“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?”