Okay, now I'm just trying to annoy you all. (winks)

Ch. VI:

Back and Forth

Warm skin against warmer glowing skin (literally glowing from within, like one of those egg-shaped lamps with feet, only much more pleasingly shaped), bare and soon to become barer.

"I wonder what it could be," muses Artemis, stroking the head of her faithful doe.

Eyes inches apart but barely seeing as lips take their far-from-first tastes of each other, then traveling.

The nearest Hunter looks up from her soapstone carving. "Sorry, my lady?"

Percy knows he should be nervous.

Artemis smiles. "Oh, nothing in particular, Phoebe. I was simply thinking aloud, about something I overheard the other night. Aphrodite doing the same, apparently."

But nothing that makes him feel as complete as this could possibly scare him.

"Oh." Phoebe makes a face. "No disrespect or anything, Lady Artemis, but who cares about her?"

It seems so right.

"Ordinarily I would have nothing to do with any business of hers, of course." Artemis sounds as if she too would like to make a face, but dignity forbids. "But this may have import to me. She is deliberately concealing some secret from me."

The breath between them is thick as Lethe water, hot and palpable and another barrier to be melted away.

"Maybe she's plotting to curse a Hunter with love." Phoebe looks disgusted. "I hope it's not me. Love changes you. I've seen girls who used to be my friends—"

He'd swear the world had disappeared and nothing was holding their molecules together except each others' hands; clinging, reaching, burning.

"I wouldn't worry about it." Artemis' smile is a little more real this time. "I'm sure it's nothing to do with you. Most likely she's simply gloating because she knows I disapprove of nearly all her schemes. Who knows how the mind of Aphrodite works? Come, Phoebe, the moon will be making its way down the sky soon. We have much work to do."

In the bedroom of an otherwise empty New York apartment, dawn at the stroke of midnight.