The house was no less beautiful than the apartment next door, but unlike Eris, who kept hers tidy, welcoming and bright, Mattis hadn’t dusted since he moved in. Most of his belongings were still in boxes, and there was a faint aroma of damp, dirt, alcohol, vomit, sex, and magic.
I had to dodge seven poisoned darts shot through the next wall—Cas waved them away—then a good old slicing hexagonal hex, which imprisoned me in a sphere. I backflipped twice in a row and the spell still got some of myhair.
Cas smirked, leaning against the wall as he observed me.
“I will murder you,” I informed him, preparing for a third jump because the bloody hexagon was still keeping me locked inside it.
“You remember you have magic, right?” he asked casually while I was in the air.
Fuck.
I was an idiot.
I stared at the closest of the points marking the trap, and willed it to explode. It instantly did, and the invisible wall caging me in dropped.
“Couldn’t you have reminded mesooner?” I groused as we walked into what appeared to be a storage room. “Or, I don’t know, undone the hex yourself?”
“What would have happened to you if you’d taken that hex full-on?” he asked.
I blinked. In truth, probably not much, but he wasn’t supposed to know that. “How?—”
“You’re Artemis. The day a bargain basement mage manages to harm you is the day the gods have died.”
I bristled. “Yeah, well, my clothes, my hair, and mydogaren’t ironskin.”
“Ironskin,” he repeated. “An old word. Odd, too. It’s not iron that makes you indestructible.”
“What is it, then, if you know so much, oh wise amnesiac?” I hated how he clearly knew so much and yet pretended to be completely ignorant. Mostly because everyone else seemed to fall for his bullshit.
“Ichor. That’s what runs through your veins and makes it impossible for anything crafted, made or imagined by man to affect you. Gods can only be harmed by godly weapons. Can you feel anything?”
At first I wondered if he was asking a philosophical question about divine inner powers, but then I remembered we were in the overfull, untidy room for a reason. I made myself focus, and followed the familiar feel and scent of Kleos’s distinctive energy—sea and sunshine—to a drawer in a desk.
I sighed, spotting a handful of crystals. “That’s all there is here. I mean, everything in this room is illegal, and enough to lock him away under the Guard for years, but I don’t sense any more of Kleos’s crystals.”
“Hand me one. I need to familiarize myself with it.”
I did as I was bid, frowning. “Wait, you’ve met Kleos.”
He nodded. “I’m hardly familiar with her, or her magic. This will help me identify what we’re looking for next time.”
He closed his hand over it and shut his eyes for several seconds.
While he was still, not smirking or opening his mouth, it was hard not to notice how ridiculously beautiful he was.
Someone had to convince him to wear a bloody shirt.
He snorted. “Odin’s tits, your friend’s boring. All sunshine, happiness, and rainbows.”
I should be annoyed, but I remembered thinking the exact same thing when we first met. Kleos had always been so fuckingperfect.
Getting to know her allowed me to see more under the surface, but she was inherently so very good.
“I used to think the same thing. Then one day she humiliated a bunch of kids for bullying me. Over the years, I’ve seen her do things that verge on torture. She knows how to hurt—to be cruel. She chooses not to.” After a moment, I added, “Most of the time.”
“I can respect that.” He handed me the crystals, watching me put them in my pocket. “You should leave them, you know.”
I frowned. “What?”
