The Return

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  fight a Titan.”

  Her eyes met mine before flickering away. “You’ll be okay, Josie.”

  I’ll be okay? That’s like telling someone who was about to jump into shark-infested waters they’ll be okay.

  She came around the bed and shoved the jeans and sweater into my arms. “You should shower and get ready before Seth comes back. Unless you want him to see you in that robe again, which by the way, does nothing to hide your goods.”

  Oh Jesus.

  I let her push me toward the bathroom, but I stopped just inside and faced her. Our eyes met, and somehow I knew—I just knew—that after I closed this door, she was going to be gone, and I wasn’t sure, no matter what she said, if I would see her again.

  Our friendship had been built on lies. There was no ignoring that, but the last two years… She had been there for me when I was the scared and naïve freshman, away from home for the first time. She was there the first time I drank tequila, and she held my hair while I vomited it all back up later that night. She’d been there when I went out on my first date with the boy from my Soc 101 class, and then rescued me when he started talking about inviting me to meet his mom five minutes into our awkward dinner. She’d also been there when my mom had a terrible relapse and had gone missing for days, ending up in Tennessee. She had become my best friend, and that wasn’t something I could forget. No matter how much it sucked and hurt to know that the foundation of our friendship had been precariously built on a house of lies, it didn’t change everything she had done for me.

  I couldn’t hold a grudge.

  Dropping my clothes on the floor, I sprang forward. Her eyes widened as my arms circled her shoulders. I pulled her in for a tight, fierce hug. And I didn’t say anything. Neither of us did as she hugged me back. We stood there for a few minutes, and when we pulled apart, her deep eyes glimmered with tears.

  “You better get ready,” she said, her voice thick as she smiled faintly.

  The lump in my throat was hard to talk around, so I nodded as I drew back. I needed a deep breath before I spoke. “You’re my best friend, no matter what.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut briefly as she whispered, “You’re my best friend, too. No matter what.” Then she stepped back, her smile spreading as she flashed me the peace sign.

  For some reason, knowing what she was, that made me laugh as I gripped the door. But it wasn’t until the bathroom door was closed that it really set in she was leaving and I…I wanted another hug.

  Throwing the door open, my shoulders slumped. Like I’d suspected moments earlier, the hotel room was empty. Erin was gone.

  CHAPTER

  11

  TIME WAS ticking and we had a thirteen-hour-and-then-some drive ahead of us, and here I was, standing at the back of the silver Porsche Cayenne that I had borrowed, staring at Josie’s ass.

  In my defense, I was a guy, so when I had the choice between staring at a bunch of trees or a female’s ass, it was probably going to be the ass. And it was also a nice ass, too. Plump. Not too hard to imagine peeling down those jeans that hugged her ass and shapely thighs. The pink sweater she was wearing rode up, exposing a ribbon of skin along her lower back. Huh, it was a very tempting area of the body I’d never paid attention to.

  I reached out before I knew what I was doing. My fingers hovered just above the hem of her sweater, preparing to tug it down, when I jerked my hand back. A series of tingles rippled across my fingers, almost as if my skin was protesting not touching her.

  What the fuck?

  Searching for a distraction, I scanned the parking lot of the hotel again. No vengeful shades lurking around—unfortunately. My gaze moved back to Josie, and to her ass as she wiggled it, stretching even further.

  I sighed. Maybe groaned a little, because her ass stopped wiggling, and I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or disappointed by that.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and climb in the back?” I suggested.

  Her body stilled. “I’ll just be another second.”

  “What are you looking for in there? The answers to life?”

  “Ha. Ha,” she responded, her voice muffled. “Erin packed everything, so I don’t know where anything is at. A-ha!” Triumph rang out in her voice. “Found it.”

  “What? Did she accidentally store some cow hearts in there?”

  Josie flew out from the back of the Porsche, clasping a slender black rectangle electronic thing in her hand. She took a step toward me, and that black thing smacked into my arm.

  “Hey!” I stepped back, folding my hand over my stinging upper arm. She’d actually hit me. She’d seriously swatted me with something. I was freaking stunned. “What the hell was that for?”

  “She does not eat babies or cow hearts!”

  “How do you know?” I challenged, damn well knowing furies tended to not eat babies or hearts, but whatever. Her sweater was a V-neck. Of course. The swells of her breasts all but defied the limitations of her sweater. I shifted, spreading my legs. This was just ridiculous. “Did you Google a furie’s diet while you were hanging out in the back of this car? Was that what you were doing this whole time?”

  “Erin’s a vegan, smartass.” Her lips pursed and her nose scrunched in that cute way again. Cute? Dammit. “Or at least veggies and crap is all I’ve ever seen her eat. And I wasn’t Googling crap. I was looking for my Nook, which I’ve now found. It’s a requirement for any road trip.”

  “Nerd.”

  Her arm flew back as she prepared to swat me upside what appeared to be my head this time. I caught her arm before she delivered the blow. “Do not hit me with that again.”

  Deep blue eyes flashed. “I’ll hit you with it again if I want to.”

  “If you hit me with that again, I’m going to bend you over the back of this car, right in front of everyone and all the gods, and smack your ass like your momma should’ve done.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Not even using any amount of strength, I tugged her forward, and before she could pull away, I circled my other arm around her waist, keeping her in place. My body immediately warmed in every place we were connected. She was a good head shorter than I was, but we lined up well enough in all the important areas. As focused as I was on all of her softness pressing against me, I forgot what the hell I was doing. Something about spanking her ass?

  That was a damn good plan.

  “I would so dare,” I told her, my voice dropping low. “And I would also really, thoroughly enjoy it.”

  She tipped her head back, lips parting as our gazes locked. “I would so not enjoy that.”

  I dipped my head, coming so close to kissing her that my groin tightened with need. The sudden rush was all-encompassing. “I think the blush traveling across your cheeks tells me you’d enjoy it just as much as I would. Maybe more.”

  Her soft exhale sent another jolt through me as her breath danced over my lips. “I’m not blushing,” she said. “The breeze is chilly. And I have sensitive skin. I burn really easily, which is funny considering I have some sun-god blood in me. Go figure—”

  I placed the tips of my fingers on her cheek, stopping her chatter. Her eyes widened then, the blue going so deep if I wasn’t careful I could tumble right into them and do something really idiotic.

  And there were a lot of idiotic ideas that were coming to mind right now.

  I trailed my fingers to her mouth, my touch feather-light. When I reached her parted lips, the softness of them against the tips of my fingers spiked the need into something damn near primal. The feeling was raw, and as I pressed her lips together, the whole fucking thing backfired on me, because parts of me were aching now.

  “Liar,” I said to her.

  Josie jerked back, but her chest rose and fell quickly. “I don’t like you.”

  I bit down on my lower lip, but it didn’t stop my grin. “I don’t like you, either.”

  She shot me a dirty look over her shoulder as she rounded the side of
the SUV, heading toward the passenger side.

  This was going to be one long-ass trip.

  Three hours in and it was already feeling like a long-ass trip. We’d spent too much time this morning dicking around and now there was no way we’d reach Osborn by nightfall. We’d have to stop somewhere along Interstate 64 for the night, because driving straight through was stupid when the potential for facing anything was high.

  Josie had been playing the quiet game, glued to her Nook from the moment I’d climbed behind the wheel and started the SUV, which had been fine with me, but I did wonder what she was reading. Probably romance. Or Harry Potter. She seemed like the kind of chick that would dig boy wizards. But it was around the time we crossed out of West Virginia and hit Kentucky that she powered the thing off and started staring out the window.

  My fingers tapped on the steering wheel. A lot of stuff had been dumped on her in such a short period of time, but she was holding it together like a champ, like…

  Like Alex.

  Fuck.

  If I could carve out all those memories and every shitty thing I’d caused and everything attached to Alex, I could look at this objectively. I could see that Josie had some of Alex’s strength. Obviously not the physical kind, but strength… It went beyond muscles and the ability to fight. Josie had the important kind— mental strength. The girl had…grit. Most mortals, after finding out they weren’t exactly mortal, that spirits and Titans were after them, and that their father was a legendary god of dickdom, would’ve flipped their shit by this point.

  But she was just staring out the window, her profile thoughtful, a little distant. Maybe I should have said something, like point out how well she was doing—positive reinforcement and all that good stuff. But the words weren’t there, and every time I glanced over at her, her expression hadn’t changed.

  As the tires smoothly ate away the miles, my mind wandered to those moments outside of the SUV, to how her body had felt pressed against mine. There was no denying that I was physically attracted to her, and while she was a different type of girl than I normally went for, I wasn’t surprised by wanting to get in her pants and between her legs.

  It just wasn’t something I should act on. But not acting on it wasn’t looking too good. It had only been a handful of days since I’d first seen her and not nearly as many hours that we’d been together, and I was already feeling my tenuous grip on restraint slip. I wasn’t known for my self-control, especially when it came to something I wanted.

  And yeah, I wanted her. Wanted her in a way that was purely physical and inherent to who I was. And it was official. Apollo was a bigger idiot than I realized for putting his daughter under my guardianship, knowing everything he knew about me.

  I laughed out loud at that.

  “What?” Josie asked, looking at me.

  Grinning, I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then she blurted out. “I forgave Erin.”

  The statement caught me off-guard and I glanced at her again. She was staring at me, the hollows of her cheeks pink. “Okay.”

  “Do you think that makes me, like, too forgiving?”

  As I coasted around a slow-moving van in the passing lane, I smirked. “I’m probably not the best person to ask, Joe.”

  “Why, Sethie?”

  My smirked turn into a grin. “I hold onto grudges. I feed and water them, growing them into happy little pools of bitterness.”

  “Well, that sounds fun and lovely.” She shifted in the seat, stretching out her legs. “I don’t see the point in holding onto grudges, because that happy pool of bitterness will turn on you and start eating away at you.”

  Already was.

  “It sucked that she lied to me, but she’s still my friend. She was still there for me,” she said. “And that’s what matters. Anyway, I guess some of this is kind of cool,” she went on, “I mean, there’s this whole world existing right alongside ours, interacting with ours, and we’ve had no idea. It’s like something in a movie or a book. Like Hogwarts coming alive.”

  Yep. I called it. Totally into boy wizards.

  “You’ve read Harry Potter, right?”

  I snorted. “No.”

  “Seen the movies?”

  “Nope.”

  “Been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter?”

  I laughed. “That would also be a no.”

  “I’ve never been there either, but still.” She twisted toward me so fast, it was a surprise she didn’t choke herself on the seatbelt. “Have you been living in a cave?”

  “I’ve been busy,” I replied as I checked the rearview mirror. “You know, fighting automatons and saving the world.”

  “What’s an automaton?”

  “Something you do not want to see,” I said, and when she huffed, I sighed. “They are one of Hephaestus’s creations. He’s like the ultimate blacksmith. He can create just about anything. Automatons were basically half-robot and half-bull. They breathed fireballs.”

  She turned back to the windshield. “That doesn’t sound like any fun. How do you even pronounce his name? Can I just call him Hippo?”

  I laughed under my breath. “We call him Hep. He hates it, as much as he hated Ares for sleeping with Aphrodite while they were married. Ever hear of unbreakable chain and net? It’s real. He used it to catch the two of them getting it on.”

  “Oh. I…I thought Aphrodite was with Adonis or something?”

  “Aphrodite has pretty much been with everyone. She even hooked up with one of the Sentinels I know, and he ended up with a nice scar as a reminder of the no-touchie-touch policy.”

  “The Sentinels… You’ve mentioned them before.” She tapped the Nook on her knee. “You said they were mostly the halfs, right?”

  “Yeah. Now the Sentinels are more of a mix of pures and halfs.”

  The Nook continued to bounce. “And the Sentinels are like the godly version of the army?”

  “Something like that. All halfs go before the Council—well, used to. A lot of this has been abolished for about a year, but back in the day, at the age of eight, we went before the Council—twelve pures who oversaw each of the Covenants, which are schools near the largest communities, and it was determined if we were to train to become Sentinels or to go into servitude. I obviously went into training. We got basic education, but it was more focused on different styles of fighting and defense, ranging from hand-to-hand combat like grappling and krav maga, to basic martial arts, to gun and dagger play. There’s thousands of Sentinels. Used to be more…” Before I helped kill a whole truckload of them.

  “So you’re a Sentinel, too?”

  “Yes. And no. First and foremost, I’m the Apollyon, but I was trained just like any other Sentinel. Probably pushed harder, and I was never really with them. Even when I was in classes with the others, I was always separate somehow.”

  “Why?” she asked. Obviously the quiet game was officially over.

  A huge part of me had no idea why I was telling her so much. “The halfs and pures knew what I was. They knew I was different, and since I could easily knock one of them into next year, it didn’t make them real comfortable around me. Neither were a lot of pures. Everyone liked to stare when I was around, but people didn’t get too close.” Unless the pures and halfs were female, most steered clear of me. All except the few connections I’d made with those who’d been at the Deity Island Covenant, and I hadn’t seen any of them for over a year.

  The Nook stopped moving. “You really didn’t have friends growing up?”

  “I had no one,” I admitted, surprising myself.

  “No one?” she whispered.

  I glanced at her, and she was staring at me, not with curiosity but with a visible need to understand, to relate. It was written all over her face. Maybe that’s why I kept talking, telling her things only one other person knew. Maybe it was because I thought, out of everyone I’d ever known, this girl…she’d understand. “The very second I opened my mouth and
took my first breath, my pure-blooded mother—and using the term ‘mother’ is a fucking joke—handed me over to a caregiver who was as warm and fuzzy as Medusa. She hadn’t wanted me. You see, relationships between halfs and pures were forbidden. We knew it was because of the potential for an Apollyon, but it’s also because halfs have always been looked down on, but my mother… There was no great love affair between her and whoever my father was. She liked getting it on with the help, until she got pregnant by one of them. Then not so much. She probably would’ve drowned me in the Mediterranean Sea.”

  She gasped. “No, she wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Pures did that all the time, Josie, and that would’ve been my