Chapter 20
Itucked those thoughts away and hurried to join Cupid in my office. He was swiveling in my chair, swinging it from side to side like a little boy, chatting with my window. As I moved closer, Norbert dipped his alligator snout from the other side. His way of saying hello.
“Sorry about that.” I raised my voice loud enough for Cupid to jolt out of my chair. I had to admit, I enjoyed watching him stumble. “Cecelia and I were having a bit of a hiccup.”
“Oh, yeah, I was just talking to the alligator.” Cupid gestured toward the window, which now reflected only the bay and my favorite bench. He wrinkled his nose. “It was there a minute ago.”
I debated screwing with him for a moment. After all, he seemed to enjoy messing with other people’s emotions. Why not mess with his? Then I reminded myself that I was the mature professional in the room. Or something like that.
“That Norbert, he likes to disappear quickly.” I rounded the desk, gently shoving him toward his own chair and taking my seat back. “We’re getting a bit of a late start today, so why don’t we jump right in.”
“Okay.” This was a new side to Cupid, and I found it intriguing.
His mannerisms were jumpy, and his voice uncertain.
I guessed that when I’d figured out that he was messing with romances on purpose and called him on it, our dynamic had shifted.
I’d been too tolerant of his antics up until that point.
And, like the immature god he was, he’d tested those boundaries.
Now that I’d established a new one, we were on a whole new playing field. Mine.
“Did you have any luck with your new arrows?” I put air quotes around the words and didn’t bother to keep my distaste out of my voice.
“Not exactly.” Cupid inspected his fingernails, picking out invisible pieces of dirt. “I did try a few, but they didn’t have the effect I’d expected.”
“Tell me more about that.” I flipped open my notepad and grabbed a pen. “What did you do, and what did you expect?”
“Well, I started with the first arrows I’d shot.” A deep blush bloomed on his cheeks. “I felt really bad after our talk Friday and I thought, you know, I should start there.”
“And those first arrows were to my friends Ray and Ethan, weren’t they?
” His head shot up, surprise lacing the blue of his eyes.
I dropped my head back and laughed. “It’s fairly obvious, Cupid.
They went from acting like there was a giant wall between us to sending me flowers in the span of a single afternoon. ”
“They did? I thought …” Cupid straightened, twirling one of the curls at the base of his neck. He jiggled a little, like a proud schoolboy. “Never mind. If it worked, then we celebrate.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “With one of them in particular, your constant arrows are making him … volatile.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” He deflated a bit, his brow worrying like he was puzzling something out. His response was curious, but I’d made a promise to Brianne.
“We’ll handle that another time.” There was a lump in my throat, but it wasn’t the usual signifier of me misusing my magic or telling a partial truth.
The weekend had left me sad and unsteady.
But, much like I had to do with Nina, I filed that away.
“I’d actually like to try a more focused exercise. ”
“Okay. Yeah.” Cupid leaned forward, eager to please. How had this dude with total Labrador retriever energy managed to live thousands of years without maturing? “What do we do?”
“So, I get the sense that you have some control over the emotions that pour out of your arrows.” Without realizing it, I’d doodled one on my notepad. I turned to it, pointing at the tip, which I’d drawn in the shape of a heart. While he inspected it, I crossed the heart out. “Is that accurate?”
“Sort of?” Cupid looked at the paper, then back up at me. “I mean, I can choose want or don’t want. Is that what you mean?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Can you explain it to me further?”
Cupid sat back and tapped his finger to his chin. Bless his pretty heart, he was actually trying to think. I folded my hands and waited. After a minute, an invisible light bulb lit over his head.
“Don’t go anywhere, k?” Before I had a chance to answer, Cupid was gone.
I barely had time to react before he was sitting in the chair again, this time dressed more like the traditional images I’d seen of him.
He was still not a fat baby, but he was wearing a bone-white toga made of some material resembling silk, draped casually over one arm and across his chest. His head was adorned with a laurel wreath, each of the leaves delicate and swaying, as if an invisible breeze kept them alive.
Slung over one shoulder was a quiver. THE quiver.
“Holy shit.” I reached out, unable to stop myself from leaning across the desk to touch it.
Cupid obliged with a chuckle, taking it off and placing it on the surface between us.
It was made of some sort of golden chainmail, each link flawless and polished to a sheen.
It moved fluidly under my fingertips, the contents shifting inside with a slight clink when I touched it.
The contents, of course, being arrows.
“I figured, why tell you when I could show you?” Cupid was a student doing the coolest show-and-tell ever.
He slid one of the arrows out, dropping the quiver on the floor like it was made of junk.
I couldn’t help my wince, though I quickly forgot about it when he displayed the arrow to me, laying it across his hands and presenting it like a chalice.
“Most people can’t see them,” he said. I’d imagined wood, but his arrows were made of far stronger stock than that. Porcelain, maybe, or some sort of bone or ivory. They were smooth and white, no thicker than my pinkie finger. “But you can. Your power is strong. Real strong.”
Cupid believed I was so strong I could handle his arrows. I couldn’t stop the snort that came out of my twelve-year-old brain. For the third time in a day, I set aside a thought rather than follow it.
“Can you show me how it works?” It glistened in his hands, the light of it reflecting in his eyes, as if something inside it glowed. “Without using it,” I added hastily.
“These are fletchings.” He angled it to show me the end opposite the point, where two feather-like pieces were woven into the arrow with a thin gold thread.
I’d looked up arrow anatomy when I first started treating him, so I recognized the flap thingies on the far end that stabilized the arrow.
But nothing I’d seen online compared to this.
There was something alive in them. They shimmered like opalescent wings, just as dainty as a butterfly’s, so thin I thought they might break off at the slightest touch. But they moved, more frantically as my hand neared, as if excited to see me.
I didn’t dare make contact.
“They each control something different.” Cupid angled it toward me, pointing at each one. “This one is intensity. This one duration.”
“I thought arrows had three fletchings?” The longer I stared, the more I noticed the variations in them. The intensity one rippled between soft pink and deep red. The duration one started pale cream at the tip but was bold yellow where it met the shaft.
“The hunting ones do. So they can, you know, fly farther and hit their target. But I shoot at close range.”
“Do you?” I dipped my eyebrows low, trying to remember seeing Cupid in the wild.
“You’d never see me.” The grin that signified he was up to no good returned. “Anyway, I can make it as strong or as weak as I want and last a few seconds or, well, forever.”
“Okay, I’m following.” And I was, though I couldn’t help sitting in awe of the situation. The Roman god of passion was showing me his tools. I snorted again. “But how do you control which emotion you shoot them with?”
“Oh, I don’t!” Cupid dipped his head to whisper to me. “That’s the beautiful part. See this here?”
He pointed to the markings just below the fletching. Etched into the arrow was a series of symbols. They were unlike anything I recognized, some sort of ancient hieroglyph perhaps. “What do they do?”
“It’s my crest.” He puffed out his chest with pride. “The Mark of Cupid. Anyone who’s been hit by an arrow has one. Most can’t see it.”
It wasn’t a dare, but it felt like one. I started to scan my arms, twisting them to find the mark. In a moment of horror, I imagined a small Cupid tattoo on my butt. I patted my hips, like I might suddenly feel it. Cupid let out a guffaw.
“I’ve never hit you, Simone.” He chunked the arrow on the ground. I winced. “Just people around you.”
I blinked at him. “I thought you said you’d shot a bunch of arrows randomly?”
“Mostly. I fiddled with the intensity and duration, and my crest decides whether it’s going to be all-consuming passion or outright loathing.
” He smirked, and I wanted to smack him for it.
“Then I wandered around and”—he pulled one elbow back and extended his opposite hand, flicking his fingers to mimic the shooting of an arrow—“ping!”
“Then how do you know you didn’t hit me?” I was missing something, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. All this time, I’d assumed the entire supernatural community had been affected. Or at least most of them. “I thought I wasn’t being affected because I was half-human.”
Cupid raised one eyebrow. “I shot them at the party you had. For your friend. The one with the vampires.”
“But I was …” My voice trailed off as the timing of it all finally clicked into place.
I’d had a moment of connection, to my past and to Cecelia.
She’d transported me up the stairs to the Reading Room.
I’d gotten my first text from Cupid. Shortly after, Cecelia had opened volume six of the codex to me.
Entangled Threads:
Friendships and Romances in the Supernatural World
“You were there.” I shook my head, not liking the ball of fire building in my gut. The one with the vampires. And the whole town. “You waited until I was upstairs, then started firing.”
“Guilty.” Cupid said it lightly, but his voice wavered when he looked at me. “That was really bad, huh?”
“I’d say invasive is a better word, Cupid.
Maybe even irresponsible.” I was fighting for calm as the full force of what he’d done landed in my lap.
“You acted without thought for anyone else, using random settings on your most powerful weapon to distract yourself from the loneliness you were feeling. Not caring that it might hurt others.”
Cupid didn’t reply for a long time. He closed his eyes and heaved a sigh. When he opened them, I had my first glimmer of hope that, finally, Cupid was ready to grow.
“I understand,” he said.
And I believed him.
“Good.” I made some notes on my pad, then shoved it aside. “Can you tell, from the mark, what your arrow was set to when it hit a target?”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Cupid sat up straight. “That’s brilliant, Simone.”
“I know,” I grinned. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”