| |
Thalia
She tried to pretend it didn’t matter. It was only a fling, anyway. A summer romance that wasn’t supposed to last. And really, if this was how he was going to deal with their arguments, she was better off anyway. Better off. How many times had she tried to tell herself that since she’d met him?
Damn, Pirithous! It was just sex! She didn’t even know him, and what she did know was completely outrageous. How did he expect a relationship between them would work out? He didn’t know anything about anything, and she didn’t know anything about the things that would do him any good. Even if she had wanted to marry him, as long as he was a non-entity with no record of his existence, she couldn’t. Not that she did want to marry him. Or anyone. And she’d been completely upfront about it with him that first night. He knew she didn’t want to settle down, so what did he expect?
Thalia stripped the bed and threw the sheets in the wash, irritated enough now that she didn’t even consider keeping the pillowcases that smelled like him. He was good in bed, that was all. That was the only reason she was annoyed that he’d left again. It wasn’t her fault if he had hoped for more than that.
She slammed the washer shut and went back upstairs to remake her bed. Clean sheets, and no Pirithous. If he never came back, she’d think of him fondly and make good use of everything he’d taught her.
A long hot shower washed away the worst of her aggravation, along with the smell of him on her skin and in her hair. The first moment was the hardest, when the water hit and the steam filled the shower, thick with the smell of his body and the wood smoke from the fire. She leaned against the tile and breathed it in, refusing to let herself dwell on the trouble he was going to get himself into alone. Then she shampooed her hair and tried to remember Josh Andrews’s phone number. After all, if she was going to be hanging around by herself, it might be worth looking up someone to meet at the bar.
It wasn’t until she’d returned to the bedroom and her stomach sank that she realized how desperately she’d been hoping he’d come back. The disappointment wrapped hard fingers around her heart and squeezed. Thalia dropped to the bed and rubbed her face.
How the hell had Pirithous gotten this far under her skin in forty-eight hours?
***
“THALIA! HOW THE HELL are you?” Josh’s enthusiasm made her feel slightly better for calling his mother to get his cell phone number. It wasn’t really stalking, she decided, to look up an old friend through his family. “God, how long has it been?”
“A long time,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me calling?”
“Of course not,” he assured her. “As often as Nikki’s been back and forth, I knew you wouldn’t be left behind. Your brother around?”
She smiled. “No, my brother is still in the city, and Nikki went back too, so I’m all by myself.”
“And you called me.”
“I was just telling Nikki about that time we went cow-tipping,” she said, ignoring the obvious suggestion in his tone. “You remember that?”
“I remember what happened after we went cow-tipping.”
Josh Andrews clearly hadn’t changed in the last three years—she hadn’t spoken to him since her twenty-first birthday, but then she’d run into at least half of her graduating class that night, at one point or another.
“Sofia said she saw you in town yesterday with some guy,” Josh said.
Thalia shrugged even though he couldn’t see it, ignoring the twinge of heartache, and pulling the ribs out of the fridge where they’d been marinating overnight. If she was going to hit the bar later, she’d still need a solid foundation, whether Pirithous was here to help her eat it or not. “He needed some fashion advice.”
“At the grocery store?”
“If I’d wanted to play twenty questions about my relationships, I would have gone back to the city with Nikki and had dinner with my brother.” She put the phone on speaker and set it on the counter top. “Can’t we just catch up and flirt a little for old time’s sake?”
“Oh, is that why you called me?” She could hear his grin through the phone. “To relive our youth?”
“Only if we can skip the cow-tipping this time.”
“As long as this guy isn’t going to show up and pound me. Sofia said he was pretty big.”
“Aww, Josh. I promise not to let the big scary man rearrange your face.” Though if he kept it up, she wouldn’t be sorry to see Alexandros try.
He laughed. “Hey, for all I know he’s some friend of your brother’s sent to keep you out of trouble.”
She rolled her eyes. He was as bad as Nikki, agonizing over imagined consequences. “Don’t let me twist your arm or anything.”
“You can’t blame me for being concerned. The last time we made out your brother cornered me in a dark alley.”
“You’re a grown man, Josh.” She turned on the oven and put the ribs in, wondering if she should save the bones for Pirithous or not. At this point, she’d have been glad to be hanging around the fire pit watching him burn orange juice. All talking to Josh was doing was reminding her of all the ways every other guy she’d ever met fell short.
“Alexandros makes an impression.”
Were those footsteps? Her pulse sped up at the sound, her gaze shifting to the back door. Pirithous was climbing the stairs, head and shoulders coming into view through the window. His face was bleeding, and something was sticking out of his shoulder. An arrow?
“Shit.” She ran for the door. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What—?”
She ignored Josh’s voice and threw the door open. “What the hell happened?”
Pirithous grinned up at her, gray eyes bright with amusement. “You stare at me as if I’ll drop dead before I reach the door.”
“You’re bleeding!” It was ridiculously obvious as responses go, but the more she looked at the arrow, the sicker she felt. Blood she could handle, but the idea of someone shooting him turned her legs to jelly. “From an arrow!”
“Yes, but I am not fainting, nor feeling any unusual weakness, thank the gods.” He reached the top of the stairs and she stepped back, letting him inside. He shut the door, his eyes narrowing as he searched the trees. “I worried there would be poison in the wounds.”
“Poison!” She reached for a chair, and then he was steadying her as she sank to the floor before she found one.
“Thalia? Is everything all right over there?”
Pirithous froze, his hand still wrapped around her arm. “You have a guest?”
She lifted her head, remembering Josh still on the phone. “Shit. No—it’s just—”
“Did you say someone got shot by an arrow?” Josh asked, somewhere between confused and worried. “Should I be coming over there?”
“Um.” It was the only thing that came out, because her gaze kept going back to the arrow, too, and the blood that oozed from the wound. Pirithous straightened, stepping back. If it weren’t for the shaft of wood sticking through the joint, she wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with him at all. Well, the arrow and the white-eyed glare he was using to search the kitchen for the source of Josh’s voice. His good hand was a fist.
“Thalia?” Josh asked.
She tore her gaze away from Pirithous and lurched for her phone. “Sorry. Sorry.” She had no idea who she was apologizing to, or what for, if she was being honest. “Josh? I’ve gotta go.”
“Sure.” Josh said, obviously beyond confused. “Yeah. Just give me a call later, I guess.”
“Uh huh,” she agreed absently. “Bye.”
Pirithous had moved toward the entryway. From the back he didn’t look nearly so bad, except for the torn cloth of his shirt, and the blood seeping from a third wound on his other shoulder. It wasn’t just some accident then. Some bow-hunter letting fly at a flash of movement in the corner of his eye. He’d been in a brawl of some kind. In the woods.
“Pirithous.” Her voice trembled, so she tried again. “Are you all right?”
“It is nothing,” he said, his back to her still. She had the distinct impression he was still searching for her supposed guest—or maybe he was looking for whoever had put that arrow into his shoulder. She couldn’t really be sure. “Once we pull the arrow, I will heal quickly, provided Apollo does not send fever into the wound.”
“Pull the—you want me to do that?”
He turned then, grimacing. “I had hoped for your help, yes. But if you are otherwise engaged...”
“What?”
“Your guest?”
“Oh!” She held up her phone before setting it back down on the counter. “No. It was just speakerphone. Like how Nikki kept talking to Alex while she was here? Only louder. I was um.” She was staring at his shoulder again. The blood. “You know, I’m a lot more worried about that arrow than explaining the magic of modern technology at the moment, if you don’t mind taking a raincheck on that one.”
“Ah,” Pirithous’s lips curved, as if he found her fixation amusing somehow. “It must be pulled straight out or it will tear the muscle more than it has already, and I cannot afford to lose more time healing than I must, even if it is not my sword arm.”
“Oh, God.” She closed her eyes and sank back down to the floor, feeling lightheaded. Pirithous shot by an arrow, and she didn’t dare take him to a hospital. This was exactly what she’d been afraid of happening. And Josh had heard—who knows what Josh had heard but it would be all over town before the weekend, and any hope she’d had that Pirithous might remain hidden would be gone. She never should have called him. But how was she supposed to know that Pirithous was going to come back? With an arrow through his shoulder, no less! When he’d left earlier, it had felt so final.
“Breathe, Thalia.” And he was beside her, stroking her hair, his voice steady. “You are safe and I will keep you so, I swear it.”
She laughed, but it sounded more like a squawk. “I’m not worried about me! I’m worried about you. And how I’m going to drag your over-muscled body out into the woods when you die in my bed from some ridiculous infection! How the hell did you get shot?”
“Centaurs,” he said. “How else?”
Centaurs. Of course it was the centaurs. Almighty God, rescue me from demonic imaginings and darkness. Fill me with the light of the Holy Spirit that I may be guarded against all snares of crafty demons. She didn’t even know if she believed in demons, but centaurs were trying to kill them. No. No, she didn’t have time to think about all of that.
First things first. He had an arrow in his shoulder, and if she couldn’t take him to the hospital, then she was going to have to do the best she could. Alex would have known exactly what to do, the insufferable boy scout, but if she called him, Nikki would start asking questions at the least, and worst case he’d show up, afraid she’d hurt herself. It was only a matter of time now, until he heard about all this, and she wasn’t about to hurry it along.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and grabbed the table, dragging herself back to her feet. “We’ve got to disinfect that. And you’re lucky that I have one more of the extra thick elbow bandages because I don’t know what else I would have been able to use. I don’t have any gauze.”
“Any cloth torn into strips will do for a bandage.”
She glared at him. “Any cloth absolutely will not do. It didn’t go through and come out the other side, did it?”
“The bow was not that strong, though the arrow may have lodged in the bone.”
She noticed for the first time how his arm hung dead and bit her lip. If he’d done serious damage, she’d never know. Really, he needed an x-ray. But how the hell was she going to get him one of those? Even if she’d had the money to pay cash, there would be paperwork. He didn’t even have a last name, as far as she could tell. To say nothing of the immigration status issues they really couldn’t afford. He probably couldn’t even prove he’d ever existed, never mind provide a passport or any other kind of legal identification. And in this town, it would only take one person gossiping in the wrong place to blow his cover. No, the hospital was completely out of the question.
“I would not ask this of you if there were another way.” His eyes had darkened again, the humor leaving his face.
She let out a shaky laugh. “I wouldn’t be agreeing to do it if there were another way.”
He smiled. “Good girl.”
“Well you don’t have to be patronizing about it.” But if he was smiling, it couldn’t be that bad. For that matter, if he was teasing her, he couldn’t be in that much pain, and if he wasn’t hurting then it shouldn’t be anything too serious. She jerked her head toward the hall and he followed her. “Let’s do this in the bathroom, I guess. I hope I have enough hydrogen peroxide, or else you’re going to wish you’d done this yourself in the woods, because rubbing alcohol burns like hell.”
“You would not waste good wine, I hope.”
“No, but I’ll give you a whole bottle to drink when I’m done.” She waved him to a seat on the toilet, then chewed the inside of her cheek. There was no way she was going to be able to pull it straight out with him sitting down. “I’m going to need you to lie down, aren’t I?”
He started to laugh, then winced. “It might be best.”
“All right.” She grabbed a thick towel and threw it down on the tile as a relatively clean surface, then grabbed another, in case he started bleeding hard after she pulled the arrow out. God help her, she had no idea what she was doing. Her hands shook when he stretched out on the floor, so she rolled her shoulders and took a couple of deep breaths.
“Sit on my chest,” he said. “It will keep me still.”
“I should get scissors or something. To cut your shirt—”
“Thalia.” He grabbed the hem of her shirt before she could turn from him. “Pull it out. Once it is out, my body will heal, but it must be removed and it must be removed now.”
She nodded, but her heart raced and she swallowed hard against something that felt suspiciously like a sob. She was not going to start crying like a child. She wasn’t hurt. He was. And he needed her help, not some ridiculous, useless crybaby.
She straddled his chest, and gripped the arrow as near to the wound as she could. The shaft was slick with blood, and his shirt was stained wine-dark.
“Just pull straight up,” he said. “Clean and quick.”
She adjusted her hold and pulled. The arrow twisted just slightly and he hissed.
“Shit. I’m sorry.” She didn’t dare stop or she’d never start again, and the arrow tore free.
Pirithous exhaled heavily beneath her, his eyes closing. “Thank you.”
“You’re going to hate me in a minute.” She tossed the arrow into the sink and pressed the hand towel over the wound. “Hold that there, and try to apply constant pressure. I know it’s a weird angle but I really need to get the scissors now so we can get this shirt off you and out of the way.”
His hand covered hers, pressing down and she slipped free, running for the scissors in the kitchen drawer. She nearly dropped them in her hurry to get back, but then she was slicing the fabric free. It was Alex’s shirt, not one of the new ones she’d bought. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice it was gone if he hadn’t cared enough about it to take it with him when he moved to the city.
She peeled it back carefully around Pirithous’s wound and picked what threads she could see out of it. Please God, let there not be anything stuck inside him.
“Okay,” she said, hydrogen peroxide in hand. “This is going to sting, and foam, and feel really weird, but it will kill any germs and hopefully keep it from getting infected. Are you ready?”
He murmured something she didn’t understand, then opened his eyes to meet hers. “Sit on my chest again. If it will hurt that much, I will need the reminder.”
“I should have boiled some water or something to rinse this stuff away when I was done.” She should have boiled the towel she’d pressed into his bleeding shoulder, too, while she was at it. “I’m sorry, Pirithous. I’m really not the best person for first aid.”
He gripped her ankle when she had settled on his chest, squeezing gently. “You’ve done well, Thalia. But I will be grateful for the wine.”
“Okay. Here goes.” She bit her lip and poured.
Pirithous growled, his jaw setting and his hand tightening around her ankle. The hydrogen peroxide bubbled and spat. She waited for it to stop and then splashed him with it again. He winced, but made no noise the second time, and when it was done foaming, she slid back and then stood.
“Sit up and we’ll let it drain for a minute before I put the pad on. I’ll have to go into town for more tonight. Honestly, you probably need stitches for something like this. But maybe if I get some superglue, too...”
He sat up carefully, leaning against the bathtub. “It will wait until morning when I can go with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m perfectly capable of making a quick run to the store by myself.”
He grabbed her arm, his expression dark. “Thalia, they will hunt you. In the chariot you are safe enough, but they will follow, and there are woods all the way to the edge of your city. In the dark, they will feel secure enough to leave them. You will not be safe in the open when you leave the chariot and walk to the market building. If you must go alone, wait for daylight.”
She sighed and opened her mouth to argue, but the arrow caught her eye, blood stained and crude. The stone tip on its head was small, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous. Centaurs. If they could hurt Pirithous, a man who could bend steel with his bare hands, she didn’t stand a chance against them, self-defense classes or not.
“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll wait until morning. But I swear to God, if you run off on me again like you did today, I’m going to kill you myself.”
His eyes narrowed. “You did not seem terribly lonely in my absence.”
“It was a phone call, Pirithous. And how was I supposed to know you were coming back?” she demanded, all of her irritation rising back to the surface. “You can’t keep disappearing every time we have any kind of disagreement and expect me to hang around waiting for you to show back up again if it suits you! The way you left this morning—it isn’t any of your business anyway, what I do or who I talk to.”
“But where I go and when I leave and if I mean to return is your business?”
“I think I have a right to know if I’m feeding you dinner or not.”
“Is that what you meant to do with your... phone? Feed him dinner?”
“Josh Andrews is an old friend of mine from high school, and if I want to have dinner with him or go have drinks at the bar, I don’t see why you should care.”
His gaze sharpened, and he climbed to his feet, looking suddenly dangerous, between all the blood smeared on his chest, and the white fire in his eyes. Thalia took a step back and hit the sink behind her. Pirithous followed, pressing her back.
“And will this Josh Andrews be traveling with you to Virginia?”
The question was so absurd she laughed, in spite of his glare. “He’s so afraid of my brother he won’t even kiss me, Pirithous. I don’t think you have to worry about me running off with him.”
His good arm blocked her from sliding away to the door, and his eyes still burned. “But you mean to run off, all the same.”
She studied his face, ignoring the glow in his eyes for the lines of pain that fanned from them. The bridge of his nose had crusted with blood where he’d been cut by something else. A sword or another arrow. She sighed. He was covered in dirt and sweat and blood, and all he cared about was her. Keeping her safe. Keeping her.
“We should get you washed up before I put this on you, especially if I can’t go get more bandages or the superglue until tomorrow.”
“Thalia—”
“Why are you allowed to run off every other hour, without so much as a goodbye, but I’m not allowed to have plans for my life outside of taking care of you? Did you think I’ve just been hanging around here waiting for you to show up, praying to find some time-traveling Greek king on the side of the road?”
He let out a breath, dropping his forehead to hers and bringing his hand to her face. She closed her eyes at the caress of his fingers, her stomach twisting. How could she ever have thought Josh Andrews would make her forget this? Even for half a minute. Even with the help of all the beer in all the bars.
“Perhaps you were not waiting for me, Thalia,” he murmured. “But I begin to think that I was waiting for you.”
She kissed him then, because if she let him keep talking that way, it was only going to make all of it hurt so much worse.