“Of course.”
Lucas held out his hand, and Jason accepted.
“Good seeing you, Gregorian.”
“You too. Take care of her.”
Lucas nodded. “I will.”
“Because I will have a conversation with you if necessary,” Jason said.
Tessa blushed.
“You won’t have to,” Lucas replied.
“I hope not,” Jason said.
As Jason watched them walk out the door, he got this horrible sinking feeling in his gut.
Now that they were back together, where did that leave him?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Andres!
That’s it! Ava mused as she helped—or rather, gave her moral support—while Lilly and Christy tried to figure out a plan for Lilly’s charge, Bruce, who’d utterly screwed the pooch with his HEA.
Andres, a Council representative for fairies, had a soft spot for Lilly. Had for years. Maybe he could help with the file. If anyone would know why Jason’s file was being so stubborn, it would be Andres.
Duncan was no help, even if he was FID. He’d been off doing who knew what for the last three days—not that Ava was complaining. She’d gotten to know Jason in more ways than she should have. The closer they became, the more she realized Jason’s correct HEA could never be Tessa.
Leading her down the only possible path—one that made her very nervous.
Her file was wrong. Seriously wrong.
Which put her in strange waters—what would she do now?
“Ava?” Christy jarred her out of her musings.
“What?”
“We’re done here. Unless you have more to contribute to this plan?” Lilly asked.
“No, I….um, really. It sounds good.” What plan? What was it? There was something to do with a bucket.
“Do you want to come?” Lilly asked. “I’m very interested to see if Bruce can fix this mess he made.”
“Either his HEA will love him forever for causing a fire in her driveway, or she’ll call the police,” Christy said.
“Yeah, I’d better go make sure this goes okay.” Lilly glanced at Ava. “You sure you don’t want to come? This could be fun.”
Ava shook her head. “No. I got stuff.”
Christy tipped her head to the side. “What is it? What’s going on, Ava?”
“Just some unexpected stuff with my charge.”
“Like what?” Lilly asked. “Do you need some help?”
Ava gritted her teeth. She wasn’t a kid. “No, I got it. Just some trouble with his HEA.”
“Well, if you need anything,” Christy said.
Ava shook her head. Her pride wasn’t about to let her tell her friends how screwed up this was. Did she need help? Yes, but she could make this work. How—that was another story, but she could figure it out.
“Can I come out now?” Bruce, Lilly’s charge, bellowed from his bedroom.
“Are you clean? Did you shave? And wash your hair?” They had sent him to his room to clean up while they plotted what to do about his HEA. Evidently, he hadn’t been bathing much the last few days.
“I am not five,” Bruce yelled back.
Lilly rolled her eyes. “You’ve been pouting around here for days like a five-year-old,” she hollered. “I just wanted to be sure.”
“I’m not wearing a tie!” he said, coming out of the room.
Lilly flapped her wings and floated over to Bruce. “You look great,” she said, flying around him, flicking a piece of lint off his shirt. She handed him a bucket. “I programmed your phone with the GPS directions. Get going. You got one shot at this.”
“I know.” Bruce sighed and left, carrying the bucket, muttering that he couldn’t believe he was doing this.
As the door shut, Lilly smirked. “A bucket. I don’t think I’ve ever given a charge a bucket, in all the three hundred twenty-some-odd years I’ve done this.”
“Well, we all do things every once in a while that we never expect.” Ava looked away from her friend, her cheeks warming.
“I suppose we do,” Lilly said, rolling her shoulders. “I’m off to see if he can pull this off. You sure you don’t want to come?”
Ava shook her head. “I need to talk to Andres about stuff.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just have some protocol stuff to talk to him about.”
“Your HEA isn’t coming around? You know, I can help…” Lilly’s wings fluttered.
“No, I got this.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’m sure he’s nearby—”
Soft, silver glitter appeared, revealing Fairy Councilman Andres, dressed in his usual light-gray suit. “Did you require my assistance, Miss Avalynn?”
Ava nodded. Then glanced at Lilly.
“Okay, I’m off to check on my charge.” And Lilly disappeared with a flutter of gold spraying everywhere.
Andres sighed as she disappeared, then faced Ava. “And what can I do for you?”
Ava looked around, since they were still standing in Lilly’s charge’s home. “Can we cross over and talk about this?”
“Of course.” In a blink, Ava and Andres appeared in his office—the gray he favored in his clothing covered the walls and the chairs.
“Wow, isn’t all this gray depressing?” Ava asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “You needed to speak. Feel free to say what you choose here. We are magically blocked.”
Ava nodded, knowing he meant business. “Okay. My file is wrong.”
Andres blinked. “Files cannot be wrong, Avalynn. They are always correct.”
“This one isn’t.” She materialized it and slapped it on his desk. “My charge can’t be with his HEA.”
“Why not?”
“Because his HEA is getting back together with her ex that she still loves. And it’s not my charge.” She flipped the pages open, revealing the HEA page.
Andres raised his eyebrow and took the file. “This Tessa? That’s the only one that has been there?”
“No. The first day, there was a blank line above her name. But it’s gone, and I figured, since files can change according to what mortals do, that my charge was supposed to be with this woman.” Ava slumped in her chair. “But she’s wrong for him. In every way. I don’t understand it. I’ve never seen a file wrong before.”
Andres started studying the file. “Hmm.”
“Have you?”
Andres glanced at her. “Have I what?”
“Seen a file wrong?”
Andres tapped his finger against his lip. “I have before.”
“So what do I do? I can’t complete the assignment until he’s with his HEA. The HEA isn’t available at this point.”
Andres didn’t say anything. Instead, he ran his fingers over the open file, from top to bottom. Then he did it again.
The third time, he paused, hovering on the HEA page, right where Tessa’s name was. A glow of silver oozed from his fingers and sank into the page, pulling out all the power that held the page together.
Ava’s eyes went wide.
Layers of magic wrapped into the file’s pages. Magic that wasn’t supposed to be there. Of course, the files themselves were magic, but this was a different sort of magic. It bound and forced its control over the natural magic in the file. The natural magic sparked and throbbed, like tiny slivers of lightning fighting in a storm.
As Andres tried to release a spell cast over the file, the room began to swim. Winds whipped through the tiny space. The air got thick. He poured more magic into the file, but no matter what he did, the magic that controlled the file resisted any tampering.
Andres’s face started to pale, and his magic started to weaken. His eyes rolled back into his head.
“Andres!” Ava cried, jerking him bac
k from the file.
He released the paper. “I can’t…I can’t change it back,” he panted. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth the locks into place. “The magic is too strong.”
“You’re a Council member. There’s no such thing as too strong of magic for you.”
“That is not true,” Andres said. “We need to take this to someone else.”
“Who? Jupiter? He’s not going to—”
“No, not Jupiter. Anteros.”
Ava sighed. Anteros was Cupid’s brother—and everything that Cupid was not. Thick and meaty, Anteros had longer dark hair, where Cupid was slender and trim, with blond hair.
And where Cupid bent free will to create love, Anteros was the God of Unreturned Love. He believed in love happening naturally, and if it didn’t, he was there for the heartbroken and lost. A great ally to the fairies, if they really needed it, against Cupid and his meddling.
Today, Ava really needed it.
“I’ll go to him right away.”
Andres nodded. “I will go with you. Just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
Andres didn’t say anything.
Just in case of what?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tuesday Evening—Mt. Olympus
Statues of heartbroken lovers, those who had loved and lost, littered the entryway into Anteros’s sort-of-enclosed home. Pillars created a structured form, but no walls hung anywhere. Anyone could see through the house, see whatever the owner was up to, if they so chose.
Ava, though, couldn’t take her eyes off the forlorn sculptures in the foyer. She could relate a little too much.
Lovely, Ava thought as she and Andres waited in the foyer of the god’s home.
Paintings done by both mortals and Anteros himself—of love lost, or love unreturned, hovered in the air, a kind of wall divider between the spaces. Just being around the art depressed Ava.
Probably because her feelings for her charge were getting less and less proper. She knew Jason’s file was wrong, but what she didn’t know was who that other spot in the file had been.
What if that woman was worse than Tessa?
Ava didn’t know if she could stomach Jason being with someone worse than Tessa. She didn’t know if she could stomach Jason being with anyone who wasn’t her.
A problem, for sure.
Yet, was she just as bad as these paintings? A love for someone who didn’t return it? Sure, she and Jason had been intimate, but did their connection mean to him what it was starting to mean to her? Times were different. A hundred years ago, if two people were intimate, it was because they were in love.
Now, though, so many had such a cavalier attitude toward sexuality. Granted, Ava had this same attitude, or had for a long time.
Or had she really?
Was that part of Cupid’s magic? To make her think intimacy didn’t mean anything?
She didn’t know.
Andres elbowed her, drawing her out of her musings because Anteros had appeared in the foyer.
“Andres,” Anteros greeted them with a smile. “A pleasure.” He really was the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. Though unlike many gods on this plane, he didn’t dress in a traditional toga, but a black T-shirt and pants, his hair pulled back at the nape of his neck. He looked more like he belonged in the sixties, reading poetry at a coffee shop, than in the Realm.
Andres bowed. “Yes, always.”
Anteros glanced at Ava. “And, it’s Miss Fay, isn’t it? Avalynn Fay?”
“Yes,” Ava said, bowing as well.
The god’s eyes flicked from Ava to Andres.
“Please, you come with purpose.” He gestured for them to enter his home. “Let us see what brings two fairies to my door.”
They followed Anteros through his home into a space filled with more statues—these white, but again, depicting longing and love lost. Ava tried not to stare at the forlorn faces, dread filling her gut.
What if he couldn’t fix this?
What if he could? She didn’t know which would be worse.
The god materialized chairs, and Andres quickly explained about the file and Ava handed it to the god.
Anteros looked the file over, running his fingers over the HEA page, just as Andres had.
“Yes, I can feel it.” He shook his head. “Cupid has been busy.”
“Cupid?” Andres asked.
Ava inhaled a breath.
“I always recognize my brother’s power.” He glanced at Ava. “Would you expect anyone else?”
Ava shook her head. Of course it was Cupid. She felt so stupid for not thinking of it sooner.
Was he just trying to ruin her life? Shooting her with his love potion, messing with her cases, and now changing her latest file?
Why was he doing this to her?
Anteros studied her for a moment, and Ava wondered what Cupid had told him about her.
Now you’re just being paranoid.
Anteros sighed as he moved his fingers around on the pages. “This will take more magic than just me. Cracking it open is the hardest part,” he said. “Both of you will have to help.”
“Whatever I need to do,” Ava said.
Anteros glanced at her, a strange twinkle in his eye. “I’m sure you will.” He waved his hand again, and a pedestal appeared between the three of them. Anteros laid the file on it. He gestured for Ava and Andres, and as the god put his hands on the edge of the file, Ava and Andres followed suit.
Anteros whispered a few words, and magic surged between the three of them.
Magic had never “felt” like much of anything to Ava—something that she wielded without thinking about it. Now, though, combined with the power flowing through the two men, the energy shocked her, sent ripple upon ripple of surges through her. She forced herself to channel it where it needed to go.
She could see the edging of the natural file’s magic, as well as the hard, cold magic that Cupid had wielded over it to twist the outcome. It felt like they were trying to crack granite with a rubber chicken.
The more the three of them poured into the file, the more it remained charged with Cupid’s manipulation.
Like it couldn’t be healed…
The thought made Ava sick, and her concentration started to waiver.
“Enough,” Anteros said, letting out a breath. Andres did the same, and they both looked rather disheveled.
“What did he do?” Ava whispered, rocking her head back and forth to stretch her neck.
“He did what he does,” Anteros replied. “It is far easier to charm this kind of magic than to uncharm it.”
“So what now?” Ava asked, collapsing on the chair.
“Somehow make your charge see reason and continue his attempts with the listed HEA. Find him his happy place with her,” Anteros said.
“No. That’s not happening.” She absolutely wasn’t going to do that. Hell, she’d wind up having to stay with Jason for his entire life, and even when—
Wait. Maybe that was not a horribly bad thing… She would be with Jason for the rest of his life.
She shook off the thought, because she knew better. While that may have appeal now, her trio would never get closure, and that could prevent Christy, heck, even Lilly, from retiring like they should.
While there was appeal in staying with Jason—and who was to say there wasn’t another potential out there for him—she couldn’t leave her friends hanging.
“Then you will be forced to stay with your charge until he finds an HEA.”
“No. I can’t do that to my trio. There has to be a way to fix this, to bring this closure.”
Anteros smiled. “Good.”
She raised her eyebrow and glanced at Andres, who wasn’t paying attention. He stared at a small image he’d manife
sted, and if Ava wasn’t mistaken, it was Lilly.
Ava cleared her throat.
Andres blinked. Then glanced at Anteros and Ava. “I am sorry. But I need to go. There are a few things I need to take care of.”
“Of course. Go, and take care,” Anteros said.
When Andres disappeared, Ava turned back to the god. He looked far too smug. “You said ‘good’. Why?”
“Because I wanted to see what you would say.”
“So you can fix it?” Ava asked.
“Yes. We made some cracks in the magic. It will take a few days, but it can be broken through.”
“Do you need me to help you?” Ava asked.
“No, but I would like a favor.”
Oh great. Here we go.
“What?” Another god to owe a favor. Not what she wanted today.
“I want to know why my brother is so fascinated with a little fairy named Avalynn Fay.”
She blinked. “He likes pink?” She gestured to her wings.
Anteros’s eyes roamed over her. “That is possible. But I think he likes red better.”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. So what do you want, Anteros?”
“Tell me everything. Your relationship with my brother, and why he’s so interested in you and your cases.”
“No.”
“Do you not want my help?”
“Of course I do.”
“So tell me.”
She stared at the floor, trying to buy herself some time to think. Not that it worked. “You’re on the Council. If I tell you, it could cost me everything.”
“Now those are the kinds of stories I like.”
“I’ll go back. There’s not a lot going on with Roark and Stephanie right now,” Christy was telling Ava just outside the healers’ ward. Ava had gone to Lilly when her friend called, even though it interrupted the story she was telling Anteros.
It was a good thing too. Anteros hadn’t looked pleased. Nor did he when he collected Cupid shortly thereafter, breaking up the fight between Cupid and Andres. What they were fighting about, Ava hadn’t known, but it had been pretty funny watching Andres punch Cupid. However, what wasn’t so funny was seeing Lilly get hurt. Right now, Lilly was inside the healers’ ward, supposedly resting, but Cupid had shown up, with intent to speak to her.
Just His Taste Page 15