Cupid’s Misfire
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© 2014 Katriena Knights
Editor: Healther Rodriguez-Raymond
Cover Art: Marteeka Karland
Books are NOT transferable. Re-selling, sharing or giving eBooks is a copyright infringement.
There was something...off...about this Valentine’s Day. Cupid couldn’t quite pin down what it was, but it definitely had his pinfeathers in a twist. Buzzing the streets, keeping himself just above the heads of the people swarming on the sidewalks, he just wasn’t feeling it. No single person caused the arrow nocked in his bow to quiver, shake, shudder, or otherwise respond.
He’d been out since the clock had struck midnight, announcing the arrival of his most sacred day, and he hadn’t found a single unrealized romance with enough uumph to warrant an arrow to the heart.
It just wasn’t possible.
He pulled himself up to a hover, his wings whirring behind him. His wings were tired, his shoulders were tired—everything was tired. He only had about ten hours until Valentine’s Day was officially over for the year, and not a single target.
With a sigh, he popped his neck and continued the search.
And, ten minutes later, as he rounded a corner onto Tenth Street, the arrow jumped.
He stopped, stared at it. Loosening his grip slightly on the bow, he let the arrow track its tip toward the target it had found. Cupid readied himself to draw the string back, to take aim...
She was stunning. The most stunning creature he’d seen in centuries. She was tall, elegant, and possessed of a feminine power all too rare in these strange days when no one seemed to really know who they were. Her skin was what these unimaginative twenty-first-century humans would have called black, but in reality it was a rich, deep brown with a faint undertone of red. It looked as if it would feel like velvet under his fingers. Her black hair was drawn back and tied behind her head, but beyond the band that held it back it bloomed into a pouf of natural, unfettered, untreated beauty.
Like a Nubian princess, was the first thing he thought, because his brain had suddenly screeched to a halt, leaving him in his most elemental self, which dated back so many centuries he couldn’t count them anymore. But this wasn’t Africa, or Nubia, or Egypt, or any of those places. It was New York, and he had his arrow pointed straight at her.
His hand jumped. For the first time ever in his infinite existence, Cupid released an arrow before he had settled his aim. The arrow sproinged unelegantly from the bow, the shaft shivering, the fletching moving strangely, almost as if the arrow itself were trying to use those feathers to fly.
Then it veered. Veered a lot. Veered so much that it reversed its trajectory and came straight at him. There was no time to duck. The arrow sank straight into his heart.
No one had ever told him what might happen if he accidentally shot himself. No one had ever considered the possibility he could be so clumsy or ill-prepared. Then again, none of the old gods had been very specific in their instructions or their history or anything else for that matter. They’d basically handed him a bow and told him to get to it.
It hurt. He should have expected that from the reactions he’d seen when he’d shot others, gleefully watching the arrow disappear into them, until the length of it, arrowhead, fletching and all, was absorbed into their heart of hearts. But holy shit it hurt like a son of a bitch. He sank to the ground, grasping his chest.
Then he realized his chest wasn’t the only thing that hurt. His shoulders suddenly burned with a searing agony. Arching backwards, he reached with his other hand toward his wings.
They weren’t there.
What the hell? Gone? His wings were gone? How was he supposed to finish his duties for the holiday? How was he supposed to get back to Olympus, for the gods’ sakes? He couldn’t spend the rest of the year in New York City. He didn’t belong here.
“Hey! Mister! You okay?”
The voices did jumping jacks around him, and it took him a few seconds to realize they were speaking to him. Speaking to him? How was that possible? He wasn’t visible to mortals—he was a god, albeit a minor one. Humans couldn’t see him unless he wanted them to, and he almost never wanted them to. But a few young men and a lady or two were approaching him hesitantly, peering at him as he lay there, helpless, clutching his chest, his back aching where his wings had been, his hip bone driving into the cold concrete.
Oh, fuck. He was naked. Stark. Buck. Whatever prefix meant the most naked, he was that.
“Where did he even come from?” someone asked. Another voice called, “Does anybody know CPR?”
“I do.” That voice was like cream and velvet, honey and figs, the finest, sweetest, most beautiful thing you could possibly imagine. Cupid blinked up into the face of the woman he’d had his arrow trained upon. She sat right down on the concrete next to him, slim business suit and all, and touched his forehead. “Are you okay? Do you even need CPR?”
“Oh, by Hera,” he said. She was so beautiful. He could smell her, feel her warmth. Deep inside his chest, the arrow seemed to shake, as if it were laughing at him. “God, you are so...” He reached up, grasped the soft, frizzy pouf of hair behind her head, and kissed her. Hard.
The woman jerked back. “The fuck?” And she slapped him across the face.
He fell back onto the concrete, and everything went black.
* * *
“That didn’t look like CPR to me.”
Aja Hastings looked up at her friend Billy, who was whiter than white and gayer than Christmas. He had crossed his arms over his chest and was eyeing her disapprovingly. Shit, he was even tapping his toe on the sidewalk. Disapprovingly.
“Did you see what he did?”
“I thought you were giving him mouth-to-mouth.”
“He’s not not breathing! He doesn’t need mouth-to-mouth!” She stopped. Had that made any sense?
“Well, if you’re giving him CPR, you need to hit him in the chest, not in the face.” Billy hit the concrete next to her and lifted a fist, fully prepared to crush the pretty naked man’s sternum. Aja intercepted his attempt, closing her hand around his arm in mid-arc.
“Stop it, Billy.” She bent over the prostrate man, who was blinking and mumbling a little, so at least she hadn’t killed him. Why the hell had he kissed her, though? Maybe he was just delirious. Drunk. High? There was no telling these days. “Don’t just stand there. Be useful and call 911.”
Billy rubbed his arm where she’d grabbed it. “Fine. Don’t let me use my natural medical skills.”
“You have no natural medical skills. You’re an accountant.”
He made a snorting sound and pulled out his phone.
“Also give me your jacket,” Aja added.
Grumbling a bit more, Billy pulled off his jacket and handed it over. Aja laid it over the man so he’d be a tiny bit less naked—that body sprawled out in front of her was amazingly distracting, even knowing he was hurt or high or drunk or stoned or about to start a flu-pocalypse. He was trying to sit up. She took his hand and carefully helped him.
“Ow,” he said. Behind her, Aja heard Billy calling for an ambulance. The other passersby had dispersed, no longer interested. Somebody else had claimed the problem, so they could leave without it weighing on their consciences.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Aja told him. He struggled until he was sitting up, the jacket pooling in his lap. That was okay, Aja thought. She needed that lap covered most of all. “You shouldn’t have grabbed my hair.”
“You’re so beautiful,” he said. He really did sound stoned. Maybe he was from Washington State or Colorado and was suffering some kind of withdrawal from all the marijuana he normally consumed. That was possible, right? Then again, he’d said she was beautiful, so he had to have a few screws that weren’t entirely loose.
“You’ve hit your head or something, honey,” she told him. “There’s help on the way.”
“The arrow...” His voice trailed off. He looked stoned, too, his pupils dilated. What she could see of the irises was nearly as black as the sprawling pupils. “I need to stay here...with you.”
“You’re not staying here with me.” She tried to speak gently—after all, he was probably insane. “You need to go to the hospital and let them check you out, not stay out here in the middle of the sidewalk.” She sensed a movement behind her and half turned to see Billy returning.
“Paramedics are on the way,” he said. He took a long look at the semi-conscious man. “He’s a dishy one, isn’t he?”
“Billy! He’s been banged on the head. Don’t look at him like that.”
“Looking at him isn’t going to hurt him any. What’s your name, Mr. Dishy?”
“Cupid. My name is Cupid.”
“Wow.” Aja shook her head. “He really is crazy.” It was disappointing, really. Still, sadly, it seemed like all the good-looking ones were taken or crazy. Or gay.
Still, it was with a surprising amount of disappointment that she passed him into the hands of the paramedics and watched the ambulance doors close behind him. It was a certainty, of course, that she’d never see him again.
* * *
He had to see her again. It was the one certainty that had never left his brain the whole time he’d been in the hospital, with mortals poking and prodding him and asking frankly rude questions about the marks on his back where his wings had been. Forget about returning to Olympus. Forget about trying to figure out how in the world he was going to function on this mortal plane if he couldn’t get back. The only thing driving him was his need to see the woman again.
He didn’t even know her name. The mark of the arrow, burned deep into his heart, would lead him to her, but it was a big city. She might not even be from here. What if she was a tourist? What if she was from the other side of the country? It could take him forever to find her.
They’d let him out the hospital after a few interminable hours, deciding there was nothing wrong with him that they could readily diagnose. Someone had mentioned the possibility of keeping him under observation for psychiatric evaluation, but Cupid had put that thought right out of the doctor’s head by making sure he noticed the petite and lovely, abundantly curvy nurse who walked in at that moment. Even without his bow and arrow, he was a formidable force, minor god or not.
So they’d provided him with some clothes, thank Hera, and sent him on his way. Another carefully engineered distraction kept him from having to fill out any annoying papers, and shortly after he’d been escorted down to the lobby, he was back out on the streets.
Where to start? It was a big city, yes, and he didn’t know her name, but he could wield his powers if he had to. He wasn’t quite sure how, but surely he could figure out something. He headed down the sidewalk.
He hadn’t walked quite three blocks when he stopped in his tracks, staring into the window of the electronics shop on the other side of the street.
She was there. Right there. Her face on the screen of a row of six flat-screen televisions, in full-color, high-definition glory. She was reading the news.
Aja Hastings
, he read from the screen. NBC news. Reporting on the Olympics.
Cupid grinned. Well, then. Obviously finding her wasn’t going to be so hard, after all.
What
was
going to be hard was finding clothes that didn’t make him look like a vagabond. Ah, well. That was what being a minor god was all about. He set his sights on Bloomingdales.