From Darkness (Hearts & Arrows Book 3)

by Staci Hart

  He had been her companion for many years before she realized what was truly between them, only to have him ripped away from her. The giant was a hunter and her best friend, though she had missed him for thousands of years, mourning what might have been had he not been killed. It had taken so long to understand that she loved him, and the shock and confusion of the revelation never found an end.

  There was no resolution and never would be.

  The moon was high and bright that night, and Artemis crouched behind a wild basil bush to mask her scent as she watched a buck in a clearing before her. She counted his points.

  Eighteen. Orion will never beat me.

  The creature lowered his head and nibbled on a patch of spring grass. He never heard Artemis draw her bow.

  The arrow flew straight into his heart, and he took off at a sprint, only making it about a dozen meters before he collapsed. She trotted over to him and knelt down, laying her hand around the base of the arrow.

  “Peace, noble brother,” she whispered reverently as he slipped away.

  Artemis made quick work of field dressing the buck, eager to return to camp and see who had won.

  She and Orion would compete often to see who might bring back the most, the biggest, the best. It was usually a draw, which both impressed and annoyed her.

  She thought of his face when he had lost to her, and her heart fluttered like bird’s wings in her chest.

  They were together almost always, spending long hours doing what they both loved. Hunting was their foremost recreation, the thrill of the track and the chase, the anticipation of finding what you sought and taking it for your own.

  But it was more than that common enjoyment. Orion could make her laugh, truly laugh from deep in her belly and until she had no breath, a feat which was a rarity. He understood her and accepted her, never questioning, never expecting anything more than what she gave. He was her favorite companion, always there when she needed him and armed with the exact right thing to say. But it was more than that too, though she couldn’t be sure what more was, only that the prospect excited and disquieted her.

  Artemis dragged the buck around the rock face to the clearing where their camp bustled in the dark. She easily spotted Orion, the giant, where he sat near the fire. His height was double hers, and she never liked being so much smaller than him, so when they were together, she would take on a larger form, though she never cared to hunt at that size. So ungainly, too difficult to stay silent. As soon as she saw him, she shifted to her giant form and looked across the camp with a smile.

  Sirius, Orion’s dog, stood tall and lean and trotted over to her, snuffing her hand with her long nose. Artemis scratched the dog’s ear and looked back to Orion.

  He sat with his back against a massive olive tree and his feet up near the fire. His hands were folded behind his blond head, and his smile was brighter than the stars, the type of smile that told her she’d likely lost. She felt herself flush and was unsure if it was due to the loss of their game or her nearness to him.

  “What a sweet little buck, Artemis. Noble effort.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And where is your prize, Orion, King of Hubris?”

  Orion jerked his chin toward a rack where his buck hung, and she held her breath as she counted the points with haste.

  “Twenty? By the gods.” Exasperation was thick in her voice, and the buck was forgotten behind her.

  Eleni approached. “Shall I finish cleaning this for you?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Artemis took a seat next to Orion, and Sirius followed, curling up next to him with her eyes on the fire.

  “You may tell me how superior I am now, Artemis.” The firelight cast shadows under his jaw and the slope of his lips as he taunted her.

  “Oh, may I?” She crossed her ankles in front of her. “You are fortunate that I am exhausted and in no mood to smite you.”

  “You would never smite me.”

  She smiled at his certainty. “Would I not?”

  “No,” he said with a chuckle as he shook his head. “I do not believe you would.”

  “I have smote so many. You would just be one in a very long line.”

  He leaned toward her, a smile playing on his wide mouth, his deep eyes twinkling. “You would never smite me, as you know what lies in my heart.”

  He was so close, she could see his every eyelash. Even in the dark, she knew his eyes—blue with flecks of green and gold that shone in the firelight. Her breath quickened, and she wondered what was happening as she leaned into him, drawn to him like a siren call.

  Eleni cleared her throat, and Artemis blinked a few times with a laugh as she turned away and dusted off her boots, the sound far less awkward than she felt as she tried to find her footing again.

  “Well, nicely done on your buck. You won today, friend, but tomorrow, you will not be so fortunate.”

  Orion leaned back with a strange look on his face. “Yes, Artemis, there is always tomorrow.”

  Confusion wriggled through her as she realized that she had almost kissed him.

  Is that so hard to believe?

  Orion was everything she wished for in a companion, and she wanted to be with him always.

  And it was then that she wondered…could she feel love?

  But it was impossible. She could never take a lover.

  Artemis was a virgin goddess, the maiden. It was a title she had requested from her father, Zeus, wishing to escape the prison of marriage and duty that women were bound to, preferring to retain her freedom. But Orion already held power over her, power she didn’t understand and hadn’t knowingly given, and for a fleeting moment, she understood what love was, saw it laid out before her like an ocean.

  Artemis pushed the thought away and cleared her mind. She had no care for love, or so she told herself, but still considered speaking to Aphrodite. The goddess of love would understand the makings of her heart better than she and perhaps would give her guidance.

  But she balked at the ludicrous notion. Artemis, in love? Pure fantasy.

  Artemis looked up at the sun pouring into the skylight, the rays cutting through the dark water in wedges, as she floated in her reverie. Looking back never brought peace, only pain.

  In that way lies madness.

  She knew all too well that was truth. She had tortured herself with the past for so long that she was a shell, so constricted at her core that she was calcified, a hardened version of who she had once been.

  Orion was the closest she had ever come to love, but he had been stolen from her, gone forever, and she could not heal. The wound only festered, and the sadness and unfairness of it all twisted around her heart, poisoning her.

  Artemis swam through the open crag, looking up at her nymphs as she made her way back to the present, leaving her memories in the black below. They watched her as she swam away with longing.

  The sun was barely up when Josie rolled over in bed, and her mind switched on like a lightbulb as she ticked through her schedule for the day. It would start like it always did—with a run, then shower, breakfast, and work. Her day was planned out, every minute filled with something productive. She hated the feeling of having nothing to do, mostly because, when she was idle, she couldn’t help but think about all the things she’d lost.

  She saw Jon’s face behind her closed lids and opened her eyes to banish him. She stretched for her phone, sighing when she noted that her alarm wasn’t set to go off for another fifteen minutes.

  Jon. His name rang clear in her mind, unbidden and unwelcome.

  She hated seeing him, hated how she felt after, like someone had cut her kite string and she was left untethered, whipping around in the wind.

  Josie slung her legs out of bed and forced lingering thoughts of Jon from her mind, wishing there were a way to permanently eject him from her head and life. Her temporary fix was yoga, which was equal parts therapy and exercise, a way for her to control her body and find focus. It was the emotional equivalent of a reset button.


  She lifted her arms up in a sun salutation, breathing deep and exhaling before she bent over, hanging her arms, her knuckles grazing the rug, breathing in time as she pushed out to downward dog.

  Exhale the bullshit.

  Her smoky-gray cat, Ricochet, strutted into her eyeline and flicked his tail in her face.

  “You’re crushing my Zen, Rick.”

  He meowed back.

  She sighed and stood, scooping up her cat to kiss him on the head. “I’m sorry. You hungry, kitty boy?”

  He looked up at her with yellow eyes, and she walked into the kitchen where she deposited him on the counter.

  She held up two cans of Fancy Feast. “Chicken Florentine or Salmon Tuscany?”

  He tilted his head.

  “I know. It’s ridiculous. You eat better than I do.”

  Josie popped open the Florentine and dumped it into Ricochet’s dish, hit the button on her coffeemaker, which was already prepped and ready, and made her way back into her room to throw on running shorts and a sports bra. She grabbed her fat rubber watch off the counter and put it on, giving Rick a pat on the head before pulling on her running shoes in the almost silent apartment.

  It was the one thing she could never get used to—the quiet. She almost always had music going to fill the silence that had once been occupied by Anne, and she missed that feeling, that presence of another person. Sensing them in the other room, knowing they were there. Josie shook her head as she closed her door and descended the stairs, trying to stop her memories as they crawled through her mind.

  She glanced at her watch. It was almost seven, and the sun was golden, full of promise, the first days of spring. It was one of those days that was a glimpse past the cold winter and into the future, though it was fleeting; the chill would swing back in and wipe away the traces of warmth. But she reveled in the moment as she took off running toward the Hudson.

  Leave the past where it is.

  Josie’s arms pumped harder as she picked up her pace.

  Josie had met Anne her junior year of high school. Anne had been sitting at a lunch table alone, glossy, thick auburn hair tumbling over her shoulder, reading manga and wearing a T-shirt with a K-Pop star on it. Her purple cat-eye glasses had slipped down her nose as she polished off a Rice Krispies Treat, and her fingers had stuck to her comic when she tried to turn the page.

  Josie had never seen her before and was curious about the quirky girl engaged in a sticky-fingered ninja fight with a comic book, so she’d joined Anne. The minute Anne had made a joke that relied heavily on a Star Trek reference, Josie had known they were meant to be.

  They’d become instant friends and were inseparable through high school, but Josie hadn’t fully understood how much she needed Anne until she was rejected from the police academy. When the X-rays from her physical had shown the slightest of abnormal curves in her spine, it had been enough to have her permanently disqualified. It had been her darkest time—to realize she could never have her dream, never have what she’d wanted ever since she was a little girl.

  But then Anne had swooped in with the brilliant idea to become PIs. Investigating was the next best thing, if not better. Josie was independent, with avenues and resources the police didn’t have, and she and Anne had both been good at their job. Very good.

  So, at eighteen, the girls had moved into their apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, one of a few properties that had been in Josie’s family for decades. They had taken their classes and put in apprentice hours, which was made easy by Josie’s dad’s connections. Before long at all, they’d had steady work, doing something they both loved and excelled at. Anne had been the researcher, the coordinator, and Josie was the face, the muscle.

  They’d worked that way for ten years until the day that Hannah Mills’s parents asked them to find their daughter, and everything had changed.

  Josie and Anne had been sitting at their desks for hours, all day and into the night. The room was dark, though their faces were illuminated by their laptop screens as they searched the internet in tank tops and panties, neither willing to break away long enough to get dressed. Chinese take-out boxes littered their desks that stood facing each other in the living room.

  Josie’s eyes never left the screen as she typed in another search term, fished around in the lo mein with her chopsticks, and brought a bite to her lips.

  Hannah Mills, a sixteen-year-old cheerleader from just across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey, had gone missing two weeks before, and her tearful parents had come to Josie and Anne when the police hit a dead end. Hannah never made it home from cheerleading practice, and there had been no sign of her since she walked out of the school doors. The Mills only wanted to know what had happened to their child and said they understood the chances of finding her alive were slim.

  Josie wondered if anyone could really understand something so grim.

  She’d been working with the detective on Hannah’s case, her father’s friend from the academy. She and Dennis had been sharing information from the start, though neither of them had much to go on.

  In the first few days after they had been hired, Josie had canvassed the Mills’ neighborhood via the pathway that Hannah had walked home. It was October, and the days were getting shorter, so by the time Hannah had passed through the neighborhood, it would have been dark outside. No one had seen anything.

  There was one resident though, Corey Rhodes, who had thrown her red flags. Josie couldn’t put her finger on why—he’d seemed perfectly normal. He was in his mid-forties, built in that bulldoggish, barrel-chested way, and was charming but with an air of superiority. Really, there was just something in his mannerisms, in his choice of words, something in his smile that had set off alarms.

  That was two days before, and she and Anne had been researching him ever since.

  His criminal history was nonexistent. The man didn’t even have so much as a parking ticket, never mind something they could connect to Hannah. He had grown up in Deer Lodge, Montana, but went to college in Boston before moving to the city where he’d been working in advertising for the last twenty-some-odd years. His credit was in the seven hundreds. He’d never been married. On paper, nothing stood out about him at all, but her gut had never steered her wrong, so they were still digging.

  Josie shoveled more noodles into her mouth and set her dinner down, drumming her fingers on the desk before typing in another search term.

  She’d chased the Google rabbit through the internet, looking for anything on Rhodes, but she’d come up empty. There were a few articles from his college days playing football in Boston, but before and after that, she couldn’t find a thing. She wondered if she could learn anything through his hometown—figuring that, like most small towns, half of the news was about high school sports—but the newspaper was so small that their website had nothing more than a few days old. She checked out the Helena Independent Reviewer, hoping that Montana’s capital city would at least have archives back through the ’80s, but she hit a dead end there, too.

  Josie sighed and sat back in her chair.

  Anne extended her orange chicken, and Josie accepted, trading her lo mein.

  “Anything?” Anne leaned over the box and scooped noodles into her mouth.

  “Nothing. I’m pretty sure I’ve read every article on him twice.”

  Anne pushed her glasses up her nose. “Me too. I can’t find much on his parents either. His father died when he was fourteen, and after he moved to Jersey, his mom relocated. She died of cancer a few years ago.”

  Josie looked through her computer, unable to focus her eyes. “I think I’m going to have to order copies of the newspapers from the library in his hometown, but I don’t know how long that will take. I feel like there’s got to be something there. If he played college football, he would have played in high school, so someone would have to know him and remember him. I just wonder what’s hiding in that little town.”

  Anne chewed with one eye on Josie. “How sure are
you of this hunch?”

  “It’s called a hunch for a reason, and there’s no being sure of one. There’s no reason for me to be suspicious, but I am.”

  Anne ate in silence for a beat. “Something bad happened to Hannah. I know that in my own gut, especially after talking to her friends and her boyfriend. She didn’t run away, and she wasn’t into anything that would have gotten her in trouble. Something happened to her on the way home, and I don’t think it was random. She’s too old to be hopping into windowless vans. So, if you say Rhodes has something to do with it, I’m gonna take your word for it.”

  Josie heard the opening and took it. “You think I should fly to Montana?”

  Anne nodded. “Otherwise, we’ll be sitting on our asses for weeks, waiting on newspapers. Plus, we all know that you talking to the people of that town in person will get you further than over the phone. If nothing else, we can rule out our only suspect.” Anne lifted noodles out of the paper carton and shoved them into her mouth, saying around them, “While you’re gone, I’ll tail Rhodes and see what I can dig up.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “As sure as you are. Can’t hurt to try, right?” Anne shrugged.

  “All right. Don’t forget to put on pants and a bra before you go chasing the potential kidnapper.” Josie motioned to Anne’s naked legs.

  “You can’t tell me what to do. Plus, if he caught me, he’d never remember what my face looked like,” she said as she shimmied her shoulders, which incidentally made her boobs knock into each other.

  “I’ve always said you should have done burlesque with those puppies. Now, find me a flight.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anne said with a salute.

  The following afternoon, Josie found herself walking up the stone steps of the library in Deer Lodge, Montana, and was charmed by the old building as she passed between stone columns to the deep mahogany door. An elderly woman sat behind the desk with her gray hair in a tight bun and her rosy cheeks a companion to her smile. The nameplate on the counter said Mrs. Herold.