Footsteps echoed off to his right. He opened his eyes. A pair of platform black boots decked out in silver buckles stopped directly in his line of sight.
For a heartbeat, he didn’t move, barely breathed. If it was another hybrid, he was toast. No way could he defend himself right now.
Then the legs attached to those boots bent, and the being—no, woman—knelt in front of him. “You don’t look so good.”
She reached out to touch him. Obviously thought better of it and pulled her hand back. His gaze lifted. He focused on her golden hair. On smoky, made-up eyes with irises the color of a summer lilac. On porcelain skin that stretched across finely carved features. And for a split second, just a heartbeat, he knew he’d stared into that face dozens—no, hundreds—of times before.
She pushed to her feet and vanished, her boots crunching across sticks and rocks on the forest floor. Seconds later she reappeared and pressed a wad of fabric against the side of his head.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “I thought you were attacking me, not…” She shook her head. “Never mind what I thought. You’re lucky I fired a warning shot.”
His memory was a maze of starts and stops. He had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
She pressed against his ear. Looked at the blood on the rag, pressed again. While she mumbled about daggers and poison and magic, which made zero sense, he stared at her face and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
He knew her from somewhere. Was sure of it. Still couldn’t place her to save his life.
“I think this is going to be okay. It’s barely bleeding now. You know, if you’d told me you were shifting, this wouldn’t have happened.”
He still couldn’t follow her, but lying on the ground when his head felt as if he’d shoved it in a washing machine during the spin cycle wasn’t helping the situation. He knocked her hand away, then maneuvered to sitting, resting his back against the trunk of a tree for support.
“Skata.” The forest spun. He pressed both hands to his pounding forehead and tried to quell the thump.
Shifting back always left him weak and out of it. If he’d fed in his daemon form, he’d be fine. Better than fine. He’d be as strong as the Argonauts. But that wasn’t his goal, was it? No, he couldn’t change who he was, but he could control it. Most of the time.
He glanced down, found his pants ripped through the calves and thighs, his shirt shredded. He was pretty sure he’d worn a jacket, but who the hell knew where that had gone? He was lucky he still had some kind of clothing left. Sometimes he was left bare-ass naked.
He moved to his knees, pushed to stand. The woman reached out to steady him.
“I’m fine,” he managed in a raspy voice before she could touch him. “Though if you’re hot to grab something…”
She shot him a yeah, right look. “I see one part of your brain is still working.”
Yeah, his little brain, not his big one. Because he was way too aware of the human woman standing entirely too close to him on the bloody battlefield.
Sonofabitch. There were three dead-ass daemons lying on the ground that he now needed to get rid of. And he’d annihilated the fuckers in front of a witness.
A human witness.
The woman turned away, walked toward the hybrid he’d tossed near the shrubs. Her hair was windblown, there were streaks of dirt and blood smeared across her black clothes, and her right cheek was pink, as if she’d taken a hit there. But she didn’t seem fazed. Or scared. And though nothing about the fact she’d just been through a daemon battle screamed “sexy,” Orpheus couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
Who the hell was she?
The daemon’s arms stuck out at an odd angle and twitched against the forest floor. She knelt by the crumpled remains, looked close. Orpheus opened his mouth to warn her away—daemons, especially hybrids, were hearty creatures—but before sound left his throat, she pulled a dagger from her lower back and decapitated the beast like a pro.
Two things occurred to Orpheus in the silence that followed. One, she’d definitely fought daemons before. And two, she was well trained on how to take them down.
His strength came back little by little as he watched her stand, wipe the bloody blade against her thigh, and sheathe it at her back. But when she turned and stalked in his direction, those kick-ass boots echoing in the still dark air and her hair trailing behind as if she were more supermodel than superwoman, Orpheus was struck again by the strange sensation that he’d met this particular female before. A long time ago. A lifetime ago.
“We’ll need to dispose of the bodies.” She stopped in front of him, gestured to the two mutilated hybrids to his left. “A fire this close to the concert will cause too much attention. We could weight them down and throw them in the river. Hopefully the remains will disintegrate before anyone discovers them.”
Burning was the safest and quickest way to get rid of any evidence. Though Orpheus didn’t give a rip what humans knew of the gods, even he realized the pandemonium that would result if they discovered that monsters like these, like him, roamed the earth. The female was right. Daemon remains decayed quickly—quicker than normal—but the question of how she knew that surged to the front of his gray matter.
She bent over, grasped the arm of the closest hybrid, but Orpheus blocked her with his hand on her forearm. Shards of heat penetrated his skin when he touched her, spread deeper, amping that arousal he shouldn’t be feeling. “Before we do that, why don’t you tell me just where you came from?”
She rose. “And ruin the mystery? Where’s the fun in that?”
She was toying with him. He didn’t know why, but the knowledge eased the tension inside him. “You’re not Argolean.” He tapped into his senses, this time focusing on her. On what he’d ignored before, because he’d been too distracted by his target to pay attention to her. “And you’re not a god. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but—”
“What in Hades…?”
She was staring at the ancient Greek text on his arms. The text marking him as a guardian of his race.
Damn it. When he’d lost his shirt in the shifting process, he’d forgotten all about the Argonaut markings. Markings he didn’t want and couldn’t wait to get rid of. Markings he’d inherited after his brother’s death.
Her eyes darted back to his face, and confusion—maybe even a little horror—slithered into their amethyst depths. “You’re an Argonaut? But I saw you shift. I saw you turn into that…that thing.” She shook her head. “Daemons can’t be Argonauts. They can’t be chosen. It goes against every law ever established. It goes against the natural order.”
She was definitely otherworldly, but he still didn’t know from where. And if she knew what he was, why wasn’t she slicing and dicing him like the others right this minute? When she jerked her arm out of his grasp, he didn’t try to stop her. ’Cause, yeah, this whole fucked-up situation went against his order too.
Damn you, Gryphon. And damn the gods for marking him in Gryphon’s place. There was only one thing he wanted now. One thing that would grant him vengeance against the sonofabitch god who’d cursed him to begin with.
He stepped back, perched his hands on his hips, breathed deep so he’d stay calm and not shift again. But it wasn’t easy. Because the fire in her eyes told him his night was far from over.
“Screw whatever it is you want to know about me,” she said. “What I want to know is…who the hell are you?”