Lucky Courage (9781370361410)

by Washington, Amanda

  After all, we were three badasses, responsible for collecting the essences of Zeus and restoring him to power. Twenty-six flights of stairs had nothing on us. Or at least that’s what I thought. Then we hit the tenth floor and my lungs tried to burst and my legs about fell off. Determined not to complain about how much excruciating pain I was in and make Tweety feel worse, I clamped my mouth shut and kept climbing.

  The clock was ticking and we had an appointment to make. Tempted to shadow hop—travel through shadows to the furthest distance I could see—I checked out the stairwell and found far too many camera bubbles. We didn’t need security guards freaking out at the disappearing and reappearing people in their stairwell. I don’t know how we made it all the way up, but by the time we emerged onto the twenty-sixth floor, my butt, thighs, and calves were on fire.

  We passed a restroom on the way to Steffan’s office and Tweety peeled off to use the facilities, promising to catch up with us. The second he was out of earshot, I groaned, but kept moving forward, afraid if I stopped I’d never start again.

  “I’m dying. Please tell me you’re dying. I can’t be the only one in this much pain,” I said, searching for the right office number.

  Demarco chuckled. “I haven’t been able to feel my legs for the past ten minutes. I’m not even sure they’re still there.”

  I laughed. “It’s gotta be just around the corner.” I gestured down the hall and took two steps before grabbing Demarco’s hand. “That was pretty terrific of you… offering to take the stairs with him.”

  Demarco’s silvery-blues turned intense as he stared down at me. “I was just gonna tell you the same thing.”

  “Think he knows how terrific we are?” I asked.

  Demarco chuckled. “I know how terrific you are.” He planted a sweet, but way too short kiss on my lips before pushing me back in the direction we’d been heading. “Now come on. I need to sit down before my feet dissolve.”

  I understood his pain all too well.

  Tweety emerged from the restroom

  Swearing, I pointed out the door of Steffan’s office.

  “What?” Demarco asked.

  “I just realized we’re going to have to go back down.”

  He laughed as Tweety joined us and we entered the travel agency.

  DRESSED IN A nice suit, Steffan Gabor seemed like an average businessman. Brown hair, brown eyes, nice smile, no unusual markings. So far he hadn’t sprouted fangs or doused us with pheromones, and both of his legs ended in feet, which already made him better than my last travel agent. Although I could tell he wasn’t completely human, the buzz of godblood hadn’t been present when we’d shaken hands, so he wasn’t a demigod.

  I could use luck to open my eyesight and potentially see through whatever glamour Steffan wore, but some things were better left unknown. As long as he didn’t try to kill us, I’d respect his privacy. He did, however, have a difficult time understanding what I needed from him.

  “You want to pay me for a photograph of Peru?” he asked again, his forehead creased with disbelief.

  I nodded. “Please. Somewhere northeast. The more remote, the better. The photo needs to be less than five days old.”

  “Do you need rights to the photo? Are you using it for marketing? Will you be making money on it?”

  “No. Nobody will see it but me.” I looked to the guys. “And maybe these two, but nobody else.”

  “This has got to be the strangest request I’ve ever had. Why didn’t you just look up a photograph on the Internet or something?”

  It took me the next five minutes to explain to Steffan why I needed a contract from him promising all photographs he sold me would be less than five days old. My life (and his since we’d make a magically-enforced deal) depended on it. Finally, he relented and sat down behind his keyboard.

  “Northeast Peru is pretty remote. It may take some time,” Steffan said, smoothing back the sides of his hair.

  “Time, we don’t have. But we do have incentive. We’ll pay well.” I paced the office, stopping to stare at the view below. Way below. I wasn’t looking forward to returning to the stairwell. I didn’t care how many cameras were on us, I’d be finding some nice, dark corner to disappear from as soon as Steffan got me the picture. We didn’t have time or energy to waste on more stairs. Great excuses, Romi. I patted myself on the back, having adequately justified my laziness.

  “Whoa, we might actually be in luck,” Steffan announced, drawing my attention back to him. “One of my clients has a brother who’s currently going through some sort of midlife crisis. The man quit his job to backpack all over the world, and my client had me get him a flight to South America to kick off the trip. According to his social media, he’s in Peru now. I can’t believe this. What are the chances?”

  Good, considering my mother was Tyche, the goddess of luck. If luck had finally decided to throw me a bone, I intended to lick it clean rather than question the gift. “Can you contact him? Get him to send you some photos?”

  “No need. Posted some early this morning. Looks like he’s in a town called Rioja.” He hit a few keys, angled his monitor toward us, and pointed to a spot on the map. “Here. Will this work?”

  Hope hurried my feet to the side of his desk to study the map. Rioja was more like north-central than northeastern, but there had to be tin somewhere in the vast, unpopulated space above it.

  “Yes. It’s perfect. You’re sure the photos aren’t more than five days old?”

  Steffan nodded. These photos show him flying in to Lima six days ago and bussing it, making multiple stops along the way. It’s a twenty-hour straight shot.”

  Not a guarantee, but it would have to do. “Great. Let’s make a deal.”

  Steffan was also able to secure a recent photograph of Harbeson, Delaware, which was quite a bit easier, since he could tap into a state patrol road cam. The photo came out a bit grainy, but I’d worked with worse. I paid him five hundred dollars for our fifteen-minute meeting and he printed off the pictures, shaking his head all the while.

  Making a mental note to take Mike something special for putting me in touch with Steffan, I led the guys out of the office and we headed down the hall. The workday was over and most of the offices on the floor were dark, so we found a shadowy spot hidden from cameras and I took us back to Demarco’s place to pick up our packed bags before heading to Peru.

  * * *

  We stepped out of the shadows onto the dirt road beside a vast, lush jungle paradise, complete with rolling hills and fog-covered mountains. In the distance behind us stood the town of Rioja. We took a moment to get acclimated to the warmer, more humid climate before stepping off the road into knee-high vegetation.

  “We’re probably going to get eaten alive by bugs,” Tweety said, waving off some sort of flying insect. “I’m also concerned about not being able to see my feet. Anything could be in this grass.”

  Sandals weren’t the best idea for the trip, but the griffin couldn’t seem to force himself to wear shoes.

  I patted his arm reassuringly. “Just remember you’re a big, scary, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound mythological lion-eagle and you’ll be all right. Besides, we’re not going to be walking much.” Setting my sights on a distant hill, I grabbed the guys’ hands. “Hold on. This is going to be a little rough.”

  Shadows gathered around us. We stepped forward, through the realm of Erebus, and directly to the hill I’d been staring at. My stomach did a little flip as I turned my gaze to the clearing on the next hill and stepped again, bringing the guys with me. The hill beyond was covered in trees, so I set my sights to a small clearing to the right and stepped again. I did it five more times, then when there were no more clearings in sight, I released the shadows and dropped my hands.

  “Whoa,” Tweety said, separating his feet for balance. “That was so freaking cool.”

  Demarco lurched forward, holding his stomach.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He held up a finger. “Yeah
. Give me one sec.”

  “Sorry. I should have warned you. Shadow hopping can get a little intense.”

  “I’ll say.” Demarco straightened and looked back the way we came. “How far did you take us?”

  “I don’t know. About fifteen miles.” I shrugged. “Far enough from civilization. Is there any tin close by?”

  The clearing we stood in was maybe ten feet by twelve feet. Forests of thick trees surrounded us in all directions, looking ominous and a bit terrifying. It wasn’t like the forests up north where the branches started well above my head. No, these trees fanned out all the way to the ground, potentially hiding all sorts of creepies and crawlies. I shuddered, trying not to think too hard about the types of creatures we could potentially run into.

  Demarco pointed to the east. “We need to go that way. I hate to ask, but you can’t do more shadow jumping through there, can you?”

  “Shadow hopping, and no. It’s too condensed… no line of sight.”

  He sighed. “All right. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way then.”

  In addition to his big-ass hammer, Demarco had also brought along his wood-splitting ax. He unsheathed it and went to work, clearing us a path, as Tweety and I followed close behind. The trees seemed to close in around us, blotting out the waning sunlight and shrouding us in darkness. The griffin had excellent night vision, but he and I pulled out flashlights and turned them on. Tweety angled his beam in front so Demarco could see what he was chopping while I scanned the area, jumping at every little frog croak and snake slither.

  I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I’d grown up in the Seattle Underground after all. But the jungle was so much more than dark. It was alive with heartbeats, hisses, and secrets, none of which seemed happy about our intrusion.

  By the time we emerged in another clearing, my boots were caked with mud from random streams, my hair was full of cobwebs and the gods only knew what else, and something had breached the protection of my T-shirt to crawl up and down my back, driving me crazy.

  I burst into the twilight of the clearing, dropped my flashlight, and ripped my shirt over my head, not even caring if the guys got an eyeful of my sports bra and bare stomach. “Get it off, get it off, get it off!” I shouted, turning my back to Demarco.

  “What?” he asked. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Uh… Romi?” Tweety pointed at the inside out shirt in my hands.

  I looked down in time to see a silver-dollar sized black and yellow spidery-bug thing crawling toward my hand. Its torso ended in two black points, and its legs were red. I screamed and threw the shirt as far from me as I could. The beam of Tweety’s flashlight followed in pursuit.

  “That looked wicked!” the griffin exclaimed. “Where’d it go? I want to get a better look.”

  There was something so wrong with him. “A better look? I want it dead. Squash it and show me evidence. The thing has been crawling on me…” I shuddered. “For at least a half-hour. It needs to die. I want to see guts and twitching little legs as proof. I swear I will not be able to stay here any longer if I know it’s alive and out there stalking me.”

  “Stalking you, huh?” Demarco asked. He lifted my shirt off the ground with the head of his ax. “You want this back?”

  “No.” I suppressed another shudder. “It needs to be doused in gasoline and burnt.”

  “Romi has an itty-bitty fear of spiders,” Tweety said. His voice held a bit too much humor.

  “Not all spiders,” I defended. “Just the ones that touch me. You saw that thing. It was probably poisonous. He was crawling up my back, headed to my ear, no doubt.”

  “And tell Demarco what the spider would want with your ear,” Tweety said. He’d heard my arachnophobic ravings before.

  “It’s dark, warm, and the perfect place to deposit an egg sac. Millions of little creepy black and gold spiders could be crawling out of the side of my head in no time.”

  Demarco stared at me, his eyes wide and the side of his mouth quirking up into a smile.

  “I’m not being irrational,” I defended. “It could happen.”

  “It’s wild, isn’t it?” Tweety asked. “She’s the granddaughter of darkness and shadows, makes deals with gods, turns into a shadowy thing that gives me nightmares, pets a metal-feathered bird of Ares like he’s a kitten, and she’s terrified of spiders.”

  “Not terrified,” I clarified, trying to save face. “And only if they touch me. Now why haven’t either of you hunted that eight-legged freak down and brought me back its head? It’s almost fully dark and I don’t know why we brought sleeping bags, because I’m not staying in a jungle with spiders.”

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb here, but probably all jungles have spiders,” Tweety said.

  “Romi.” Demarco’s voice was low and calm. “There’s enough tin here. This is the place. Look behind you.”

  I turned, anticipating a web of arachnids ready to pounce, inject me with some sort of paralyzing agent so they could wrap me in a cocoon and slowly feast on my blood. Instead, pale brick archways, eroded by time, were draped in a curtain of greenery. We’d stumbled on some sort of ancient ruins. Fear temporarily replaced by excitement, I picked up my flashlight and plunged ahead, with the guys hot on my heels. It was some sort of wall with lots of archways. Behind it stood even more ruins.

  “There’s enough tin here?” I asked, spanning the area with my flashlight.

  “More than enough. Also plenty of zinc and manganese. I could build the forge behind the wall, and they wouldn’t see it. This place is perfect.”

  “And creepy,” Tweety added, looking over some faded markings. “Where are we?”

  “Who cares?” I shrugged. “It’ll work. Tomorrow we’ll bring the copper shavings and set up the forge before we meet with Eris and Talon.”

  “But we did bring sleeping bags…” Tweety said. “We could crash here and get an early start in the morning.”

  “I can leave you here alone,” I suggested.

  Tweety shook his head and grabbed my hand. “Just go-go-gadget shadow fiend and annihilate all the spiders.”

  “Yeah, whatever. I would, but you’d probably wet your pants.”

  Demarco laughed as he took my other hand.

  When we got back to Demarco’s place I took a long bubble bath, after which I made myself a cup of chamomile to relax and sat on the floor to inspect my gear for stowaways.

  “You almost ready to go to sleep?” Demarco asked. Freshly showered, he wore nothing but his low-riding pajama pants and the sexiest smile I’d ever seen.

  “Sleep?” I shook my head and returned his smile, discarding my backpack. “We could die tomorrow, you know?”

  He laughed and offered me a hand. “Probably a good thing we didn’t spend the night in the jungle then, huh?”

  I accepted his help, allowing him to heft me to my feet where I could wrap his arms around my waist and reach for his face to bring it down to mine. We made out on the way to the bed, taking our time as the urgency built. Once our legs hit the mattress, I scooted until my hand found the nightstand. After fumbling with the drawer for a moment, I got it opened and explored the contents until I felt one of the boxes of condoms.

  Demarco pulled away to see what I was doing as I set the box on top of the nightstand. “Getting prepared, huh?” he asked with a grin.

  “Yep. You know, I’m not really afraid of spiders. That was all just a ploy to get back here and try these things out.”

  He chuckled. “Worst liar ever.”

  I blew my bangs out of my face with a huff. “Fine. But since we’re here, we might as well see how many of these things we can get through tonight.”

  His eyes sparkled with humor before turning to silver again. “Challenge accepted.”

  Then he ripped off my shirt and tossed me on the bed.

  OUR INCREDIBLE NIGHT of lovemaking left me barely able to walk the next day. Regardless, I felt amazing. My entire body seemed to hum and glow as I showered and got dressed. Lo
oking over myself in the mirror, I decided Aphrodite would be proud. Perhaps there was a little of the goddess of love and debauchery in me after all.

  Tweety snickered as soon as we walked in. “My, don’t you two look happy today?” he asked. “Get a good night’s… sleep?”

  Refusing to blush, I said, “Just excited to see your smiling face, sunshine.”

  Then I stole his cup of coffee.

  The guys threw together a quick breakfast of bagels and protein drinks while I studied the picture Steffan had given me of Harbeson, Delaware. As soon as we ate, we stuffed the dishes in the washer, grabbed hands, and headed out.

  Harbeson was a clean, tiny town with less than two thousand people, nice homes, and well-maintained front yards. We stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. The man behind the counter took one look at Demarco’s built physique, my dark outfit, and Tweety’s Looney Tunes T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, and his eyes went wide. Locals, we were not.

  Despite his shock, he politely pointed us down the street we’d just been on. “You’re not too far from it. Keep right on going. Take the third left, then it’ll be on the righthand side. Can’t miss it.”

  We thanked him, bought a couple of bottles of water, and continued on our way.

  “Think he’s calling the cops or the news?” I asked as soon as the door closed behind us.

  “Both,” Demarco replied. “We'd better hurry.”

  The warehouse was underwhelming, but the guy behind the counter also had a small-town politeness about him as he wheeled our cart piled high with ten-pound bags of copper shavings to the waiting area.

  He gestured toward the door and offered, “I can put these in your vehicle if you’d like.”

  Which would be a pretty neat trick, since we didn’t have one.

  “That’s all right,” Demarco said. “We can get it if we can borrow your cart for a few minutes.”

  The guy insisted on helping us—probably wanted a break from what he was doing—but Demarco added a little extra persuasion to his words as he took the handle. Back outside, we searched for an inconspicuous place to jump back and forth from. The alley behind the building gave us a decent amount of privacy, so we each grabbed bags and the guys held onto me as I wrapped shadows around us.