20. Leni

The weather turns. First to fluffy powdered sugar snowflakes, then to wet and hostile menaces that glob into loogie-like splats.

I overhear three separate unseasonably warm conversations, and refrain from pointing out that warm constitutes a three-digit temperature. Only twice.

Cross whisks us inside a small pub, signaling to the hostess for a table toward the back, thanking her in flawless Danish and passing her a smile she fans herself to.

“Danish, English, Estonian.” I tick off as we weave through the crowded dining room. “Is there a language you don’t know?”

His arm curls around me when we get to our table, pulling me to sit beside him on the bench against the wall.

“I’ve always been good with my tongue,” he says, loud enough to make my eyes bulge, a slight smirk on his lips. “But you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

I don’t have a response to that.

I’m planless, out of depths.

“People are eating,” I blurt, like he’s offered to show me, in languid detail, precisely how skilled that tongue is. He doesn’t look at me, just bends to knock the snow off his jacket.

“Astute observation.” He’s smothering a smile. “Relax, pyro, I’ll not devour you here.”

Not here. Implying … Heat streaks across my body.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I mutter, forcing my head straight. “There’s a perfectly good chair there. We can sit face to face.” I rise halfway to an awkward wall-sit-stand-stance that makes my thighs scream when Cross’s arm snakes around me, hauls me down and drags me along the cold lacquered bench to his side. Tucks me there.

“Sit close,” he orders, eliminating the air between us. “Couples are less suspicious. Even when you’re disappearing, you have to stay alert. There’s always a chance someone could be just as skilled as you.”

The way he says it, emphasizes you, sticks to me like a glossy gold star. Like I’m just as good as him out there.

The weather worsens, and the pub fills with mortals seeking shelter. The kitchen churns out hot plates of food, and the rugged, old world bar’s taps seem endless. In short, it’s the last place I’d ever go to hide. Bustling and intimate. Cozy in a hand carved chair backs and mismatched water glasses way.

I mention my observation to Cross, and he shrugs. “Seems like the perfect reason to stay.” He passes me a laminated menu. “Relax.”

Against all odds, I do.

I doubt anyone could follow him here, anyway. Not when I almost lost him, and I was physically attached to him.

The niggling questions bubbles up, along with annoyance. A bit of my pride deflates. “You weren’t really trying to lose me this past week, were you? I never followed you in circles.”

“The mere fact that you followed me at all means that you are a better tracker than creatures who live, breathe, and die by it.” He’s stern, direct. Forceful in his compliment. “It’s not exactly a skill a princess need possess.”

“Not a princess,” I remind him.

The low hum of dissent in the back of his throat vibrates along my arm.

Is this how we are now? After a male makes you come, does he require constant, physical contact? Am I supposed to be able to relax with him? If anything, it’s gotten harder to be around him. Every touch and glance taking me right back to Cross on his knees, feasting on me like a fresh chocolate fountain.

A waitress with a red poppy tucked behind her ear swings by, and Cross orders two of the local brews and the evening specials without hesitation.

It doesn’t escape my notice that it’s the most common plate sprawling around us. He doesn’t ask for substitutions or specify restrictions. It’s ordinary, easy, as if everything he does in life pivots on blending in. Vanishing is second nature.

Ridiculously, it irritates me. How accustomed he is to being insignificant. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Through a series of awkward points and slow English, I stop our server and request a steaming cup of Pekoe tea as well. Cross’s usual.

He hooks his fingers over my knee, squeezes a thank you.

It’s funny. How easily he vanishes when every part of him stands out to me—how intently he speaks, the way he slowly draws back his hood, leaves it slovenly gathered on his shoulder, how he leans back from the bench to make himself seem less imposing, even folds his long legs up beneath our table.

None of it works. He’s no less striking. Smooth cheekbones, lips stained from biting, those eyes. Those captivating eyes, the slashes of obsidian.

Sometimes I forget exactly what shade his hair is—debate internally if it’s soft brown or honey brown—but I always know those eyes.

I undo my scarf when two pints hit our table with a flash of poppy.

“The Blackguard,” he says, “was honored with gifts. Enhancements to our natural proclivities.” His voice is right in my ear. He’s warm, like always, and smells like rain, fresh air. I nuzzle closer, linking up with him.

A date, yes.

I can imagine it.

His hand covers mine, trapping it against my knee. “Can you guess what mine was?”

Seduction, I want to say. Or sex appeal or whatever he’s doing to me right now. “Your tongue?”

His eyes light with dark fire, tongue in question darting out to wet his lip. “I’m a ghost. Most can’t even remember the color of my skin, let alone the length of my hair, the color of my eyes. Mannerisms, food preferences. They don’t know my name. They think of me as a shadow. Sometimes they say ‘Cross’ to my face, talking about the male they believe haunts them. As if he exists.”

“And who am I with then if he doesn’t exist? Three children stacked in a trench coat?”

“Cross isn’t my name.”

“Of course it is.” It’s how he introduced himself. It’s what Lev calls him, or maybe Lev never said his name. Neither has Atlas. Or anyone. I go stiff. “Your name is Cross, you told me.”

“Cross as in the cross of your fingers behind your back when you lie, the supposed protection. That’s me. If you don’t cross your fingers when you lie, if you feed me false information, I end you.”

“Crossing your fingers? That’s you.” I blink, not computing, watch white foam bubble in my pint. “Are you telling me I don’t even know your name?”

He genuinely seems surprised. “Does that bother you?”

I consider flipping over our table. “You’ve been inside me,” I hiss.

Cross goes completely still for a moment.

I freeze too, panic spreading like wildfire through my stomach, embarrassment, mortification, insecurities I never realized I had. Does he regret being with me?

But before I melt beneath the table and crawl hand and knee over sticky bar flooring, Cross says quietly, his gaze pinned on me, “Hardly as much as I’d have liked to be.”

My knees shake. My heart struggles to pump blood anywhere but my ears. My mouth dries.

A swallow. He twists away, glides strong fingers around his beer and drinks. And drinks.

And drinks.

When he finishes, he bites apart the orange slice on the rim. His eyes flutter shut, big hand white knuckling the glass. I think he might leave to refill it, think he might put his head under the draft and drink until his liver collapses than admit to what he said.

He clears his throat. “I only mean that—”

“What is your name?”

His head tilts, letting a few strands of soft brown curls fall into his forehead. “I don’t know,” he admits. A phrase I never expected to hear from him.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs, and when he looks at my beer, I slide it directly in front of him. Receive a nod.

“It’s a gift,” he says again. “I’m skilled at what I do and Kadmos made me better. If I have no one—not even myself—I can never be exploited, never be convinced to switch allegiances. I grew up in Mayfair, twenty years and I can’t even tell you which street I lived on or what color the flowers were in the window boxes.” He sends my beer back, reaches for his over-steeped tea. “Cross is as much my name now as Leni is yours. I don’t remember any other one.”

My stomach sinks. Not remembering your childhood, your name, that’s a desolate loneliness. My biggest nightmare. “What about your family?”

“Dead, I presume, unless they too swore fealty to a descendent of the Gods and gained immortality. And in the unlikely event that they did, they still wouldn’t miss me.”

Dark. He’s so dark right now.

“I’d miss you.”

A dull silence follows. Muted and thick. I sample my beer, immediately decide it’s not for me. Bitter, odd, not fizzy enough and yet too fizzy. Still, I consider choking down the hazy amber. One go. Erase the sting.

I don’t know how to comfort him, if it’s even possible. But misery loves company right? I can give him a bit of that. “I feel constantly exposed,” I confess, folding my napkin to its limits.

“Perhaps blue was the wrong choice.”

So obsessed with my hair.

“It’s better than it was,” I defend. “And it doesn’t matter. Creatures see me, like to see me, but they don’t care who I am, if I have a name or dreams. If I’m smart. If I’ve read anything juicy and interesting lately. They see a body for them to use or leer at or hate.”

Cross’s arm wraps around my shoulders, fingers dipping into the collar of my sweatshirt, knuckles stroking down my neck, dripping heat into me. We’re close. Breathing the same air, he smells a bit like the orange slice, and barley.

He frees an azure tendril of hair of its prison, and curls it around his finger, watches it with avid fascination.

Plates have materialized on our table, the salt burn of home fries, and cut sausage.

“Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable,” he murmurs as his forehead touches mine. I swell up in my seat, tilt to him.

He takes a sharp inhale, and then, shutting his eyes, shakes his head. “Unfortunately, there’s a line between using intimacy to throw the eye, and being so affectionate, you draw it.”

I follow his gaze to the couple at the table next to us, outwardly embracing.

Us, if this were a date.

She’s dewy-eyed, with arms like an octopus, coiled around her beau—middle aged man with gel streaked in his sandy hair and a tan that says Ibiza. Her leg is thrown between his knees, half sitting on his lap as she sucks on his tongue. Two plates of cold pasta die in front of them, and… This is why people request the back tables when they aren’t on the run.

Because they’re desperate for each other. Hungry.

“Tell me about the black flames,” Cross says.

I tense over my food. Rummage through the fries for the crispiest, wondering if Yaya is screaming in up at me from Hades.

“How familiar are you with Phoenix?” I ask, hating the word on my tongue.

Cross shrugs, plucking crispy fries and maneuvering them to my plate, scooping up the floppy rejects in exchange. “They’re extinct.”

“What else?”

“Sometimes I think, Leni, that you like holding all the cards. Let’s agree that you have the wits, I have the bloodthirst, and we split the rest down the middle, yeah? Stop kidding ourselves? Tell me what you know.”

I can’t even appreciate the compliments. My blood has frozen, my heart stopped. I wish I were back in the rain, with my blisters, with no fries. “When a Phoenix dies, they burn. And the flames are not red.”

“Are they not immortal, then?”

“What are you?” I ask. “Two hundred years old?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Ignore the heartache. “They’re not immortal like you,” I explain carefully. “It’s ironic, actually. They invented the written word with the Phoenician alphabet. They wrote the stories of the heroes, the battles, Homer was rumored to be a Phoenix, but honestly, I read The Iliad, and if he was kicking around in Ilion, it’s much more likely that he was a—”

“Leni.”

“Sorry, off topic.” I snatch the mermaid salt shaker, stare at my plate. “Where was I?”

“You admire the Phoenix and are much better read than I am.”

I do, he’s right. Is that what I’d said, though? “Anyway … the Phoenix didn’t write about themselves, so it’s not clear exactly how long they lived. I found records of over four hundred years.”

Cross nods, pensive. “And this elderly Phoenix—who’s definitely not Homer—you believe they burned black?”

I accidentally pepper my fries. Apparently should have intuited that purple seashell bra signifies pepper, not salt. “They wouldn’t be elderly. They could be as young as us. When a Phoenix dies, they’re reborn at their prime age, the same way ichor in immortals selects the pinnacle of a creature’s beauty to stop aging.”

“So they die and regenerate.” He lifts one eyebrow. “That sounds better than immortality.”

You’d think. “You drank ambrosia to gain your immortality, right?”

“You don’t need to ask rhetorical questions to involve me.” A cunning, amused smile. “I’m listening, Leni. Always.”

I take in his intense expression, and a warmth spreads across my skin, not his, not the tangible throw of his immense power. This is subdermal. It’s in my blood, an ember inside me catching flame.

“Ambrosia began as honey,” I begin, finally salting my fries. “Zeus asked all the creatures in the realms to surprise him with the most delicious food, and a bee provided her honey. Zeus lauded it as the best food to exist. He offered a prize to the bee for her laboring.”

Cross’s response is wry. “Let me guess, he tried to sleep with her.”

I laugh. “Probably. But she asked for a weapon, because her honey kept getting stolen and she was exhausted. Zeus, our beloved Cloud Gatherer,” I snort. “He was offended by her request. Enraged that so gentle a creature would crave violence. Nevertheless, he was bound by his word to reward her, so he granted her a stinger, a mighty weapon that would kill her the moment she used it.”

Cross huffs, unsurprised, as bitter as me. “Temperamental heathen our King of Gods.”

“Stop or he’ll put a snake in your bed.” I’m nagging. It feels nice. Normal almost.

Cross must enjoy it too, leaning onto the table to study me. “No, that’s Hera’s thing.”

He’s right. “Don’t speak ill of the Gods.”

“Don’t tempt me with sweet, unattainable things and expect me not to grow aggravated,” he returns, unflinching, gaze so focused on my mouth, I struggle to sit still.

Again, he goes for my hair, finger folding around a wind tangled strand caught in my hood. “What do Phoenix have to do with bees, professor?”

I wet my lips. “Everything. There’s no such thing as too good to be true. Not when you have the blood of the Greeks.” I clear my throat, hating this next part. “When a Phoenix dies, they lose their memories.”

His attention drops from my hair straight to his wrist, to the wretched band of ink. “The stinger,” he murmurs darkly, a darkness that’s worn over, encompassing and slow.

“They forget how old they are, how many times they’ve died, their own name, their families, until one day, they die without realizing it’s their last time and black flames rise.” I meet his gaze head on, handing him to key to my doom. “It’s the only reference I’ve ever read to such phenomena.”

“Why would a Phoenix kill Kadmos?” Cross muses. “They never fought.” He clicks his jaw, connecting the dots faster than I can explain. “Because they were too afraid to die and forget why they were even fighting.”

He scrubs a tired hand down his face. “They’d be an ideal weapon. Send them in to blow someone up, and even if they got captured, an interrogation would reveal nothing post death.”

“They’re creatures, not weapons,” I snap a little too harshly. “And it’s not so simple. The books say—” I stop.

I hear it.

Breaking across the scant feet between us.

“I’ll make you beg for me.” Frantic whispers from the intertwined couple to our left. She’s straddling him. He’s roughly gripping the back of her throat. His teeth flash against her cheek. “You’re going to scream my name as I fuck you. As I make you submit.”