To our left came a sudden crash like two monstrous hands clapping together and then bursting apart. The resultant shockwaves buffeted the airliner like a kite. Panic had me reaching for the armrest, but since Nick’s hand was already there, I nearly shredded him with my newly manicured nails. He hissed with pain, but didn’t draw back his hand. Instead, he turned it over to take mine. He looked into my eyes. I stared into his, and thought well, if the world ends, at least we’ll go out together. It was a shockingly romantic thought for me, and that, more than anything, snapped me to. We were not going to die. My cousin Tina would kill me. It would make her wedding party lopsided.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and started to rise, to demand that we make an emergency landing or something, not caring how crazy I’d sound, when the lightning flashed again, cracking across the sky like a whip. The plane flinched as it struck, bucking like a thing alive desperate to escape the pain. I was flung forward, bashing myself on the overhead bin and falling into Nick’s lap. He gripped me close and held on tight.
“Stay put,” he ordered. “There’s nowhere to go. We’ll get through this. It’ll be okay.”
But I knew he was wrong. I struggled against him as the plane banked sharply. No, not banked. Sheared off, beginning to fall, as if something was off on one side…like an engine.
“We have to land,” I yelled. “Now!” As if this was a newsflash.
There was so much screaming going on—babies crying, grown men and women praying or wailing or whatever—that no one heard.
Another crash of thunder came from the side of the plane, and punched into us like a fist, knocking us even farther off-kilter. The metal of the plane groaned in defiance, but it wasn’t a victorious sound. It was more like, “You’ll never take me alive.” And that’s exactly what I was afraid of.
“We have to do something!” I shouted at Armani. Nick, dammit, Nick. Even as we rushed toward death, I couldn’t get it right. But that’s how I’d thought of him when I’d first met him, a defense mechanism against my attraction, one I’d never gotten over.
“Like what?” he shouted back.
I didn’t want questions, I wanted action, but I didn’t have any to suggest.
Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling as the plane continued to drop altitude and the pilot was too busy, I supposed, trying to stop it to comfort his panicking passengers…as if an announcement would have made any difference. As if they, like me, couldn’t feel the ground rushing up to meet us.
Armani lifted me off him to grab two masks before pushing me down into a seat and manhandling me to get my mask into place. I didn’t fight him, only because the sooner he knew I was okay, the sooner he’d see to himself and I could lunge past him.
The second he was distracted, I did just that, avoiding his grabbing hands to lunge down the aisle. Down was the operative word. We were now at a forty-five degree angle, nose to the ground—falling, falling.
I canted left and then right as the plane lurched, the pilot battling to level off. I apologized as I went, gripping a man in a very personal place when a really bad thunderclap threw me off balance and I had to catch myself.
I hit the curtain between us and first class to the curses and cries of my fellow passengers. A flight attendant strapped down into her jump seat and counting off frantic prayers on a rosary tried reflexively to stop me from crossing the sacred threshold, but I stopped her with a look. The look. I froze her in place. She’d space right through at least a few minutes of panic, long enough for me to invade first class.
Apollo was already out of his seat and met me halfway down the aisle.
“You okay?” he asked. It was a silly question, so I ignored it.
“What do we do?” Scratch the we. If there was anything I could do, I’d have done it. “Don’t you have some power to stop all this?”
But I knew the answer before I heard it from his lips. I could see it in his eyes.
“I’m the god of the sun, and they’ve cut me off from it. Even if I could harness it still, I have no control over storms. There’s nothing—”
“Screw nothing!” I said. I looked around frantically for something, anything. But there was nothing physical to fight or fight with.
A male flight attendant risked life and limb to close in on us, coming from the front alcove.
“Sir, ma’am, you’re going to have to return to your seats!” he yelled over the noise of the screaming plane and howling passengers.
The aircraft bucked again, and I screamed myself. Apollo’s arms went around me, and we fell hard into the seat beside us, into the laps of an elderly man and woman who looked dumbstruck. The armrest between them dented my side. As we scrambled to right ourselves, the plane started to roll. I screamed again and gripped Apollo for dear life. If only I could freeze the air like I could people, but I couldn’t stare it down. Eye of the Storm was just an expression and anyway, we were locked tight in its abusive embrace.
Thunderclaps crashed to our left and right as if trying to crush us between them. The plane was blown forward and shot ahead like a torpedo, momentum giving it momentary stability.
Then the miracle happened… We stayed that way. The plane rocked from side to side, but the gut-wrenching roll had halted, and we started to level off.
Apollo and I looked at each other, as close as lovers on the bony knees of the old couple we’d crashed into. The man bounced his knees upward at that moment as a prompt to move, and Apollo helped me stand. We both held to the back of the surrounding seats, sure the reprieve was only temporary.
Someone snapped a picture with a cell phone camera, which I knew only because it took the pic with the totally unnecessary shutter sound. I whipped my head around to look for the source and was stopped by Serena’s death glare. She was turned around in her seat, glowing green eyes taking us in.
Glowing green.
Crapcakes.
I turned back to Apollo. “Um, about Serena…is there anything you want to tell me?”
Apollo looked toward the woman in question, but the glow in her eyes was gone. Now she looked more miffed than outright homicidal. Had I truly seen what I thought I’d seen or was I now imagining monsters where none existed? Was my mind playing tricks on me, turning simple jealousy into a literal green-eyed monster?
“Serena?” he asked, “What do you want me to tell you? You wanted the press off your back, the new film’s PR guy wanted a little off-screen romance to help sell the movie…it seemed like a win-win. Surely you’re not jealous.” He was watching me closely. Too closely. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
He was right. It was what I wanted. Maybe. Possibly. Anyway, it was what had to be. There was Armani. And besides, Apollo would swallow me whole. With those turquoise eyes and that toned…everything…and the sparks that flew between us… It was amazing the oxygen in the air hadn’t ignited on our spark. But he was also a god, and even if ancient history wasn’t full of cautionary tales about trifling with gods, my own experience would have been enough to warn me off.
“Yes,” I lied. “That’s what I want.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“Great,” Serena cut in, rising from her seat. “Then if everything’s back to normal, perhaps you’ll unhand my co-star and return to your…class.”
I ignored her, especially since I hadn’t “handed” him to begin with, and turned back to Apollo.
“What do you think happened?”