Poisoned Kisses by Stephanie Draven Page A

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. Shestartled, 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