by Jenna Black
The problem was the Liberi had a way of intruding on even the most mundane aspects of my life. After my haircut, I stopped by my favorite little French bistro to have a leisurely lunch while indulging in some people-watching from my seat in front of the generous picture window.
I’d been expecting to watch strangers, but before I’d even had a chance to place my order, I saw someone I knew crossing the street, headed my way.
Cyrus, the current leader of the Olympians, was Konstantin’s son, and you could see the resemblance in his olive-hued skin and coarse black curls. Cyrus, however, gave off the vibe of being an approachable human being, unlike his father, who looked exactly like you’d expect someone who calls himself a king to look. I’d met Cyrus a few times now, and he seemed like a friendly, personable kind of guy. If he weren’t an Olympian, I might almost say I liked him. But he was an Olympian, and he believed in a world order that was anathema to me.
I hoped that Cyrus just happened to be passing by, his presence nothing but a coincidence. Too bad I don’t believe in coincidence.
Cyrus finished crossing the street, obviously not caring about the indignant drivers who were honking at him. He smiled and waved at me through the window and made a beeline for the bistro’s door. So much for my plans for a quiet, uncomplicated lunch.
Either assuming he was welcome or not caring if he wasn’t, Cyrus plunked himself down on the seat across from me.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked with a charming smile.
“If I told you I minded, would you leave?”
Why I bothered to ask the question, I don’t know. Cyrus gave me a mock-reproachful look and helped himself to my menu. I considered getting up and walking away, but as I said, Cyrus is likable enough, and I harbored more than my fair share of curiosity about him. For one thing, I knew he and Steph’s . . . Well, I didn’t quite know what to call Blake. Boyfriend, I guess, although as far as I knew, they weren’t sleeping together. Blake, being a descendant of Eros, is apparently such a supernaturally good lover that any woman he sleeps with more than once will never be satisfied with another man. Anyway, it seemed that Blake’s unfortunate ability didn’t have the same effect on men, so he and Cyrus had hooked up in the past. Having seen the two of them interact before, I wasn’t sure how mutual—or how permanent—the breakup had been. Blake had described their former relationship as “friends with benefits,” but I suspected there was more to it than that. If there was any chance Cyrus would play a continuing role in Blake’s life, Steph had a right to know, and I figured I could try to work in a pointed question or two.
The waitress came over to take our orders. I guessed Cyrus was staying for lunch, since he ordered a croque monsieur, which is a fancy name for a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. I’d gone for a light soup-and-salad combo, resisting the temptation of all that butter and cheese. I felt virtuous and deprived at the same time.
“So to what do I owe the dubious pleasure of your company?” I inquired as soon as the waitress had retreated.
“Dubious pleasure?” He put a hand on his chest as if it hurt. “Why, you wound me.” He’d have looked a lot more wounded without the glint of humor in his eyes.
If he weren’t the leader of a bunch of rapists and murderers, I might have let myself relax and be charmed. I certainly liked his pleasant, easygoing demeanor a lot better than I’d liked that of any other Olympian I’d met. Which made it even more imperative that I keep reminding myself what he was. It would be easy to become unguarded with him, and that would be a very bad mistake.
“Look, I’m not making a big scene here because I refuse to let you chase me out of my favorite restaurant and because I know I can’t get you to leave. That doesn’t mean we’re friends, and that doesn’t mean I actually want you here.”
Cyrus’s grin faded, but there was no hint that my admittedly rude pronouncement had annoyed him.
“Sorry,” he said, and he sounded like he actually meant it. “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool wiseass and I couldn’t resist teasing you. But that was overly familiar of me.”
Yes, it was. But his admission made me like him better.
“I know we’re not friends,” he continued, “and considering our . . . differences, I don’t suppose we ever will be. But that doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”
I frowned at that. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Assuming you’re actually getting at something.”
“You’re ruining my soliloquy,” he said in mock annoyance, then shook his head and made a face. “I told you, dyed-in-the-wool. I’ll just issue a blanket apology now and hope it’ll cover our entire conversation. Konstantin did his best to beat the wiseassery out of me when I was growing up, but it never took.”
It was no surprise to hear that Konstantin physically abused his kid. From what Anderson had told me, Cyrus was Konstantin’s only surviving child, but there had been others. Others he’d distrusted so much he’d killed them. I’d spent a lot of years in foster homes, and yet I bet I’d had a better, happier childhood than Cyrus had. I found I couldn’t help smiling at him, despite my determination to be cautious.
“I’ll let you off with a warning,” I said. “But if you could get to the point without too much preamble, I’d appreciate it.”
He nodded, leaning forward in a way that signaled the fun and games were over and he was being serious. “I’m the first to admit that Konstantin won’t win any man-of-the-year contests. He certainly won’t win father of the year. But he is still my father, and even though he’s stepped down and removed himself from the public eye, I still consider him an Olympian. I talked to Anderson last week, and when I got off the phone with him, I had the impression we had both agreed that he would make it clear to his people that my father was not to be harmed.”
My years of working as a private investigator had given me both a good poker face and a nice touch of acting skill. I didn’t think my expression gave anything away, though Cyrus was watching me with great intensity. Funny how Anderson had failed to mention this “agreement” this morning when he’d tried to bully me into hunting Konstantin.
“I’m sure Anderson is upstanding and honorable at heart,” Cyrus continued without a hint of sarcasm, “but I find myself wondering if his hatred for my father might trump his honor. I wonder if he followed through with his promise to warn his people off. You, particularly, descendant of Artemis that you are.”
“If you think Anderson lied to you, then I suggest you take it up with him. No way I’m getting in the middle of that, and I’m not going to confirm or deny what he told us.” Cyrus looked like he was about to protest, but I cut him off. “I will tell you that I have no intention of hunting your father for revenge. That’s just not me. Does that make you feel better?”
He gave me a long, thoughtful stare. Trying to read me, I guessed. I’d told him the truth, even if I hadn’t exactly told him everything, and he seemed to read that in my face. He nodded and let out a little sigh.
“Thank you. That does.”
He looked honestly relieved, like he’d been worried about Konstantin’s safety. I knew there were all sorts of people out there, but I still had trouble understanding how someone could actually care about Konstantin. Fearful respect I could understand, but not affection. And yet I didn’t think it was fear or respect driving Cyrus right now.
“Anderson told me Konstantin killed all his children before you,” I said. “Why would you care so much about his safety? And what makes you think he won’t kill you, too, someday?”
Cyrus shrugged. “He’s my father, Nikki. I know he’s not a nice person, and I know he doesn’t have a good history with his children. But he’s still the man who raised me, and I think we both learned a lot from what happened with the others. I’ve made it clear that I have no desire to take his place, and while he doesn’t trust me completely, I think he at least for the most part believes me.”
“Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but you have taken his place. Haven’t you?”
He smiled blandly at me, and I understood.
“You’ve taken his place in name only,” I said. I should have known someone like Konstantin would never voluntarily step down. “He’s still pulling the strings.” I frowned. “And he’s okay with your decree that the Olympians not kill Descendant children anymore?”
It had always been the Olympian policy under Konstantin that when they discovered a family of Descendants, they would kill them all, except for children under the age of five, who would be raised to believe in the Olympian ideal—and would later be used as lethal weapons against other Liberi. That policy had been the first thing Cyrus had changed when he’d taken over.
Cyrus grinned wryly. “He doesn’t love it,” he admitted. “But since I don’t actually want to lead the Olympians, he had to make some concessions to get me to do it.”
I didn’t for a moment believe Konstantin had abandoned his quest to rid the world of all Descendants and Liberi who weren’t under his thumb, and in his mind, that meant killing children too old to be controlled. If he was letting Cyrus put a stop to the practice, that meant he thought of his son’s rule as nothing but a temporary inconvenience. I didn’t like Cyrus’s chances of surviving the regime change when Konstantin took back the reins.
“You keep playing with fire and you’re going to get burned,” I said, and Cyrus laughed like I’d made a particularly funny joke. I thought back on my words, but they were nothing more than a perfectly ordinary cliché, not funny at all. Whatever the joke was, I didn’t get it.
Cyrus realized I didn’t get it and raised his eyebrows at me. “Playing with fire?” he prompted. “Getting burned?”
Nope, that didn’t clear things up a bit.
“You are aware that my father and I are descendants of Helios, the sun god, aren’t you?”
Actually, I’d never bothered to ask. For some reason, I’d kind of assumed they were descendants of Zeus because he was king of the gods. I wouldn’t have thought Konstantin, who puffed himself up with so much pomp and circumstance, would be the descendant of a god many people had never even heard of.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Cyrus said. He turned in his chair and tugged down the collar of his shirt so I could see the glyph that marked his skin, right where his neck joined his shoulders. It was an iridescent sun with long, spidery rays. If he wore a shirt with no collar, some of those rays would be visible, though only to other Liberi. I myself had a glyph in the middle of my forehead, and no mortal had ever shown any sign that they could see it.
“I’m still kind of new at this game,” I reminded Cyrus. “I tend not to think about who a person’s descended from unless I can see their glyph. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Understandable,” he said, turning back toward me. “I’ve known what my father was, what I was, for all my life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have all this thrust upon you all of a sudden.”
There was real sympathy in his words, and I had to give myself another mental slap in the face to remind myself he was one of the bad guys. He was just more subtle and deceptive about it than the rest of the Olympians.
The waitress returned to our table, bringing our food. I tried not to stare at his croque monsieur with naked envy, but it was hard when the bread was a perfect toasty brown and glistened with butter. My soup and salad would make a perfectly nice lunch, but Cyrus’s looked positively decadent.
To my surprise, Cyrus didn’t even bother to glance at his food. Instead, he opened his wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
“Lunch is my treat, since I barged in on you so rudely,” he said, laying the money on the table and pushing back his chair.
“You’re not going to eat?”
He shook his head. “I’ve said what I needed to say. There’s no reason for me to disturb you any further.”
Then why did you order food? I wondered, but declined to ask.
“I’m sure they’d be willing to give you a to-go bag. Throwing away a croque monsieur is a crime against nature.”
Cyrus grinned at me as he stood up. “I saw the way you looked at my food when the waitress brought it. I have a strong suspicion it won’t go to waste. It’s been a pleasure.”
I watched him leave with what I was sure was a puzzled frown on my face. I’d been properly warned off, but I had the nagging suspicion that there’d been more going on during our conversation than met the eye. However, I couldn’t figure out what it was. And the croque monsieur was getting cold.
Cyrus was right; his food didn’t go to waste. It wasn’t until I was almost halfway through the sandwich that I realized Cyrus had specifically come to talk to me here, nowhere near where I lived or worked. No one knew where I was. So how had he found me?
The only explanation I could come up with was that he had tracked me by my cell phone somehow. Not something a private citizen would ordinarily be able to do, but the Olympians had so much money to throw around they could buy just about any service known to mankind.
I resisted the urge to dig my phone out of my purse and remove the battery. Cyrus already knew where I was right this moment, so there was no point. But I added a new task to my to-do list: buy a disposable cell phone.
There are some people who can chow down on butter-soaked ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch every day without gaining an ounce. I am not one of them.
Considering the radical changes my life had undergone recently, I’d decided to step up my workout regimen so I’d be in the best possible shape to fight off bad guys, and one of my favorite workouts was running in the woods. My overindulgence at lunch and the relatively mild weather meant this was a good day for a run.
I returned to the mansion and changed into my running clothes—nothing fancy, just a T-shirt and shorts. Sometimes my friend and fellow Liberi-in-residence Maggie went running with me, but after my meetings with Anderson and Cyrus, I needed some time to myself, so I didn’t go looking for her.
Being a city girl, I have very little concept of how big an acre is, but I knew there were a lot of them on Anderson’s property. Even just running up and back along the driveway was not an inconsiderable amount of exercise, but there were also tons of woods. Those weren’t conveniently furnished with running trails, though Maggie had told me that during the warmer months, Anderson brought in a tree service on a regular basis to keep the weeds and underbrush tamed. The result was that we had all the beauty of nature, without any of the inconvenience.
I went up and down the driveway once as a warm-up, then plunged into the woods, just deep enough that I couldn’t see the cleared land on which the house and its environs stood. Pine needles and leaves crunched pleasantly under my feet, and the air smelled of earth and evergreens. A brilliant red cardinal peeped from its perch on a branch above me, and I was far enough away from the road that I couldn’t hear any car sounds. The knot of tension in my gut released as I drank in the peace and solitude.
I was in the zone, my breathing steady, my legs carrying me at a comfortable pace without any conscious control, and I felt like I could run ten miles without being overly winded. I couldn’t, of course. Marathon running wasn’t one of my supernatural powers. When I came out of the almost trancelike state I was in, I’d be breathing like a racehorse and the muscles in my legs would burn something fierce, but for a few perfect minutes, I was transported.
My footsteps faltered when I heard a sound that most definitely didn’t belong out here in the woods of Maryland—a roar that sounded like it came from the throat of a big cat. The sound of that roar brought me back to myself, and I felt the brisk January air burning my throat and lungs as I panted heavily. My legs felt like a pair of tree trunks, rooted to the ground, and I bent over and put my hands on my knees, watching my breath steam as I slowly came to myself.
There was another roar, and I forced myself to stand up straight and look around. I have a very good, possibly supernatural, sense of direction, and even though there were no obvious landmarks around me, just trees
, trees, and more trees, I knew exactly where I was.
In the woods behind the house, there was a large, grassy clearing. I wasn’t sure what its original purpose had been, but some of Anderson’s Liberi used it as a sort of practice field, where they could hone their powers without anyone seeing them. I had used the clearing for target practice, trying to learn the limits of my supernatural aim, which seemed to apply equally well to throwing and shooting.
I was currently about fifty yards from the clearing, and with the leafless trees and the lack of underbrush, I wouldn’t have to go very far before I’d be able to see whatever was going on there. The feline roar ripped through the air again, and I knew any sensible person would turn tail and run as far away from that sound as possible. But I’ve rarely been accused of being sensible, so I started forward again, this time at a brisk walk.
I knew who and what was in the clearing, of course. It had to be Jamaal.
A descendant of the Hindu death goddess Kali, Jamaal possessed a terrifying kind of death magic that almost had a will of its own and wanted to be used. The death magic had driven him half mad, though I suspected his temper had always been an issue, even before he’d become Liberi. Thanks to some info I’d gathered from serial killer Justin Kerner, Jamaal had learned to channel some of that magic into the form of a tiger. Summoning the great cat seemed to vent the death magic for him, so that he was no longer as volatile as he had once been. However, his control of the tiger was shaky, to say the least, which meant that when I heard the roar, I should have known better than to approach.
Curiosity was more likely to kill me than the cat under the circumstances, but I’d had the reluctant hots for Jamaal almost since we first met, and I couldn’t resist my urge to investigate.
I eased my way through the trees toward the clearing. I hadn’t heard any more roaring, so it was possible Jamaal had put the tiger to rest. I’d only seen the creature once before, during our final battle with Justin Kerner, and I’d been too distracted by my attempts to catch a killer to take a good look.
