Stealing Cupid's Bow by Jewel Quinlan

part somehow had slipped her mind. She wondered how old he actually was, if what he was saying was true.
    “I lived on Mount Olympus for a long time. But after the divorce, it was uncomfortable to stay. The gods don’t believe in divorce, Hera especially.”
    “Divorce?” She remembered him saying that before.
    “From Psyche. You know who she is, correct?”
    Raine did know. They’d been in several paintings and sculptures she’d seen in class at college. Psyche had been the beautiful human daughter of a human king. She was so beautiful that people came to worship her from far and wide, causing them to neglect the goddess Venus who became jealous of her. Venus ordered Cupid to cause her to fall in love with a monster as revenge but he ended up nicking himself with his arrow and falling in love with her. Apparently Psyche had gone through severe trials from Cupid’s mother in order to earn the right to become his immortal wife.
    “You divorced Psyche?” Raine’s brows lifted.
    “Yeah, first ever in the history of the gods. It wasn’t received well.”
    “But why? I thought you guys lived…happily ever after.”
    “We were, for a while,” he said. “We even had a daughter. But things changed.”
    How sad that they were separated now and everyone thought of them as the exemplification of true love. It was so strange that her rusty education of ancient mythology and its seeming end would connect here in the present over such a long void of time.
    The memory of him pointing a bow and arrow at the couple in the hotel pushed its way forward in her mind. “So you really did make two people fall in love today?” Why had she seen him when no one else had? “And what about the woman in the hotel?”
    “I’m still amazed that you saw me. That hasn’t happened in a very long time.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “When I’m using them, the bow and arrows cast a glamour over me so people don’t see me at work. When they’re slung they cast a glamour so that I am seen but they are not.”
    “But if you disappear into thin air, don’t people notice that?”
    “The glamour has a repellent quality. It distracts the attention of people, and their movement, away from it.
    She was taken aback. “No wonder nobody reacted. It all makes sense now. Then why did I see you?”
    “The only mortals who have ever been able to see past the glamour are gifted artists. Apparently their minds can detect dimensions others can’t.”
    He gestured to a small oil painting on the wall in a gold frame. It was a depiction of a couple in a garden. Above the treetops flew a small baby with wings, his bow and arrow pointed at them, and an angelic smile on his face.
    “Especially as a young god, there were a lot of artists who caught glimpses of me at work. No one would believe them when they spoke of me, they were considered crazy. And after belief in the gods died away, they were given even less credibility. The many paintings through the years are, basically, snapshots of me through history, as I have been glimpsed by an artist. Some of them are family portraits commissioned by my mother. She always did love art. Of course, there are some that are pure fantasies. It’s been a long time since such an artist has been born to the earth.”
    “But I’m not an artist.” She’d never even drawn. Her days were spent now as an administrator in human resources. It wasn’t a job where creativity was remotely needed.
    He smiled smugly. “Well, maybe right now you aren’t. But the gift lies within you.” He tapped his finger lightly on her nose.
    “How come I couldn’t see your bow when you were wearing it?”
    “That I’m not sure of,” he said. “It’s possible that you need the connection of power between the bow and the archer when it’s in use. It would be interesting to study what makes mortals like you different from the others. It would definitely explain why you haven’t seen all the trainees walking around