West of Want (Hearts of the Anemoi) Read Online Free Page A

take care of her arrived.
    Three days passed.
    And she hadn’t awakened.
    And no one had come for her.
    So Zephyros stayed. He refused to leave her alone, even if she didn’t know he was there. He’d caused this, and he wanted to make it right. Though he couldn’t do a true healing in such a public place, he infused what energy he could into the air of her room, directing it to surround and ease her.
    But it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. His uselessness roiled in his gut, squeezed his heart.
    Damn it, he should’ve returned to the Realm of the Gods after his nephew’s anniversary party last week. Even as he’d hovered on the fringes of the partygoers, grief and loneliness had him grinding his teeth to keep his turmoil to himself. Never should he have come into the human realm feeling that way. Clearly, he’d had no business being among mortals.
    For that matter, how he’d thought an anniversary party would’ve been anything other than salt in his ancient wounds, he had no idea. He was pleased Boreas’s son, Owen, had found his happiness after so long. The god deserved it and his wife, Megan, was completely worthy of him—Zeph saw that the first time they met. But he couldn’t handle stepping inside someone else’s happily-ever-after, especially when he’d never have one himself.
    So he’d raged.
    And this woman had paid the price for his torment. Ella, he’d heard the nurses say. Just thinking the name calmed him.
    Lingering around the hospital for three days, elemental during the busier daytimes, more often human during the quieter nights, Zephyros had studied the woman, wondered about her. He’d overheard the nurses say she had no family, no husband. How was that possible? Even bruised and battered, with tubes and wires and monitors crisscrossing her body, her youth and beauty shined through. With her eyes wide in her face, dark circles beneath, and bottom lip fuller than the top, hers wasn’t a conventional beauty, but it appealed to him, made him want to know more. How one such as her could be all alone in the world, he simply couldn’t fathom. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to, that imagining what caused her solitude just might make him examine the reasons behind his own.
    When she’d finally awakened, he’d been torn. Her emergence from unconsciousness should have freed him to depart. But he found it oddly appealing to take care of her, to bring her a drink or hold her hand. His whole existence was about bringing life and marshaling the rebirth of nature after winter’s slumber, and yet those small acts in the dark of a hospital room somehow felt more meaningful.
    And then she’d asked him if he was okay. When was the last time someone had expressed care for him instead of contempt? Instead of betrayal? So unexpected, the two words had jolted his heart. Blanketed him for a long moment in a rare sensation of peace.
    All of this explained why, three days into the very season his lineage fated him to usher in and oversee, Zephyros, the Supreme God of Spring, Master of the West Wind, found himself haunting a human hospital, standing watch over a mortal woman.
    When the female nurse left the room, Zephyros sighed and snaked through the gap in the window frame. Each hour, nurses came in to do routine checks, until finally Ella’s eyes blinked open in the late afternoon. Her awakening heralded a parade of hospital personnel through the room. A doctor gave her a thorough exam. A nurse removed various tubes her conscious state no longer required. A nutritional aide delivered a plastic tray of covered food.
    Ella eyed the food and licked her lips. The aide positioned Ella so she could reach everything, and removed all the lids and covers since Ella only had one useful hand. Her right arm, injured somehow in the storm, sat immobilized in a sling. Zephyros grimaced at the watered-down sauce covering limp pasta noodles, but his bigger reaction was an intense desire to feed her from his own