Hearts and Arrows Box Set

by Staci Hart

  She turned to the edge of the rock, and the nymphs below moved to the shore, tilting their faces up to her as she lifted her arms and sprang from the ledge, falling down, down until she slipped into the water like an arrow.

  Artemis swam into the emerald depths of the small pond, past the rock face around her covered with plants that waved in the slow current. She pulled herself through the entrance of a small cave with a natural skylight and looked up to the sun. Strands of her midnight hair hung in the water around her, much like her thoughts, which found their way to Orion again.

  He was her companion for tens of years before she realized what was truly between them, only to have him ripped away from her. The giant was a hunter and her best friend, though it had been thousands of years that she’d missed him, mourning what might have been had he not been killed. It took so long to recognize that she loved him, and the shock and confusion of the revelation never found an end. There was no resolution and never would be.

  She thought back to the day when she first began to understand what was between them, wishing she had acted long before she did.

  ★★★

  The moon was high and bright that night, and Artemis crouched behind a wild basil bush to mask her scent as she watched a buck in a clearing before her. His head was up, and she counted his points.

  Eighteen. Orion will never beat me.

  The creature lowered his head and nibbled on a patch of spring grass. He never heard Artemis draw her bow.

  The arrow flew straight into his heart, and he took off at a sprint, only making it about a dozen meters before he collapsed. She trotted over to him and knelt down, laying her hand around the base of the arrow.

  “Peace, noble brother.”

  Artemis made quick work of field dressing the buck, eager to return to camp and see who won. She and Orion competed often to see who might bring back the most, the biggest, the best. It was usually a draw, which both impressed and annoyed her. She thought of his face when he would lose to her, and her heart fluttered in her chest.

  They were together almost always, spending long hours doing that which they both loved. Hunting was their foremost recreation, the thrill of the track and the chase, the anticipation of finding what you seek and taking it for your own. But it was more than that common enjoyment. Orion could make her laugh, truly laugh from deep in her belly and until she had no breath, a feat which was a rarity. He understood her and accepted her, never questioning, never expecting anything more than what she gave. He was her favorite companion, always there when she needed him with the exact right thing to say. But it was more than that, though she couldn’t be sure what more was, only that the prospect excited and disquieted her.

  Artemis dragged the buck around the rock face to the clearing where their camp bustled in the dark. She spotted Orion the giant easily where he sat near the fire. His height was double hers, and she never liked being so much smaller than him, so when they were together, she took on a larger form, though she never cared to hunt at that size. So ungainly, too difficult to stay silent. As soon as she saw him, she shifted to her giant form and looked across camp with a smile.

  Sirius, Orion’s dog, stood tall and lean and trotted over to her, snuffing her hand with her long nose. Artemis scratched her ear and looked back to him.

  Orion sat with his back against a massive olive tree and his feet up near the fire. His hands were folded behind his blond head, and his smile was brighter than the stars, the type of smile that told her she’d likely lost. She felt herself flush, and was unsure if it was due to the loss of their game or her nearness to Orion.

  “What a sweet little buck, Artemis. Noble effort.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And where is your prize, Orion, King of Hubris?”

  Orion jerked his chin toward a rack where his buck hung, and she held her breath as she counted the points with haste.

  “Twenty? By the gods.” Exasperation was thick in her voice, and the buck was forgotten behind her as Eleni approached.

  “Shall I finish cleaning this for you?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Artemis took a seat next to Orion, and Sirius followed, curling up next to him with her eyes on the fire.

  “You may tell me how superior I am now, Artemis.” The firelight cast shadows under his jaw and the slope of his lips as he taunted her.

  “Oh, may I?” She crossed her ankles in front of her. “You are fortunate that I am exhausted and in no mood to smite you.”

  “You would never smite me.”

  She smiled at his certainty. “Would I not?”

  “No,” he said with a chuckle as he shook his head. “I do not believe you would.”

  “I have smote so many. You would just be one in a very long line.”

  He leaned toward her, a smile playing on his wide mouth, his deep, dark eyes twinkling. “You would never smite me, as you know what lies in my heart.”

  He was so close she could see every eyelash. Even in the dark she knew his eyes, blue with flecks of green and gold that shone in the firelight. Her breath quickened, and she wondered what was happening as she leaned into him, drawn to him like a siren call.

  Eleni cleared her throat, and Artemis blinked a few times with a laugh as she turned away and dusted off her boots, the sound less awkward than she felt as she tried to find her footing again.

  “Well, nicely done on your buck. You won today, friend, but tomorrow you will not be so fortunate.”

  Orion leaned back with a strange look on his face. “Yes, Artemis. There is always tomorrow.”

  Confusion wriggled through her as she realized that she might have kissed him. Is that so hard to believe? Orion was everything she wished for in a companion, and she wanted to be with him always. And it was then that she wondered … could she feel love?

  But it was impossible. She could never take a lover.

  Artemis was a virgin goddess, the maiden. It was a title she requested from her father, Zeus, wishing to escape the prison of marriage and duty that women were bound to, preferring to retain her freedom. But Orion already held power over her, power she didn’t understand and didn’t knowingly give, and for a fleeting moment, she understood what love was, saw it laid out before her like an ocean.

  Artemis pushed the thought away and cleared her mind. She had no care for love, or so she told herself, but still considered speaking to Aphrodite. The goddess of love would understand the makings of her heart better than she, and perhaps would give her guidance. But she balked at the ludicrous idea. Artemis, in love? Pure fantasy.

  ★★★

  Artemis looked up at the sun pouring into the skylight, the rays cutting through the dark water in wedges as she floated in her reverie. Looking back never brought peace, only pain.

  In that way lies madness.

  She knew all too well that was truth. She had tortured herself with the past for so long that she was a shell, so constricted at her core that she was condensed, a version of who she once was.

  Orion was the closest she ever came to love, but he was stolen from her, gone forever, and she could not heal. The wound only festered, and the sadness and unfairness of it all twisted around her heart, poisoning her.

  Artemis swam through the open crag, looking up at her nymphs as she made her way back to the present, leaving her memories in the black below.

  ———— New York ————

  The sun was barely up when Josie rolled over in bed, and her mind switched on like a lightbulb as she ticked through her schedule for the day. It would start like it always did, with a run, then shower, breakfast, and work. Her day was planned out, every minute filled with something productive. She hated the feeling of having nothing to do, mostly because when she was idle, she couldn’t help but think about all the things she’d lost.

  She saw Jon’s face behind her closed lids and opened her eyes to banish him. She stretched for her phone, sighing when she noted that her alarm wasn’t set to go off for another fifteen minutes.


  Jon. His name was on her lips, unbidden.

  She hated seeing him, hated how she felt after, like someone cut her kite string and she was left whipping around untethered in the wind.

  Josie slung her legs out of bed and forced lingering thoughts of Jon from her mind, wishing there was a way to permanently eject him from her head and life. Her temporary fix was yoga which was equal parts therapy and exercise, a way for her to control her body and find focus. It was the emotional equivalent of a reset button.

  She lifted her arms up in a sun salutation, breathing deep and exhaling before she bent over, hanging her arms, her knuckles grazing the rug, breathing in time as she pushed out to downward dog.

  Exhale the bullshit.

  Her smokey gray cat, Ricochet, strutted into her eye-line and flicked his tail in her face.

  “You’re crushing my zen, Rick.”

  He meowed back.

  She sighed and stood, then scooped up her cat and kissed him on the head. “I’m sorry. You hungry, kitty boy?”

  He looked up at her with yellow eyes, and she walked into the kitchen where she deposited him on the counter. She held up two cans of Fancy Feast.

  “Chicken Florentine or Salmon Tuscany?”

  He tilted his head.

  “I know. It’s ridiculous. You eat better than I do.”

  Josie popped open the Florentine and dumped it into Ricochet’s dish, hit the button on her coffee maker, which was already prepped and ready, and made her way back into her room to throw on running shorts and a sports bra. She grabbed her fat, rubber watch off the counter and put it on, then gave Rick a pat on the head before pulling on her running shoes in the almost silent apartment.

  It was the one thing she could never get used to, the quiet. She almost always had music going to fill the silence that was once occupied by Anne, and she missed that feeling, that presence of another person. Sensing them in the other room, knowing they’re there. Josie shook her head as she closed her door and descended the stairs, trying to stop her memories as they crawled through her mind.

  She glanced at her watch. It was almost seven, and the sun was golden, full of promise, the first days of spring. It was one of those days that was a glimpse past the cold winter and into the future, though it was fleeting. The chill would swing back in and wipe away the traces of warmth, but she reveled in the moment as she took off running toward the Hudson.

  Leave the past where it is. Josie’s arms pumped harder as she picked up her pace.

  It was junior year in high school when Josie met Anne. She was sitting at a lunch table alone, reading manga and wearing a t-shirt with a K-Pop star on it. Her purple cat-eye glasses had slipped down her nose as she polished off a Rice Krispy Treat, and her fingers stuck to her comic when she tried to turn the page. Her auburn hair was glossy and thick, tumbling over her shoulders. Josie had never seen her before, and was curious about the quirky girl engaged in a sticky-fingered ninja fight with a comic book, so she joined Anne. The minute Anne made a joke that heavily relied on a Star Trek reference, Josie knew they were meant to be.

  They became instant friends and were inseparable through high school, but Josie didn’t understand how much she needed Anne until she was rejected from the Police Academy. When the x-rays from her physical showed the slightest of abnormal curves in her spine, it was enough to have her permanently disqualified. It was her darkest time, to realize she could never have her dream, never have what she’d wanted ever since she was a little girl.

  But then Anne swooped in with the brilliant idea to become PI’s. Investigating was the next best thing, if not better. She was independent, had avenues and resources that the police didn’t, and she and Anne were both good at their job. Very good.

  So at eighteen, the girls moved into their apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, one of a few properties that had been in her family for decades. They took their classes and put in apprentice hours, which was made easy by connections that Josie’s dad had. Before long at all, they had steady work and were doing something they both loved and excelled at. Anne was the researcher, the coordinator, and Josie was the face, the muscle.

  They worked that way for ten years, until the day that Hannah Mills’ parents asked them to find their daughter, and everything changed.

  ★★★

  Josie and Anne had been sitting at their desks for hours, all day and into the night. The room was dark, though their faces were illuminated by their laptop screens as they searched the internet in tank tops and panties, neither willing to break away long enough to get dressed. Chinese takeout boxes littered their desks that faced each other in the living room.

  Josie’s eyes never left the screen as she typed in another search term, fished around in the lo mein with her chopsticks, and brought a bite to her lips.

  Hannah Mills, a sixteen-year-old cheerleader from just across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey, had gone missing two weeks before, and the tearful parents came to Josie and Anne when the police hit a dead end. Hannah never made it home from cheerleading practice, and there had been no sign of her since she walked out of the school doors. The Mills’ only wanted to know what happened to their child, and said they understood the chances of finding her alive were slim.

  Josie wondered if anyone could really understand something so grim.

  She’d been working with the detective on Hannah’s case, a friend of her father’s from the academy. She and Denis had been sharing information from the start, though neither of them had much of anything.

  In the first few days after they were hired, Josie canvassed the Mills’ neighborhood via the pathway that Hannah walked home. It was October, and the days were getting shorter, so by the time Hannah passed through the neighborhood, it would have been dark outside. No one had seen anything.

  There was one resident, though, Corey Rhodes, who threw her red flags. She couldn’t put her finger on why … he seemed perfectly normal. He was in his mid-forties, built in that bulldoggish, barrel-chested way, and was charming but with an air of superiority. Really, there was just something in his mannerisms, in his choice of words, something in his smile that set off alarms.

  That was two days before, and she and Anne had been researching him ever since.

  His criminal history was non-existent. The man hadn’t ever had so much as a parking ticket, never mind something that she could connect to Hannah. He grew up in Deer Lodge, Montana, but went to college in Boston, then moved to the city where he’d been working in advertising for the last twenty some-odd years. His credit was in the seven hundreds. He’d never been married. On paper, nothing stood out about him at all, but her gut never steered her wrong, so they were still digging.

  Josie shoveled more noodles into her mouth and set her dinner down, drumming her fingers on the desk before typing in another search term.

  She’d chased the Google rabbit through the internet looking for anything on Rhodes, but she’d come up empty. There were a few articles from his college days playing football in Boston, but before and after that she couldn’t find anything. She wondered if she could learn anything through his home town, figuring that, like most small towns, half the news was about high school sports, but the newspaper was so small that their website had nothing more than a few days old. She checked out the Helena Independent Reviewer, hoping that Montana’s capital city would at least have archives back through the 80’s, but she hit a dead end there, too.

  Josie sighed and sat back in her chair.

  Anne extended her orange chicken, and Josie accepted, trading for her lo mein.

  “Anything?” Anne leaned over the box and shoveled noodles into her mouth.

  “Nothing. I’m pretty sure I’ve read every article on him twice.”

  Anne pushed her glasses up her nose. “Me too. I can’t find much on his parents, either. His father died when he was fourteen, and after he moved to Jersey, his mom relocated, though she died of cancer a few years ago.”

  Josie looked through her computer, u
nable to focus. “I think I’m going to have to order copies of the newspapers from the library in his home town, but I don’t know how long that will take. I feel like there’s got to be something there. If he played college football, he would have played in high school, so someone would have to know him and remember him. I just wonder what’s hiding in that little town.”

  Anne chewed with one eye on Josie. “How sure are you of this hunch?”

  Josie looked toward her computer screen, but didn’t really see it. “It’s called a hunch for a reason, and there’s no being sure of one. There’s no reason for me to be suspicious, but I am.”

  Anne ate in silence for a beat. “Something happened to Hannah. I know that in my own gut, especially after talking to her friends and her boyfriend. She didn’t run away, and she wasn’t into anything that would get her in trouble. Something happened to her on the way home, and I don’t think it was random. She’s too old to be hopping into windowless vans. So, if you say Rhodes has something to do with it, I’m gonna take your word for it.”

  Josie heard the opening and took it. “You think I should fly to Montana?”

  Anne nodded. “Otherwise, we’ll be sitting on our asses for weeks waiting on newspapers. Plus, we all know that you talking to the people of that town in person will get you farther than over the phone. If nothing else, we can rule out our only suspect.” Anne lifted noodles out of the paper carton and shoveled them into her mouth, then said around them, “While you’re gone, I’ll tail Rhodes and see what I can dig up.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “As sure as you are. Can’t hurt to try, right?” Anne shrugged.

  “All right. Don’t forget to put on pants and a bra before you go chasing the potential kidnapper.” Josie motioned to Anne’s naked legs.

  “You can’t tell me what to do. Plus, if he caught me, he’d never remember what my face looks like,” she said as she shimmied her shoulders, which incidentally made her boobs knock into each other.

  “I always said you should have done burlesque with those puppies. Now find me a flight.”