Apollo (Speed Dating with the Denizens of the Underworld)

Chapter One

On the bingo card of imagining her own death, Irowen Steed had never reserved a square for this.

Granted, as one of the globe’s most successful headhunters, she’d allowed some room for creative license. Just not enough room for impaled on a pop starlet’s foyer chandelier.

Maybe she should have rewritten things. Especially from the second she’d answered the phone call from Nao Ito.

There was a popular saying on the global hunters’ chat group. Team Ito: where the home field is Hell. She’d quickly sensed enough of the sentiment beneath the sarcasm to ignore the yakuza boss’s first attempts to contact her.

But three and a half weeks ago, Genny had been late getting home. Later—by hours—than her sister’s usual version of late. And Wen’s intuition had started firing on very unpleasant cylinders . . .

Which had been horribly right.

So she’d picked up the call and been given no choice about joining a search in which she’d desired no part. The only other time that happened, she’d done the job well enough to make sure she was never extorted into a job ever again.

Ironically, she was pickier about her gigs than Natasha Korra, the mega pop star owner of the hillside mansion into which she’d snuck a few minutes ago.

But Ito made sure his pet project was her wrenching exception.

Locating Korra’s lover, the elusive rock star Reks Byrd, had become the most terrifying priority of her days.

And, quite clearly, the last dumb decision of her life.

A fact she was hopelessly doomed to fixate on, bringing a hundred more points of pain than the wounds that had half her body weight bleeding out across this Italian marble floor.

She couldn’t exactly ignore the issue by looking away either.

The most disgusting damage of it all came courtesy of the long gold arrow embedded in her sternum.

Or maybe it seemed that way because the arrow’s shaft was glowing.

“No,” she mumbled, close to vomiting the metallic sludge in her throat and mouth.

Impossible. Two or three or eight internal organs must have been violated by the arrow or part of the palace-sized chandelier with which she’d just pulled a major D’Artagnan tribute, but nothing north of her shoulders had been hit.

She was thinking too clearly and feeling too sharply for a brain bleed.

“W-W-Wait. Whoa.”

Maybe parts of her gray matter had truly fallen loose.

It was the only explanation for what she saw now, rolling her head to one side despite the chandelier crystals crunching beneath her skull.

But blinking harder didn’t help. Neither did an attempt to haul in a breath in the name of clearing the teary haze from her vision.

Oh, God. Everything hurt. Except when she dared to look up again, which filled her horizon with a view like this.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

Especially because she should be glaring at the stunning male across the marble floor, not sopping down the air with her half-conscious mooning.

Whoever he was, even with his waterfall of silver-blond hair, his diamond cutter of a jawline, and his glittering kohl-lined eyes, nothing changed his most important status.

He was her worst enemy come to life.

Gorgeous in all the most distracting ways. Cocky enough to know it. Obnoxious enough to act on it.

Exactly as he had a couple of hours ago, when she’d arrived at the DeLux Club to question Natasha Korra in a more civilized way—if that’s what she realistically labeled as civilized, with eight of her best field soldiers on her heels—only to be shut down by this golden-haired hunk and his own unexpected arrival on the scene.

Ah, and there she went again with the creative lexicon.

When a paranormally beautiful man used a funnel of fire as his calling card, was it an arrival or an offensive?

And did it matter if he didn’t give half a shit about it?

Not even half.

No, the Greek-carving-given-life had been breathtakingly focused, to the point that she almost took notes on his style as soon as he’d snatched up Korra, her Hercules look-a-like date, and their whole speed dating event table with them.

In their wake, Wen had nothing to show for her effort, and therefore nothing to hand over to Ito, but a dust-jammed firearm, eight unconscious men, and one very sentient stranger charging her way.

A woman who was as blindingly blond and gorgeous as the disappearing statue boy.

A female he and his buddy had called Aphrodite.

Aphrodite.

Wen fought to shake her head, nearly welcoming the fresh glass in her hair.

Hopefully it’d jar her mind from its Olympus-themed fever dream.

Why did it even matter now? Whether this was Hollywood Hills or the middle of the Acropolis, she was going to bleed out on this marble floor: an elegant death row with her own etched angel to lead her to the next realm.

What would Sister Margaretta say now? The sweet nun had always been thrilled about Wen’s fascination with angel stories, until discovering she used them as foundation tales for her fan fic page, Dirty Seraphs.

Damn it. She was in too much pain to be distracted by a single scene from those tales now.

Not even as her personal angel of death fixed her again with those eyes, startling as the green glass with which the tips of his hair seemed adorned, in the middle of an expression that looked more like a confession.

But she knew better. He was sorry about something, but not for or to her. That glowing arrow was going to stay right where it was.

“Herc.”

The single syllable from his angular lips confirmed as much, though Wen was less puzzled by his rue than the word he’d used it for. Herc? As in, a nickname for Hercules? The guy standing next to him really looked the part too. But no way was that possible . . .

“Herc, I don’t think she’s one of us.”

“Hold up. So . . . what . . . she’s . . . mortal?”

And no way had she overheard them exchanging all that, as if she’d crashed through some weird boundary between realms and was actually bleeding out on a marble floor on Mount Olympus.

No. No.

That was definitely, absolutely the blood loss talking. It had to be . . .

“And a fighter. So maybe we won’t have to answer to Hades for an unscheduled soul, after all.”

“And maybe we’re burning minutes dicking around while this virago fully restores.

Hey. Brother. Are you listening? Just because it looks human and bleeds human doesn’t mean it is one of the pitiful creatures.

Are you going to just wait out the verdict?

Then what? What’re you going to do if you’re suddenly on the bad side of a gorgon? A manticore? A hydra?”

And maybe this assignment had made her officially crazy.

But with that ineffably beautiful man on approach toward her again, was sanity worth the trouble? With an angel like this to escort her into forever, who wanted to be sane?

Take me away, Angel. I’m ready for the ride.

“Mortal or monster, this female needs to survive.”

No. No. Riding usually means forward direction, Gorgeous . . .

“Not exactly where I was going, man.”

What he said, Angel. Listen to the god giant.

“Apollo. She’s a she-snake in the garden. Do you really want to keep her around just to see what she does the next time you step on her?”

On second thought, the god giant is an idiot.

Not the conclusion she was set to act out on, especially since that meant forgetting the chandelier sconces that had turned her into a human hors d’oeuvres on their tines.

In short, as she forced herself to try an actual lunge toward the big guy, inviting an avalanche of torment through her whole body.

The pain was so intense, she swore it was from the blood audibly rushing then spurting from her wounds.

Until it wasn’t.

The agony was once more replaced by his voice, thick with stress but lined with strength, commanding his brother and the female by his side to leave as fast as they could.

There was a bunch more bickering about that from the big guy—damn, his name wasn’t actually Hercules, right?

—before the angel flicked a few fingers as if simply striking a match.

But the resulting blaze?

Matches only hoped to grow up into this blaze.

This fresh funnel of fire and wind that swept up, just like the flaming tornado that had appeared earlier at DeLux, climbed to fifteen then twenty feet.

When it got that high, she barely reined back a grimace while bracing for what came next.

But why? If fate delivered on the exact same scenario, all three members of her opposition would be swept up and away into the blazing cyclone.

It’d be scarier than shit to watch but only for a few seconds.

After the strange trio was gone, she could lie here and finally die in peace.

Sure enough, the giant and his woman flew up and into the whirlwind.

But the stunning golden angel, the new bane of her existence, remained where he was.

The only thing that moved in or around him were the tips of his hair, appearing like green gamma rays as the surreal tsunami whipped through them.

Otherwise he didn’t vacillate by an inch, even when blood oozed across the floor and reached the toes of his pristine dress Pradas.

Her blood.

She battled the urge to vomit, not good when a chandelier bulb still sprouted from her stomach like a disco xenomorph.

But the skirmish came with one perk. No longer did the glow around his hair make him seem a gilded seraph.

Now he was more like a demon who’d snuck through a corner of the clouds to spy on heaven and spotted her as a special souvenir to take home.

Why?

You don’t want me, buddy. I don’t make instant firestorms. My eyes don’t glow like it either. I’m really broken goods, especially now. You know that, right? You see that, yes?

Only he didn’t.

Dear God, he just kept striding over, smirking mildly but striding precisely, as if he’d heard every word of her little protest and was now ready to play with her to prove the point.

Shit, shit, shit; he came close enough to crouch beside her, those damn Pradas squelching in her blood pond as he leaned deeply over her . . .

In the moments before his expression changed.

His scoff became a terse compression of lips. The sexy fae shade of his eyes cured to spearmint hard tack.

And yet, deep in that gaze, she caught a glimpse of something else.

Something that sparkled at her. Spoke to her.

Solaced her?

“Hm. Tough as tacks but pretty as a chandelier. So, what’s your name really, Little Monster?”

So much for the solace.

You want a monster? That’s exactly what you’ll get, Gorgeous.

Except somewhere between that threat of her soul and the surface of her face, the torture of her wounds won out.

Worse, it was joined by the agony across her spirit, a reminder that death wasn’t a luxury she could afford right now.

Not with Genny still in Ito’s clutches, utterly unfindable.

Not that Wen hadn’t tried. Oh God, how she’d tried.

But the bastard had locked away her sister like the devil stashing coal in hell . . .

Her senses swam. Tears brimmed and flowed, tracking hot stings into every wound they ran into. Black dots swarmed her vision, a perfect match to the desperation that forced words to her lips.

“Help . . . me.”

Impossible words.

A plea she’d have spit out like hemlock just a month ago, even for an entrancing angel like him. But her dignity, destiny, and life were expendable, as long as Genny was safe. She’d planned that certainty down to every conceivable detail . . .

Or so she’d thought.

Even the inconceivable could happen.

“Please . . . help me.”

An inconceivability like this.

Her. Begging. From a man.

Didn’t matter that it was for her life and not just bus money. The acid was just as awful in her throat; the resentment was rancid in her psyche. But she’d set it to the tune of Monster Mash and sang it on repeat for the chance to survive.

And live to find Genny.

So why did her masochistic angel suddenly look like the newly impaled one here?