I hardly heard her. There were tendrils of dark hair escaping her braid, sticking slightly to her sweaty forehead, curling around the soft shell of her ear. I wanted to reach out and push a strand of it back. Her skin looked soft, and even under the thick smell of alcohol, sweat and cigarettes that permeated the bar, I could pick up the scent of her. She smelled fresh, like pine and green things. I wanted to breathe her in, and I realized that I was still staring, but in that moment I didn’t care. She was staring too, and for that brief second as the tray righted itself and she caught her balance, the world froze.
To this day I don’t know what kind of luck it was that brought me to that bar, on that night, when that waitress almost slipped and fell—good or bad. Bad luck had been chasing her for a long time, and maybe that was the night it just finally caught up. Or maybe it was a higher power altogether, that thing that men and gods answer to alike, the threads of the Fates always spinning.
I like to think that it was my own good luck, bringing me something I never even realized I needed.
That’s what we would all like to think, isn’t it?
2
Ravenna
There was nothing strange about the day that I met him—or at least, nothing stranger than days I’d passed before that one. I woke in bed with Kavi and Isa, Kavi lying on his back to one side of me, Isa on the other side, his arm thrown over my chest and his face nuzzled into my shoulder. They always slept this way, Kavi slightly detached even in sleep, Isa wishing to be as close to me as possible. It was good that I had never had reason to question Kavi’s love. Many women would have; he was often distant, his eyes faraway when I wanted him to be right there, present with me. But after all he had done, all he had sacrificed, how could I ever question how much he loved me? Human men have trouble staying with a woman for five years, ten, twenty; the slightest sacrifice of convenience is too much for them. Kavi had been with me for well over a hundred and fifty, and he had given up more than I could—or had—ever asked.
I reached out and stroked Isa’s hair, that slightly coarse mixture of brown and grey that I had run my fingers through hundreds of times. It had been over a hundred and fifty years for him, too. He had never wavered in his devotion to me—to us. At times, it hardly seemed as if he shared me with Kavi, they were so close with one another. After so long, they had nearly become extensions of one another—and I of them.
I heard Isa’s stomach growl faintly, and I suppressed a laugh, not wanting to wake him just yet. I nestled deeper into the covers, luxuriating in the feel of his body pressed closer to mine. It was slightly chilly in the house in the mornings, and the cocoon of blankets was difficult to leave. We’d have to, eventually—there was breakfast to make, and boxes still left to unpack. Few of them were personal items—we had been nomadic for too long to acquire very much in the way of material things. But we were planning to stay here, in this small, cozy rental of a house, and so we needed some of those things at last. There was a sofa in the living room, still shrink-wrapped; boxes of storage containers and pots and pans in the kitchen; a television still in the original box. Our mattress was on the floor, the frame still unassembled and leaning against one wall, and the furthest we’d gotten so far with organizing was to put our clothes away and arrange a few toiletries in the bathroom.
We hadn’t discussed yet how we’d divide domestic duties, either. Kavi could be absent-minded at the best of times, and although he’d attempt to cook if asked, he wasn’t much good in the house-cleaning department. Isa was even worse when it came to cooking. He’d tried steak once, and it had been so bloody and raw that even I, who preferred my red meat on the rare side, couldn’t stomach it.
And I, for all my womanly virtues, had never been in the slightest bit domestic. As a teen—a time so long ago now, it was incredible that I remembered any of it—I’d begged to be allowed to hunt with the men of the tribe, even stealing my half-brother’s pants, tying my hair back and painting my face in an effort to blend in with the men on a hunting party. It had seemed marvelously exciting and adventurous to me at the time, a thousand times better than sitting in the huts with the women, cleaning vegetables and tanning hides and gathering the washing to take down to the stream.
It had nearly worked, too. After that, my father had told me that when I was sixteen, he’d allow me to join a small hunting party, one that would go after less dangerous game. I think he had hoped that by the time I reached that age, I’d have found pleasure in more womanly tasks, and want the men of the tribe to view me as an object of desire—a potential wife—rather than an equal.
He had been wrong. I’d joined that first hunting party after practicing whenever I could with my bow and arrow that I’d bribed my half-brother to make for me, and I’d proved myself their equal. I had gone out with every party after that, and to my father’s mixed pride and horror, made myself one of them. It did, indeed, result in a reluctance for any man to take me as a bride—all except for one.
I still remembered him, after all this time—his dark eyes that shone bright with humor, the way he’d sat close to me around the fire, the touch of his hand when he’d shown me an easier way to begin skinning a kill. The sound of his voice had faded out of memory after so many years, but I remembered his laugh still, and the look on his face when I had gone to his sleeping pallet one night out on a hunt, when all the other men were asleep—desire, regret, and the faintest bit of hope. He had refused me—something that had struck my young woman’s pride to the bone—but had offered me something else: marriage. He had promised to go to my father when we returned from the hunt, to ask for my hand.
And I would have married him, too, if not for Kavi.
I had very nearly had a life so different from the one I was living. Never once had I regretted the choice I had made—but it was strange to think that had I chosen differently, I would not only not be in the bed I lay in, between the men I loved, but I would not be at all. I would have been a hundred years or more in the ground, and long since faded from memory.
Instead I was very much alive.
I looked over at Kavi, his handsome face still and peaceful in sleep, and shook my head. We’d lived a life that rivaled the most dramatic of fantasies, full of love and danger and adventure, and now we were trying to settle down, stop running and live like any normal couple—or as close to it as the three of us could imagine. I felt a pang of fear in the pit of my stomach at the thought. It suddenly seemed like a monumental task, to try to do such menial things as decide who would do the dishes and who would cook breakfast.
Kavi stirred and opened his eyes, a slow smile spreading over his face when he saw me lying there, looking at him.
“Good morning,” he said softly, his voice still rough with sleep. He glanced over at Isa, still dead to the world, and sat up, stretching as he did so. I admired the long line of his back, the muscles flexing as he groaned softly, rolling to face him as I reached out to touch the ridge of his spine gently, my fingers brushing over his olive skin.
“Do you work tonight?” he asked as he stood, walking to the closet. I watched the blankets fall away from him and forgot to answer for a moment. Kavi and Isa both liked to sleep naked, and the sight of them never failed to distract me. Even around the men I loved, I could be shy at times, worried that my figure wasn’t up to standards, that the years had begun to slowly creep onto my face. But Kavi wore his nudity as easily as clothing, striding thoughtlessly across the room. I watched the flex of the muscles in his ass, wondering if I might be able to convince him to come back to bed. I could even wake Isa…
As if he heard my thoughts, Isa rolled towards me, his face nuzzling into the back of my neck, the stubble on his jaw faintly scraping against me, still mostly asleep. It made my skin prickle and my back arch the tiniest bit, and I considered again whether I ought to induce Kavi to crawl back into bed with us.
“Ravenna?” He turned to look at me, his expression turning amused when he saw the look on my face. I flushed, knowing t
hat he could tell what I was thinking.
He turned fully towards me, walking back towards the bed, and my eyes drifted from the chiseled lines of his face down his muscular chest, to the deep v of muscle that cut down either side of his hips. He was half-aroused, and my breath caught in my throat. Even after all these years, the countless times that we’d made love, fucked, and everything in between…the sight of Kavi nude never failed to stir me.
He saw where my gaze had stopped, and laughed, shrugging. “Mornings,” he said, leaning over the bed to drop a kiss on my forehead. “Not this morning though, I don’t think. I have an interview.”
Isa stirred again, and I could feel him pressing against my thigh. I could have rolled over and woken him with a kiss, let my hand drift down…but I knew Kavi was right. We all had things we needed to do this morning—none of them nearly as enjoyable as what I was imagining in that moment.
I gave Isa the same forehead kiss that Kavi had given me, and sat up, pushing the covers away from both of us. Isa groaned lightly, rolling onto his back and stretching, his eyes still firmly closed. I bit my lower lip as I took a long look at him, then shook my head and climbed out of bed, too.
“What time do you go into work?” Kavi repeated patiently. He was looking at Isa too, with an expression of mingled desire and bemusement—not too far gone from the way he’d been looking at me a moment ago.
“Five,” I said. “I’m working the late shift.”
Kavi frowned slightly. “You know I don’t like that place. It’s too rough, too seedy. You could get hurt.”
I shook my head, rising up on my tiptoes to kiss him lightly on the lips. His hands rested on my waist, fingers drifting just under the hem of the black tank top I’d worn to bed, playing over the thin strip of bare skin between it and the edge of my panties.
“Sure I can’t convince you to come back to bed?” I whispered against his mouth, my eyes flicking up to meet his.
“Sure I can’t convince you to quit working at that place?”
I huffed a short sigh, rocking back on my heels and turning away. “We talked about this, Kavi. If I go work at one of the fancier casinos, on the newer side, we’re more likely to be seen by someone important. It’s the same reason you’re looking for jobs on this side of town…why Isa is working as a bouncer at the casinos and bars over here and not at the Bellagio or the Venetian.”
“I’m the only one that would be recognized. I just won’t come see you at work.”
“You yourself said that what you did to me…for me…it leaves a trace. A trace that a hunter, or another immortal could sense.”
“A hunter could be anywhere.” He ran his hands over my arms, and I shivered a little, but the desire had mostly receded to the back of my mind in the wake of our conversation.
“Kavi, I can take care of myself. I make good money at the bar.” I raised an eyebrow. “I could make better money dancing.”
His expression hardened. “No,” he said firmly. “I won’t have you taking your clothes off for strangers to make money for us.” His eyes roved over me, taking in every inch of my body with the sort of possessive hunger in his gaze that made me flush all over again. The fact that I could still provoke that kind of desire and jealousy in him, a millennia-old deity, after a hundred and fifty years, made me feel like a goddess.
And after all, that was very close to what he’d made me. His own goddess. His and Isa’s.
3
Ravenna
I finished getting ready quickly after that. I wasn’t due at work for some hours, so I threw on workout clothes that I’d later wear to the gym, ignoring Kavi as he stepped into the shower. I knew that he loved and respected my independence—he just worried about me—and I knew that his worry was out of love, and a not unreasonable fear that I might be harmed. But at times, his worry could feel suffocating. Isa’s concern could be the same way, but he was usually less vocal about it than Kavi was.
We had arrived in Las Vegas a few days earlier, found a house to rent, and signed the papers. It was a far cry from the roadside motels we’d been sleeping in for a long time, and even further from the camping we’d done in the early days, keeping to the woods where we could stay hidden from everyone.
It had taken all of a day for Isa and I to find jobs. I’d lost count of the different types of work we’d done over the decades, and if there was one thing I appreciated about the new century we lived in, it was the variety of jobs available to me. I’d gotten a taste for bartending a few years back, and I was good at it, but I still remembered when my presence in a bar had been cause to get us thrown out.
Somewhere along the way, we’d discovered that Kavi had a talent for working with and fixing various types of technology. This morning, he had an interview for a company that did repairs and troubleshooting for the security in the casinos. It came with a hefty paycheck, and I knew that if he got the job, he’d try to convince me to stop working at the bar. Just the thought made me sigh and rub my temples.
I walked into the kitchen, cut open one of the boxes containing a new set of cookware, and pulled out two small pans. Kavi rounded the corner at exactly that moment, walking behind the bar and dropping a kiss on my cheek. “What would we do without you?” he asked, waiting for me to start making breakfast.
“I suppose you’d have to learn to cook,” I said, a touch grumpily.
Kavi glanced at me, his expression quizzical, and I shook my head as I began cooking eggs and sausage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just a little stressed this morning, that’s all.”
Kavi shrugged, sitting down on one of the chairs arranged along the side of the bar—oddly, the only furniture that had come with the house. I waited for Kavi to say something else, but he didn’t, only picked up his phone and began scrolling through the news. Reading thoughts wasn’t a power of his, and it certainly wasn’t anywhere in my brief lexicon of abilities—all entirely human—but at times I wished it was. It would have been easier than trying to explain the anxiety that had settled in the pit of my stomach.
There’s something to be said for novelty. But being on the run for so long, I was ready to settle down a little. Las Vegas was meant to be a place where we could stop hiding. A place where we could stay in the same house, shop at the same places, even go out on occasion. I craved normalcy more than anything else, but I wondered often if it was even possible after so long—if I would even remember how.
---
I was still brooding when I went into work that evening. Kavi had come back from the interview more cheerful than I’d seen him in some time. They’d been impressed and wanted him back for a second interview in a few days. He’d grudgingly admitted that perhaps we’d chosen a good place to stop, that it was possible we could stay.
That he might want to stay.
I had been relieved to hear it, and the look on Isa’s face had been all I’d needed to see to solidify my feeling that we’d made the right decision. After all, if we kept running, eventually there would be nowhere else to go.
That night had been particularly trying. The bar I worked at, called “The Mine Shaft,” took itself far too seriously. The cocktail waitress uniform was blue jeans, white shirts with a Southwestern stitching motif, and cowboy boots. I personally would have rather worked almost anywhere than a bar that enjoyed playing up the faux Wild West themes, but we were verging on desperate need of money, and they had been in desperate need of a waitress. Two of their girls had gotten past the point of pregnancy where waitressing was a viable job, and a third had gotten drunk off of free shots too many nights in a row, punched a customer, and cursed out the rest of the room.
Privately, I felt a certain kinship with the third girl.
They’d been in need of a bouncer, too. Isa could likely have gotten a job working security at any of the clubs or casinos in the city—not only did he look the part, he gave off an aura that unmistakably said he wasn’t to be fucked with. But he’d taken the position at the Mine Shaft as well, and I kne
w it was because I’d agreed to work there. For once, it wasn’t even Kavi’s overprotectiveness that had caused it. Isa took his job as our self-sworn protector very seriously, and he too saw the bar as a spot ripe with opportunities for me to be harmed in some way. It was both endearing and endlessly frustrating.
When I fell into the table, it was very nearly the last straw. I’d been yelled at, had a patron throw a (thankfully clear) drink at me—which forced me to borrow an extra uniform shirt that was a size too small, and left the ends of my hair sticky—and screwed up two drink orders. I was hurrying back to the table with the correct drinks when my “non-slip” shoe hit a patch of some liquid spilled by a drunk customer, and I went hurtling towards the nearest table.
I hardly even registered the man sitting at it at first. But the second I met his eyes, I felt something, an undefinable tug, as if I had a string attached to me, and it had snapped taut.
My first thought was that he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen, and then I realized that that wasn’t true. His face was too angular to be classically handsome, his frame a bit lean, although I could see the hint of muscles at the sleeves of his t-shirt. His hair was thick, dark and wavy, and his lips full—those were his best features, besides his eyes. He had eyes that were such a piercing green that you couldn’t look away once they’d caught yours. And yet, despite not being the most conventionally handsome man, there was something about him that drew you to him.
I had never particularly cared for the conventionally handsome anyway. One had only to look at Kavi, with his nearly black eyes, long dark hair and sharp features, and Isa with his brindled hair and glowing golden eyes to know that. Clean-cut men and sandy-haired poster boys had never held any attraction for me.
Pursued by the Gods Page 2
