2
She veers backward, her spine hitting the tree.
It cannot be. How can he see her?
The man’s eyes taper, then his mouth slants into a wry grin. “Nice try.”
This human dares to mock a deity? Typically, Love would approve of his snark, for it mirrors her own puckish antics. However, she bristles in offense, raising her own bow at lightning speed, her arrowhead braced inches from his.
The velocity of her motions catches the human off guard. His fingers tighten on the weapon, and his dark eyebrows slam together. With their archery primed toward one another’s hearts, they sidestep each other. Circling slowly, their boots dig a circular trench into the snow.
The man’s fitted wool coat hints at a strong physique, broad muscles filling out the material. Snowflakes dust his eyelashes, which surround irises the color of pewter, and a strong jawline carves a path across his face like a precarious ledge, easy to fall from. Most striking of all, the expression on his face—unsurprised, unafraid, and unrelenting—is staggering to behold.
He’s the most infinite thing she has ever seen. And the most fatal.
Love discerns the tension in his fingers, as well as the defensive gleam in those orbs. Unaccustomed to unearthly beings, he regards her like a wild beast, a threat to his life.
She blows out a slow gust of air. If she doesn’t shoot, he’ll remain a witness to her existence. Yet if she shows mercy, he will take his knowledge of her back to the village. Providing they don’t question his sanity, Love shall have a dangerous problem on her hands.
That mortals cannot see her isn’t the issue. This creature is an exception there. But he’s a critical one, for it takes only a single human with sight to cause mayhem among her kind.
Love narrows her gaze and stretches the bowstring farther back. One, two—
“So.” The human quirks an eyebrow. “We’re doing this, then?” And when she gnashes her teeth, he shrugs. “Okay.”
In unison, they fire. The arrows eject, cutting across the short distance. Love executes a sideways backflip, veering out of the projectile’s path. By the time she lands with another arrow nocked, the mortal is gone.
Dark threads of hair flying in her face, she whips her head to-and-fro, searching the forest. The sound of a twang reaches her ears. Northeast. Twenty feet away. Behind a prickly shrub grouted with snow. Love twists, dodging the next attack and releasing her own arrow at the same time, which punches the bush.
“Fuck,” a voice hisses as its owner leaps from his hiding spot.
The arrow whizzes past him and punctures a tree trunk, producing a crack in the dense bark. Her target rolls across the ground, catapults himself upright, and launches two projectiles in succession.
Love spins one way, dodging the first. Then she runs and vaults over the next. For no logical reason, her lips curl upon landing. This creature has impressive skills.
Disguising her immortality is a lost cause by now, for he’d witnessed her dropping from that tree without severing a bone. The battle continues, each of them maneuvering around the other. Arrows fly like missiles, needle leaves splintering in the shafts’ wake. Love’s archery cleaves through massive branches and fells a sapling, much to her remorse.
Each time, her weapons vanish and reappear in her quiver. And because his weapons lack the same vigor or capacity to replenish themselves, the mortal swears under his breath.
Love takes a moment to gloat. Then she snarls when his incoming arrow streaks past her cheek, narrowly missing her flesh. But unlike Love, he shall run out of projectiles soon.
She arches backward and dispatches an arrow vertically into the sky, the weapon spearing upward and then diving for his skull. The male whips his head toward the whistling noise, the arrow’s iron shaft glinting like a falling star.
“Shit!” he grits out, dropping to one knee and propelling his own arrow at the final second.
The objects collide. Love’s iron shears through his weapon, but his aim manages to knock her archery off its trajectory. Wood pieces scatter across the forest. By contrast, Love’s arrow blasts a crater into the ground, puffs of snow exploding like a geyser.
Separated by a dozen leagues, they swing their loaded bows toward each other.
At once, the man bolts upright and stops, a mushroom cloud of snow cascading around him. Silence descends apart from their panting exhalations, the woodland clearing in shambles from the combat.
Damnation. They’ve destroyed this area.
As he takes another hard look, Love does the same. Their eyes narrow, indicating a ceasefire.
The mood shifts. Evergreen needles stretch toward what little sunlight remains. At last, she and the man study one another closer, from their contrasting hair colors to the differences in their archery.
His penetrating gaze stalls on her eyes, which is understandable given Love’s maroon irises and starlit pupils are not of the mortal world. Yet his gaze clings to hers without flinching, the magnetic connection affecting her in an unfamiliar way. Deities might be immortal, but they require oxygen as much as humans do, and it seems as though her breath has gotten tangled up in her lungs. The deprivation makes her feel powerless.
Her. A goddess.
“Now then,” he snaps. “Where the fuck did you come from?”
His brazen attention registers her short dress. The thin material is wrapped around the crescent of her waist. He reassesses the skimpy garment, the distance from which she’d jumped, and the intricate design of her bow, which flashes as though it was forged by the hemisphere.
Not an ounce of disbelief. Instead, the man accepts what he sees.
After a moment, his bow lowers a fraction. “Are you lost?”
The sudden concern is unappreciated. Her mind whirls like a tornado destroying everything in its wake. He’s the one who invaded her territory, not the other way around.
Love glowers. “Do I look helpless to you?”
That wry mouth tilts farther. “You look underdressed to me.”
“And you look like an easy target to me.”
“Is that right? Because from where I’m standing, I wasn’t the one taken off guard.”
He doesn’t advance, doesn’t prowl her way, nor does he need to. Try as she might, Love cannot move. She’s riveted, bound to the cliffhanger of what will happen next.
The man’s gaze sketches her appearance once more. In such circumstances, sex-starved mortals can be predatory, but his pupils reflect cautious intrigue. Nothing lecherous. If it were otherwise, Love’s arrow would have impaled his cock by now. She has disposed of such humans before, when they’ve been on the verge of attacking a victim.
“Fuck it,” the man hisses, then sets the archery against a tree trunk and tears off his coat. She’d been right about his athletic build. His shoulders are marvelous—living, breathing cliffs beneath his shirt.
He holds the garment out to her. “Here. Take it. Jesus.”
Love ignores the coat. Confusion assaults her logic. Humans do not have the ability to see deities, apart from the rarest and most perilous of circumstances. And he’d moved with agility, proving himself a formidable opponent.
Perhaps she’d been wrong earlier. He could be a Dark God like her. She’s heard of elite archers who were careless enough to get themselves banished from The Dark Fates, the realm where celestials reign over deities in the same manner fictional titans rule Olympus. Yet that does not explain the human bow and the riveted way he regards her physical appearance. Moreover, Love smells the earth on him and had sensed his emotions when he first appeared, something she cannot do with a peer.
Last, a deity would never have offered the coat. Not that her kind needs warmth. Quite simply, they are too selfish to make such a gesture.
The man sucks in a breath when she disarms, her hand reaching out and swimming through his sternum. Very well, so he’s not an exiled god. Perhaps some form of demon? Nonsense. No such rivals occupy this world.
Love slaps the coat from his hand. Then she drops the longbow, windmills the arrow through her fingers, and rams the stem into his chest. The momentum plows him against the nearest tree. Only when her breasts hover close to his pectorals, her body inches from passing through his, does she pause.
The man doesn’t resist. Yet neither does he cower, his eyes glittering like polished steel. “What do you want?”
“I wish for you to be quiet, mortal,” she commands.
Yet she also wants him to speak again. His voice is a deep symphony, bursting into that place humans call the heart but deities merely consider an organ. A pounding rhythm quickens within her, throbbing as though she has swallowed a drum.
Is this what it’s like to truly feel her pulse?
Her free hand traces the contours of his body. More to the point, they attempt as much, from his straight nose to that sharp jaw.
That’s when his irises flicker with more than intrigue. Something deeper, darker, and distressing. Their bodies pump oxygen, inflating through one another with each respiration. Despite being near enough to fuse together, the only thing that makes physical contact with him is the arrow wedged against his torso.
He stalls, muscles taut as he watches her skim his frame. For an instant, those pupils expand, and his lips part on a husky exhalation that caresses her own mouth. Like this, she feels him tangibly, the stimulation gripping her lungs.
The man’s eyelids hood, fixation and vigilance playing a tug-of-war across his face. This one isn’t the type to capitulate easily, but neither is he immune to her proximity. Every place she brushes through produces a different reaction from him—a ragged intake, a flare of his irises, a clench of his teeth. The phenomenon draws her in like a moth to a flame.
Love’s hand has barely drifted along his throat when she jolts back, releasing the man. She clutches her fist, which crackles with energy. This reaction to a lowly human isn’t normal. Worse, she’s made a grave mistake. What has she done revealing herself to him?
Stars almighty. What has she done ?
“Wait!” he shouts as she breaks the trance, veers around, and launches up her tree, scaling its heights like a member of the fauna.
She tastes-smells-hears the proof of his shock on her way up, but it’s not due to her momentum, for Love isn’t moving as fast as she could. No, it’s because he sees beneath her dress, viewing the evidence that deities never bother with undergarments. She’d been too fast during the battle for him to notice, but at this moment, her ass and cunt are on full display. For nudity is hardly sacred among her kind.
Love dashes across the branch, evergreen needles obscuring her form. It’s a novel exercise that causes her face to do things it isn’t accustomed to, such as squint in confusion. Unnerved, she yanks on the dress’s hem to cover herself.
His voice echoes through the woods. “What the fuck! Get down here and put on this fucking coat!”
She stops tugging on the dress and scowls. This mortal shit has the gall to direct her with an order?
Grinding her boot across the branch, Love kicks a pile of snow off the edge and relishes the sound of him cursing as it strikes his head. Perhaps she has fallen asleep on the branch, and this is a nightmare. Or perhaps the isolation has outdone Love, and this human is a figment of her solitary imagination.
He stalks around the tree, forcing her to hop from bough to bough while wrestling with her dress. As much as she enjoys games, this cat and mouse chase is a nettling chore. She is biased and doesn’t care for it, not when she’s the target.
The man swears under his breath. He must not like the game either. Not when the objective insists on changing.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demands.
“Who the fuck are you ?” he throws back.
The sun has almost set. Exasperated, Love slaps the tree trunk. “Be gone!”
As he hesitates, she catches the renewed scent of his concern wafting from below. She will be lucky if this man is an illusion. Otherwise, she’s in danger.
“Piss off, dammit!” she shouts.
The man must hear the hysteria she has failed to mask, because he grunts in resignation. “Christ,” he mutters, swiping his coat off the ground.
Love’s fingernails stab the bark as she peeks around the tree. The man braces one foot on a fallen log. He digs through the inside pocket of his coat, pulls out a pen and small notebook, and thumbs through the contents until he reaches a blank page. She watches his head bow as he writes, his knuckles flexing, the ink of his pen bleeding onto the paper.
Minutes later, he rips the leaflet from the notebook. Folding the missive, he places it inside his coat pocket and sets the garment on the stump. “Freeze or don’t freeze. It’s all the same to me,” he lies, because Love knows when mortals are lying.
In her early years, before she’d first set foot in this realm, Love had overheard Pride and Guilt venting about human liars. The quick rise of one’s voice. The defensive posture and flitting gaze. Over the centuries, Love has observed and sensed these inclinations among mortals who conceal the truth. She’s also grown familiar with the tangy taste and uneven texture of emotions that correspond with lying.
There’s a slightly brazen tone in his voice. Verbal bait, as if he knows what she’s going to do.
The man collects his writing instruments and archery, then strides away. As his form vanishes into the woods, heading back toward the village, Love waits. He might backtrack, intent on tricking her.
After a sufficient amount of time has passed, she descends to the coat. Digging through the pocket, Love fishes out the paper and unfolds the contents.
The shadow of a body. The ghost of a touch. The mouth of a troublemaker.
It’s some sort of list about her. She peers around to make sure he hasn’t returned, then continues reading.
Who is this Selfish Little Myth?
P.S. Your aim was off.
Andrew
Her aim was what ? How dare he.
Offended, Love crawls back up the tree with his coat. Ensconced on the branch, she examines the garment, then slips her arms through the oversized sleeves. Just one moment. She’ll remove it in just one more moment.
Love holds up the note with one hand and twirls one of her arrows like a baton with the other. Selfish Little Myth. Off all the impertinence.
Nonetheless, he’s made her sound wild, graceful, and sly. In which case, she’ll forgive his insolent and wholly inaccurate assessment of her archery skills.
“Andrew,” she whispers.
It’s a name that opens the mouth wide and then puckers the lips.
She presses the paper to her nostrils and inhales a mixture of tartness and crispness, the emotions of a tormented life, yet void of self-pity. The handwriting is confident, practiced, and somehow perceptive.
Condemnation. With a gasp, Love jolts up.
Fates be damned. That’s why he can see her.