“Can you force my friends to find the book you want?”
He tipped the bottle and swallowed before putting it down and running his thumb through the condensation on the glass. “I could force them to serve me, yes. I could bind them to me, and they would not be able to say no to anything I told them to do.”
Abbi frowned. “I don’t like that.”
“I didn’t bind them. Not in that way. We entered an agreement, one which,” and this he sent my way, “Brogan and Lula can end at any time they wish. You remember that, don’t you?”
I did. Of course I did. I was the one who had set that term. But Abbi was watching me like I was a pot about to boil over. I nodded.
“It’s true. We can end our agreement at any time.”
“So,” Cupid asked, “is this when you tell me you want to end our agreement?”
Unlike the seer, nothing about the place changed. The music was still the music, Bobby Darin looking for his dream lover so he didn’t have to be alone. The patrons were still the patrons, bikers laughing and taking food outside to eat in the grassy areas, wait staff and cooks shifting it into high gear to make sure everyone was taken care of.
Time was still time, ticking ever forward.
Lu’s hand slipped into mine under the table, and I knew her fear. If we backed out of our agreement now, would that end me being here, solid, real, alive beside her? Would he snap his fingers and take away what I’d only now begun to enjoy? Would he make me a spirit again?
“You have put your trust in me,” Cupid said. “I’ve given my word and held to it. Have I done anything to make you doubt me? Have I fallen short of my promises? How have I lost your trust?”
He hadn’t. Cupid had been straight with us from the beginning. He wanted us to search for the spell book. He wanted us to find a few people or help a few people connect, people like Abbi and Hado. People like one very annoying werewolf ghost named Valentine, who we’d left at a Crossroads in Missouri. People like a clever computer repair woman and a sunny-faced mechanic in McLean, Illinois.
For a god he had been…kind. Kind to us. Kind, even to Valentine, and now, Abbi.
That wasn’t something we were used to.
Our other dealings with gods had been brief and brutal.
“The deal stands,” I said, and Lu’s hand squeezed mine once, in approval. “It isn’t what you’ve done. As of this moment, I have no quarrel with you. The seer seems to think otherwise. That you will betray us. Deceive us. Kill us.”
Abbi made a small sound, and Hado draped his big arm around her.
Cupid’s thumb traced the side of the bottle again. “Euterpe is a muse.”
Lu leaned forward. “She met him in visions. Tried to tell him the future.”
Cupid considered that for a moment. “She isn’t a seer in the traditional sense, I suppose. But she knows the music of the universe, can pluck the strings of the future. She has instruments, reeds and brass and bone and skin that carry her power. In them, in her age, in her many selves, she can see possibilities. Some of those possibilities are the future. Or can be the future. She draws the universe’s music through mortals, inspires them to hear it, to feel it.
“And when mortals feel that connection…they change the world. Change the future. So yes, in her way, she knows the future, because she plays it through every living thing, and hears it singing in every moment, every decision, every heartbeat.
“Did she tell you what she wanted?” he asked.
“Our services,” I said. “To find something stolen from her.”
His frown was quick, then gone. “What thing?”
Here it was. The choice to really trust him. And oddly, a memory flashed before my eyes. Cupid knelt in the middle of a dusty road, a small green river snaking past him. The air was heavy, hot at that time of day. Lu was beside me, and our hands, for the first time in almost a hundred years, were clasped skin-to-skin.
Lorde, our sweet dog who had thrown herself in front of a gunman to save Lu, wagged her tail at Cupid, unafraid. She let him pet her. She let him heal her.
He had done those things before settling the deal with us, fed her treats before we’d come to any agreement to work with him.
Kindness.
Not something I’d expect from a being as old as him. Certainly not something I’d expect him to extend to us or our dog. If I had to trust a god, he might be the one who deserved it.
“She didn’t say what it was,” I said. “Just that the god—you—had it. With it, you would destroy the world and use it against decent people. Against a decent world.”
