Relief was sweeter than any wine. He closed his eyes, breathed her in. Reveled in the fact she was whole, alive, not a single hair on her head out of place. And that she was here. With him. Waiting for him to come out of his nightmare.
He eased back, but he didn’t let go of her. Wasn’t ready yet. His gaze searched her face for answers. “How?” He drew away just enough so he could look down her body, so he could see for himself that she wasn’t injured. Dressed in nothing but one of his long-sleeved T-shirts, the hem hitting mid-thigh to show off her shapely legs, she didn’t just look healthy, she looked perfect. His gaze lifted back to her face. “What happened? The last thing I remember is seeing you bloody and hurt in the snow.”
“I wasn’t hurt.” She slid her hands to his forearms, over the Argonaut markings he’d been born with. “That wasn’t my blood. It was Sappheire’s.”
“Sappheire?” His brow wrinkled. “Who the hell is Sappheire?”
“The Siren you healed. She’s upstairs. In my old room. Asleep.”
A Siren was in his hold? He tuned into his senses. Didn’t pick up a thing. If a Siren was close, he should know. He should be flipping out already.
Daphne’s soft fingers landed on his jaw, tugging his face back toward hers. “Ari, you’re not crazy. It’s a curse. It’s not your fault.”
She was talking about his blackouts. His psychosis. Holy gods, she’d seen it. He let go of her and stepped back, for the first time realizing the kind of horror she must have witnessed.
“I know.” He turned toward the fire, unable to face her. “It’s the soul mate curse. Whenever I sense Sirens I can’t stop myself. The need for revenge is too strong. I can’t control it. I didn’t want you to see that. I didn’t—”
She stepped in front of him. “No, it’s not the soul mate curse. It has nothing to do with your soul mate’s death. If it did, you wouldn’t have healed Sappheire. You’d be going after her now. And look at you, you aren’t. There’s not a crazed thing about you.”
There wasn’t. He felt as in control as ever. But that just meant his curse was growing more unpredictable, and unpredictable meant even more deadly. “I remember sensing them. I remember the rage and—”
“They weren’t Sirens.”
“They were Sirens. I was there. I saw them.” He opened his eyes and stared down at her, ready to tell her to stop being so na?ve, but the excitement in her gemlike eyes halted his words.
“Come here.” She grasped his hand and pulled him around to her books, then drew him to the floor. “They weren’t regular Sirens.”
Her grip was strong, and he was still wrecked from his episode. He let her tug him to the floor. She grasped a book from her stack and handed it to him.
“Look here.” She pointed toward a passage on the page. “They looked like Sirens. When they showed up in those woods, I thought they were. But then I realized they were different.”
Ari glanced down at the book. A drawing of a female warrior dressed in leather breastplates, armbands, and boots, holding a weapon graced the page. “Different how?”
“At first it was the look in their eyes. There was a darkness there I’d never seen before on a Siren. But then I looked closer.” She flipped the page. Another drawing of yet another female warrior filled the page. She was dressed the same as the first, except this one wore a sleeveless tunic. “It’s subtle, but if you look closely...” She pointed toward the marking on the female’s right bicep, flipped back to the first drawing. No marking there. She turned the page again. “Two S’s in the shape of snakes, head to tail. Those females had this marking.”
Ari was more confused than ever. “If they weren’t Sirens, what were they?”
“I think they were the Sirenum Scorpoli. Zeus’s secret band of Sirens. The ones he culls from the Siren Order to do his dirty work.”
“That’s no different from any regular Siren.”
“It is different. The Sirens are tasked with policing otherworldy creatures in the human realm. Zeus’s own private army. He can’t control the Argonauts and what you do, but he can control the Sirens. The Sirens, however, are headed by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, so he can’t use them in all the ways he wants. Enter the Sirenum Scorpoli. He can do what he wants with them, can command them to carry out any plot he deems worthy. And no one can stand in his way. Not Athena, not the Argonauts, and especially not his wife.”
“What does Hera have to do with this?”
“Everything, I think.” Daphne paged through the book in his hands until she came to a chapter on the gods, specifically a passage about Hera, Zeus’s wife. “‘And the Fates decreed,’” she read aloud, “‘that no person—mortal or immortal—shall be subjected to more than one curse by any god at any time.’”