Awakened Love

by Skyler Andra

  He frowned at me.

  Rane shoved Colton into a chair, securing his arms behind the back before tying him to the legs so he couldn’t repeat his little outburst.

  “How the hell did we miss this?” he asked roughly.

  “Because we weren’t looking,” Mads replied curtly. “As far as we knew, Colton was dead. Long walk off a short pier and all that. But then guess who greeted me after my kidnapping. Surprise! He’s alive.”

  To my shock, Colton started to cry, his face turning a splotchy red with rage. “Damn you, Locke! Damn you!”

  Now that I’d straightened my clothing and calmed myself, I considered his words. Why was he so mad at me? What had I done? How was I supposed to destroy whoever he was talking about?

  I carried a spare chair over to him.

  “Locke,” Rane cautioned, his tone warning me to stop.

  One look at my face made him think the better of it, and he moved aside.

  I set the chair backwards in front of Colton. Sitting on it, I rested my forearms on top of the chair back.

  Colton, the little shit, wasn’t as fast as my lovers, but he was quick and he could do some serious harm to me if he wanted to. Rage gnawed away inside him like the deepest pit of hell. He was defeated; it was as plain as day.

  “So you’re the one who called me that night,” I started, remembering his voice on the phone sex line some five months ago. The creepy caller who’d asked me what I thought of love before telling me I was perfect. Following that, I’d been struck with a bright light and woke up with the powers of Cupid.

  He glared at me. “It was perfect. You thought love was bullshit. You didn’t have any in your heart.”

  “You gave me the powers of Cupid,” I said, the pieces beginning to snap together. “But not the connection to the god himself. Why?”

  Colton laughed like a typical, crazy movie villain. “I gave you the god himself.”

  Murmurs flew around the room, mainly between the avatars.

  What the hell did he mean? How was that possible? Colton was no god. He shouldn’t have been able to gift anything that powerful based on powers alone. From everything Rane and Mads had told me, the gods chose a person as their avatar, not the other way around. I needed more answers.

  “Where is Eros, old man?” one of the twins snarked.

  Colton’s eyes blazed manically. “He’s my prisoner!” he growled unevenly, his voice shaking and high in spots. “And without him, you’d all go mad slowly but surely. But you ruined everything.” His gaze pinned me like a wild animal’s.

  Aha. That was why the pantheon had dragged me into this. They could feel the absence of the Cupid eating at them. And eventually, if he wasn’t located and restored to Olympus, it would have driven the avatars mad, too.

  Rane uttered a long and threatening growl from behind me. He’d never hurt someone if he didn’t have to, but Colton didn’t exactly fit that description after his involvement in my torture and kidnapping.

  “We could kill him,” Rane proposed casually, suddenly reversing his earlier pleas for mercy. “He’s certainly done enough harm and put us through hell.”

  I didn’t disagree with the last line, but I took objection to the first. Some serious pain welled up inside of Colton, and I needed to dig deeper to find out why. Had he orchestrated all this from the beginning?

  A crafty smile flitted across Colton’s face. “Yes, the orb. I came across that little toy ages ago. Did you like confronting the monster you really are, Ares?”

  “Wasn’t fun,” Rane snarled. “Neither is what I’m going to do to you.”

  “No!” I cut in sharply. “Just… wait a second.”

  My thoughts were racing and going in too many different directions. If Colton didn’t release Eros, the rest of the gods would go mad. I didn’t have the stomach for murder, so I needed another way.

  I glanced over at Mads leaning on the wall, his usual smile non-existent and his eyes bright and alert. He gave me an encouraging nod.

  Byron stood by the twins, keeping a close eye on the group. Ophelia and Conor watched with growing shock at the unfolding events.

  My eyes flickered to Rane and I detected a rising heat in him.

  A thought hit me, so I tried another tactic to avoid the whole eye for an eye scenario. “So, tell me about her, Colton.”

  “Fuck you,” he replied, his words shaking. I detected a sense of longing and love all at once and it took my breath away.

  Fine, if he wasn’t going to talk, I’d find out for myself. I reached for Colton’s gold cord, seizing it.

  “She was tall and pretty, your Layla,” I mentioned, reading their love thread. “Oh, wow, she had an amazing laugh. The kind that you could listen to all day. And she read a lot? Ah, no wonder. She worked as a professor. Her students loved her, you know.”

  Colton wrestled against his chair. Tipping over, he fell sideways with a loud crack.

  My muscled tightened. He didn’t need to do this to himself. His pain was killing him.

  Rane easily righted him again.

  “And she died of lung cancer.” The moment I said the words, the grief fueling Colton departed him and he slumped back in the chair, exhausted from fighting his bitterness and hatred.

  “Can you believe it?” he muttered with absolutely no feeling in his words. “Never smoked a day in her life.”

  I listened, letting him get his pain off his chest because sometimes that’s all it took to make someone feel better. In reality, even I knew he needed more than a simple counseling session. This guy had serious issues.

  Members of his team watched him intently. I glanced over my shoulder to see the avatars doing the same thing.

  “I was with her to the very end,” he continued. “I loved her more than anyone’s ever loved anyone. And because I’m the fucking avatar of Cupid, I felt it with more emotion and heart.”

  “And your power wasn’t enough. You couldn’t save her?”

  “No,” he said, and he bent his head forward. “It will never, ever be enough, and if that winged bastard has to suffer with me for all my days, if the whole pantheon goes crazy and they all kill each other and the avatars end up in a psyche ward, then so be it.”

  At last we got to the heart of things, allowing the last piece of the puzzle to snap into place. Colton had set everything in motion by planting Eros inside of me. How had he even done that? Why had I not exploded into dust from having a being so powerful inside of me?

  I stretched out Colton’s cord, examining his plan as he’d enacted it by meeting with an elusive organization, the ones who funded him with resources to capture the avatars in exchange for extracting their powers to sell them to the highest bidders. Then he’d called me and used a spell from the Book of the Dead—something he’d stolen from the Egyptian avatar Robin Goodfellow—to cage Eros inside of me.

  Not finished with Colton yet, I turned to him, who was a remnant of who he once was—a man who’d loved a woman. He’d done terrible things, but it was hard to think of punishing him when he already lived in one of the worst hells imaginable: living without the other part of his heart. A thousand knives hacked at my own chest as I imagined his pain.

  But I had an idea that might just solve everything. I wasn’t sure if it would work, or whether it’d get my ass hauled back to the underworld, but it was worth a try.

  “All right, Colton,” I said. “I’m going to teach you a prayer.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Prayer?”

  “It will help,” I said. “Trust me.”

  Left with nothing to lose, he nodded. The ancient Greek words he repeated after me were empty, but I had seen what was in his heart and I knew what it would conjure when he recited them. The lord of the dead had once whispered the very words to me. The syllables were sharp and hard, but they slid against each other smoothly, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  Out of the side of my vision I caught Mads pushing off the wall, Rane looking around warily and B
yron’s head snapping in my direction. I wished I could tell them that there was nothing to fear.

  “No, Locke!” Byron yelled at me, racing to my side and trying to clamp his hand over my mouth to stop me.

  Mads and Rane wrestled him off.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” Mads insisted. “Let her do this.”

  That was one of the reasons I loved him. He didn’t try to change me, and I didn’t want him to either. Together we were equally perfect.

  I didn’t dare stop murmuring the prayer with Colton, chanting it over and over again until the room darkened and filled with a chill that no clothing could stop.

  From the darkness, in all his antique finery, stepped Hades. It was hard to think of this man as an avatar. How he’d given up anything human ages ago. What was before us now had the cool beauty and the titanic indifference of an actual god.

  “Hello, Locke,” Hades rumbled. “You are ready to return.”

  “Did you miss me?” I asked with a slight smile, and he thawed just a little bit.

  “Perhaps,” he said with a smile. “But if you have called simply to ask me that–”

  “God, no!” I climbed off my chair, approaching him. “But I have someone who doesn’t belong here. He needs a certain place. Only one will do.”

  Hades nodded in understanding.

  Colton stumbled to his feet with the chair stuck to his back. “Can you take me to her? Bring me to her side? I don’t care what I have to do, help me find my wife!”

  Hades frowned briefly, and for a moment I feared my efforts might be all for nothing. “He gives himself as a willing sacrifice?”

  “Will you take him, Hades?” I pushed, my sanity teetering on the edge of darkness at the thought of having to return to the underworld.

  Indifference radiated in his stare. He passed his hand over Colton’s eyes and the man went still. “This one has been looking for me for some time, but I never answered his calls. Today I will.”

  Elation rushed through me. “So that’s it? No more owing you a favor? We’re square?”

  Hades shrugged, that faint smile still on his face. “We could certainly play it like that if you like. You are always welcome in my halls.”

  Rane’s growl was as loud as a rumble of thunder.

  Hades held up one hand. “Peace, Ares, it was only a joke. Locke, our deal is fulfilled.”

  Thank Eros! I released the breath I held.

  “Now, I have business to attend to,” Hades said, his smile creeping further up on his face. “There’s nothing like reuniting two lost souls.”

  Didn’t I know it. While I brought people together in life, Hades brought them together in death. We weren’t so different in that regard. And he was right; there was nothing like it.

  Hades and Colton faded away, moving beyond the reach of mortals.

  For all that Colton had done, I truly hoped he found his peace in the next life when there was none in this one.

  When they vanished, Mads piped up. “Well, that was–”

  I never heard the rest of his words because a blinding light seared through my skull, lighting me up from the inside like a paper lantern. Suddenly I was elsewhere, floating through the air on a kind of light that I knew automatically didn’t come from the sun. There was an impression of something huge in front of me that I could barely make out. I was only able to perceive a white feather here, a blue eye there.

  ‘Hello, Locke!’ the voice said in my head.

  I squinted against all the heavenly light. This time I recognized the mighty bow. “Eros?”

  ‘Yes. You have freed me.’

  “In all fairness, it was kind of incidental, sir,” I replied, not one to take too much credit even when it was due.

  How did you talk to a god? What did you address them as when they weren’t even human? I hoped ‘sir’ was a mighty enough title for the god of love. At some point during this entire adventure, I probably should have asked Rane or Mads, maybe even Byron.

  ‘Asking the avatars of Athena and Ares wouldn’t have helped. Their patrons don’t have much in common with me. The avatar of Hermes, perhaps a little more.’

  “Oh, great, you can read my mind,” I mumbled, glancing around at the clouds floating by. This was so cliché.

  ‘Believe me when I say that there is nothing I have not seen a thousand times before,’ came the voice with some kindness. ‘But mostly… I just want to say thank you.’

  His gratitude warmed me like no other heat I’d ever felt before. Like the rest of the god, the satisfaction was too much to comprehend, too much to take in. I imagine it felt like having your rowboat bumped by a blue whale while you were alone on the ocean.

  “I didn’t get into this mess wanting to, um, be an avatar for you,” I pointed out.

  ‘You are my avatar now—my true avatar, until the day you die.’

  Really? Part of me didn’t want that responsibility and the dangers that came with it. But then again, manifesting condoms out of thin air might come in handy for the three hunks waiting for me back in the military mess hall. Plus, I bet there were a hundred other nifty tricks I hadn’t yet explored.

  “Don’t think this means that I’m going to do whatever you say,” I warned Eros.

  He laughed, a beautiful noise like a chorus of angels singing at once. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it. There’s a reason you would have been the next avatar even without Colton.’

  “Wait, what?” I glanced up towards the area of god’s glowing face.

  Instead of explaining himself further the bastard dropped me and I fell through the thick layer of clouds, through space itself. As I plummeted I heard an enormous peal of laughter, wild and free, emanating from my own being. Eros was just one more thing to worry about.

  Chapter 20

  Locke

  I awoke with a jolt, staring up at three extremely worried and handsome faces. After coming back to reality, I realized my head pillowed on Mads’ thigh.

  “Gods really like getting the last word,” I murmured.

  Rane laughed shakily from his kneeling position besides my body. “They do. Are you all right? You went over like a poleaxed steer.”

  “Hmm fine, I think,” I said, testing my arm for any broken bones. Lifting it up, I wiggled to check for a broken back. Nope. Thank Eros. “Just a little dizzy. Mouth is dry. What did I miss?”

  Byron spoke next. “We decided to let the other prisoners go.”

  “What?” I sat up, propping myself with my hands. “Are you crazy? They might kidnap us again.”

  He shook his head. “The mercenaries are dead. The scientists and nurses were struck with a glowing red arrow, erasing their memory of the past year.”

  “Eros’ gift to us for releasing him,” Mads explained, brushing my hair aside. The backs of his knuckles grazed my neck and I closed my eyes for a second, enjoying it.

  Thank you Eros, I thought with a pleased smile. For bringing me on this rollercoaster of an adventure. For awakening my heart to love again, pairing me with three men whom I have come to love very much in different ways. Thank you for choosing me as your avatar and for the new life waiting for my men and me.

  “Without Colton,” began Rane as he took my hand and stroked it with his thumb, “the group is nothing. None of them knew a thing. He compartmentalized everything to ensure the group funding him didn’t kill him once they got the avatars. No one but him knew the avatar identities. That’s why he captured innocent people as placebos.”

  What a clever bastard. His cord told me he’d planned his revenge for many years.

  “And the orb?” I asked. As long as that device operated, we were still at risk of being trapped and having our power stolen.

  “Destroyed,” Byron said.

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I laughed a little. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Waiting,” Mads muttered, jerking his head to gesture to the rest of the avatars standing around. Victor kicked the floor in boredom. Lucy shot arrows into the p
laster wall to pass the time. Ophelia and Conor were discussing something in the corner. “The boss is gathering the family for a conference.”

  “Oh god, not another meeting,” I moaned, dreading having to face the pantheon of avatars.

  Right then Rane’s cellphone rang and he quickly answered. “Yeah, okay,” he affirmed, pressing a button and putting the volume on speakerphone. “It’s Blake.”

  “Is everyone assembled?” a man asked authoritatively.

  “Yes,” Rane answered.

  I stepped up beside him, examining the main caller’s image, a bear of a man with a silver spade beard. Blake, the avatar of Zeus. Below him was a lengthy list of other faces attached to the call with locations listed by them. Many of them I didn’t recognize, but they were all avatars like me. One particular woman caught my attention. A beautiful woman with plump lips, emerald eyes, and flowing blonde hair streaked with green. Persephone. I had discerned her image from reading Hades’ love cord. Somehow I had to speak with her and pass on a message from her lost love.

  “Brothers, sisters,” Blake boomed. “Thank you for all being with us today.”

  Zeus’ avatar explained the story, starting with the Colton faking his death and his treachery against the pantheon to orchestrating the madness of the gods and the kidnapping of the avatars.

  “But we are safe now,” Blake acknowledged, “thanks to Rane, Mads, Byron, Lucy, Victor, Ophelia, Conor and… Locke, our newest avatar of Eros.”

  Several people on other line cheered and clapped. A round of ‘thanks’ buzzed along with our names and some ‘welcomes’ for me. Something about it touched my heart. The other avatars I met may not have been perfect, but they were family in a way and we had to stick together and look out for each other.

  “I know you’re all busy,” Blake said, “so thank you for joining us today. Until we meet next time.”

  “Which thankfully isn’t often,” Mads whispered in my ear, making me smile, before he added aloud, “Roger that, boss!” Being a smartass, he saluted, signing off.

  “Persephone wait!” I called as Rane was about to end the call.

  I snatched the phone from him, bringing it up to my face. Blake, along with Tara and a few other nosey avatars had not disconnected their lines as if they wanted to hear me to speak. Three frames below Blake’s, Persephone stared at me with confusion and curiosity burning in her eyes. Oh, like this was any of their business. I ended the call with Blake and the others, one by one hanging up on them, only keeping her on the line. Her real name, according to what displayed on the phone, was Autumn Snow. God, it sounded a bit like a porn star name, but whatever. I guess the autumn thing kind of suited the nature-loving goddess.