CHAPTER
3
MY EYES had to be deceiving me, like some kind of twisted-off-its-ass wish fulfillment or something. The hair was the wrong color. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what color hair this girl had. Light brown? Blonde? Pale blonde? All the shades rolled into one? And her nose was too small, but this girl, she looked…
I couldn’t even bring myself to finish that train-wreck of a thought.
Her eyes, a shade of deep denim that was familiar in a nagging sort of way, were fixed on mine. When she didn’t answer my question, I decided to take a more touchy-feely kind of approach. My hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist.
I waited for something—a zap, a fissure of power signaling what she was.
Nothing.
Her eyes widened, almost consuming her face, and there was a quality of innocence to her suddenly wary gaze that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“W-what are you doing?” She pulled on her arm, but she didn’t get very far.
Her question fell to the side. I was focused on trying to puzzle out what the hell she was and why in the hell I was here.
There’d been no awareness of her when I’d entered the stairwell—late, according to the schedule I had. I hadn’t even expected to find the mysterious J.B. after this class. Shit, I hadn’t even felt her until I’d zipped up the stairs, too fast for any human to track, and startled her. She was definitely not a pure or a half, because I would’ve sensed that. So she wasn’t hiding out in the mortal world, like some of them had managed to do in the past. But when I’d straightened and had seen her face, I knew—I just knew this had to be the person Apollo had sent me to find, and her initials had confirmed it.
There was nothing special that jumped from her skin to mine—no awareness of anything that would make her unique. She felt mortal, but she couldn’t be, because there’d be no reason Apollo would want me to guard a mortal college chick. Unless this was another warped form of punishment, and hell, that actually wouldn’t surprise me.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
Her voice broke through my thoughts. My gaze dropped to where my fingers curled around her slender wrist. The skin around my hand was turning white. Shit—I was hurting her. I dropped my hold as if her skin had scalded mine. Surprise flitted through me, but I had no idea if it was real or just wishful thinking that I hadn’t truly intended to harm her.
Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure what my intentions were anymore.
“What are you?” she asked, her nose scrunching as she spoke. “Other than a heart-stopping hot guy with obvious boundary issues and problems with anger management?”
I blinked at her. She thought I was a heart-stopping hot guy? Well, of course she did.
“God. Just my luck,” she went on, rubbing the skin around her wrist and eyeing me with more than just a hint of distrust. “Why do all the hot ones have to be such freaking D-bags?” She pushed up to her feet. Her eyes met mine as she stepped to the side, pressing against the wall. “What do you want?”
Seth, what do you want? Those words from the past were accompanied by angry, whiskey-colored brown eyes. I drew back so fast I was surprised I hadn’t given myself whiplash.
“You know what? I don’t want to know. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t. I’m just going to get my bag and keep on going. Okay? All right, sounds good to me.” She edged down the wall. “This is me leaving.”
An odd sense of déjà vu washed over me as she pushed past me—literally knocked her shoulder into mine—and snatched up her bag.
“Crazy asses,” she muttered under her breath. “I am a weirdo magnet.”
I turned as she hurried down the steps, away from me like I was the maniac people didn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And well, that wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Some would probably prefer to come face to face with a harpy instead of me.
At a set of doors, she stopped to look over her shoulder, and again, I was struck by the familiarity of those deep, dark-blue eyes, of the curve of a stubborn jaw and chin, and bow-shaped, pouty lips. From my vantage point, I could really see her now. If that oversized sweater weren’t hiding her ass, I bet it would match her heart-shaped face.
It was like taking two people I knew and mixing them together to form a brand-new person, and that was entirely unnerving.
Then she was gone, slipping out the doors, and I was left standing on the landing like a dickhead.
Seth, what do you want?
Everything and anything and nothing at all?
Yeah, that sounded about right. My hands tightened into fists. Closing my eyes, I tried to center myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been here before, but with someone else.
A crack of loud thunder from outside reverberated through the stairwell and echoed inside my skull. A storm was brewing, matching the warring emotions inside me.
What do you want?
My eyes flew open and the stairwell was tinted in amber. No, fuck no. I staggered back against the wall. It didn’t make sense, but godsdammit I had been here before.
Dammit.
I was going to commit god-slaughter on Apollo.