The Return

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  step behind me. Maybe later I’d be embarrassed, but at that moment, all I could do was stare at him.

  He had to be the most beautiful guy I’d ever seen, and that was no joke. I couldn’t even think of anyone on TV, in the magazines, or in movies who looked like him. His male beauty was delicate and yet hard at the same time, rough and smooth, a total conundrum of splendor, but his eyes…

  They were the strangest color—a tawny amber. There was no way they could be natural. But damn, he worked those contacts, paired with surprisingly dark lashes and brows a shade or two darker than his hair.

  I suddenly wondered if it was possible to have a visual orgasm, because I think I might have just experienced that, except he… this unreal, beautiful man was staring at me with honey-colored eyes that kept getting wider.

  And the way he was staring at me was not good—almost like he couldn’t believe what he was looking at—as if I had grown an extra head. While I knew I wasn’t going to be winning Miss USA anytime soon with the hip span I had going on, I had no idea why he was looking at me like he suddenly wanted to vomit.

  Or hit something.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, and my bag slipped out of his fingers and landed once more with a heavy thud.

  If I hadn’t already been sitting on my ass, I would’ve fallen on it again. His voice… I slowly shook my head, wanting him to speak again, because it was the deepest, smoothest voice I’d ever heard, with a slight accent I couldn’t place.

  I needed to say something, but all I could do was sit there and stare at him in open wonder. And think about the fact that the only makeup I was wearing was lip-gloss, and I was the kind of girl who needed at least some blush, mascara…and an entire painted face.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  My mouth dried as I continued to stare at him like my brain had shorted out, which was possible. It felt like I’d lost some brain cells, maybe a few synapses, and maybe a few other important things…stuff.

  He shot forward, moving as quickly as the striking rattlesnake I’d seen once by the lake back home—so fast that I had no way to move. One hand landed on the railing by my head, and the other two steps above me, and he was right there, in my face, breathing the same oxygen as I was. The wide stairwell with its red-washed walls constricted and the space seemed much smaller than before.

  Our gazes locked, and…and as crazy as it sounded, his eyes… They looked as if there were some kind of light behind the pupils. “Are your initials J.B.?”

  Way in the back of my head, I realized that was a weirdly on-point question. “How do you know that? We haven’t met. I’m sure of that, because I would’ve remembered that.” There I went again, rambling like an idiot. “I mean, I’m good with faces.”

  Especially extraordinarily gorgeous faces—yeah, I remembered those.

  Thick lashes lowered, covering those eyes briefly as he muttered, “Shit.”

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Your name?”

  Part of me wanted to ask him what the hell his name was, but I was caught off-guard and I answered. “Josie. Josie Bethel.”

  His gaze flew back to mine and for a long moment he didn’t speak. A sense of hyperawareness rushed over my skin, forming tiny little bumps. Tension poured into the air like kegs of it had been tapped open above us. My pulse picked up as I drew in a shallow breath. A muscle spasmed along his jaw and his lips parted as he said, “What in the fuck are you?”

  CHAPTER

  3

  MY EYES had to be deceiving me, like some kind of twisted-off-its-ass wish fulfillment or something. The hair was the wrong color. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what color hair this girl had. Light brown? Blonde? Pale blonde? All the shades rolled into one? And her nose was too small, but this girl, she looked…

  I couldn’t even bring myself to finish that train-wreck of a thought.

  Her eyes, a shade of deep denim that was familiar in a nagging sort of way, were fixed on mine. When she didn’t answer my question, I decided to take a more touchy-feely kind of approach. My hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist.

  I waited for something—a zap, a fissure of power signaling what she was.

  Nothing.

  Her eyes widened, almost consuming her face, and there was a quality of innocence to her suddenly wary gaze that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “W-what are you doing?” She pulled on her arm, but she didn’t get very far.

  Her question fell to the side. I was focused on trying to puzzle out what the hell she was and why in the hell I was here.

  There’d been no awareness of her when I’d entered the stairwell—late, according to the schedule I had. I hadn’t even expected to find the mysterious J.B. after this class. Shit, I hadn’t even felt her until I’d zipped up the stairs, too fast for any human to track, and startled her. She was definitely not a pure or a half, because I would’ve sensed that. So she wasn’t hiding out in the mortal world, like some of them had managed to do in the past. But when I’d straightened and had seen her face, I knew—I just knew this had to be the person Apollo had sent me to find, and her initials had confirmed it.

  There was nothing special that jumped from her skin to mine—no awareness of anything that would make her unique. She felt mortal, but she couldn’t be, because there’d be no reason Apollo would want me to guard a mortal college chick. Unless this was another warped form of punishment, and hell, that actually wouldn’t surprise me.

  “You’re hurting me,” she whispered.

  Her voice broke through my thoughts. My gaze dropped to where my fingers curled around her slender wrist. The skin around my hand was turning white. Shit—I was hurting her. I dropped my hold as if her skin had scalded mine. Surprise flitted through me, but I had no idea if it was real or just wishful thinking that I hadn’t truly intended to harm her.

  Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure what my intentions were anymore.

  “What are you?” she asked, her nose scrunching as she spoke. “Other than a heart-stopping hot guy with obvious boundary issues and problems with anger management?”

  I blinked at her. She thought I was a heart-stopping hot guy? Well, of course she did.

  “God. Just my luck,” she went on, rubbing the skin around her wrist and eyeing me with more than just a hint of distrust. “Why do all the hot ones have to be such freaking D-bags?” She pushed up to her feet. Her eyes met mine as she stepped to the side, pressing against the wall. “What do you want?”

  Seth, what do you want? Those words from the past were accompanied by angry, whiskey-colored brown eyes. I drew back so fast I was surprised I hadn’t given myself whiplash.

  “You know what? I don’t want to know. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t. I’m just going to get my bag and keep on going. Okay? All right, sounds good to me.” She edged down the wall. “This is me leaving.”

  An odd sense of déjà vu washed over me as she pushed past me—literally knocked her shoulder into mine—and snatched up her bag.

  “Crazy asses,” she muttered under her breath. “I am a weirdo magnet.”

  I turned as she hurried down the steps, away from me like I was the maniac people didn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And well, that wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Some would probably prefer to come face to face with a harpy instead of me.

  At a set of doors, she stopped to look over her shoulder, and again, I was struck by the familiarity of those deep, dark-blue eyes, of the curve of a stubborn jaw and chin, and bow-shaped, pouty lips. From my vantage point, I could really see her now. If that oversized sweater weren’t hiding her ass, I bet it would match her heart-shaped face.

  It was like taking two people I knew and mixing them together to form a brand-new person, and that was entirely unnerving.

  Then she was gone, slipping out the doors, and I was left standing on the landing like a dickhead.

  Seth, what do you want?

  Everything and anything and nothing at all?<
br />
  Yeah, that sounded about right. My hands tightened into fists. Closing my eyes, I tried to center myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been here before, but with someone else.

  A crack of loud thunder from outside reverberated through the stairwell and echoed inside my skull. A storm was brewing, matching the warring emotions inside me.

  What do you want?

  My eyes flew open and the stairwell was tinted in amber. No, fuck no. I staggered back against the wall. It didn’t make sense, but godsdammit I had been here before.

  Dammit.

  I was going to commit god-slaughter on Apollo.

  Too freaked out from the run-in with the kind of scary, yet extraordinarily hot, guy in the stairwell, I didn’t end up calling my granny before the start of Statistics. I shouldn’t have even bothered going to class, because when the fifty minutes had passed, it felt like I’d only just sat down and cracked open my notebook.

  I’d taken about two sentences worth of notes and somehow ended up with a doodle of something that looked like a zombie in the margin of my page. Real effective note-taking skills right there.

  Once outside the class, feeling like I’d somehow just gotten dumber rather than smarter, I checked in with my grandparents. Like I’d expected, they were totally aware of Mom’s feelings and were watching her closely. Granny told me not to worry, and while that was easier said than done, it did ease some of the stress. Mom had support. She wasn’t alone.

  As I walked to my dorm, my thoughts coasted back to the stairwell in Russell Hall. Who was that guy, and why in the world had he asked what I was? Like there was some other option besides human? That had be the oddest question I’d ever been asked, and I’d been asked some peculiar crap.

  God, I really knew how to attract some weirdos.

  I had an elaborate history of them, starting with Bob. I’d never known his last name, which was probably a good thing, considering the whole weirdo magnet thing. But when I was a little girl, he’d been my world for one summer.

  I’d spent most of my days at the lake that was hidden by the sad willows and the bright-yellow oak trees that butted up to my grandparents’ property. At that age, the lake had appeared the size of an ocean. And it was there that I’d met Bob.

  He’d shown up while I’d been playing by the dirt-and-pebble shore one afternoon—an important afternoon to me. One of the girls at school had had a huge slumber party that night in celebration of school ending and the beginning of summer. I hadn’t been invited—I’d never been invited to any of those things— and I’d been sad and confused, because all I’d ever wanted was for the other kids to like me. And the boys didn’t like me until high school, but then they’d done so for all the wrong reasons.

  When I’d first seen Bob, I’d been scared out of my mind, frozen in place when he stepped out from among the trees. Dark-haired and with eyes the color of the sky, he’d been as big as the superheroes in the stash of comics that my grandfather had in his office that I’d been warned away from ever touching.

  I’d touched them a lot.

  Bob had claimed to live further down the lake, and I hadn’t thought to question him, because the world was too big then for me to know that there were no cabins or houses there, other than my grandparents’. The first time we’d met, he’d talked about the catfish in the lake and the bigger fish he’d seen in the oceans, telling me stories that had fascinated me. I’d liked him and had been happy when he’d returned the following week, on the same day at the same time, bearing candies. A once-a-week ritual had started, and being relatively friendless with the exception of the random new kid in town who’d either never stayed around long or stayed nice, Bob had become my best friend over the course of a summer.

  And the baby dolls that he’d brought me had helped.

  Even to my young eyes, they had appeared rare and expensive—as if he’d gathered them around the world—because the pretty, painted faces had come from many cultures I’d never heard of.

  Looking back, I totally saw how creepy all of that was, but then, I’d been so starved for friendship, I probably would’ve warmed up to the Grim Reaper if he’d wiggled his bony fingers at me.

  Truth.

  The friendship had ended when my grandfather had stumbled upon us one afternoon. Bob had been sitting cross-legged by me, showing me how to fold grass between my fingers and turn it into a whistle. Needless to say, Pappy freaked and I’d been carted away from the lake. They’d found the dolls, and all of them had gone into the trash. Mom had cried for some reason, and then I was sat down and taught all about the whole stranger-danger thing.

  I’d never seen Bob again.

  I’d collected more weirdos over the years, like the old lady who was always at the convenience store when I was stocking up on junk food because my grandparents were health-food nuts. Somehow we’d struck up an oddball friendship—me, her, and her nine cats. Then, there had been the high-school librarian. She’d been the closest thing to a BFF I’d ever had.

  There had been more, and as ridiculous as it sounded, sometimes I wondered if there was some innate crazy that other crazy folks could sense in one another, like a homing beacon. So I guessed I shouldn’t have been so surprised by a random, crazy— albeit hot—guy running into me on a campus with thousands of people.

  I entered my dorm and took the elevator the ten floors up. Adjusting my bracelets, I shifted from foot to foot, impatient. When the elevator stopped, I barreled out the doors and almost knocked down a smaller girl. She stumbled back, catching herself on the opposite wall.

  “Sorry. So sorry,” I said, wincing as she righted herself. “Really sorry.”

  “No biggie.” She smiled as stepped in the elevator.

  Shaking my head, I pivoted around and walked down the long hall to my dorm room. As I reached the door, the shiver was at the base of my spine again, dancing its way up until it traveled across my shoulders. My heart turned over heavily and I closed my eyes.

  Twice in one day.

  Oh God.

  I’d never felt this more than once in any span of several days. Swallowing hard, I wrapped my fingers around the doorknob, battling the urge to turn and scan the hall, because I knew no one would be there.

  Dragging in a deep breath, I opened the door and stepped inside the room. My brows flew up, and I forgot about the feeling as I closed the door behind me.

  Erin was sprawled on the floor, palms pressed down on a mat, her spandex-covered behind jutting up toward the sky. She turned her head, peering at me from under her armpit.

  Her armpit.

  “How in the world do you get your neck to bend like that without killing yourself?” I asked.

  “Skills, yo.”

  Erin did yoga and meditation religiously, saying it helped merge her yin and yang together or something. She’d once told me she had a hell of a mean streak, and contorting herself into painful-looking positions helped keep “good vibrations” around her. Which was strange, because I’d never seen Erin lose her temper in the two years I’d known her.

  Erin unfolded herself from some kind of downward dog or upward pony and grinned at me. “Check under the bed.”

  Curious, I dropped my bag and stepped over her legs. Bending down, I lifted the bedspread and my eyes grew to the size of saucers when I spotted the bottle. I snatched it up and clutched it to my chest as I whipped toward her. “José!”

  Her grin spread into a smile. “The best boyfriend ever.”

  Standing in the middle of the penthouse suite in the hotel not too far from Radford, I yelled for Apollo for the fourth time since I’d walked through the door.

  Finally, there was an answer in the form of a fissure of energy permeating the room. Warm air blew over the back of my neck. I spun around, cursing when I saw Apollo standing right there. As in, he’d zapped himself into the room practically on top of me.

  “Gods,” I barked. “There’s at least eight hundred square feet in here, buddy, you didn’t need to land
on my ass.”

  Apollo snickered as he folded his arms. “You called?”

  I squared off with the god. We were nearly the same height, putting him at maybe an inch or two over my six-foot-four. “Who is she?”

  There was a pause. “Josephine Bethel.”

  I stared at him as irritation spun up like a high-speed cyclone. “I’ve figured that out. Thanks.”

  “Is that so? By the way, you’re off to a good start with this whole ‘protecting her’ thing. Are you doing it remotely? Is that a new ability of yours I’m unaware of?” He turned, tilting his head to the side. He seemed to be staring at the chain hanging from the ceiling fan. Seconds later, he confirmed this by reaching out and tugging the chain.