I sheathed the blade and went back to Zephyr's side. "Zephyr?"
"Poulaki." He reached up to touch my cheek. "I'm so sorry."
I turned and kissed the palm of his hand. "What can I do to help you?"
"Nothing, it'll pass, I'll heal soon enough." He met my gaze. "Callister…I don't know what he did to you, but he hates you."
Yeah, I kind of gathered that after the flashback I had. I crawled into the bed with him and put his head in my lap. I stroked his hair away from his face as he focused on breathing.
"Do I need to tend to the wound?"
"No, the bleeding stopped, and the surface has healed. I just need to rest." His eyes fluttered open and his gaze met mine. "I'm perfect, right where I am."
I smiled down at him and had to admit he was right. Despite his injury, this felt perfect. Normal. I didn't want to think about Callister or Maverick's death. I just wanted to sit here with his head in my lap and smooth his hair away from his face.
His eyes closed again as his breathing evened out. I leaned my head against the headboard and felt myself relaxing.
At some point, I drifted off to sleep like that. I felt Zephyr move from my lap and guide me down into the bed next to him. His warm body pressed against the back of mine and he draped an arm over me. It should have been awkward since we hardly knew each other, but it wasn't. I felt safe in his embrace. I snuggled down into it and let him hold me.
Come out, Amaya, there's no need to hide from me," Callister's voice drifted through the temple.
I knew he was playing with me; there was no way I could truly hide from him. I pressed my back against the pillar and tried to think of a way to escape. The last few months had been hell. The only good thing that had come of it was he'd taught me how to defend myself in battle.
He was a warrior through and through, but a woman should not have to defend against the man sworn to protect her.
I waited until the click of his sandals against the tile of the temple stopped. I'd wanted to go into the city of Mount Olympus instead of having to be locked away in Poseidon's home.
"Come on Amaya; it's time to go home."
I turned to see him right next to me, and he grabbed my wrist. "I don't want to go back."
His eyes flashed in anger, and I flicked my hand so that my fingers turned to claws. I was daring him to take that anger out on me. It'd turn into another fight I wouldn't win, but it would feel good to get a couple blows on him.
"Come, brother, is that any way to treat your fiancée?" Zephyr's voice broke the tension, and my heart soared a bit.
Callister's grip loosened just a bit. "Ah, Zephyr, I'm glad to see you're back from battle."
I woke when Zephyr shifted against me. His face was buried in my hair, and his arm was tight around me. I wondered for a moment what he was dreaming of. I ran my fingertips over his arm and smiled. This was right where I needed to be. Being held by my warrior.
I cringed at the thought. I didn't know him; he wasn't mine. Yet I knew I wanted this. Zephyr kissed my neck.
"You know for us just meeting each other I didn't expect to find us in bed so soon."
I rolled over to face him. "Me either, but you know, you're wounded, and I was weak." I pressed my forehead against his. "This just feels right."
"A many of nights we've spent like this, though in fewer clothes."
I blushed at his words. "Ike showed me the first time we met."
"Ikelos visited you?" He sat up and smiled. "That's great news."
I pushed myself up and then lifted his shirt to see the wound there. Instead of a gaping wound, I found a slick pink scar crossing his stomach.
"You know, if you wanted to see me naked, you just had to ask."
I licked my lips. It was tempting, but there were things I wanted to do today, and Zephyr wasn't on that list. I closed my eyes and tried to push the thought of a naked Zephyr from my head.
When I opened my eyes, he wore a smirk that made me want to rip his clothes off. Yep, it was time to get out of bed.
"I was looking at your wound."
He lifted his shirt up and looked down. "It's still a bit tender, but I should be back to fighting full force tomorrow."
"What did Callister do?"
He hesitated slightly. "He tried to kill me with a mortal sword. Luckily for me, it wasn't one made by Heph, because it would have been well, deadly."
"He hates you," I whispered. "He's so angry because you took me away from him."
He shook his head. "No, Callister is just blinded by our mother's ideals."
"I don't understand why your mother would want me or why Callister would either." I started to get out of the bed, but he pulled me back.
"I'm not done snuggling you."
I laughed. "I have a murder to solve before the deputy gets back."
"And what do you think will happen when he gets back?" He nuzzled my neck. "This is normal. I just want normal for a few minutes."
His voice was barely a breath, but I still heard him. I couldn't help that I'd forgotten everything, but I didn't like the hurt in his voice.
"If he gets back and he finds out that Maverick was murdered, he'll open his own investigation, and then the first person he'll be looking at is you." I snuggled back into him. "He'll think that you killed Maverick and will either hand you over to human justice or kill you himself."
He seemed to think about it for a moment. "What do you know?"
"Not a lot. I'm going to go check out Maverick's house today and see if I can find any information on him."
"Breaking and entering?" He raised a brow. "I like it."
I rolled my eyes and pried his arm off me. "If you want to come, you can." My eyes went to his stomach, and he waved his hand.
"I'm fine. I'll be healed completely in a few more hours. Let's go."
My stomach growled, and I hung my head in embarrassment. He chuckled. "Let's eat first."
I walked up to Maverick's house. It was an unassuming little two-story brick house with a white picket fence. It fit perfectly in Normalcy with the vines starting to crawl up the pillars holding the porch overhang up.
I stood on the sidewalk and looked around. It didn't seem like anyone had been here since Maverick's death.
"Have you ever been inside before?"
I shook my head. "No, I'd only ever seen him at the station. I only know where he lives because it's a small town. We all know where everyone lives." I walked up the walkway, studying the particularly cared for grass, not a blade out of place.
Zephyr walked with me. He held his hand out. "Let's go in."
I wrapped my fingers around his and let him transport us in. We reappeared in the entryway of the house. A strange smell assaulted my senses, and I wrinkled my nose.
"Gross, he must have left food out." I covered my nose and mouth with my hands to keep from gagging.
Zephyr nodded. "Smells like it."
I looked around and saw two pairs of shiny black boots against the wall and a jacket hanging up. Everything seemed normal. Pictures of family hung on the wall, newspapers and a couple empty cups sat on the coffee table in the living room.
Zephyr let go of my hand and went to explore on his own. I walked through to the kitchen and found a plate of eggs and ham sitting on the counter and covered my mouth again. The smell of meat sitting out for too long was stronger now.
So. Gross. But it meant that he'd fixed himself a meal sometime after having dinner with me. I hadn't woken until noon, so he could have been killed in the morning.
"May, come here." Zephyr's voice came from the back of the house. I made my way back there to the room that he stood in front of.
"What's up?" I looked over his shoulder and froze. "What on earth?" Pictures covered the walls. My heart pounded as I got closer. Each image was taken from a distance with a zoom lens. T
here were some of the people here in town, Lee, Teal, Joseph, a few other folks that lived here. Each one had a label on it. Wolf, unknown, vampire, shifters.
My heart fell when I got to the pictures of me. Some were from the soda shop, while others were taken through the windows in my house. He had a complete shot of my exposed scarred back.
"What a freak."
The label on my photos also read "unknown." I licked my lips nervously. "He didn't think I was human."
"You aren't, May," he reminded me. I ignored him for a moment as I looked over the other photos. There were people I didn't recognize, and some of them had their faces scratched out of the photographs.
"I think there was more to Maverick than we think." I stepped back and looked at all the photographs. "This doesn't look like the work of an innocent human."
Zephyr put his hand on my back. "We should go. You can let the deputy handle it when he gets back. Now that we know Maverick wasn't innocent."
"No, we don't know that for sure. He clearly had a twisted side, but that doesn't tell us who killed him."
Zephyr growled. "He's taken nude pictures of you."
"He only has my back up here." Though I didn't know how he'd managed to get that much. It wasn't like I went around flaunting my back. Even around my house. The picture was zoomed in enough that I couldn't tell where in my house it'd been taken.
Zephyr spun me around to face him. "It doesn't mean that he doesn't have others around."
That was true. I sighed. "We still need to figure out who killed him and if this had anything to do with it."
Zephyr let out a long breath. "Okay fine. I guess even the wicked deserve justice."
It was more for me. I wanted to know who would kill Maverick, and if it had something to do with his photographs, why didn't they bring it up?
"Lex mentioned that he'd been to the outskirts lately." I looked closer at some of the photographs. Overgrown pathways and crooked iron fences caught my eye on a couple of them. "Looks like we need to go back." I pulled my phone out and snapped a picture of the photographs. I zoomed in on one that had the most details. It was one with a face scraped off. The female body was standing at a casual angle as if she were talking with someone.
Zephyr sighed. "Back to the hookah bar?"
I shook my head. "No, I think we need to talk to someone other than Lex. Locals who might have been more out about what they were."
I tapped the note on the bottom of the photo, 'shifter' was written in print. "Someone has to have seen him there, and more than just looking for a potion." There were always whispers of witches in the outskirts. It didn't surprise me that a human would venture down there to take a look if they wanted a potion.
Zephyr's gaze went back to the photo of my back. "The crow tattoo, I saw that on your back the other day. It's missing in this picture."
"Which means it's from the first year that I moved here. I'd gotten the tattoo for the first anniversary of my arrival."
A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. "Your wings are black, like a crow's. You've always loved them."
I didn't know what to say to him. "Come on, let's keep looking." I walked out of the room and went to another room. The door was cracked open, and I could see the glimpse of a bed.
I pushed the door further with my foot and looked in. I saw nothing unusual from the doorway, but I walked in to look around.
It should have felt wrong, sneaking around a dead man's house, but it was the only way we were going to get to the bottom of this. I opened the closet doors expecting to find uniforms and casual clothes, but instead, weapons hung on the back wall.
A crossbow with a quiver of bolts hung next to a shotgun and a set of silver throwing knives. Old fashion wooden stakes sat on a shelf next to a cross and a heavy silver chain.
"Holy shit," I muttered, and Zephyr came up behind me.
"Well, well, well, what do we have here?" He scanned over the weapons. "It looks like Maverick was some type of hunter."
I looked at the stake in the closet. "This looks like the one that killed him."
"Self-defense maybe? Maybe he went after a vampire, and they used it to defend themselves?"
I quickly went through the logic. "Why put him on my porch though? Most vampires I know would just dispose of the body."
"I don't know how you play into this, but what I do know is that Sheriff Maverick Jones was not a good man."
It was very much looking that way. I wanted to argue, but I couldn't. "I think we've seen enough. Let's go home and regroup."
He grinned at that. "Home? Our home?"
"As in my house."
"I know."
He wrapped an arm around me, and the world disappeared.
We reappeared in my dining room, and I sat down at the table. "Are you going to tell me what happened with Callister?"
"There's a dead man who has a naked picture of you on his, wall and you want to talk about my brother?"
I tried to keep the sarcasm to a minimum. "The dead man isn't going anywhere. Callister was in the house last night. You tell me which one is the bigger threat."
He looked like he wanted to argue but thought better of it. "I went to speak to him about why he was in town."
"Did he give you anything worth being stabbed for?" I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms.
He nodded, but he wouldn't meet my gaze. "He said that he was here to take you back home. That he'd win your heart."
"He has no chance of winning my heart, Zephyr; you should know that." I leaned forward and reached for his hand.
"It's silly. I know that in a million years, you would never go to Callister. He was too old-fashioned for you, too strict, too controlling, yet I find myself worried that the…new you might find something charming about that."
"Let's get something straight, the old me and new me are still one person. Just because I've forgotten it, doesn't mean I don't have a past. Callister strikes panic in me every time I see him or hear his voice, so there will be no winning back my heart. A heart that I'm not sure he had at any point in time."
He snorted. "You're right; he never had your heart."
"Besides, he threatened me last night, so really, I think his words were just meant to distract you. Why did he stab you?"
Zephyr pressed his lips into a thin line. "Because I told him that you'd never be his. That even in your state, you wouldn't let him touch you. And he responded with something I couldn't let go, and I attacked him first."
"What did he say?"
Zephyr shook his head. "Nothing that you need to know." But there was a haunted look in his eyes. "What matters is that Callister knows you're here and I was wrong about my brother."
There seemed to be a thread broken in him now. His shoulders slouched a little bit when he spoke about Callister instead of getting defensive. He said the full name instead of shortening it to Cal.
But it confirmed what I already knew. Cal had a hand in hurting me before my arrival here in Normalcy. Zephyr hadn't wanted to believe it.
I stood and went to make myself a cup of tea. Zephyr sat in silence, and I let him be. There was no reason for me to pull him out of his thoughts. My guess was he was still trying to process the conversation with his brother.
I sat back down with my tea and looked at him. "Zephyr, whatever it is, it's over now."
"I know, but I feel like I failed you."
I reached over and held his hand. "You didn't fail me."
"You can't say that. You don't remember what happened."
The tone of his voice hit me hard. "You're right, but I know that you've spent the last five years wondering where I was and you found me."
He looked up at me. "I didn't want to believe you were dead."
"Who told you that I was dead?" I sipped my tea and leaned back in my chair.
"Ike told me he wasn't able to find yo
u. He talked with his brothers, and they said that you were dead, that's the only explanation for not being able to get to your dreams." He hung his head. "I couldn't believe them. Callister also said you were dead and that I needed to let you go. That it was time to come back to Olympus and give up my search."
"Well, now that we know Callister had something to do with my disappearance, we can rule out his words," I muttered.
He didn't say anything, and I sighed. "I'm going back to the outskirts to ask about Maverick."
"I'll come with." He met my gaze. "I don't want you in that place alone. Lex mentioned you'd been there once before; it didn't sound like it was a pleasant experience."
I shrugged a shoulder. "I got lost, Teal came to save me. No big deal."
"Doesn't sound like it."
"Just drop it." I didn't want to go through the details with him. It had been a mistake.
He held his hands up, and I put my teacup in the sink.
"Come on, let's go before it gets dark."
"Don't we need to talk to the vampires?"
I shook my head and pulled my phone out and showed him the picture. "No, this was taken out in the daylight. Look at the shadows."
He took the phone and studied it for a moment. "Okay, let's go then."
We stepped outside, and thunder rumbled overhead. He looked at me. "Are you upset?"
I cringed. "The weather seems to like me here. It always matches my mood."
"Why are you upset?"
"Why shouldn't I be? Haven't you seen everything going on around me lately?" I snapped back. "Look, it's not fair for me to take my anger out on you. I'm sorry."
He took my hand and stayed silent. The world swirled around us as he took us to the outskirts.
Chapter Eight
The world reformed around us and we stood in the rain. The droplets clung to our hair, weighing it down, the chill started to move through me already as my clothes were soaked.
Zephyr pulled me close. "We're going to talk about what's bothering you later."
No, we weren't, because I was suddenly feeling like everything was trying to tear me apart. A crash of thunder made me jump. Zephyr kissed my head.
Approaching Storm Page 8