The winged monster shrieked in anger. From his waistband Demetrius drew a three-foot spear, opened his eyes, and peered over the ledge to the beach below.
He hurled the spear down toward the beach. An agonizing cry echoed up to where Isadora lay watching in horror, and then all sound ceased but for the gentle whistle of wind through the trees and the crash of waves against rock at the base of the cliff.
No, not a god, she realized as she stared at him. This male was something else. Something dark and menacing, and if she wasn’t careful, a thousand times worse than the monsters they’d faced earlier.
He turned his gaze on her. His dark eyes were as focused as she’d ever seen them when he stalked in her direction. She tensed, closed her hand over a rock at her side to defend herself if need be. He picked up the end of the ladder and snapped the bottom rung off, leaving sharp ragged points of wood on one side, then dropped to his knees at her side.
Isadora’s whole body went rigid, unsure what he was going to do next. There was nowhere for her to go, no way to get away from him. When he reached for her bad leg, she flinched. “What are you doing?”
“I think you re-broke your leg. Hold still.” He immobilized her with ease, as if she were nothing but a child, then began unwrapping something from the bottom of her leg.
Isadora looked down and realized the shin of her left leg was wrapped in a sheer black gauze-type fabric. “What? When did I—”
“In the clearing with the daemons,” he answered without looking up at her. “I didn’t see it happen.” He removed the last bit of wrap and cringed. “Dammit.” He reached for the wood he’d broken off the makeshift ladder, picked at the ends so the jagged edge wasn’t quite so sharp. “Hold still. I’m not very good at this. It’ll probably hurt.”
Hurt? What was he going to—?
He set the wood near his knee, then placed both hands over her shin. Before she could ask what he was doing, he closed his eyes and chanted in that unsettling language again. Excruciating pain swirled and condensed in that one spot, stole her breath, and darkened her vision. Isadora cried out, tried to push his hands away, but the torture was too much and she dropped back against the rock in agony.
The pain seemed to go on and on. Just when she was sure he was killing her, the edges softened and inch by inch the roar in her head and leg turned to a dull throb. When the worst was over, she gasped for air and tore her eyes open to stare up at a swirling gray sky.
His hands shifted; the chanting stopped. She tried to focus on one single cloud to ground herself, couldn’t seem to make it work. His hands moved again as he braced the wood against her leg and rewrapped it with the same gauzy black fabric as before.
“You shouldn’t walk on this for at least a day.” His voice was thick as he worked. “I knit the bones back together, but it still needs to heal.”
Knit the bones?
Isadora blinked several times. Found one cloud she could focus on. As she worked on simply breathing, her mind wandered. Who the hell was this guy? Not a healer, that was for sure. She’d heard that chanting before. Recognized the language.
Medean. He’d been speaking Medean. Her stomach rolled with understanding, but the one thing circling loudest in her brain was the fact he’d just tried to heal her, not harm her.
Him. Demetrius. The one guardian who hated her more than any other and made no bones about the fact he thought she wasn’t qualified to burn toast, let alone rule Argolea. He’d never been nice to her, not once in all the years he’d served with the Argonauts, and yet…he’d not only just healed her broken leg with—she swallowed hard—magick, he’d saved her from two monsters straight out of a nightmare when he could have sacrificed her and gotten away with ease.
Questions hit her from all sides. Questions she needed answers to right now. Gritting her teeth, she pushed up to her elbows and looked down her body to where he still knelt, wrapping her injured leg.
She opened her mouth, then noticed the oversized white dress she was wearing wasn’t a dress at all but a male’s long-sleeved shirt. And the hem had ridden up so high on her thighs it was clear she wasn’t wearing anything beneath.
Warmth rushed through her body all over again. A heat that came out of nowhere seared her center with an intensity that stole her breath. Tingles she didn’t want or understand ignited in the skin beneath his hands and traveled up her leg, seemed to gather in that spot just barely covered by the edge of the oversized shirt. She tried to push her legs together, but his hands held her immobile.
He must have felt her tense because his fingers stopped moving on her lower leg. Her pulse ratcheted up as his eyes traveled up the length of her bare leg and zeroed in on the hem of her shirt.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
Yeah, that’s what she was suddenly thinking about too. With him. Here. Now. Any way he wanted. Which, considering her history and his history and the fact they couldn’t even stand each other, was utterly and mind-bendingly insane.
Chapter 7
Demetrius pushed up from the ground and turned so fast he stumbled and nearly fell on his ass.
Graceful, dickhead. And really fucking heroic. If you wanted to stare at her body, you should have left that sheer black nightgown on her instead of giving her your shirt.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he tried to wipe away the image of Isadora’s near-naked lower half from his mind. Which was as productive as trying to open the friggin’ portal right this minute, because all he could see were her sleek bare legs, those creamy inner thighs, that little treasure that was hidden just under the hem of his shirt…
His face grew hot and his pulse beat so hard he could hear the blood pounding in his veins. Damn it, he didn’t want her. He didn’t like her. She wasn’t even his type.
He thought back to that girl at the club. The dominatrix with the delta tattoo and fuck-me boots. Now she was his type. She was the kind of female he was attracted to. The only kind he deserved.
Isadora cleared her throat. Scowling, he glanced sideways and saw she’d crossed her good leg over her bad and pulled his shirt down over both legs as far as she could, then wrapped her arms around herself in a don’t-even-look-at-me move he’d have to be a moron to miss.
Okay, just fucking refocus.
He stalked across the ground, picked up what was left of his weapons. He was going to need to make more. The invisibility spell he’d cast on the edge of the cliff wouldn’t last long, and with the sun setting they needed to find shelter. Two days on this island had already taught him the really nasty stuff came out at night.
“I didn’t realize you were a…” Isadora swallowed. “A witch.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, right.” Louder, she added, “You’re from Jason’s line. It shouldn’t surprise me, since he shacked up with a sorceress. Do the other Argonauts know?”
“I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what they know.”
“That would be a no,” she muttered.
Her disgust hit him square in the chest, and before he could stop it that blackness circled, latched on, and squeezed. “I also don’t care what you think you know. But don’t lump me in with your little witch friends. I’m not the one who turned you over to a warlock.” I’m the one who fucking saved you, dammit. He reached for another broken spear from the ground.
“Oh my gods,” Isadora whispered. “Apophis’s witches. You were there.”
Her shocked voice brought his head up, and too late he realized bingo. Thanks to him, her brain had just snapped back into gear. She’d been out the whole time they’d been here, while he’d been getting his ass kicked trying to find a way off this damn island and at the same time making sure nothing snacked on her when he wasn’t looking. And though it would have been nice if she’d been awake instead of deadweight during all that, her consciousness now ignited a whole other set of problems. Namely, what did she really remember, and how the hell was he going to explain any of this?