East of Ecstasy (Hearts of the Anemo)

  “Anything you offer will be perfect,” he said in that same seriousness. The words were almost weighted with a significance Anna didn’t understand. And was probably imagining.

  Anna made quick work of heating up chili and cornbread from the night before for both of them. Before long, they sat together at the table over their late lunch. They hardly talked—because Devlin ate like a man who’d missed way too many meals and didn’t know when he might get his next. There wasn’t anything impolite about his table manners, exactly, besides the fact that he ate with an air of desperation that made her heart beat harder and her throat go tight.

  The possibility that he really was desperate—and for food, of all things… He was a god—how could that even be possible?

  Not wanting to make him uncomfortable, Anna dug into her own meal, sneaking a quick peek across the table every so often. “How ’bout some more?” she said when he cleaned his bowl. “There’s really only enough for one serving left, anyway. You might as well finish it.” She popped a piece of cornbread into her mouth, not wanting to do anything to reveal just how apparent his hunger was.

  He tilted his head and studied her before giving a single nod. When she reached for his bowl, she pretended not to notice the slight backward jerk of his body, as if…as if he feared her.

  “Do you have a favorite food?” she asked as she fixed him another helping.

  “I’m not picky,” he said in a low voice.

  “I’m not picky either, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t kill for a plate of lobster ravioli in a rose cream sauce.” She smiled over her shoulder and found him watching her intently. Heat lanced through her body—and made her realize he was the only man besides her father or Evan who had sat at that table since she’d come back home to take care of her dad. She didn’t date often, and when she did, she didn’t bring them home. But, God, it was really nice to be taking care of a man in her own space.

  An ironic thought given that her relationship with her father had pretty much devolved entirely into one of caregiving. But this…this was different.

  “Well,” he said, shifting and crossing his arms in what seemed to her to be a defensive posture he adopted almost reflexively. “Um, there’s this thing called shepherd’s pie.”

  Anna smiled. She’d had no idea what kind of a food a god might hold as his favorite, and yet his choice was so simple, so normal, something she liked herself.

  “What?” he asked, narrowing his gaze at her good humor.

  “Nothing. I like it, too,” she said, bringing his refilled bowl back to the table.

  “Thank you,” he said gruffly.

  “When was the last time you had shepherd’s pie?” she asked, her mind mentally running through her cupboards to determine if she had everything she’d need to make it. And how perfect that it was something her father would like, too.

  Devlin paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth. For a moment, his gaze went distant, and then he shook his head and continued eating.

  “Well?” Anna asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Bracing her elbows on the table, Anna laced her fingers together and stared at him. “Sure I do.” When he didn’t answer right away, she took a drink of her water.

  “Over a century ago,” he murmured around a bite.

  Anna choked on her water. Setting the glass down, she pressed a napkin to her mouth until she managed to clear most of the water from her windpipe. With watery eyes, she peered across the table to find Devlin staring at her. A century? Holy crap, it shouldn’t have surprised her given everything else she’d learned about him, but it did. She grabbed hold of the table’s edge to anchor herself to the real world.

  “Told you,” he said, emptying his second bowl and polishing off his third piece of cornbread.

  “You did,” she said, drying her eyes. “And, of course, now I’m curious about how old you are.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-nine,” she said.

  “Hmm.” Carefully, he collected his dishes into a pile as if he meant to carry them to the sink.

  Anna rose. “I’ll get that.”

  “I can help.”

  “No doubt,” she said with a smile. “But you’re my guest. Right?”

  “Not that I gave you much choice.”

  Anna shrugged and reached to clear his place at the table slowly, not wanting to startle him as she always seemed to do.

  He grasped her hand. “I thank you for the meal.”

  Such formality. “It was nothing,” she said.

  His grasp tightened. “Kindness is never nothing, Annalise. Trust me.”

  The reverence in his tone filled her chest with an aching warmth. She didn’t even mind his use of her full name—which had always struck her as an old lady’s name—because he pronounced it as if his tongue were caressing each of the syllables. She blinked away the ridiculous thought and replaced it with a far more important one: what kind of an existence did he lead if a simple meal represented extraordinary kindness? “You’re welcome,” she managed.

  Suddenly, she no longer just grudgingly accepted his presence here—even though he was right, he hadn’t given her a choice. Instead, she was almost surprised to find that she was glad he was here. Because, as head-spinning as everything about him was, how was she going to go forward in a world where she knew he existed but would never see him again? If he didn’t have much time to find out what her paintings meant, that meant…she didn’t have much time with him, either.

  The realization settled on her shoulders like an anvil. Quietly, mechanically, she cleared the table and moved everything to the sink.

  As she went to turn on the faucet, Devlin rose. “Wait,” he said, cocking his head as if listening to something.

  Anna braced her hands against the counter. “What?” she asked, not hearing anything out of the ordinary.

  As if tracking the sound, Devlin crossed the kitchen and stepped through the arch to the living room.

  “Devlin!” she whispered loudly. God, please let Dad be asleep. He was. “My father,” she mouthed, waving Devlin back toward the kitchen.

  Frowning, Devlin pressed one finger over his lips as if to shush her. Anna would’ve rolled her eyes, except he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he focused on the television.

  Peeking around Devlin at her thankfully sleeping father, she tiptoed closer, nearly holding her breath from the anxiety that he’d wake up and find them standing there. Devlin was a stranger, a man, and with Anna—a trifecta of things sure to make him go ballistic.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered when she stood next to Devlin.

  He jutted his chin toward the TV.

  A weather special report had interrupted the football game. A map of the East Coast flashed onto the screen, showing a red line and a blue line making two alternate paths up the coastline. Both originated from a rotating symbol—a tropical storm on the verge of hurricane force. The blue line had the storm making landfall in the Carolinas. The red line had the storm making landfall at the Chesapeake Bay…pretty much exactly over Jarrettsville.

  As this news sank in, Anna became as riveted by the meteorologist’s analysis as Devlin, especially as he predicted that storm would be a serious hurricane by the time it hit land toward midweek.

  “As the fifth storm of this year’s hurricane season,” the forecaster explained, “an ‘E’ name was selected, but this is the first time Eurus has ever been used in the history of recorded storms. And it’s an interesting choice, because Eurus was an Anemoi, a wind god the Greeks believe controlled the east wind. And I’d say they picked an appropriate name given Eurus’s definite collision course with the East Coast…”

  Eurus was a Greek wind god… Prickles broke out over Anna’s skin. Questions on the tip of her tongue, she turned to Devlin—and her stomach dropped to the floor.

  Sparks flickered all around him, his eyes blazed with what she could only call black light, and his body
seemed to fade in and out before her eyes.

  “Devlin?” she gasped. Clearly, the storm’s name wasn’t a coincidence. And this wasn’t any usual storm.

  Chapter Eight

  Devlin was a powder keg ready to blow. His inability to get his shit together had given Eurus a wide-open door to build this storm. And now that it was underway, they’d be hard-pressed to overcome what his father had started. Not as long as he wore that damn ring. Now, more people would die and more of nature would be decimated—and it was all Devlin’s fault. Again.

  He had just enough presence of mind to hear Anna gasp his name before he shifted into the elements and removed himself to the backyard.

  As far as he could make it before he lost all control.

  Fire and electricity exploded out all around him, the legacy of the Phlegethon. Steam smoldered off the rain-saturated ground creating a cloud of fire and smoke with its creator at the center.

  Fight it, Devlin. Fight it, came Aeolus’s voice from deep in his memory—beyond the rage, beyond the hate, beyond the chaos. Control it.

  But in that moment, there wasn’t enough of the god named Devlin present to heed his grandfather’s words. Devlin was rage. Devlin embraced the hate. Devlin danced in the destruction of the chaos.

  Fucking Eurus.

  As if the errant thought had conjured the god himself, Devlin heard another voice, thin and distant.

  Give in. Join me. It is your birthright…

  The summons spoke to the darkest parts of the rain god’s psyche. Taunted. Beckoned. Seduced.

  A scream. Another. The sound tugged at Devon’s consciousness until he felt nearly ripped down the center.

  Devlin suddenly saw himself as if in the middle of a long hall. On one end, darkness and damnation. On the other, light and salvation. The alluring words came from the darkness. The screams from the light.

  What sense did that make?

  More screams.

  His consciousness drifted toward the light, ravaged as it was by fire and smoke.

  A woman’s voice? Calling his name? But who?

  Never knew his mother. Had no sisters. He hadn’t even consorted with a female in more than century. Then…

  “Devlin!”

  The voice was familiar, urgent, important. And he understood none of it.

  “Devlin, make it stop! You can do it!”

  The command pulled him to the end of the tunnel, just shy of the light.

  “If I can do it, you can do it. Now, Devlin! Before the house catches!”

  Like a hook around his body, the words yanked him into the human realm and into corporeal form. Fire ravaged the grass in every direction around him, just licking at the porch on the back of the house. Two small trees near him were totally engulfed.

  With a great gasp of breath, Devlin regained some semblance of his senses. Heat seared his skin. Thick smoke choked his lungs. The roar of the flames and screams of the woman—

  Annalise.

  Struggling to focus, Devlin finally found her hiding behind her Jeep, using the cage of steel and glass as a shield. Against him.

  They locked eyes across the fire, and the relief that flooded her strange gray gaze tugged at something inside him. Something that wanted to please, to help, to do the right thing.

  “Devlin, please! Whatever this is, you have to control it!” she yelled.

  Yes.

  Rain.

  Before the thought was even fully formed, the heavens ripped open and poured a deluge to the earth, dousing the fires, but having no impact on the bolts of electricity lashing out here and there.

  For a moment, he was back inside the bowels of the Rock of Gibraltar, training with his grandfather to master this terrible power. The training exercises. Shaking with exertion both physical and mental, Devlin visualized the power as a great beast he controlled. He focused on the sound of his breathing to clear his mind and recall the beast to the cage inside Devlin’s heart.

  But it was not the sound of his own breathing that gave him the clarity he needed.

  It was Anna’s. Her ragged, rasping breaths as she choked on her fear and the smoke. The triple-timing beat of her heart. The repeated whispers of his name from her mouth, like a litany. A prayer. A spell.

  The electricity boomeranged back inside him from every angle.

  The shock of the impact held him upright for a long moment, and then Devlin hit the ground like a ton of bricks.

  On his back in the middle of a great circle of fire-ravaged grass, Devlin stared unblinkingly into the gray sky.

  “Devlin?” Crunching footsteps approached him. “Devlin?” came Anna’s shaky voice again.

  Anna.

  “Oh, God,” she said, coughing. “Oh, God.”

  He tried to force a swallow, but his throat was scorched dry. Slowly, he parted his lips, and he would’ve thought he’d attempted to lift Mount Olympus it took so much effort. The droplets of cool rain that slipped over his lips and onto his tongue were life itself.

  Soothing warmth pressed against his fingers. “Devlin?” Anna asked from his side. “Is it over?”

  The question echoed in his mind, unleashing waves of desperate foreboding.

  No, Anna, he wanted to say. It’s only just beginning. Eurus’s storm proved that. Its name was no coincidence—it was his father’s twisted sense of humor at play. Now Devlin knew why his father hadn’t hunted and found him in the two days since the battle that ended Boreas’s life. Because he was already making his next move.

  And here Devlin thought he’d hidden well.

  But he couldn’t say any of this to Anna, because the great explosion of his new powers had drained his divine energy so dangerously low that Devlin’s soul struggled to remain attached to his physical form.

  Warm, smooth heat moved up his bare arm. Over his biceps. Onto his shoulder. “Devlin?” came a voice filled with shock and grief.

  But he couldn’t focus on that one, couldn’t make sense of it. Because he was fading away.

  In his final moment of consciousness, he did something he hated doing. He asked for help. He sent the summons, but had no idea whether anyone would respond to a request from the second-most-reviled god of the entire pantheon of the Anemoi.

  …

  Anna scrambled closer to Devlin as his eyes rolled back in his head. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God! “Don’t be dead,” she whispered, her heart pounding so hard and so fast she was almost light-headed.

  Or maybe that was from nearly being burned alive.

  “Devlin?” she whispered, reaching a shaking hand to touch his rain-spattered face. Though his wet skin was covered in smudges of black soot and his clothing hung in ragged tatters on his lean frame, his temperature felt normal to the touch. She dragged her fingers to his throat and pressed two into the soft spot below his jaw. “Come on,” she said. “Please.” Nothing.

  With a whimper, she grabbed his closest wrist and felt for a— There! A heartbeat. Oh, thank God.

  Jesus, what the hell had just happened?

  Anna couldn’t begin to imagine, but she had no time to figure it out now anyway. He might be alive, but he wasn’t well. And he needed her. He needed help.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, dashing across the puddles already forming here and there on the burned grass and up the charred wood of the back steps. She grabbed the handle on the screen door and hissed. It was hot as hell, something she probably should’ve guessed given how heat-warped the molded design of the door itself was.

  Daddy! Had the fire gotten into the house? As she tugged out the hem of her shirt to wrap her stinging fingers in the soft cotton, her gaze surveyed the back of the house. The white aluminum siding had melted from the heat, but everything about the structure itself appeared intact.

  Using her shirt like a hot pad, Anna tried the handle again.

  She darted inside, scooped her phone from the charging station on the kitchen counter, and beelined to the living room. She had to choke back the stream of questions and
reassurances sitting on the tip of her tongue. Somehow her father had slept through the catastrophe in the backyard.

  Thank goodness for small favors. No doubt this would’ve turned his anxiety about venturing outside into a full-blown phobia.

  Quietly backtracking, she debated what to do and settled on dialing 911. Who knew if human doctors could help Devlin, but what other choice did she have? She rushed outside and into the backyard. The scene stole her breath anew. It was like a bomb had exploded and Devlin was ground zero. How the hell was she going to explain this?

  “9-1-1, what is your emergency?” answered the operator.

  “My friend is unconscious. He…he…” A perfect explanation clicked into place. “He was struck by lightning and then the yard caught on fire,” she said loudly, trying to be heard over the pouring rain. She knelt beside him again as the dispatcher walked her through a series of questions about Devlin’s condition, their location, and what kind of help they needed. Anna assured the woman she didn’t need to stay on the line now that help was on the way.

  Despite her soul-deep yearning for adventure in the big city, Anna had probably never been more grateful in her whole life that she lived in a small town. Mere minutes passed before she heard the distant wail of sirens. “Hang on, Devlin,” she said, gently holding his hand. Lying there so still, he appeared younger, more at ease, and a helluva lot more vulnerable. It squeezed Anna’s heart. “Don’t you dare die,” she said as a single stinging tear leaked from each eye and mixed with the rain on her cheeks. He was her sole connection to something so magical, so special, and so much bigger than herself.

  She wasn’t ready to lose that. She wasn’t ready to lose him.

  Before more chaos erupted here, she had to make another call. She speed-dialed Evan, feeling terrible for needing his help so soon again, and gave him a bare-bones explanation of what’d happened. He offered to come take care of her father before she’d even asked.