CHAPTER 7
The elevator passed Ted’s floor as he headed to the top of the Belkin Oil building. After the late-night news report last night, he’d made a call to his informant at the Crystal City Police Department. For a few minutes, he’d been consumed with dread that the paralyzed woman thrown from the pier and eventually dragged out of the sea was Trinity.
When the elevator opened, he strode right past Mikolas’s secretary and through his office door. The Greek looked up from his paperwork. “Good morning.” He frowned. “Something wrong?”
“Everything.” Ted took the chair across from Mikolas. “You didn’t see the news from last night?”
“No.” Mikolas straightened behind his desk.
“I told you Pamela wasn’t going to stop.” Ted sighed. “She’s going to expose all of us.”
“What has she done?”
“She didn’t get caught, at least not yet. But after she stormed out of the meeting and threatened me, witnesses saw a tall blonde attack a paralyzed woman and throw her from the pier. It had to be Pamela.”
“Shit. Is the woman…?” Mikolas’s voice trailed off.
“She’s alive. A good Samaritan dove in after her and pulled her out of the tide.”
Mikolas leaned back in his chair. “Who was the victim?”
“A woman named Clio Clarke.” Ted crossed his arms. “My best guess from our list of muses is that she’s the Muse of History.”
Mikolas stood, coming around to the front of the desk. “I did some research on the name Pamela gave you. Philyra was a sea nymph, and she was Kronos’s lover. She escaped being imprisoned in Tartarus with the Titans and has probably been plotting her revenge against Zeus ever since he locked his father in the center of the Earth. Eventually Zeus took her only son’s immortality from him and he died, so I’m guessing that’s the root of Pamela’s hatred of the muses.”
“Did you find a way to stop her?”
“No.” Mikolas pressed his lips together, clearly deep in thought. “But maybe our new friend Kevin might.”
Ted frowned. “I thought you wanted to keep him out.”
“I still believe he’s more than he seems, but at this point, if we don’t stop Pamela, we’re all at risk of being exposed or killed, and dying is not high on my priority list right now.”
Ted nodded. “All right. When and where?”
Mikolas glanced at the door and back at Ted. “Here. Tonight. I’ll warn the security detail to be on the lookout for trespassers. At least we’ll get a heads-up if Pamela pays us a visit.”
“Sounds good. What do you want me to tell Kevin?”
Mikolas picked up a pen, popping the end and finally replied. “Tell him I’ve got a way for him to earn his place in the Order.”
“Got it. See you tonight.” Ted headed for the door. “I’ll see if I can get him here by six o’clock after the office staff is gone.”
When Ted made it back to his floor, Marion popped up out of her chair. “Ted, there’s a woman in your office. I tried to make her wait, but she insisted you would want to see her.”
Ted frowned. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“It’s Pamela Costas, sir.”
He stared at his closed office door. Oh shit.
Mason parked at Clio’s apartment and jogged around the truck to open her door. He offered his hand, and she smiled. “I swear, I’m all right.”
“Humor me.” His eyes sparkled, and she placed her hand in his.
She took the stairs more slowly than usual and unlocked her apartment door. “There’s not much to see. I was almost done packing.”
He followed her inside, and she set her keys on the kitchen counter. He scanned the boxes stacked randomly throughout her studio. “Thanks for getting me out of the hospital and helping me move,” she said.
He crossed to her side. “How long have you known?”
She blinked. It took her a second to figure out what he was talking about. “About being a muse?”
He nodded.
“It was a process, I guess.” She shrugged and opened the drawer at the end of the counter. She took out her backup pair of glasses and put them on. The dark-red frames had been an impulse purchase, and she rarely wore them. The last thing she wanted was more attention, and the brightly colored glasses seemed to scream, Talk to me, I’m fun.
“I was a history major in college when I started having these weird recurring dreams. I thought they were brought on by all my studying, but they kept haunting me long after my course work in the Greek eras had passed.”
His lips curved into a sexy smile. “Red suits you.”
Heat crept up her neck into her cheeks. Keeping her head down in her books, she wasn’t used to compliments from men. “Thanks.”
He took her hand, his rough fingers twining with hers. “My cousin said her dreams were always about Euterpe and a theater in Greece.”
She nodded. “Mine were like that, too, but with Clio. It took me awhile to catch on. I thought I was seeing her because we had the same name. What clued me in was when the dreams changed. A condemned theater and the Crystal City Pier got me researching California. And I moved here the second I graduated.”
He walked her over to the card table she used in the tiny dining area and pulled out a folding chair. “You’re brave.”
“My parents thought I was crazy. They probably still do.” She chuckled, taking the chair he offered. “But once I got here and found the theater, Polly had already started the LLC and purchased the property. I reached out, and after we met up, we had a common goal. They’re the sisters I never had. Until them, I had this weird secret I couldn’t share with anyone.”
Mason pulled another chair over and sat beside her. She lost herself in his eyes, praying her memory of him pulling off his T-shirt on the ambulance was real. Had she dreamed the bright-red crescent-shaped mark on the underside of his bicep?
She caressed his cheek. “A few months ago, I came across a new scroll. I’m always watching for artifacts that refer to the muses, and this one caught my eye. It was prophecy.” She swallowed the lump in her throat and dropped her hand into her lap. “This is going to sound nuts, and I don’t want you to pack up and leave town.”
He chuckled. “Crazier than Greek muses awakening inside mortal women and an immortal trying to kill them?”
“Maybe not crazier, but this could potentially put you right in the middle of all this chaos around us and the theater.” She shook her head. “And I probably shouldn’t say this, but I really like you, and I’d like you to stick around.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Clio.” He took her hand in his with a playful grin. “Full disclosure. Whatever you’re about to drop, Trinity and Erica told me to believe you.”
Clio rolled her eyes laughing. “They didn’t threaten to kick your ass, did they?”
“You’ve got some amazing friends.”
“I do.” She nodded, making a mental note to chastise Trin and Erica later. “Okay, here goes. I translated the prophecy, and it basically said the nine daughters of Zeus would be reborn each generation, and with them, nine men would be marked by the gods to be their Guardians—one for each muse. The Guardians are born with some kind of latent ability that only comes to life when they find their muse. Nate, Hunter, Reed and Cooper all have a crescent-shaped birthmark, like a waning moon. We figure that’s the mark in the prophecy.”
Mason stood up, and she braced herself for him to walk out the door. She wasn’t expecting him to take off his shirt.
And she wasn’t complaining. Her gaze wandered up from the worn jeans low on his hips, up his washboard abdomen to his broad shoulders. Once her eyes met his, he lifted his right arm, exposing that crescent-shaped birthmark.
“This mark saved my life.”
She hadn’t been expecting that response. “What do you mean?”
He came back to her and sat down. “The day we lost Sadie, she and I were swimming in the lake just after sundown. Pamela came up as silent as a gator and waved her hand, paralyzing Sadie just as she did to you. She sank like a stone, and I swam down to save her and pull her up, but I was a little guy. She was too heavy.” He looked up at the ceiling, and Clio’s heart ached at the pain lining his face. Tears shone in his beautiful green eyes when he returned his gaze to hers. “I had to let her go.”
He paused, a muscle clenching in his cheek. “When I came up for air, Pamela smiled at me. I raised my arms, thinking she’d hurt me, too, but she looked at my birthmark and laughed. She patted me on the head and told me she’d see me again someday.” A shudder shook his shoulders. “I had nightmares for years.”
Clio ran her hand along his thigh. “I’m so sorry, Mason.”
He covered her hand with his. “The day I met you, weird things started happening. It was like I suddenly had superstrength when I was around you. But I didn’t understand why it only seemed to work sometimes, and I didn’t want to scare you off, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t realize you knew you were a muse.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s how you broke down the door during the fire. And lifted the beam the other night.”
He nodded slowly. “Apparently when you’re around, I turn into Hercules.”
Clio sucked in a breath and lowered her voice. “Don’t ever say that around Pamela. I’m pretty sure she’s really Philyra, and if I’m right, her son trained Hercules and it led to Chiron losing his immortality and, eventually, his life.”
Mason reached up to rub the back of his neck. “I’m beginning to think none of this is random.” He met her eyes. “One more question.”
“All right.”
A smile toyed at the corners of his mouth. “When you kissed me the other night, were you trying to hold out for your Guardian?”
“I was failing to hold out for him.”
He leaned in closer and whispered, “Or you already found him.”
His lips claimed hers. Heat blossomed low in her belly, and her hands explored his bare chest as rational thought slipped away.
His heart pounded as his tongue twined with hers. Every touch of her hands on his skin sent a jolt of desire through him until his erection pressed painfully against the zipper of his jeans. He’d held women in his arms over the years, but damn, no one had ever had this kind of effect on him. In the dark shadows of his soul, his wolf howled. He pulled back, startled.
Clio blinked her eyes open. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” he answered quickly as he got up and grabbed his shirt off the floor. Usually his wolf was dormant. It was more like primal urges tugging at him, yearning for freedom to run and hunt, but this was different. He heard the wolf inside him, with him, not a separate entity or enemy to struggle against but part of his soul.
Was this how his ancestors had lost themselves to their wolves? A gradual slide until the man faded away? He tugged his shirt down over his head and found Clio standing in front of him.
“Mason?” She reached up to cup his cheek, luring him back into the moment, to her. Worry lined her eyes. “Are you all right?”
He focused on her, drawing strength from her touch. “Yeah. I will be.” As long as he didn’t lose control. He glanced around at the boxes. “I guess I better get started loading these up.”
“Oh.” She looked away but not before he caught the hurt in her eyes. “Yeah, we probably should.”
Dammit. The last thing he wanted was to make her sad. But how could he make her understand something he wasn’t sure he understood yet?
Screw it. He had to try.
“Clio, wait.”
She lifted her gaze to his. His uncle’s warnings about keeping the legacy of their family line a secret taunted him. He didn’t know Clio well. Could he really trust her with this? He took a deep breath. He was many things, but a coward wasn’t one of them. She trusted him with her life, so how could he do any less?
“I’ve never told anyone this, and it can’t leave this room, not even the other muses can know. Can you do that?”
She didn’t answer immediately, pondering his words. Her pause bolstered his resolve. She was taking his caution seriously. If Clio agreed, she would keep his confidence.
“Whatever it is, it’ll stay between us,” she said.
He nodded and went to the window. He didn’t want to see it if she laughed in his face. “I was born and raised in North Carolina, but my father’s family actually emigrated from the Arcadian mountains.”
Her chair scraped on the floor behind him as she stood. “So you have some Greek blood in your veins, too.”
He placed his forearm against the window, resting his forehead on it as he focused on his truck in the parking lot below. “My family line traces all the way back to the King of Arcadia.” Clio carried the Muse of History in her heart. He was fairly certain she’d be able to connect the dots. He forced the words out. “To King Lycaon.”
Silence sucked the air from the room. He kept staring out the window, afraid to look back at her.
Clio’s voice was barely more than a whisper, but there was no judgment in it. “Zeus cursed him and all his sons to become wolves.”
Mason nodded slowly. “The curse still carries through the males in my family.”
“Are you telling me you’re a werewolf?” She came to his side, but he didn’t look her way.
“No.” He sighed and snuck a peek at her, then gathered the courage to face her fully. “I’m a Lycan. The wolf isn’t a part of me; he’s made of Zeus’s power. Once we’re old enough, the wolf lures us to shift, to experience the freedom of the primal hunter.”
Concern was shining in her eyes. “What are you saying?”
“I shifted in the theater fire. The smoke was too thick, and I couldn’t see you. So I surrendered to the wolf hoping he’d catch your scent.”
Her eyes widened as she held her hand out in front of her. She rubbed her wrist, and then just stared down at it. Tiny scars from what looked like puncture wounds marred the skin there.
Fuck. He’d never noticed them before.
He straightened up, running a hand down his face. “He hurt you.”
“No.” She looked up at him without a trace of fear. “He saved me. All this time I thought I dreamed the wolf.” She placed her hand over his heart. “But it was you all along.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, blinking back the swell of emotions swirling inside him. “I had to fight my way back to having control. I think the only reason I’m standing here is because the wolf knew I was the only hope of getting you out of that fire alive.”
She searched his gaze. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He blew out a frustrated puff of air, shaking his head. “The wolf is a curse, Clio. Eventually, we don’t change back. The night Pamela drowned my cousin, my father shifted so he could track her scent.” He ground his teeth, forcing the words out. “He couldn’t come back. The curse took him forever.”
Her jaw dropped slightly. “He’s still a wolf?”
“As near as we can figure. My uncle is pretty sure he spotted him in the woods on Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina.” His pulse pounded in his ears, waiting for her to put two and two together.
Her face fell as the realization dawned. “If you shift again…”
“I’ll be a wolf. Forever.”
Tears filled her eyes, but she forced a smile. “Then I’ll have to be sure you don’t shift.”
He nodded. It was enough for now. She knew his secret. She didn’t need to know that the only way he could stop Pamela would be a final surrender. Mason was pretty sure pitting Zeus’s power against Pamela’s would be his only hope to keep Clio safe.
The feral growl of the wolf whispered through his mind. It wouldn’t be long now.