by Skyler Andra
“Typical,” the man muttered, scuffing his foot. “Let me fix it up so you don’t have to sneak out like a criminal.”
I smiled. A man in shining armor was more my style of rescuer. But that only solved one of my questions. “What about the cops?”
“Don’t worry. They’re not after you,” he said, and I tilted my head and lifted an eyebrow to send him a yeah right look. “If you must know, I eavesdropped on their radio signal.”
I didn’t know whom Mads or this hunk worked for, but my curiosity for answers peaked now. “Time to start talking.”
“We need to make a move,” he said forcefully.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Heard that one from Mads.”
“I’ll tell you everything in the car.” His voice had that promising quality to it, but my suspicion still lingered after the way Mads had abandoned me.
“Let me settle your bill,” he said.
My eyes got their fix as he walked out. His denim hugged his muscled legs and ass, the way I wanted to cling to him. I’d be damned if my legs betrayed me, carrying me out after him, so my eyes could feast on him some more.
The only thing that drew my eyes away were the two officers dunking their donuts in their coffee. My tensed muscles relaxed a little when they talked animatedly about some punk they’d pulled over, not paying me, the stranger, or anyone else in the place any mind.
Back at the counter, the hunk pulled out a couple of twenties to pay for Mads’ and my meal as well as leave a tip.
“Thank you,” I said as we exited together.
The hunk took long strides towards a dark green truck that I assumed belonged to him. Fitting. Muscled man. Big vehicle.
When he realized I had stopped halfway between the diner and his truck, he turned. “Come on. I have to get you out of here.”
I hesitated, unsure whether to trust him as I had foolishly done with Mads. Look where that had gotten me. “Listen. I appreciate you taking care of the bill. But I just want answers.”
He exhaled loudly and stared at the ground. “Can’t we do this in the car?”
I was really tired of this evasive behavior. In fact, I was all around tired from only getting a few winks last night. Tired and pissy Locke was not someone to mess with. So I did the first thing that came to mind, taking off in the opposite direction towards the highway.
Lita’s Diner was on the freeway, but there was a small town nearby, one I could walk to and search for a payphone or even hitch a ride to visit a friend from college. Miraculously, I managed to get across the freeway without getting hit by any oncoming traffic. When the hunk shouted after me, I made a rash decision and headed into the corn instead. Corn leaves brushed against me, rustling as I moved through them. It was pretty hard to find someone lost in a cornfield, and maybe, just maybe, he would give up and I could try to get out of this weird mess that I had found myself in.
Deeper into the field, however, I realized my strategic mistake. I’d been marching for a good five minutes now, and the hunk’s voice grew more distant. He might not have been able to see me, but I couldn’t see him either, and the corn in every direction was extremely disorientating and I felt a little dizzy being surrounded by it. At best, I was terrible with my sense of direction, always getting lost in my car in the city, and my GPS on my cell phone always glitched.
Tired and grumpy, I sat down in the corn to try to pull my thoughts together. My chest pumped with rapid breaths. Where was I? A whole lot of anger slowly replaced my panic. I hadn’t asked for what was happening to me, and hell, at this point, I barely had any idea what exactly was happening to me anyway.
I thought back to the bright light that had seemed to come into my window, how it had left me feeling strange and almost euphoric for a moment before I’d blacked out. Well, I supposed being visited by aliens and chased by the men in black was actually one explanation for what was going on with me.
I wanted to laugh, but it’s pretty hard to laugh at your situation when you’re penniless, without a cell phone, or a car, and stuck in a cornfield with no sense of a way out. Tears pricked at my eyes. They may just have been because I was exhausted, but I hated crying and I wiped them away angrily. In that moment, I had no idea what I was going to do.
Countless time seemed to pass, and I didn’t know how long I sat in the cornfield. The swishing of its leaves, the wind whistling through it, did little to drown out my worried thoughts. The problem was that I was so worn out, the longer I sat there, the more inclined I was to stay there. The corn had a fresh and worn scent, dry and living at once. Above me, the sky was a clear and flawless autumn blue. I was very much a city girl, and I hadn’t been out of the reach of a Starbucks in years, but there was something intensely peaceful about the setting. For the first time in twelve hours, I felt as if I could really catch my breath.
I didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t know what I was going to do. All I could do was sit still and think.
My thoughts and my heartbeat were finally starting to slow down when the corn rustled close to me.
Before I could get up and start running again, the man who’d come to pick me up approached with his hands raised. “Please don’t run again. You took a dozen years off my life when you crossed the freeway.” His voice was calm, even kind, and contained no hint of a threat.
Even if I was still wary, I relaxed a little. “Why did you follow me?”
“I wanted to make sure that you didn’t hurt yourself.” I laughed at the oddly encouraging note in his voice.
“Gee, thanks.”
Despite my sarcastic tone, he maintained his seriousness. “Locke, I told you I’m here to protect you.”
Again, what was with these strange men who knew my name? Was he connected to the scorned guy on the phone, the one who had told me I was perfect?
“To take you someplace safe. Look, there’s a lot going on here…”
“Mads said the same thing. Have to admit, I’m a little tired of hearing that and not getting any else in return.”
The corn stalks stirred, thrashing at each other, as if responding to my rising anger. When I took a few deep breaths, the rustling stalks stilled.
“All right, that’s fair,” said the hunk, respectfully remaining where he was, as if worried I might bolt if he came closer. “If I tell you what’s going on, will you come with me?”
I glanced at the sky. “If you tell me what’s going on, I promise that I will think about it harder than I am right now.”
He uttered a soft sigh. “Can I come closer?”
At this point, why not? “Sure, knock yourself out.”
He approached with a silence that was unnerving. Now I could see that the blurred and old tattoo on his shoulder was some kind of military seal with a Latin saying underneath it. His arms muscles flexed as he sat down across from me. The small tuft of corn silk that caught in his hair made me want to smile, but I brushed it away.
“All right. What have you got?” I asked with a frown.
He hesitated as if trying to choose the best way to open this conversation. I sat with my arms folded across my chest, unimpressed and uninterested in helping him. Of course, when he finally figured out what he wanted to say, it didn’t really help matters much.
“What do you know about the gods of ancient Greece?” Lines furrowed his tanned brow.
“Okay.” I ripped off a corn leaf and tore it to pieces. “Um, we covered them in my literature class in high school? Enough to occasionally get a question at pub crawl quizzes right?”
The man sitting across from me made an awkward face. “All right. Narrow it down. What do you know about Eros?”
“Who?”
“The Greek God of love and desire?” A spark of fire flashed in his gorgeous blue eyes. “Also known as Cupid to the Romans.”
Impatience stormed through me, and I wanted to tell him to get to the point. But at this stage, it was delving into genuinely weird territory, which I found mildly amusing, and I wan
ted to know how in the world this was going to play out.
“Er, god of florists,” he stammered. “Looks like a baby with a bow. That’s… probably not right.”
For some reason, that made him smile a little, an oddly hopeless little thing. The way his lips upturned made my heart sigh, and I had to tell it to steady itself and calm down.
He rubbed the back of his neck, highlighting the definition of his arms. “Well, showing you what I mean would certainly make things a little easier. Can I… Can I show you?”
What was making someone as confident and serious as him a little nervous?
He offered me his hand, and without thinking, I took it. The spark that arced between us when we touched almost made me jerk my hand back. The only thing that stopped me from doing so was that he seemed as surprised by it as I was.
“What was that?”
“Just wait.” He closed his large and calloused hand around mine.
I wasn’t particularly tall, but this man made me felt tiny. He was taller than Mads, and heavier. All of that bulk was pure muscle, and I had a feeling that there was really no way in the world I could have gotten away from him if he truly wanted to stop me.
His words left me wondering what in the world he was going to show me when my vision went blank. It was like what had happened to me in the apartment right before this entire mess had started. Somehow it felt as if I’d been catapulted high in the air, straight up into that flawless blue above the cornfield. In a second, I was spinning through the atmosphere, through space and past a thousand lights dancing around me. Finally, I jerked to a stop in a place of boundless horizons. Quickly, I became aware of something titanic standing over me, a being of heat and power. The air contained the overpowering scent of gunpowder and gasoline. An instinct deep inside me was compelled to fight.
Wait…fight who, fight what?
The answer roared in my head. I crouched at the foot of this being, covering my ears at the deafening sound consuming me.
“Fight because you must!” its voice bellowed. “It is what you are! It is the way of the world. Be strong, fight, and raise your head to the sky!”
I had always thought of myself as a fighter, but this tremendous lust for blood and war overwhelmed me. This wasn’t just finding the strength to overcome, this was something that sought the complete eradication of the enemy, to make them bow so that nothing would ever, ever threaten me and what belonged to me again.
I dared sneak a glance at this mighty being in front of me. An expanse of raging fire shaped into the giant human body, with balls of light erupting from its body.
I backed away. It was so much. Too much. My hands clamped tighter over my ears, I screamed. Anything to shut it out, to make it get out of my head before it changed me forever.
Then it vanished and I was sitting in the cornfield again. Someone held my hand. I opened my eyes to find the strange man clutching me tightly. When I looked into his crystal blur eyes, a kind of sorrow greeted me.
“What was that?” I asked, my voice shaking.
He lifted his chin. “That was Ares. My patron.”
“Ares?” I said. “As in the god of war?”
Well, that sure explained all the lust for fighting and surging anger.
I took a moment to take several deep breaths. They helped me calm down a little, but the truth was that I wasn’t sure when I would ever be composed again, given what I had just felt.
“Explain please,” I panted. “Only without the terrifying out-of-body experience.”
Chapter 6
I didn’t let go of the man’s hand, and he didn’t let go either. Right then, I wanted—no, needed—to be connected to something human, even if I had a few doubts about this man. He was better than whatever it was that I had just witnessed.
“I don’t know whether they’re the gods of ancient Greece,” he started. “Or whether the ancient inhabitants called them gods. Because what else could you call something like that? What I do know is they’re elemental forces. Powerful, beyond us in every way, but for some reason… they need us.”
I searched his eyes for answers. “Need… us?”
A slight smile played across his face, mirthless and a little grim. “It’s my theory anyway. If you spoke to Hermes or to Apollo, you might get a different answer. But you’re talking to me, and I think yes, they need us. Mostly, we’re called avatars, and we channel their powers into the real world to help the gods somehow.”
I thought of the place where Rane had taken me with a shiver. It might not have been like the world I was used to, but right now, I had no doubt that it was its own kind of real.
“Wait, you said we?” I said, wanting to know what this meant, and if Mads had any connection to the gods too.
He rubbed his chin, the stubble making a scratchy sound. “All of the gods have avatars. Humans selected through some mechanism to channel their wills. Ares chose me as his avatar. But you…” The man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re something different.”
“Lucky me?” I picked another corn leaf, but instead of tearing it to bits, I stroked its silky length between my fingers.
Finally, he let go of my hand, leaving it tingling and longing to be held by him again. “You’re something new, and that’s why we were sent to find you.”
“By ‘we,’ you mean you and Mads?” I asked.
“Yes. Mads is the avatar of Hermes, the chief messenger of Olympus. The god of trade, wealth, and luck, who happens to have a clever and mischievous side.”
That pretty much summed up Mads. He liked flashy cars and apartments, even though he didn’t own the one he’d taken me to. I recalled being on the fire escape with him, when the creeps who had broken into my apartment had pointed their Tasers at us, and the weapons had turned into toy guns. Hermes’ mischievous influence on Mads, no doubt. Along with his casual air of indifference about breaking into people’s homes and encouraging me to steal their belongings.
Right when he’d left me at the diner, and I’d gotten up to chase him, a strange and confusing sensation had swamped me, leaving me with no memory of where I was or how I had gotten there. That sensation had subsided when Mads had pulled out of the truck stop, giving way to my original thoughts of annoyance at his sudden departure.
“Mads has an extensive network of spies and messengers,” the man explained. “That’s how he found you first. But I caught up to him at the diner. It’s my job as Ares’ solider to protect you with everything my patron has to defend you.”
Having my own personal bodyguard, especially one as delectable as this guy, sent a shiver of delight through me. It wasn’t everyday a woman like me got such an honor. But I’d rather not have strange men in black suits after me.
Something Mads had said to me about why he’d left the diner reared up in my mind. “He said something about not getting along with Ares…”
The hunk looked impatient. “Of course he said that. We might get along better if he paid attention to what he was meant to do and didn’t go off chasing the first shiny thing he saw glinting off the side of the road.” He cut himself off when I laughed.
“When you talk like that,” I said. “I think I see why he doesn’t get along with you all that well.”
The hunk considered my words for a few moments. “Maybe you have a point.”
“So I’m supposed to call you Ares?” I said, lightening my tone, heading into a little flirty territory.
What? He was gorgeous!
To my surprise, he blanched a little at that, shaking his head hard. “Don’t…that’s…my name is Rane Elladon. And you’re Locke Casey.”
I tilted my head. “And you were just in the middle of explaining why you know that, weren’t you, Rane?” Again, nothing wrong with a little flirting when I felt a strong tug at my core for this man.
“Call it my godly avatar powers.” He tapped the top of his head.
“Ahhh.”
Rane leaned in closer. “Have you met Eros? Cupid? Whatever you want to
call the god.”
The events of last night flooded back into my memory. “Er, no. I had a call from a strange man asking me weird questions about love.”
I purposefully kept out the little detail about my job as a phone sex operator.
“Then he said I was perfect and hung up.” I shrugged. “Next thing I knew, a great white light entered through my apartment window, and I fainted. I woke up in my bathroom and two creeps in my kitchen were talking about extraction teams from Carbondale.”
Rane exuded calm and focus as he listened. “You’re not an avatar, but you seem to have the powers of one. I feel it inside you.
Intrigued, I straightened my spine. “What powers?”
“Love,” was all he said. “Can you use it?”
I knew enough about love to know that it wasn’t all fluffy clouds and hearts, and the more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. “How?”
“Connect to your power,” Rane urged.
I closed my eyes, summoning whatever power resided within me, and I waited a couple of seconds. When Rane didn’t say anything, I peeked through one eye.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You just lack the connection to the god himself.”
I gave him a bitter smile.
“Good!” I had no idea what connecting myself to the god of love would look like, but after having met the god of war, I was not eager for an introduction.
What a ridiculous idea. The god of love, imbuing me, Locke Casey, with its power! After everything I’d admitted to the desperate guy on the phone, I was the last person who embodied that emotion. The god had made a huge mistake. Chosen the wrong representative for relationships, intimacy, passion and all things warm and fuzzy.
But then another few memories surfaced. Of the waitress and the trucker at the diner, and how they’d flirted and were all over each other. That had been funny to watch, but that wasn’t really a thing that happened to people, was it? Or the guy behind the counter at the drugstore, who had decided that hitting on me was the best thing to do when I was running from the police. Was he just an asshole, or had I been influencing things with my supposed powers?
