A.k.a. Goddess

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

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?”

I was rolling on to and off of the balls of my feet, like a Tai Chi form about to escape. “When can I go up there?”

I wanted to see the damage for myself. I had to know if this really was random. I kind of hoped it was.

Static crackled on Officer Douglas’s radio. Then a voice: “Nobody’s here. It doesn’t look like they took anything.”

I jogged up the stairs without waiting for Sofie Douglas’s permission.

The place was trashed, all right. Sofa cushions slit. Drawers overturned. Plants uprooted in dark spills of potting soil. In some corners, my carpet had even been torn off its pad. Stunned, I headed for the bedroom, which was just as bad. All my clothes…!

“Can you tell if anything’s missing, Ms. Sanger?” asked a burly, red-haired officer. “Anything of value?”

“It’s all of value,” I said, more softly than I would have liked. “It’s mine.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean—”

But I held up a hand to cut him off. I knew what he meant. As a test, I checked my jewelry box. There never had been a lot there—even when I was engaged briefly, I used to wear the too-expensive diamond—I had few family heirlooms.

“Nothing’s missing.” I turned and noticed my bedroom TV. It was portable, but it hadn’t been, well, ported. I returned to my living room—the TV and stereo remained there, too, though they’d been upended—and looked into my office. My computer hummed steadily, monitor facedown on the floor. But…

“The CPU’s running,” I said. “I turned it off before I left home this morning.”

Officer Douglas, who’d followed me upstairs, went to look more closely at my computer. The redhead, whose shield identified him as Officer Willis, said, “Does anybody have a key to your home?”

“My parents,” I said. “Two—no, three of my friends.”

He exchanged an amused glance with the other male officer, a tall, graying guy with a mustache.

“And the lady who cleans up for me once a week,” I added. “Oh, and my dog walker.”

Willis looked concerned. “You have a dog?”

As if I would’ve hidden in my car if any dog of mine had been in jeopardy! “Not anymore. She died last fall. I just never bothered to get my key back. I’ve also given a key to my neighbor, so she can check on things when I’m gone. But she’s trustworthy. They all are.”

“Maybe I should’ve asked who doesn’t have a key.”

There were a few.

“I prefer not to empower fear,” I murmured, turning in a circle, and he snorted with male superiority. At least he didn’t use that old line about “a woman as pretty as you,” as if a decent appearance begs for trouble.

Trouble doesn’t wait for invitations.

That’s when I noticed what was left of my curio cabinet. The cabinet itself had been destroyed—lying on its side, the door yanked completely off, cherry wood splintered and every pane of glass smashed. And my collection of statues, inside…

Little more than rubble.

I took a step forward, unbelieving. Chunks of white marble were all that remained of what had once been a twelve-inch Pallas Athena, which I’d bought in Greece. Shards of lapis lazuli had been my Isis-and-Horus statue. My obsidian Shiva was many-armed rubble. My glossy, ceramic Virgin Mary had been smashed to shiny dust. Even the wonderfully fertile Venus, similar to the famous Willendorf figure and carved from granite, had been reduced to round and jagged bits.

There was no way the Venus could have broken like that accidentally. Someone must have pounded on her, hard. Repeatedly. Purposefully.

And in anger.

I’d recently read a news piece about a goddess artifact being similarly destroyed, in a museum in India, and the similarities—as well as my sudden conclusions—unnerved me.

“Wow.” Willis whistled. “What were those?”

“Goddesses,” I said. “I collect statues of ancient goddesses.”

“Were they worth a lot?”

Monetarily? Some more than others—none were originals, thank heavens. But emotionally…

Officer Douglas, from my study doorway, said, “Goddesses? Are you one of those Wiccans?”

“Not exactly,” I told her, fingering the amulet I wore under my shirt. It wasn’t a pentagram, but two interlaced circles called a vesica piscis. I wasn’t technically Wiccan. But our beliefs have surprising similarities.

It’s like I told you.

I come from a very long line of very strong women.

The police all but moved in. They made phone calls and questioned neighbors. Specialists showed up to photograph the wreckage and to dust for fingerprints, more backup than I’d ever expected for a simple break-in. When I asked if this was normal, Officer Willis said, “We’re just trying to be thorough, ma’am.”

I put up with it for insurance reasons, but mainly I just wanted to clean up. Did you know recent studies have shown that while men have a fight-or-flight response to stress, women have a hormone that prompts them to tend-and-be-friend? I hated to see Officer Sofie go, despite her leaving her card with me and telling me to call anytime. But I also wanted space in which to mourn my statues, to put things as much to right as I could…and to consider who could have done such a thing…and why.

I couldn’t help thinking this break-in might somehow be related to the recent destruction of an ancient goblet, the Kali Cup, a week before it could go on display. But that meant things I couldn’t face. Not yet.

I’d barely managed to start straightening the mess, alone at last, when a knock at the door startled me. I don’t like being scared. It goes against almost everything I believe in.

Checking the peephole and catching a glimpse of brown hair, and a familiar face in its usual impersonal mode, didn’t do a lot to improve my mood…or my lingering disorientation.

Lex.

Alexander Rothschild Stuart III and I go back. Way, way back. Worse, he makes me question my life choices almost every time our diverse paths collide. See, he’d be the dream catch for almost any woman—wealthy beyond his unimaginable inheritance, quietly handsome and, despite nearing thirty, still something of a brooding bad boy. Hard to resist, huh?

Hell, even I have a terrible time resisting him, as our roller-coaster history attests to. And I have different views on money and power than a lot of women. At least—I try.

I could also no longer trust either him or his family as far as I could comfortably spit them.

Still, there was that lack-of-resistance thing, and the intimate-history thing, along with no small amount of curiosity. It had been months since I’d so much as glimpsed him, yet there he stood, too self-possessed to even look impatient while I checked him out. Him showing up on the night of my break-in couldn’t have been a coincidence even if I believed in coincidences.

I don’t. But I opened the door.

“Are you all right?” The question came out vague and polite, as if he were making bored chitchat at a cocktail party. Lex has always had that coolness about him—he supposedly can trace his family line back to the Royal House of Scotland, by way of England, so it’s probably all that blue blood chilling in his veins. But the fact that he was here at all, much less this late, belied his nonchalance. So did the powerful energy that instantly roiled between us. “I heard about the break-in.”

“From the police?” I asked. That might explain all the special treatment, mightn’t it? “Or are you a part of the criminal grapevine now?”

He’d been accused of perjury the previous year. Worse, he hadn’t denied it. It had contributed to our latest breakup.

Now my words wrung a hint of a smile from him, an expression that, on Lex, packs a potent punch. “So may I come in? You know I need permission to cross a person’s threshold.”

No, he wasn’t a vampire. He was just being sarcastic.

“You might as well.” I sighed. “Everyone else has tonight.”

So he did, casually touching my arm as he passed me…except that nothing Lex Stuart does is truly casual. He’s got a great poker face, but it’s more as if he’s eternally lying in wait for something, patiently still, ready to pounce.

I’ve only seen him pounce once. I didn’t enjoy it.

“Ouch,” he said, noticing my broken curio cabinet. I’d had to cruise every room before I saw it, but he took it in first thing. “They got the girls?”

“Thoroughly.” I watched him cross to the rubble. I’d been straightening, but I hadn’t gotten to that yet. Once I cleaned it up, I might as well throw it all away—nothing left to save. I wasn’t sure I felt ready for that.

“Bastards.” Lex picked up the round, faceless head of my Willendorfesque Venus—a piece he’d given me when I got my doctorate. We hadn’t even been dating at the time. But he’d sent me the statue for my collection anyway, managing in true Lex fashion to choose something that, despite my best sense, I couldn’t bear to return.

“Luckily none of it was original.”

“This was,” he said.

I gaped at him.

He shrugged, dropped the chunk of rock back onto the carpet, and brushed his fingers on his neatly pressed, thousand-dollar slacks. “You know my family collects antiques.”

Yes, I knew. Beyond last year’s corporate espionage trial, and his still-murky role, his family’s antique collection was one more reason to distrust the Stuarts. Considering my own family’s connection to certain relics, that is. Now this.

“You gave me an original piece of Paleolithic sculpture?” Not counting what something like that would fetch at auction, hadn’t it belonged in a museum? Was owning it even legal?

The Stuarts never had constrained themselves with something so mundane as legalities.

“So did they take anything?” Lex answered my question with his avoidance. “Or was it simple vandalism?”

They were looking for something. The dumped drawers, the gutted cushions, the carpet pulled away from the corners… It was the only logical explanation. I hadn’t cleaned enough of the damage for someone as smart as Lex to miss that, either. And they hated my goddesses. Any guesses?

“I haven’t found anything missing,” I said, noncommittal. “But it’s hard to tell, this early.”

We eyed each other, letting the silence stretch. Me, because I had theories I wanted to protect awhile longer. Him…who could tell? Maybe he had secrets, too. Or it could just be his love of a good competition.

Either way, neither of us ’fessed up to anything.

He turned away first—though it may have been a simple courtesy. “You really need a monitored security system, Mag. If you can’t afford one, I wish you’d let me—”

Blessedly, my phone rang to cut him off before he tried to buy me yet again. Even during the good times, we generally argued when he did that.

Another ring. He turned away to look at other damage, giving me an illusion of privacy. It wasn’t the best circumstance under which to take a phone call, but I didn’t want the answering machine to pick up and broadcast anything to him.

Too bad I’d already rehooked the machine. So I answered. “Hello?”

“How soon can you get to France?” Sure enough, it was my cousin Lil—likely on business Lex shouldn’t know about.

I used every bit of self-control to say, “I have company. Call you back?”

There was a long pause while she took that in. Then Lil asked, “Is it who I think it is?”

Maybe she’s psychic. Maybe she’s just really smart. Does there have to be a difference?

I peeked over my shoulder at Lex. He’d decided to make himself useful and was shelving some of my scattered books, scowling at the destruction.

“I think it is.”

“I’ll call you,” she said, and hung up. Quickly. I wondered if she’d gotten off the line before a trace could be run…assuming anybody was running a trace.

She would call back from a different phone, likely using someone else’s three-way dialing to confuse matters further. Just in case. We’re amateurs at the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but we learn fast. And as much as I hated bowing to that kind of paranoia…well, someone had broken in.

Lex turned back to me, solemn, as I set down the phone. His rich hazel eyes didn’t flinch. “You used to trust me.”

Did he purposefully choose the best way to wound me, or was he just expressing his own pain? I didn’t want to do this again. It had hurt both of us too much the last few times. Still, I couldn’t not answer. “You didn’t used to work for your cousin.”

He tried a wry smile. “I never said Phil isn’t an ass, Mag.”

“And yet you cover for him, despite last year’s trial.”

“In which the charges were dropped.” And they had been. Espionage. Perjury. Insider trading. Unfair monopoly.

Like magic.

“After an undisclosed settlement,” I reminded him. “That you won’t even talk about.”

He took a deep breath. “Because I signed a contract of nondisclosure.”

“Damned convenient, that. The ends don’t always justify the means, Lex. Sometimes the means are everything.”

“The stockholders seem happy enough.”