“Personal reasons.”
Okay, that was weird too.
“And you’d be smart to stay away from him if you do see him,” he added in a low tone. “Far away. He’s dangerous.”
That spot on Casey’s lower back tingled again, and she lifted her chin. There was looking out for her, and then there was telling her what to do. And even though something instinctive told her she’d never see the Greek god again, right now, coming from Nick, she wasn’t wild about either.
“Yeah, Nick,” she mumbled as she turned and headed for the dressing room. “I’ll be sure to do that.”
“Theron, put me down.” Isadora’s free hand pushed against Theron’s chest, but her protest did little more than annoy him.
He wouldn’t lose his temper. The fact that he’d spent four days tracking her down was inconsequential at this point. So was the fact that he’d left his kinsmen to come after her. He would simply take her home before the Council discovered she was gone and all hell broke loose.
“Theron, I mean it,” she said again, as the door to the human skin club snapped shut behind them and he headed away from the building.
“It’s time to go home, Isadora. You’ve had your fun.”
Isadora glanced over his shoulder back toward the building with a defeated look in her eyes. “You don’t understand. I need her.”
Need her? Like hell. He was the only one she needed right now. If her father found out what she’d been up to…
He gnashed his teeth at the thought and kept walking. If it were up to him, no one would know where she’d been these last few days or what she’d been up to. The last thing he—the leader of the Argonauts and a descendent of Heracles, the greatest hero ever—needed was for his warrior brothers to know his future wife had a human-female fetish.
He cringed at the thoughts. Both “human female” and “future wife.”
Isadora squirmed in his arms again, but finally gave up with a sigh. And that was just fine with Theron. He wasn’t in the mood to play nice.
The air was cool, but Theron barely felt it. A muffled thump-thump-thump echoed from the club behind him as he walked. Quietly, Isadora said, “She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Graceful and tall. I…I didn’t expect her to be so tall.”
More frustrated by the second at Isadora’s strange behavior, Theron picked up his pace. It wasn’t until Isadora sighed again and rested her head against his chest that he remembered how inebriated she was and how tightly he must be holding her.
He loosened his grasp and forcibly gentled his voice, though even he knew it came out rough and stilted. “Isadora, you cannot just run off like this.”
“I…I know,” she breathed against him, her body growing lax in his arms. She shivered and tried to burrow closer. “I just wish…”
Her fading voice made him remember how she’d had trouble standing in the club. For the first time, he realized there hadn’t been a single glass on her table. Not even a watermark from one that had been recently cleared away. Gathering her in one arm, he reached around and felt her forehead. Her skin was cold and clammy.
His aggravation morphed to urgency. She wasn’t drunk at all. She was sick.
Skata. He had to get her back to Argolea. Like, now. “Hold on to me,” he said firmly in her ear, repositioning his arm under her legs again. “I’ll get you home.”
She closed her eyes and, after a moment of what looked like incredible pain and heartbreak, nodded in what he could tell was great reluctance. “Yes. Yes. You’re right. It’s long past time. Take me home, Theron.”
He took one step forward with her in his arms and felt the air change. It went from moist and warm to frigid in the span of a nanosecond. And he knew without looking that they were not alone.
Four daemons, beasts of the Underworld caught between mortal and god, horns sharp, teeth bared, appeared as if from thin air. One directly ahead, two to Theron’s right, one to the left. They had bodies of men, covered in leather and trench coats that flapped behind them as they moved, with hideous faces, something of a mix of lion and wolf and goat.
Isadora’s muscles relaxed in Theron’s arms. He wasn’t sure if she’d fallen asleep or if the sickness that racked her body had pulled her into unconsciousness, but at the moment he didn’t care. It was better for her if she didn’t see what they faced.
“Release the princess, Argonaut, and your life will be spared,” the daemon directly ahead announced in a raspy voice.
A humorless sound bubbled from Theron’s chest even as his mind spun with options on how to get out of this one. His kinsmen were nowhere close. He’d come looking for Isadora on his own. “Since when have daemons been known for their mercy?”