Enraptured by Elisabeth Naughton
For the Running Girls:
Connie, Stephani, and Sara.
Because you kick my butt into gear and make me run even when I don’t want to, Because you listen to me grumble about characters and plots and all things writing related while we’re on those runs, And because you’re awesome friends who not only love me, but the crazy worlds I create.
For all these reasons and so many more too numerous to list, You girls totally rock!
So mighty is the hidden power of truth…
For the one achieved high heaven,
And the other…on sounding wings hovered a conqueror in the fluent air.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses 4
Chapter 1
Death growls, devil horns, and a mosh pit. Not Orpheus’s idea of a good time. Not by a long shot.
As he maneuvered through the metalheads in the crowd of outdoor concertgoers banging to the beat of the pounding bass, he couldn’t help but be slightly amused by their stupidity. They had no idea what they were opening themselves up to with the satanic lyrics and black-magic worship. But Orpheus did.
Boy, did he ever.
He glanced around the crowd again, searching for the familiar darkness he knew was hovering somewhere close. His urgency ratchetted up about ten notches. After tracking her for the last three months, he’d finally found her at this outdoor concert in western Washington. What she was doing with a bunch of headbangers, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t about to lose her. Not to the chase, and definitely not to them.
A blur of black crossed his line of sight four people over, and his adrenaline amped. He pushed past a man wearing leather pants and a dog collar.
Beer sloshed over the man’s T-shirt. He turned and glared Orpheus’s way. “Hey, dickhead, watch it!”
Normally Orpheus would be right up in the guy’s face, but not tonight. Tonight he had more important matters to deal with. He scanned the crowd again, searching for her. She was petite, and dressed all in black with that long dark hair, not easy to find, but he caught sight of her again when she looked back to see if he was still following. The whites of her eyes all but glowed in the darkness, and the recognition and fear on her pale face told him she knew just what he was.
Smart girl to run. In any other situation, that might amuse him. But he’d had it with playing cat and mouse.
She picked up her pace, maneuvered easily through the crowd as she headed away from the stage. Orpheus wasn’t so lucky. His size kept him from weaving through the throng of people. He muscled his way past the pulsing fans, intent on not losing her.
She brushed by a woman with long blond hair. The blond turned to look after her, said something Orpheus couldn’t hear, but his target didn’t even slow. She disappeared again in the crowd. The blond, however, turned to look his way as if she sensed him. Their eyes held for the briefest of seconds.
Violet eyes. The color so startling, he faltered. Like polished amethyst. Déjà vu struck him square in the chest. He didn’t know how or where, but he’d seen this human before.
Before he thought better of it, he took in the long hair that fell to the center of her back. She wasn’t dressed outrageously, like some of the others in the crowd—no chains or dog collars, just a denim jacket that covered a fitted scoop-necked black shirt and slim black pants. But the clothes accentuated her curves in all the right places. And the knee-high black goth boots that propped her up a good four inches were sexier than hell.
She wasn’t headbanging or jumping to the beat, but she was obviously here for the show. One corner of her glossed lips curled into a wicked smirk as she studied him back. As much as he would have liked to let her look her fill, the longer he distracted himself with this human the farther away his target would get.
And yet…where the hell had he seen her before?
He turned away from the blond, scanned the crowd again. Called himself ten kinds of stupid for being distracted by a measly human. He let his senses guide him. The darkness within his target he could stomach. It was the light that repelled him. That odd light that marked her as one of Zeus’s own and told him exactly where she was located in the mass of people.
There.
His daemon surged forward. He moved to see past a couple with spiked purple hair and caught sight of the ends of her long black locks waving in the wind as she ran past the last concertgoers and dropped down over the other side of the hill.
Damn it.