Completely Smitten (3 page)

When she looked back, the little man was still there, cursing. The arrow was stuck in the ground. He bent over and grabbed the shaft, tugging at it.

“Like those three harpies will ever know,” he was mumbling. “As if I wanted to help him in the first place. Why they assumed we’d become friends, I have no idea.”

He pulled, and the arrow finally came loose. He looked at it and frowned. Then he broke the arrow over his knee. Wisps of smoke, in the shape of red hearts, floated out of the arrow’s center, and then faded as if they never were.

“Good enough,” he said, and shoved the broken pieces of arrow back in his quiver. Then, in a blinding flash of white light, he disappeared.

Ariel rubbed her eyes. She was crouched on the damp ground, behind the rock cropping, breathing hard. Dawn’s light still filtered through the evergreen boughs, and dew still covered the grass—except in the places where her footsteps had disturbed it. Footsteps that made it look like she had been running.

But there was no little man with a cigar and wings, and there was no broken arrow that created smoky red hearts. She must have been asleep and dreaming.

Sleep-running.

That was a new one, and a bit disturbing too, especially since most of her campsites from now on would be near the river. What if she sleep-ran into the water—or over the edge of a cliff?

That was the thought that had been worrying her all day. She really wasn’t thinking about competitive swimming or torn rotator cuffs. She was wondering if the stress of the last few months had damaged her mind.

Twigs, leaves, and broken branches covered the dirt path. Even though the hiking trail had been open for a month, no one had bothered to clear the winter debris. A sign, posted at the fork, warned of slides and unstable rocks, but Ariel didn’t plan to dislodge any of them.

She was smart enough to keep an eye on her surroundings at all times. People died every year in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness Area. She didn’t plan on being one of them.

She planned to come out of this trip refreshed, her confidence in her body’s abilities renewed. The rotator cuff injury had shaken her, and the loss of the Ironman—particularly when she’d been favored to win Hawaii this year—was especially hard.

Some of the other tri-geeks, people she’d known since she started running tris in high school, told her to swim through the pain. But she had done some research on her own. If she did, she might lose the use of her arm altogether. She planned on living another seven decades, and she felt that the use of her arm was more important than being in some record book as the winner of the Hawaii Ironman.

Even if it did come with endorsements and great publicity. She hadn’t been doing triathlons for the money anyway. She had been doing it for the challenge.

Hiking was a challenge. It was just a different kind of challenge, one that she hadn’t tried before.

Physical activity had always been her escape in the past.

She saw no reason why it wouldn’t work now.

Darius sat on a hillside, feeling grumpy. He had no reason to feel grumpy. The day was beautiful—the sky a clear blue, the sun shining down through the pine trees. The air smelled fresh and clear, summer in the mountains. In the distance he could hear the roar of the river, and it wasn’t even accompanied by the screams of rafters.

The hiking trail was empty. He hadn’t seen anyone all day except, of course, Cupid.

Cupid had shown up at Darius’s front doorstep shortly after dawn, looking angry, disgruntled, and generally out of sorts. Darius’s greeting hadn’t helped.

“They still making you wear diapers?” Darius said as he peered through the screen door.

“Fine way to greet a man you haven’t seen in five hundred years.” Cupid’s voice rasped from too many cigars. The butt of his last one stuck to his lower lip and moved when he talked.

“Hello, Cupid,” Darius had said. “I thought you gave up the arrows and wings around the birth of Christ.”

“I thought so too. Damned Fates decided I needed a refresher course. They slapped the wings on me last night. I think they’re just drunk with power.”

“They have been holding the same job for a very long time.”

“Too long, if you ask me.” Cupid shuddered. “You know it’s cold up here at this time of the day. May I come in?”

Darius looked at Cupid’s wings. “If you don’t shed.”

Cupid snapped his fingers, but the wings didn’t disappear. He sighed. “Guess I haven’t finished my little task. Or is there a mandatory time limit on form-altering spells?”

“I have no idea,” Darius said as he held the screen door open.

Cupid stepped inside. “I’d heard that the Fates made you four feet tall with a long white beard and a hideous mug.”

Darius started. He hadn’t realized any of the magical knew about that part of his sentence. They knew about the other part, of course. He was a laughingstock because it had been nearly three thousand years and he still hadn’t put a hundred soul mates together.

He’d just finished the ninety-ninth couple a few months before and he had come to his Idaho house as a getaway. The Fates granted him two weeks every year—taken either in whole or in part whenever he chose—when he got to look like himself. For the last few years, he’d been taking a week in solitude, up here.

“But you look just like you always did,” Cupid was saying. “How’d you keep from losing your hair?”

Darius didn’t answer that question. Instead, he asked, “Where’d you hear that I got slapped with a different body?”

Cupid shrugged. “Bacchus, maybe. Or whatshisname, later called himself Rasputin—crap. The brain’s going.”

“So are the wings,” Darius said, looking pointedly at the feathers covering his hardwood floor.

“They’ll be gone by the end of the day, I’m sure,” Cupid said. “And none too soon. They itch.”

He sat on Darius’s overstuffed couch and put his feet on the coffee table Darius had made out of a tree stump.

Darius debated whether or not to offer him food. The sooner he got Cupid out of the house, the sooner he’d be alone again. “To what do I owe this visit?”

“Old times,” Cupid said, pulling the ancient wool blanket Darius had on the couch over his torso. “Do you know there’re not a lot of folks who can remember Ancient Greece anymore?”

“You just mentioned Bacchus.”

“The last time I saw him was Spain four hundred years ago. He did something to really piss off the Fates and disappeared into deep storage around then.”

“What about Pan?”

“Went legit about ten years ago. Does concerts in the style of Yanni. Makes a mint, and doesn’t like talking to the riff-raff.”

“Hermes?”

Cupid rolled his eyes. “I don’t talk to Hermes anymore.”

“You never willingly talked to me either,” Darius said. “I interfered with your sentence from the Fates, or so you said.”

“So they said. Seems to me that’s why you’ve been playing matchmaker for most of your life.” Cupid leaned back on the couch, then exclaimed with pain as he crushed his wings. “Still not used to the damn things. Listen, offer me breakfast, and then I’ll get out of your way. I’m too damn tired to whisk myself back to Monte Carlo.”

“What’re you doing in Monte Carlo?” Darius asked.

“Running a casino.” Cupid took the cigar out of his mouth. “Don’t look so surprised. Casinos are safe. They’re one of the few places in the world where young lovers are scarce.”

“What does Psyche think about this?”

“Psyche?” Cupid grinned. “She loves the games, man. It was her idea to open the place. She’s a lot more adventurous than she looks.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. Within thirty seconds, he was snoring. Darius sighed and stood. He and Cupid had reached a sort of peace five hundred years ago. Of course, it had come at a price. Cupid had spent most of that last visit laughing at Darius for failing to complete his sentence. Cupid seemed pleased that Darius was still paying for the things that had happened two millennia ago.

Darius still didn’t like the little creep. Breakfast was all he was willing to do. He made pancakes and sausages and poured some of his homemade syrup into a pitcher.

When he finally served the food, Cupid was too busy stuffing his face to talk. He’d made Darius get up three times to bring him more syrup and then, when they’d finished eating, Cupid had disappeared without a real goodbye.

But he’d never been good on manners. It was one of the many things that Darius still disliked about him. The other was the stench of cigars that he couldn’t seem to get out of the house.

Darius had come to his favorite reflecting spot just so that he could get some fresh air. He still didn’t see the point in Cupid’s visit. They hadn’t talked about old times. They hadn’t talked about much at all. Darius got a sense that Cupid had remembered why their mutual dislike was … well, mutual.

A twig snapped, pulling Darius out of his reverie. He sighed and hoped this hiker wasn’t in trouble. The last few were so relieved at seeing a house, they stopped just for conversation. After this morning’s visitor, the last thing Darius wanted was conversation.

Then a woman emerged from the trees. She was too thin. He could see the bones in her arm even from this distance.

But it wasn’t a thinness caused by excessive dieting or illness. This was an athlete’s thinness, the kind that came from pushing a body to its very limit. A kind he both recognized and respected. The body he wore at the moment— his original body—had that kind of thinness.

He had always found that look extremely attractive.

With a shrug of her shoulders, she adjusted her backpack. It looked heavy—at least fifty pounds—and she carried it as if it weighed only five. Within easy access she had rope, a knife, a flashlight, and a bottle of water. She was prepared.

She wore her auburn hair pulled back from her face. Darius strained to see her features but couldn’t make them out clearly.

She moved with an athlete’s grace, with a confidence that very few people ever attained.

He inched closer to the tree, peering around it so that he could see her better. She walked with her head up, taking in the beauty of her surroundings. He looked too, trying to see this familiar vista through her eyes: the jagged mountain peaks, the bright summer sunshine, the ribbon of water running through the valley below.

She was conquering this place, hiking through it alone, making it her own. He, on the other hand, came here to hide. He used an airstrip that had existed since the 1930s, and he had never hiked in, not once, in the more than one hundred years he’d owned the house, hidden in the woods above him.

She had just passed beneath him when he heard a snap and then a rustle. He stiffened, hoping the sound didn’t portend what he thought it did.

He looked down, saw tiny rocks sliding toward her. She saw them too, and tried to step backward, but it was too late.

The path disintegrated beneath her and suddenly she was falling toward the raging river, a thousand feet below.

Three

The path crumbled beneath her hiking boots. Ariel jumped backward, but not quickly enough. Her weight made the path disintegrate faster. She reached for the stable part of the mountain, but her hands couldn’t find purchase.

She suddenly found herself on her back, sliding down the cliff toward the water. She couldn’t grab anything. Her pack was between her and the ground.

Using all her strength, she rolled over and grabbed her knife from her belt. The rock-strewn ground cut into her bare skin, abrading it. She stabbed at the dirt, trying to slow her slide so that she could grab a tree branch or a root or anything that would keep her from sliding the thousand feet into the river.

The strain pulled at her barely healed shoulder. She could feel the rocks scraping her skin, but she couldn’t seem to hold on to anything. She was sliding faster and faster and she couldn’t stop.

And the worst part of it was, no one was here to see her fall, to help her, to record her death. She would plunge into the river and she might never wash up again.

No one would ever know what had happened to her.

She struggled harder, her fingers raw and bleeding. Her knife was finally slowing her fall. She could feel the movement ease, her body remaining stationary while the dirt slid beneath her. All she needed to do was dig herself in somehow and she would be all right.

Carefully she shoved her toes into the ground, then stuck the fingers of her free hand in as well. She found herself hoping to see the crazed arrow guy. She’d pay him to haul her off this mountainside. She’d even explain to him how to do it, since she doubted that anyone who ran around the woods while wearing diapers thought of carrying rope.

The mountain seemed steady. The little landslide had ended and she hadn’t slid any farther. She breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Then her blade snapped and the fall started all over again, faster this time. Suddenly she was in free fall, no longer touching the ground at all.

This was it then. She was going to die, alone, unnoticed on this mountainside.

The portents had been right after all. This trip was a strange one—and it was going to end in her death, the strangest journey of all.

Darius hurried out of the trees, running toward the path. The woman was sliding on her back like an overturned turtle. She wouldn’t be able to do anything from that position.

Then, to his surprise, she righted herself and pulled out her knife all in the same elegant movement. She dug the blade into the ground, trying to slow herself.

She didn’t seem panicked at all.

It had been years since he’d seen an ordinary mortal who was so calm in the face of death. The last one had been Napoleon, and he hadn’t been calm, he’d been crazy.

Darius stopped just shy of the place where the slide began and watched her fall. She was slowing down—the blade was working—and he knew then that she would be all right.

He stayed above her, though. She might need his assistance getting back up the mountainside. Normal, humanlike assistance, with rope and a lot of effort. No magic at all.

She stopped sliding near the edge of an embankment. The mountainside turned into a cliff face not a hundred yards from her feet. She dug her fingers and toes into the dirt and sighed with relief. Darius started the spell for the rope, hurrying toward her as he did so.