In Service to a Goddess,
Book One
Copyright©2003 by Ed Howdershelt
ISBN 1-932693-10-6
Caution: Some Erotic Content
A Very Quick Introduction:
You are about to meet a few very special women.
They're women of strength, brains, and beauty who are charged with the protection of entire worlds and are subjects far more interesting (to me) than unicorns, dragons, or other "safe" fantasy creatures.
A number of people (all women, so far) have emailed that they thought I must be a lesbian writing under a man's penname. This is not so, but...
Since most lesbians seem to know about pleasing women, I consider such comments to be compliments. Thanks! (note that all refer to Chapter 3 as a basis for thinking so.)
These ladies aren't super-powered Barbies. They possess dynamic libidos that are both a source of power and a weakness, which means that if you're underage or easily offended by moderately graphic depictions of sexual activity, you probably shouldn't be reading this stuff.
I was a feminist before the first bra was burned in the sixties. (Yeah, that old...)
I don't like Cinderellas and Snow Whites, so the women in my stories are dynamic and powerful, intelligent and resourceful.
They certainly aren't passive frog-kissers.
Personal Opinion: If you've kissed too many frogs and found no prince, you may come to one (or more) of the following conclusions:
1: You aren't really a princess, or...
2: You're shopping in the wrong ponds, or...
3: Real princes avoid silly women who kiss frogs.
Last note: This story occurred because, after all the editing I'd done within a certain on-line writer's group, they challenged me to write something in their genre. Now they're ragging me because I haven't written more. Oh, well...
End of Intro (told you it was quick)
Dedication:
I dedicate this book to E-book writers everywhere. We're on the bleeding edge of a new era in information dispensation and a brand-new century.
* * *
Chapter One
What's left of most of the money I ever had is invested in an old Texas farm. I went out there for some peace and quiet after a 27-year career as a mercenary.
Don't get me wrong about that. I was a Medic, even when I worked with SOG-types. I never shot anyone who wasn't trying to kill me or the wounded in my care.
One day I knew I needed some R & R time when too many ripped-apart kids came through my doors in the last African-tribal internecine squabble. I spent about a week trying to climb into just about any kind of booze bottle and I was never much of a drinker, so when I could think again, I guess I took my binge as some kind of a sign from within to get my then-45-year-old butt out of Africa.
When I went back to Texas a few years ago, I realized I was tired of being a merc, too, but I couldn't seem to figure out how to settle down, so I rented an apartment in Dallas and sort of hunkered down to give things some thought.
It wasn't too long before I realized that I didn't fit worth a damn in the so-called "civilized" world. I was bored and unable to find a single legal thing to do or be that didn't seem superficial at best. I was always either "over-qualified" or "in need of further training" when I applied for jobs or training programs. There was always some excuse.
One woman told me her real feelings in an interview:
"You're scary, like the wolf in the barnyard was when I was a kid. It just appeared one night, stayed about two weeks somewhere nearby, and it even drove away a bear one night that was trying to get into the hen house. It never so much as growled at any of us and never did anything to our livestock, but it was a wolf, don't you see?"
Yeah, I guess so, lady...
That wolf was probably getting older, like me.
Looking for a safe, comfortable home, like me.
Looking for a suitable companion, like me.
But, as she said, "He was a wolf, don't you see?"
Kind of like me...
Driving back from Fort Worth one night, I saw a bright light in the sky just before something landed in the road ahead of me hard enough to make me think I'd just seen a meteorite slam into the ground.
When the curtains of dirt it kicked up had cleared, I could see that it had made a crater in the concrete of Eastbound I-30 big enough to eat my car whole, and it was all I could do to avoid driving straight into it.
The grass on the side was wet and the old Ford I'd picked up as a get-around was sliding as if it were on ice. I treadled the brakes to avoid locking them and tried to steer with the fishtailing to keep from breaking into a spin.
The car finally slid to stop so close to a pole that I could read the phone company's tiny warning sign about calling before digging in the area.
It took me a minute to gather myself, there in the ditch and the dark. The final impetus to get out and move came from my bladder, which was crying to get rid of those last two beers from Ft. Worth. I was rinsing my left rear wheel when I noticed more lights converging overhead.
One set of lights was a light plane, from the sound of it, and the other was a helicopter. They buzzed around overhead for a few minutes before the chopper began to descend near the crater. I reached in and flicked off the car lights to save the battery.
My car wasn't going anywhere for a while, mired as it was to its bumpers in the muck at the bottom of the ditch. I began trudging up the side of the embankment to get a look at whatever had almost hit me when something did hit me.
The chopper I was watching exploded in mid-air, sending a shockwave and debris in all directions. I got flat fast as all kinds of crap splattered around me and the burning remnants of the helicopter tumbled from the sky.
I could hear the light plane coming back around, probably to see what happened and look for survivors. The plane was almost directly over the hole in the road when it, too, exploded in a fireball and plummeted to earth some distance north of the highway.
My experience finally kicked in and I scanned the area for someone with hardware capable of knocking aircraft out of the sky, not that I expected to see much so soon after two big doses of bright light. I saw nothing. Nobody.
As the fire from the copter died down, the dark closed back in around me. I heard a sizzling noise behind me and had just turned to look when my car exploded. The blast lifted it from the mud and flipped the burning hulk end over end through the air.
That's when I saw headlights coming from the west. Three sets, staggered by distances. Each, in turn, became a mass of light for a few seconds. Somebody was shooting at anything that moved.
I hoped that whatever was at the bottom of that crater wasn't still too hot as I dove over the edge and slid down the crater wall...
... and slammed to a halt against a tall, beautiful blonde woman who instantly grabbed me by the throat and held me well off the ground at arm's length, glaring at me. Her glare suddenly softened and she spoke.
"Sorry," she said, "I thought you were one of them."
She appeared to be nude and was easily as tall as me, and I'm 6'2".
I couldn't see a mark on her other than a few smudges of dirt, but I had to ask, "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," she said tersely, "They missed. I won't miss."
She looked at the sky above the crater rather intently, oblivious to her nakedness or me.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I saw she wore a silvery costume that covered only the barest of essentials by placements of a series of artfully-arranged strips. I logged that as just one more of the evening's surprises.
"What the hell do you mean 'they missed', lady? They blew up my car, whothehellever 'they' are, and some other cars, and a plane and a chopper. You got any idea how to get out of this hole alive?"
At that moment someone appeared at the edge of the crater holding a weird-looking rifle. As he aimed it in our direction, I grabbed a handful of the crater crud, pushed the blonde out of the way, and threw the mix of fine dirt and gravel as hard as I could at the figure above us.
The gun wavered as the man reflexively covered his face, and I was nearly to him before the rifle's muzzle swung back around to me. The end of the wide barrel looked more like a tunnel at that moment.
Looking up, I could see the 'fuck you' grin on his face as his trigger finger tightened. I knew without a doubt I was about to die, so I had to try.
I grabbed for the barrel and pulled as hard as I could... and just wound up hanging there under the rifle barrel. The big bastard hadn't moved an inch, but he was laughing his guts out as he began to shake the weapon to loosen my grip. I hung on grimly, not wanting to again be in front of it.
As he swung his arm up for another downward shake, I managed to wrap my legs around his arm almost to the shoulder and wrapped the rest of me around both the gun and his arm.
Kicking and punching at points that should have put him on the ground in agony or stopped his breathing had no effect.
I know I hit the marks, and some more than once, but he was beyond tough as I'd ever seen it defined in the flesh. Only my attempted strike at his eyes had seemed to really get his attention, so I struck again when I could reach them.
That seemed to change his mood. It wasn't funny anymore. He raised his gun arm and I realized he was about to slam me against the concrete edge of the crater, so I did the only thing I could. I let go and slid down his back, groping at my belt for my folding knife and flicking it open as I landed in a crouch.
When he swung around to face me, I straightened inside his arms and drove my knife into his throat and upward, trying to reach his brain from below. He failed to stop me, but the gun barrel hit me hard in the back of the head.
I saw lots of stars and my vision dimmed as I shoved the knife in. It stopped against gristle, apparently wedged tightly between his neck vertebrae. In the spirit of 'If I go down, so do you', I threw myself at the crater with a solid grip on his shirt. We fell in together.
He had both hands at his throat and I managed to keep him beneath me as we slid down the crater wall. I didn't know where the gun went and didn't care; my only concern was killing that son of a bitch before I died.
When we stopped sliding I could barely focus enough to realize I was sort of sitting on his chest. He was making gurgling noises and feebly pulling at my knife.
I waveringly aimed a kick as carefully as I could and used the arch of my sneaker to drive the knife in as far as it would go. A shudder passed through him and he went limp. Then I went limp. I fell back and mostly off him, my world condensing to a blackening haze and the ringing in my head so loud I almost couldn't hear the woman yelling at me.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
She wasn't yelling, it was just the way my whacked-on brain was processing her voice over the ringing in my head. I managed to sit up. She was standing over me, and even in my banged-up, semi-conscious condition, the sight of her took my breath away for a moment. When I tried to get up, my first effort failed and my head rang worse than ever.
"No," I said, "No, ma'am, I'm not even a little bit all right. I can barely hear you over all the noise in my head. I've met the woman of my dreams in the middle of a damned nightmare. If there's one of those guys, there are probably more around here, and I really don't think I can do that again tonight. We have to get the hell out of here."
She reached over to get a delicate grip on my knife with two fingers and pulled it out of the guy's throat. It dimly occurred to me that doing that should have required much more than two fingers and maybe both her hands.
After carefully wiping the knife on his shirt, she silently handed it to me. She looked thoughtful as she watched me fold it and put it away, then she smiled.
"Woman of your dreams, huh? I'll bet you say that to all the girls. Would you like to leave now?"
She seemed not the least bit perturbed at our situation as she helped me up. Slinging the rifle on her shoulder, she pushed her hair back from her face, a motion that raised her breasts and framed her lovely face with her arms in the dim light from burning aircraft debris above the crater.
I started to ask how the hell she expected to get out of this free-fire zone, but she put a finger on my lips and said, "Just a yes or no will do."
"Yes," I said, staring raptly at her.
She then picked me up like a child, crouched for a second, and jumped. We had to be a few hundred feet up when she said, "I'm going to need directions."
After a look into her beautiful, confident eyes, I just pointed toward North Dallas. She leaned that direction and the lights of my area seemed to grow larger very quickly as we neared them. Only a few minutes passed before I was able to point out my building below and to the left of us. She corrected course and we landed on the roof.
When she put me down and started to turn away, and suddenly I just couldn't let that happen. I practically leaped across the distance between us.
"WAIT!" I fairly shouted, grabbing her arm.
It was like grasping velvet-covered steel, and I knew that she could simply shake my hand off her arm, but she stopped and turned to me with an amused look on her gorgeous face.
I lifted her hand to my lips and gently kissed it. I didn't let go of her hand as I gazed into her eyes. Her amused look disappeared, but she didn't pull her hand back.
"Before you leave," I said, "Words would take too long and say too little, and I know what my real chances were out there. You saved my life. Thank you."
The amused look came back to her face as if I had said something mildly funny.
"Well," she said, "Maybe we're almost even, then. I'm just going to go get some other clothes and check in. I'll be back in a while, so put some coffee on. We have to talk."
She stepped back, blew me a kiss, then launched herself into the sky. As I watched her go, I realized she couldn't know which apartment was mine. SUCH a FOOL! I let her leave without telling her where I lived! I'd never see her again unless I bumped into her on the street.
At my apartment door the neighbor's cat slipped in past me as was his habit and made a bee-line for the kitchen.
"Hi, Fred. Bye, Fred," I said as he scooted past.
I opened a beer that didn't taste good, recapped it and put it back, then opened a Coke instead, and poured a little milk for Fred. I remembered how confident she'd sounded about her return.
I thought, 'She said it as if she believed it. Why shouldn't I?'
So I put that pot of coffee on, using the excuse that it was 4:am and I'd drink it later anyway. Four aspirins, a few bites of yesterday's cold pizza, and some Coke later, I was relaxed enough to stretch out on the couch.
Not long after I got flat on the couch, Fred stretched himself out on my chest and began to purr. I patted him a few times and let myself nod out, hoping my ringing bastard of a headache would be gone by morning.
As I drifted off, I was thinking, "Yeah, but it felt so good to feel alive again..."
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