her was a bow and poisoned arrows. After what he’d seen so far, he’d come to the conclusion that that was enough.
It was all surreal, but he was sure that he was drugged once he stepped inside the leader’s tent. Firstly, it took him a moment to orient himself to the size. Outside it seemed about the height and width of a small military pop, but when he stepped inside, it loomed frighteningly large as though he’d walked into a forty-by-sixty palace chamber. Everything was draped in white satin and sheer gauze interspersed with finely woven Moroccan rugs, ornately decorated Mediterranean urns, and lama hides. Vince pushed the heel of his hand against his eyes to recapture reality.
“Wine or water?” Artemis said on a weary exhale, and then dropped her weapon against a white alpaca fleece by the far tent wall. When he didn’t answer, she turned to stare at him. “If you are not thirsty, barbarian, then I offer grapes…olives, goat cheese, bread? Surely by this point you do not think my goal is to poison you?”
She ignored him as she briefly lifted her hair off her lovely neck and stretched, and then helped herself to the bounty that graced her table. She settled herself in one lithe move and continued her solitary meal unfazed.
“I have many questions, many things I do not understand that I must know if I am to be the protectress of the wilderness. Sit, Titan, and talk genuinely, or draw my wrath…I grow weary of rage, so let us find an accord.” She popped a grape into her mouth and cocked an eyebrow. “Why do your people behave as they do—don’t they realize that if you hurt the beloved forest, you will also starve?”
He watched her eat and take a careful sip of dark mulberry-hued wine, and despite the incomprehensible circumstances, found himself drawn to the stain it left on her mouth. Tentatively he approached her table and sat on an ornately carved wooden stool across from her. As though reading his mind, she handed him her challis, and then poured wine into the empty one that he didn’t remember being there earlier. Yes, he’d drink only what she drank and eat only what she’d eaten, breaking bread with the enemy to better understand, but would not subject himself to be drugged or poisoned again.
“My people used everything the bounty of the wilderness offered,” he said quietly, taking a sip of wine and studying her eyes very carefully. “We wasted nothing, never hunted more than we could use. We respected the wilderness.”
An eerie tingling began in his chest and fanned out to slowly consume his body as she stared at him. Then she nodded.
“I believe you,” she said quietly. “My search of your soul agrees with your words. Continue…worthy warrior. Know that in all my years of battle, you are the only one I have allowed to enter my tent.”
Her bizarre statement was accompanied by a rosy flush on her high, regal cheeks, and she looked away as though somehow embarrassed. He couldn’t fathom why or what had happened and he glanced into his challis for answers. Albeit he knew his people worked with some pretty potent hallucinogens, but whatever these chicks were plying—man. He just wondered what she’d spiked the arrow with because not only was he seeing strange things but he also had the irrational urge to tell this woman the truth…not that such a thing was allowed. But if telling her beliefs from his people could give her something to identify with, and maybe save a hostage’s life, make her drop her guard, then it was a tactic he’d employ.
He searched her gorgeous face, trying not to become hypnotized by the subtle beauty of her eyes or the strange innocence that seemed to hide just beneath the surface of her placid expression. Her sad, philosophical tone washed through him, reminiscent of the elders he’d listened to as a boy on the reservation when they’d orally recite the history of lands lost and treaties broken.
“You can’t win this fight,” he murmured, not meaning to allow his voice to drop the way it had. “At least not through these methods.”
He watched tears rise and shimmer in her luminous dark eyes. “I know,” she whispered. “My nymphs do not yet understand that, however. I have seen the new weapons of this era…the suns that explode against the ground and burn all that is alive for eons.”
“Nuclear bombs, daisy-cutters, napalm,” he said flatly, for some reason wanting to reach across the table and hold her hands so badly his ached. Every fiber in him knew this tone of defeat; he’d heard it all his life spoken on the reservation, spoken in French by his Haitian father, spoken by people whose history would be distorted by the conquerors.
The tears in her eyes fell. “Yes,” she said nodding. “I am not the enemy.”
“Then who is?” he asked quietly, unable to forebear reaching across the table to clasp her hands. He set his gun aside and stared at her. But it was impossible to touch her satin hands and stare into her eyes at the same time without feeling her thread throughout his system.
“You do not believe in the cause you fight, do you?” she whispered. “You know they are wrong. You know who desecrates the land.”
He nodded. “But I can’t let you execute them. There are courts, other ways…laws…”
“The words are hollow even to your own ears,” she said, squeezing his hands. “Your people heard those words and laws, too, and were betrayed by failed treaties.”
He looked away, but could not remain out of the gravitational pull of her dark irises except briefly. “Who are you?” His voice came out as a hoarse, broken whisper. The tingle that began in his chest and spread throughout his body had become a dull ache centered in his groin.
“I am Artemis,” she said, her gaze rambling over his face. “Goddess…and I have never in my existence wanted to break my vow so thoroughly. Therefore, the true question that besets me is who are you, Titan? Of what hidden Olympus do you herald? I have never felt honor as pure as yours enter my ethereal body and lay siege to it.”
He couldn’t answer that—not because his actual hometown was classified data, which it was, but simply because as she touched his jaw and allowed her fingers to gingerly explore his lips, his voice failed. “You are definitely a goddess,” he finally managed. “And I wish the world was different…wished they understood your heartbreak and mine, but they don’t.”
“Are you displaced, too?” she asked, leaning forward. “A being greater than mere mortal trapped by the disbelief of the era?”