by S W Clarke
“Why were you headed into Canada?”
His blue eyes regarded me with a little mischief and a whole lot of intensity. “Because of you.”
I eyed him, turned my face back to the road. “This is getting creepy.”
He laughed, a warming sound that eased my tight grip on the steering wheel. Everything about Cupid had that effect; being next to him was like sitting by a warm hearth. “I was drawn to you,” he said. “Well, to your love story, more specifically.”
“My love story?”
“Yes—it’s a very interesting one. Powerful.”
“You mean me and Justin?”
“Justin is part of it, but he isn’t the whole of it. Your story involves so much love, Isabella, and not just eros. Other kinds, too.”
I ventured a long look at Cupid. “You’re referring to things that haven’t happened yet.”
He nodded.
“How? How could you possibly know?”
He tilted his head, eyes drifting out toward the road ahead of us. “You know, I always wanted to ride in a Mustang. Ever since the gods left and my mortal life began, I thought: ‘Before I die, I’m going to ride in a Ford Mustang.’ ” He clapped his hands together. “And who would have thought I’d ride on top of one before I sat in one?”
I said nothing. What did that have to do with—
“But now that I’ve done it, I realized something, Isabella. The temporary pleasures of modern life—that powerful desire, that exhilaration I felt once the car’s hood was beneath my feet—it all dissipated. It’s the old, less exciting loves that bring the most fulfillment. And I can see them in people.” His hand went into the air, closed into a fist. “Pulsing like a heart.”
I was struggling to follow. “I was asking about the future,” I said. “The story that hasn’t happened yet.”
He turned to me, his hand moving in one elegant gesture to point at the center of my chest. “I can see it in you. The old loves, the quiet loves. You’re like a beacon. That’s what I mean when I talk about your story—it’s in you, waiting to unspool.”
And because he was staring at me with such intensity, I refocused on the road. Who would have thought the chubby boy from mythology would be such a wise romantic? Here I thought he twanged a little arrow from his bow and giggled before he flew off.
Turns out, he was by turns vulgar and philosophic.
“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” I said quietly.
“Whatever.” Cupid waved me off and turned to look out the window. “People always underestimate the former god of love because I look like this. I’ll have you know, the reason I still wear this loincloth is because it gets really hot glowing the way I do. I need the venting.”
The last thing I wanted to think about was Cupid’s loincloth and his otherwise lack of clothes. “The gods are gone.”
He groaned. “Do you have to remind me? Half of them still owed me.”
“Owed you what?”
“Oh, debts for this and that. Mostly all the arrows I shot off because they fancied this human or that one. Gods are terrible with IOUs, you know.”
I couldn’t help a laugh. It was the first real moment of humor I’d felt since that creature had appeared, and the taut bundle of nerves inside me eased. “Thank you for helping us,” I said. “We can take you as far as the motel.”
“And then?”
“We’ll part ways.”
He turned back toward me. “That would be a mistake. A real whoopsie-daisy, as it were.”
“What would be?”
“Parting ways.” He lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “But it’s your choice.”
I eyed him. “Isn’t the gist of your power that you make choices for people?”
“Oh sure,” Cupid said. “About love. Not the rest.”
I hesitated, then, “Why would it be a mistake for us to part ways?”
His dimples reappeared. “Because I’m part of your love story.”
Chapter 4
The neon bed floated over the highway with all the promise of Christmas morning, the vibrant green and red lights beckoning us in. Vacancy, the sign declared. Beneath it, an arrow pointed straight down at the rutted parking lot.
“We’re here,” Cupid sang to the two of us as I slowed the car. “And the GoneGods saw fit to bestow us free cable.” He directed one finger at the sign. “Boy, do I love me a good telenovela.”
We came off the road and to a stop. As soon as I’d turned the car off and pulled the keys from the ignition, I sat there staring at my shaking hands. I couldn’t make them stop, even when I squeezed my fingers to fists.
It happened every time I ran away. And in five hundred years as an encantado, I’d done a lot of running. My propensity for anxiety—fear—came as second-nature, and I’d grown very good at listening to what it told me. Too good. So that even when the danger had passed, I couldn’t stop the shaking.
Cupid noticed. “Someone could use a dip in the jacuzzi.”
“I doubt they’ve got jacuzzis here.” I lowered my hands, unbuckled my seatbelt. When I angled around toward the backseat, I sighed; Justin had completely passed out. “Will you help me get him into the room?” I asked Cupid.
He eyed Justin, flexed one of his chubby arms. “Sure. Not many people know this, but I once carried a very drunk Achilles to his bed.”
“He can walk—he just needs someone to get him upright.” I climbed out of the car. My legs unfolded with pins and needles, and the frigid air hit me like a wall. I zipped up my coat as I bent back down to look into the Mustang. “Just wait here a minute, you two.”
In the office, a graying woman sat engrossed in one of those bare-chested romance novels. When I came in, she took a single look at me and set her book fully down on the counter. “Evening.”
“Evening.” I pulled my purse up onto the counter and extracted my wallet. “I saw you have a vacancy.”
“You saw correct. Just one room?”
I pulled out my credit card. “Two rooms for the night.” I had told Cupid he couldn’t stay with us, but as soon as I’d walked into the front office, the guilt had hit me. Even as a formerly immortal Other, Cupid still struck me as a child. And I didn’t see where he could be stashing any money in that loincloth.
The least I could do would be to get him a room for the night. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the funds; the upshot of a life spent anxiously was that over the past few hundred years I’d always had a get-out-of-jail-fund stashed away somewhere. I had a few thousand dollars on me … Now if only we knew where we were going.
The woman rang me up on a register I remembered coming into fashion in the ‘70s. “It’ll be $75.”
I paid her, and she plucked two keys from the corkboard behind her. Not a single other key was missing from its spot.
“Are we the only ones staying tonight?” I asked.
She nodded as she passed them to me. “Yes ma’am.”
Good, I thought. Right now, the fewer faces I had to deal with, the better. I just wanted one night of good sleep without worrying. I lifted the keys. “Thanks.”
“Checkout’s at noon.” She flipped her novel back over. “Let me know if you need anything between now and then.”
Just as I was about to leave, the door opened, and a man actually ducked through the doorway. He was that tall. But that wasn’t the most interesting part about him.
It was that he looked identical to the bare-chested rogue on the cover of the motel owner’s romance novel, now splayed open in her hands. Actually, nix that part about her hands—I heard the sound of her paperback hitting the floor as she spotted him.
And I knew why: he was completely bare-chested, all the way down to what looked like a lion skin girding his loins.
I gaped up at him. For a second, all my good senses had left me. Not only was he at least six-and-a-half feet tall and rippling with muscle, but he bore a certain refinement to his features. His brown hair touched his shoulders in effortless curls, his
square jaw was shaved, and he had a straight nose and striking brows over a pair of intense green eyes. But it was the lips that did me in. I had a weakness for men with full, kissable lips.
As it turned out, all it would take to defeat Isabella Ramirez was a strong jaw and a good head of hair. Oh, and the lips. That’s the thing about us encantado: we’re lovers, and we love to love. Most of all, we love romance and eroticism. And this man’s eyes spoke of those in spades.
He glanced between the two of us, took a step forward and leaned down toward me. I would have backed up if I hadn’t been rooted to the spot. As it was, he could have picked me up and whisked me out of there and I wouldn’t have noticed I was airborne until we were out of the parking lot and into the trees.
I waited for him to say something, but he only took a giant whiff of me, his nostrils flaring as his great lungs filled. “You have the stink of my labor on you,” he said in a honeyed baritone.
“Uh,” I said. Suffice it to say, I was feeling especially articulate tonight. “What?”
“Can I help you?” the motel owner said. Her voice had risen by an entire octave.
Those green eyes shifted to her, but his finger raised to me. “Tell me of your deeds.”
All at once, it hit me: this guy was high. I mean, gorgeous, but totally out of his mind on something. It took every ounce of willpower to edge my way around him with my hands up. “Sorry—I don’t know what you mean.”
Even so, I couldn’t help looking back before I passed through the door. He was staring after me, and the motel owner was still gazing up at him.
I couldn’t blame her. He was unreal.
Back in the parking lot, Cupid had opened Justin’s door and he was half-splayed out of the car, still mostly unconscious. When Cupid saw me, he paused. “Your boyfriend’s a lightweight.”
“Ahh, yeah ...” I groaned, jogging over to kneel by the car. I took Justin’s hand. “Let’s get you inside.”
Justin’s eyes opened and, after a few seconds, focused on me. His smile was automatic. “Hey.”
I couldn’t help but return it. As soon as I saw that smile, the memory of his sacrifice—what he’d done to get us out of Montreal, to save me from Serena Russo—came back to me.
He might not have been Mr. Muscle back there, but he was a good man. I owed him one. Hell, I owed him fifty.
“Hey,” I said back. “Can you stand?”
“Of course.” He lifted his head, and found Cupid standing above him. “Woah, Isa—look.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s Cupid.”
He allowed me to leverage myself under his arm and help him to his feet. Cupid floated up under his other arm, and Justin stared at him with new amazement. “You can fly. You’re a … a …”
Cupid sighed. “I know—I’m a miracle of creation. ‘How can he possibly fly with those tiny wings and all that chub?’ Am I right?”
Justin rolled his head, gazing out across the parking lot we were crossing. “Well, I guess when you put it that way, yeah.”
“I could ask the same thing about you, buddy,” Cupid said. “You have an incredible capacity for upchucking. I didn’t know one man could carry that much GoneGodDamn liquid in his stomach.”
Justin glanced at me. “I’m being cursed out by a toddler.”
Cupid’s face popped out from the other side of Justin. “I can hear you, you know. And I’m not a toddler. I’m way, way older than you.”
Justin’s head rolled back. “Then why do you look like one?”
“He’s been given the gift of looking permanently youthful,” I cut in as we reached the door and I pulled out the key. I was getting testy myself; all I wanted to do was lay down in a bed and get a few hours of sleep before the sun came up—or the World Army showed up. Again.
“You know Diff’rent Strokes?” Cupid said.
Justin nodded. “ ‘Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout Willis?’ ”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cupid said. “Well, the thing that made Gary Coleman look like a kid at age forty? I’ve got the mother of that condition.”
“Oh,” Justin said. “Cool.”
“ ‘Cool’? Please. Do you know how hard it is to buy a drink when you look like this?”
Meanwhile, I opened the motel room door, and the familiar smell of must and lack of ventilation filled my nose. This wasn’t my first motel—I was an encantado, after all—but it was my first in this country. Seems motels smell the same just about everywhere, though. I found it strangely comforting.
We walked Justin over to the bed and lay him down on it. Cupid floated out the door after me, and I handed him his key in the breezeway. “You’re next door,” I said.
He accepted the key. “Does this mean we’re a party?”
“A party?”
“You know, a group. a gang, a collective ... brothers-in-arms. Well, Others-in-arms.”
I gave him a blank look.
“Are we all on the same mission now?”
“No,” I said. “The only mission is for him and I to run as far as possible, as fast as possible. We’re in danger. And worse, we’re dangerous, Cupid. Unpredictable and powerful … Well, he is, at least,” I sighed. “You don’t want to be near us—trust me.”
He looked me up and down. “No offense, but you look about as dangerous as a mole who’s just seen daylight. Same goes for your boyfriend. Especially your boyfriend.”
Inside the hotel room, Justin let out a moan. I turned back, glancing through the doorway. “Everything OK?”
“Sure,” came the reply. “Just slowly turning inside out.”
I made a face; that might not be so far from the truth. When I turned back to Cupid, his eyebrows were raised in confirmation of what he’d said.
“It’s not that we’re going to hurt anyone,” I said. “It’s that we’re being followed by people who aren’t afraid to hurt anyone around us. I don’t want that for you.”
“And what about him?”
“Him? Whatever they did to him gave him powers and these weird, random fugue states.” Then, more to remind myself than anything else, “That’s why I need to get somewhere secure. To do some tests, and fix whatever they broke inside him.”
“Ah.” Cupid gave a single nod. “So that’s why I sensed so much standing in the way of your love story.”
I wasn’t about to try unpacking his constant refrain about my love story—not right now. After all, he was Cupid, and everything to him was a love story. Hell, buying bubble gum probably had some romantic twist to it. “Right, so …” I held out my hand to shake. “Thank you for your help, but we have to part ways.”
He stared at my hand, then lifted his eyes back to mine. “I just saved you both from an odontotyrannos while riding atop your car, and now you’re turning down my help—the kid who’s clearly much more capable than the both of you put together.”
My brows pulled together. “Even after I told you about the bad guys chasing us, you still want to come with us?”
“Like I said”—under the dim breezeway bulb, his blue eyes gleamed with heavenly light—“you have a powerful love story. One of the most powerful I’ve ever seen. My brothers and I were drawn to you right away.”
On the highway, a car’s engine approached, grew in volume until it sped right by the motel and disappeared down the road. My whole body tensed as it did, but I said nothing. What was there to say? “You’ve got the wrong encantado?” It didn’t seem like I could convince him of that.
Eventually, Cupid’s cheeks dimpled as he smiled at me. “You think about it, Isabella.”
And that was how Cupid and I left it in the motel parking lot.
In the room, Justin was feverish and sweating. I spent an hour tending to him, and then took a long, long shower when he’d fallen asleep. I closed my eyes, let the water run over me, and imagined home. My first home—the rainforest, where I bathed in a river every day before modern luxuries.
I missed home.
Cupid couldn’t come with us, because
I had decided that we were headed to my home, Brazil. It would be a long journey, but Justin and I would be safe there. I could find a lab to continue my work on Other DNA, and treat the side effects of Justin’s genetic modifications without worrying about the World Army every minute of the day.
Of course, that involved getting on an airplane, which involved getting to an airport, which involved getting to the nearest city.
New York City.
I toweled off and came back into the main room, where Justin was sleeping with his mouth open. Right now, he needed me to keep him safe. Which meant we needed to ditch the car. The World Army was tracking us somehow, and Justin’s Mustang was doing us no favors. They probably knew the make, model and license plate.
Plus, our car now had an odontotyrannos-sized dent in the trunk.
I picked up my purse, found my phone and sat on the edge of the bed. When I called Egya, he picked up right away. “It’s Isa,” I said. “We made it to Vermont.”
“Uneventfully?” His voice, always vaguely amused, bore not an ounce of humor now.
“They sent a creature after us.”
I heard him curse. “What happened?”
“It’s a long story, but we’re OK for now. Are they still expecting us in the city?”
We never said who they were on the phone, for fear of someone—anyone—listening in. But we both knew who we were referring to.
The resistance.
“Yes. When you arrive, go to Times Square and do exactly as I instructed. Be there two nights from now. They will find you.”
“Can’t you give me an address?”
Egya sighed. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you, but I cannot. You understand.”
I understood; the network of Others who had banded together against humans were still so fragile. If the World Army found them …
“I get it,” I said. “We’ll go to Times Square.”
“Be safe.”
Safe. That was starting to feel like such a temporary, flitting word. Safety didn’t last—it was impermanent.
I got dressed in the clothes I would wear tomorrow, as I had done for days now. I packed our belongings into the single backpack I’d brought into the room with our essentials, set it next to the bed. I kept the car keys in my hand as I sat on the bed. We were always ready to go.
