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A.k.a. Goddess
Evelyn Vaughn
Mills & Boon Silhouette
This wasn't in my job description….Reporting a break-in, avoiding my overprotective exlover, dodging dangerous men out to kill me…not exactly a typical day for a comparative mythology professor. So how did I, Maggie Sanger, get mixed up in all this?It started with a family legend that connects me to a goddess and charges me with recovering the grail she hid away ages ago. Apparently some powerful people heard the story and are bent on destroying the grail at any cost–including my life. Now I have to find it before the enemy closes in….The Grail Keepers: Going for the Grail with the goddess on their side.
The Target:
The ancient chalice of Melusine
The bad guys: Otherwise known as the Comitatus, a powerful group of gun-toting men bent on destroying the goddess grails—and anyone who gets in their way. They’ve got superior firepower, a worldwide network of resources and a dangerous reputation. Fearing that the power of the grails will threaten the brotherhood, they will use any means necessary to prevent them from being united.
The good gal: Magdalene Sanger, college professor and grail keeper, comes from a long line of women charged with protecting the ancient grails, keeping them out of enemy hands and safely hidden until the time is right. What’s at stake? No one really knows what power the grails may hold, but Maggi’s determined to find and preserve these legendary artifacts of woman power with all of her wits, her research…and the power of a goddess.
The Grail Keepers:
Going for the grail with the goddess on their side!
Dear Reader,
Enter the high-stakes world of Silhouette Bombshell, where the heroine takes charge and never gives up—whether she’s standing up for herself, saving her friends from grave danger or daring to go where no woman has gone before. A Silhouette Bombshell heroine has smarts, persistence and an indomitable spirit, qualities that will get her in and out of trouble in an exciting adventure that will also bring her a man worth having…if she wants him!
Meet Angel Baker, public avenger, twenty-second-century woman and the heroine of USA TODAY bestselling author Julie Beard’s story, Kiss of the Blue Dragon. Angel’s job gets personal when her mother is kidnapped, and the search leads Angel into Chicago’s criminal underworld, where she crosses paths with one very stubborn detective!
Join the highly trained women of ATHENA FORCE on the hunt for a killer, with Alias, by Amy J. Fetzer, the latest in this exhilarating twelve-book continuity series. She’s lived a lie for four years to protect her son—but her friend’s death brings Darcy Steele out of hiding to find out whom she can trust….
Explore a richly fantastic world in Evelyn Vaughn’s A.K.A. Goddess, the story of a woman whose special calling pits her against a powerful group of men and their leader, her former lover.
And finally, nights are hot in Urban Legend by Erica Orloff. A mysterious nightclub owner stalks her lover’s killers while avoiding the sharp eyes of a rugged cop, lest he learn her own dark secret—she’s a vampire….
It’s a month to sink your teeth into! Please send your comments and suggestions to me c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279.
Sincerely,
Natashya Wilson
Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell
A.K.A. Goddess
Evelyn Vaughn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
EVELYN VAUGHN
has written stories since she learned to make letters. But during the two years that she lived on a Navajo reservation in Arizona—while in second and third grade—she dreamed of becoming not a writer, but a barrel racer in the rodeo. Before she actually got her own horse, however, her family moved to Louisiana. There, to avoid the humidity, she channeled more of her adventures into stories instead.
Since then, Evelyn has canoed in the East-Texas swamps, rafted a white-water river in the Austrian Alps, rappelled barefoot down a three-story building, talked her way onto a ship to Greece without her passport, sailed in the Mediterranean and spent several weeks in Europe with little more than a backpack and a train pass. All at least once. While she enjoys channeling the more powerful “travel Vaughn” on a regular basis, she also loves the fact that she can write about adventures with far less physical discomfort. Since she now lives in Texas, where she teaches English at a local community college, air-conditioning still remains an important factor.
A.K.A. Goddess is Evelyn’s seventh full-length book for Silhouette. Feel free to contact her through her Web site, www.evelynvaughn.com, or by writing to P.O. Box 6, Euless TX, 76039.
I owe thanks to many people for this book. Thanks to Leslie and Stef and Lynda and Cheryl and Julie at Silhouette Books, and to Paige at Creative Media Agency. Thanks to friends who critiqued or brainstormed, especially Maureen McKade and Pam McCutcheon and Deb Stover, and to Toni and Sarah and Jenn and Christine. Thanks to Matt and my friends at TCC for double-checking my technical elements, and to inspirations like Maggie Shayne and Lorna Tedder and the Sisterhood of the Scribes.
This book is dedicated to all of them and more, and to the spirit of sisterhood that, as far as I’m concerned, is the most constant and wonderful manifestation of Goddessness.
Contents
The Grail Keepers’ Bedtime Story
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Grail Keepers’ Bedtime Story
L ong ago, before accepted history began, there lived a Great Queen with nine powerful daughters. Their powers lay in their beauty, in their truth, in their abilities to heal and create and protect. Their powers lay in their skill at dance and art and sports and poetry.
But their greatest power lay in being women.
Because the world needed them, the Great Queen sent her daughters in nine different directions to be queens in their own right. And she gave them each a finely crafted cup.
“Pour your powers into these cups,” she instructed, “and share them as you will. But if ever you find yourselves in danger, a victim of fear or envy, hide the cups so that your powers can live on, even though you be forgotten.”
Her daughters agreed, and off they went. For a long, long time they ruled as beloved queens—queens of the North and the South, of the East and the West, of the Heaven and the Earth and the Underworld. They married and loved and bore children. But all things change, wheels turn, and eventually, as the Great Queen had predicted, men began to fear and envy their powers.
One queen was imprisoned by soldiers.
One queen was denounced by priests.
One queen was outlawed by a senate.
One queen was erased by scholars.
One queen was exiled by her father-in-law.
One queen was overthrown by her stepson.
One queen was betrayed by her lover.
One queen was forgotten by her son.
One queen was deserted by her husband.
As each queen found herself in danger from fear and envy, she asked her own daughters to do as her mother, the Great Queen, had instructed. She had them hide her cup, so that the powers she had poured into it could survive, waiting to be found and shared if ever the world again became ready for them.
The cups wait to be discovered.
The cups wait to be united.
The cups wait to change the world.
They are waiting still…perhaps, my daughter, for you.
Chapter 1
T he light over my front door was out again. I noticed it as I carried my damp gym bag up the shadowy outer stairs. I’d have to call the landlord.
Then I climbed high enough to see that my door stood open several inches.
I knew I’d locked it.
Someone was in my apartment.
For a long, dumb moment, I just stared. Then I backed down the steps as quietly as I could. Don’t get me wrong. I come from a long line of strong women—WACs, suffragettes, ladies who disguised themselves as boys to fight alongside soldier husbands in ancient wars. And, trust me, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my family and woman power.
But there’s a huge difference between strength and stupidity. Our brains are our best weapon, or so my sifu—instructor—used to say. I reached and unlocked my car, and all but dove inside. I hit the lock button, only then using my cell phone to call 911.
Then I sat there on the phone, fumbling my key into the ignition in case whoever was in my apartment might force me to flee by automobile.
Or maybe to run them over. Who can say with hypotheticals?
The cops got there barely ten minutes later—not a bad response time—and I disconnected from the nice emergency operator. I cracked my window, but the two officers only nodded in my direction before heading upstairs to check matters out. I waited, staring unfocused at my faint reflection in the car window—late twenty-something, long brown hair pulled into a wet ponytail, eyes too serious. What felt like forever later, a second blue-and-white cruised into my parking lot. As its female officer got out, I could hear her radio crackle. A male voice said, “Someone’s trashed the place, but it seems empty. We’ll look around to make sure.”
Trashed the place? My place?
Weirdly, instead of feeling hurt or violated, I simply felt…disbelief. My apartment was safe. How could someone trash it?
The policewoman tapped on my car window. Despite having watched her approach, I still jumped. “Ms. Sanger? Officer Sofie Douglas. Could I ask you some questions?”
I was still tense—so much for the relaxation benefits of swimming thirty laps at the gym. But her being female made her more approachable. She was black, shorter than me and about my age.
As a gesture of confidence, I climbed out of the car.
“Is your name really Margaret Sanger?” Officer Douglas asked. “Like the lady who made birth control legal?”
“No,” I said, not for the first time. “Not Margaret.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Dispatch said you identified yourself as Maggie.”
I saw her writing it down. “No e.”
She scratched out the e. Hey, at least I don’t dot my i’s with hearts or smiley faces.
“Maggi’s short for Magdalene,” I said.
Officer Douglas blinked at me. “You mean like Mary Magdalene?”
Lights appeared above us, from my apartment’s bedroom window, and my head came up to track it. “That’s the one.”
“So what do you do?” she asked. “For a living, I mean.”
“I teach comparative mythology at the college.”
She stared. “You can major in that?”
