East of Ecstasy (Hearts of the Anemo)

by Laura Kaye

  Thunder exploded overhead and rain spattered against the side of the building, as if the wind were blowing it sideways. “Fuck,” Chrysander said, kneeling near the canvas.

  “At least we know it’s not you,” Zeph said, arms crossed, face serious as thunder. Owen nodded. The god being carried had dark hair, while Chrys was the only blond among them. Which meant the painting depicted the injury of either Zeph, Aeolus, or himself. Or the death.

  Red-hot dread prickled down Owen’s spine. Damn it all to Hades and back, how much more loss could they sustain?

  …

  “Done,” Anna said, sagging until she had to brace her hands on the floor to hold herself up. She felt like she’d run a marathon, or two. Her muscles ached, her joints throbbed, and her body felt as if she’d aged a whole decade.

  “Let me help you up,” Devlin said, reaching for her.

  She chuffed out half a laugh. “My legs are asleep.”

  “That’s okay. Take my hands,” he said from right beside her.

  Anna peered up at him from under the lengths of her hair that had fallen loose from her ponytail. Her cheeks warmed. She wouldn’t have made it through these paintings without him. God, he’d put her hair up, rubbed her shoulders, and given her food and water. Big and dark and intimidating as he was, he’d been heartbreakingly gentle. A couple of times his fingers had touched her lips as he’d fed her. Under other circumstances, his touch would’ve made her melt. As it was, she was so moved by the way he’d cared for her that she didn’t know whether to cry or jump him. Maybe both.

  And damn if she wasn’t more confused than ever, too. Because his actions had her feeling a connection between the two of them again. So which was the real Devlin? The one who’d sat at her kitchen table and had all but radiated gratitude? The one who’d jumped down her throat and made her feel unimportant at Aeolus’s house? Or the one who had taken care of her as if she was precious and irreplaceable?

  Anna slipped her hands into Devlin’s.

  He pulled her easily to her feet and caught her against his chest when her legs were too numb to hold her weight. And then the blood rushed in. Gritting her teeth against the pins and needles pricking at her skin from toes to knees, Anna fisted her hands in Devlin’s dark-gray shirt. All she could do was hold her breath and hang on tight. When the sensation became so intense she couldn’t hold back a reaction any longer, her breath exploded from her along with a pained laugh. “I don’t know how…something that hurts so much…can almost tickle,” she gasped out.

  Devlin leaned his face against her hair.

  Finally, the discomfort ebbed. Anna’s shoulders slumped and her focus landed on her hands clenched around handfuls of cotton. She released Devlin immediately, remembering all too well how he’d flinched away from her time and again.

  Except he caught her hands in his and pressed them to his sternum. “Let me help,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. His gaze was both insistent and hesitant.

  It needn’t have been the latter because just then, Anna needed Devlin’s strength to hold her weakness, his heat to ease the chill her bones seemed to have absorbed from sitting on the hard concrete, his magic and power to help her believe in and come to terms with her own.

  Thunder clapped so hard from right above them that the building shook.

  “I know Anna is not yet recovered, but we need to leave before the storm worsens,” Aeolus said.

  Resting her cheek against Devlin’s chest, Anna watched as Aeolus waved at her paintings. “We’ll take these with us lest they fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Wait, what?” she asked, forcing herself to stand on her own two feet—though the big, warm grip of Devlin’s hands remained on her shoulders. It gave her the feeling that he had her back, and she drew strength from that now. “These are my paintings.” No way was she just letting the gods waltz out of here with something she’d labored over so intensely—and, more than that, they were the only physical proof of her power.

  Stillness settled on the room, as if everyone held their breath.

  “Anna?” Devlin said from behind her. He squeezed her shoulder and urged her to face him. “These are unquestionably your paintings. But they tell a story that’s vital to every single god in this room. A story that, if it doesn’t end the right way, is vital to humanity, too. No one seeks to steal them from you, but for both the story they tell and to keep them safe from our enemies, would you please consider letting Aeolus take them to his home? As a loan?” Devlin’s thumbs stroked the side of her neck.

  Tingles prickled over her scalp and down her neck. “Vital to humanity?”

  He nodded, dark eyes serious and intense. “What Aeolus said earlier about your use of the magic, about benefit requiring sacrifice? The divine realm operates under a principle of balance. Maintained, balance creates natural peace on earth. But I come from…my father is…” Devlin pressed his lips into a thin line, as if he wished to hold in the words he needed to say. His eyes flared and his hands slipped upward to softly grasp her neck. “Evil, Anna. Pure and unadulterated evil. He wishes to destroy every god in this room, take over control of the natural world, and play with humanity like it was no more than a collection of toy soldiers in a sandbox.”

  A crack of thunder. Then again. Anna jumped at the percussive volume.

  Her heart racing, Anna thought of her paintings—the tornadoes, the massive storm over Jarrettsville, the strange beings in the sky through the damaged building. Her gaze dropped to the canvas that still lay drying at their feet. Vague as the image was, one thing was crystal clear—that something bad had happened to the person in the Dark Man’s arms. Or, rather, would happen, since what she’d painted depicted some moment in the future. Some tragedy waiting to unfurl.

  “They’re a part of me,” she said, looking Devlin in the eye. “As long as you’ll take care of them.”

  “You have my word,” he said without hesitation. And then he kissed her on the forehead.

  Heat bloomed over Anna’s entire body. The day. The magic. This man. Every part of her was overwhelmed, and especially by him. Just another way this day had been the most exhilarating, terrifying, and amazing of her entire life.

  “Should we take her materials, too, in case another vision comes?” Zephyros asked.

  Anna frowned and pulled away from Devlin’s grasp. “Why would you…I mean, why would I…” Realization hit her like a ton of bricks and she gaped at Zeph and crossed her arms. “My stuff should stay right here, since that’s where I’ll be.”

  “It’s not safe here,” Zeph said. “Our divine energy is all over this place. And so is yours.”

  “Yeah, Anna,” Chrys said, a sympathetic smile on his face. “Sooner or later Eurus will pick up on it. And you don’t want to be here when he does.”

  “No, you’re not hearing me,” she said, whirling on Devlin and nailing him with a stare. “I can’t just leave here. My father needs me. I have work to do.”

  “Dude, the energy from your explosion hangs over her house like a neon sign on the Vegas strip,” Chrys said to Devlin. “When E comes—and you know he will—it’ll be like a target is painted on the roof.”

  Gasping, Anna looked from Devlin’s gaze to Chrys’s, then to that of the other gods as well. They all wore the same expressions full of regret and certainty. Fear melted every other concern away, leaving only her dad.

  “If my house is that unsafe, then I especially can’t leave. I need to pack my father up and get him out of there. God,” Anna said, pushing wisps of her hair behind her ears. “You have no idea how huge this is going to be for him. He’s sick. He needs routine. Change absolutely terrifies him.” She dropped her face into her hands. “What have I done?”

  Lightning flashed again and again, lighting up the darkness of the adjoining room.

  “Devlin,” Aeolus urged.

  He nodded, but there was no way he was forcing her before she was ready. “We’ll figure out a way to make him safe, Anna,” Devli
n said. “I promise.”

  Slowly, she raised her eyes to him. “I don’t take that word lightly, Devlin.”

  Light flared from behind his eyes. “Neither do I. Look,” he said, turning to the others. “I’ll stay with her at her house tonight. Go back to Aeolus’s and, if you can spare them, send some of the guards from there to Anna’s. If Eurus is guiding the storm, we probably have a day or two window. Enough time to get things straightened out here and then get out of the way.”

  Devlin…staying with me? And guards? Holy crap, how is this my life?

  Aeolus stepped forward, brow drawn, lips tight. “Devlin, if you have any chance at all of retrieving Eurus’s key, you must go to the Eastern Realm while he is otherwise occupied with building the storm. That gives you very little time.”

  Chrys’s voice labeling the trip a death sentence rang between Anna’s ears. Her belly throbbed with an aching emptiness that had nothing to do with hunger.

  Beside her, Devlin gave a single nod. “Understood and agreed. We’ll return to your compound tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll make the trip by tomorrow night.”

  “That’s cutting it damn close, Devlin,” Zephyros said. Anna liked Zeph—despite his initial grumpiness, he’d been kind to her, held her while she cried without making her feel weak or silly, and had healed her. The wonder of that still echoed through her mind. So she was glad to see that the god’s face wasn’t filled with his typical angry scowl toward Devlin, just deep concern.

  Devlin nailed Zeph with a hard stare. “Tell me you would handle this differently.” An odd tension rolled through the room, and the expressions on the men’s faces made her feel they were having a conversation to which she wasn’t privy.

  Thunder crashed and punctuated the weighted silence. Finally, Zephyros simply said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Aeolus said, sending the room into a flurry of action. Chrysander and Owen hurried to gather the paintings into a stack, and Anna was equal parts alarmed at the prospect of their loss and relieved at the gentle way the big gods handled them.

  “What do you need from here, Anna?” Devlin pointed to the worktable. “We need to hurry. Our collective presence here is causing this.” He pointed to the ceiling.

  “Oh. Um,” she said, looking at the mess she’d left from the manic way she’d prepped the two paintings. Normally she was so careful and organized with her supplies. That her workspace was in such disarray was a physical representation of what the inside of her head had felt like when the compulsion of the visions took hold. Nothing else had mattered. Not her body, not her hunger, not the conversation going on around her—

  She gasped and whirled on Zephyros. “What did you say?” She waved her hands. “Before.” His eyebrows drew up in silent question. “About who I am?”

  “Oh, uh…just that…” His gaze flickered to Devlin, and Anna’s followed.

  “You already know you have divine power, Anna. Zephyros was just able to narrow part of it down to a source. A distant ancestor. Your distant ancestor. Iris is the personification of the rainbow and a messenger of the gods. He recognized the energy you throw off while you paint.”

  Leaning back against the table, Anna had to grab hold of the plastic and metal to ground herself against the way her head spun. “Iris,” she said, testing the name out on her tongue. “But, if I’m truly descended from a rainbow goddess”—and just saying that made the floor shift and spin—“why am I color-blind? Why am I only able to see color when I paint? Oh! And when I was in your realm. I could see color then, too.”

  “You could?” Devlin asked, then shook his head. “Probably has something to do with whatever other divine ancestry you possess. Or it could be something from your human lines.”

  “So you think…I have more than one god in my family tree?” Devlin’s nod was barely perceptible, almost as if he feared that acknowledging this new reality too boldly would throw her over the edge. And the way she felt right now, maybe it would. Because though knowing this about herself changed nothing fundamentally about her as a person, it still left her feeling a whole lot like she was a stranger in her own life. Had her brother been magical, too? Her parents? And did people in her family suspect anything about themselves, but just never talked about it? Oh my God! Will my kids be this way? In that moment, she wasn’t sure if that was bad or really, really cool.

  “Guys, Owen and I are going to start back so we can dial down this storm,” Chrys said.

  Anna barely paid attention to what the others were saying, though. She spun and braced her elbows on the table, accidentally planting her righty in the blue paint of her palette. The tangible texture of the cool, thick acrylic grounded her, gave her something real to grasp onto, and pulled her back from the brink of a panic attack. “Okay,” she said to herself as she grabbed a paper towel and wiped off the worst of the paint. Wasn’t the only place a swipe of color marked her skin. But between the day’s earlier crisis and a night spent manically painting, Anna was going to crawl right out of her skin if she didn’t get a shower. And soon. “Um, I have a travel set I can take. I just want to add some things to it,” she said.

  Forcing herself to focus on the mechanics of her body moving and her lungs pulling in air, Anna crossed the room to a shelf by the door. Owen and Chrys had in fact left, she noticed, and her belly flip-flopped for worry of her paintings, most of which were gone. She grabbed the larger of two wooden briefcase-shaped kits that sat there because it included a small, built-in easel that flipped out from the lid. Back at her table, she flicked open the silver clasps and laid the portable paint set open. Quickly, instinctively, she switched out a couple of colors, tucked the tubes of a few others into the blank spaces between the banded-in supplies, and added a few more brushes.

  “This should do it, I guess,” she said, securing it again.

  Devlin held out his hand, accepted the case from her, and then handed it off to Zeph. Stepping in close to her, Devlin leaned down to look directly in her eyes. “Don’t worry, okay?”

  A million different responses fought for airtime. “Okay.”

  After a quick round of good-byes and urgings to be safe and stay aware, the rest of the gods disappeared before her eyes. Of all the things that’d happened in the past twenty-four hours, their vanishing act wasn’t even by far the strangest. And wasn’t that saying something.

  “Ready?” Devlin asked.

  No. “Sure,” she said, completely overwhelmed.

  He grabbed her hand and yanked her closer, so close that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. “Now, hold on tight.”

  His gorgeous face, her body, almost all physical sensation—it all fell away as they shifted into the wind. But Anna knew without a doubt that Devlin was right there beside her, because his energy was so much more intense than Zephyros’s had been. Warm, surrounding, reassuringly heavy, like the feeling of a man resting his weight on you after mind-blowing sex.

  Heat shot through Anna’s psyche, and she almost swore she heard an answering low, masculine groan.

  For the record, Devlin said, the tone of his thought almost a growl, I would’ve given just about anything for your first time truly flying in the wind to have been with just me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Throughout his whole existence, Devlin had probably spent decades’ worth of time in the elements as the wind and rain of autumn. But he’d never spent a single moment of that time in the wind with a human.

  It made everything about the experience different, new, wondrous. As they flew together through the nighttime world, the storm downgrading by degrees as the Anemoi separated, his power holding her being in this form, Anna’s excitement at the experience of flying rocked through him, her curiosity forced him to be present in the moment in a way he rarely ever was, and the intensity of her emotions was almost like being reborn. Because Devlin wasn’t sure he’d ever before experienced the kind of ecstatic joy this woman was feeling right now. On some level, he wasn’t even aware i
t was possible to feel this depth of happiness, period.

  All that despite the fact that she was bone tired, somehow unwell—something he wanted to know more about—and desperately worried about her father.

  It was a testament to just how amazed Devlin was by the experience that, once they left her studio, his psyche forgot the fear that proximity usually caused. For once in his long existence, he felt something that he imagined others might call peace.

  Anna’s surprise ricocheted through her energy. What’s that?

  Up ahead, shimmery, translucent violet light hung in the sky like a curtain. If the light had been higher in the sky and they’d been in a more northerly latitude, Devlin might’ve thought they were witnessing a rare purple aurora. They moved closer, closer, and Devlin’s gut clenched in realization. The light came from the back yard of Anna’s house, which was lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. Just as Chrysander had said.

  Because of him. No doubt about it, his energy signature made the Fallston house pretty much the most dangerous place in the world, at least once Eurus became aware of it. Which was absolutely inevitable.

  It’s the reason you and your father can’t stay here, he said, using every bit of strength he possessed to strip the self-loathing from his tone.

  Oh.

  Yeah, he said.

  Her house came fully into view as they flew in over her street. It’s beautiful.

  Anna, it’s a death sentence waiting to happen.

  I understand the danger, Devlin. I do. But even dangerous things can be beautiful. A cheetah in a full-out run after its prey. The free-fall of an avalanche. Lightning. A pause as Devlin circled around the house, assessing if anyone was awake within. And it’s yours, Anna added.

  Meaning…? Devlin turned the words around in his mind, but couldn’t make any sense out of them. She seemed to be saying that…that because it was his energy, it was beautiful. But there was no fucking way that was what she actually meant. If she truly understood the danger he’d brought to her doorstep, she’d see him for what he was—the harbinger of misfortune. Her misfortune. Just like his father. And damn it all to Hades, there was nothing beautiful about that.