They Will Not Be Silenced

by Nicole Thorn

  “Stop,” Dad said, waving his hands. “No more of this. You’re tired and you need a good nap. We can take you out for a nice lunch tomorrow, and then I think it would be best if you relaxed in the house for the next few days. Tell your friends no visits.”

  My black eyes went wide. “But they might need me. I’m the only oracle in the whole world, and they’re the only seers. We’re really important.”

  “You’re the most important person in the world,” Dad told me. “Which is why I want to take care of you. Me and your mom are going to talk a few things out. Just work on finishing up the school year, and we’ll figure it all out. Okay?”

  There was no arguing with them, because they refused to listen to what I had to say. It didn’t seem so out there to me. I had answers for every question they asked, after all. They just didn’t like the answers.

  “These sticky notes should go,” Mom suggested. “I think they stress you out.”

  It did stress me out, but I needed them no less. I saw each of them as a piece to some puzzle that had to be figured out. I was the only one who could do it, and I would never shirk that responsibility. If I quit, then the world would suffer. Also, the gods might have decided to kill me, and Apollo would have to pick another Oracle. I didn’t want to die at seventeen. I had too much to do.

  Dad led me to my desk, pulling the chair out for me so I could take my seat. I could do as he and Mom wanted though, making up an essay with a bunch of wrong information in it. If it made them happy, then that didn’t seem so much to ask of me. They dealt with a lot, and there would be so much more to come. I could feel it.

  “Here,” Mom said, pulling my curtains open wider. “Look at the rain. You like the rain.”

  I loved the rain. I loved the sound of it, because it could drown out the bad noises when they got to be too much. I heard so much death, dropping in on conversations that the gods didn’t want me to hear. One would have thought they’d know how to block that from me, but I thought that maybe they didn’t care enough to. I might have been the Oracle, but I was still a human. A mostly useless, weak human.

  Mom turned on my playlist, adjusting the volume until it was almost as loud as the rain. “Okay, I think you should be good now. We’ll bring you up some dinner in a few hours. We can even all watch a movie together if you want.”

  “That would be fun,” Dad said. “I work late tomorrow, so we can make a night out of it. What do you say?”

  I made myself smile up at my father, because I didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe it would have been better if they didn’t know the truth about me, but I didn’t want to lie. It seemed like the wrong thing to do, even when they would have been happier to not know a thing about the gods or all the bad things that would come. If my life were less dangerous and had less to do with the gods, then I could have played with the idea of lying. But not like this.

  “Sure,” I decided, making my smile even wider. It was hard to hold onto as I heard other voices trickling in. I shoved them away, not wanting to listen at the moment.

  Dad kissed the top of my head. “We’ll see you later.”

  They walked out of my room, each of my parents taking one more look at me before they closed the door. I couldn’t hear them talking, but I knew the conversation they would have. It would be about how worried they were, and that they had no idea how to fix me. To them, they’d had a normal kid who snapped without warning. To me, everything made perfect sense. It was like having a word on the tip of my tongue, but not being able to remember what it was. I could tell them everything, and it wouldn’t matter.

  I sat at my desk, intent on finishing my school work like they’d wanted. If I could at least do that, it would be one less thing for me to worry about, and I could focus on the voices.

  My eyes went to the paper on my wall, wondering if I would ever know for sure what most of them meant. As I did that, the voices came back for me. They got so loud that it drowned out the music and the rain. I laid my head on the desk and closed my eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  Dad Drops By

  Aster

  ONE DAY IN the apartment, and I still couldn’t get settled. Everything felt too new and dark. I wanted to let some light in, but Mom insisted that we keep the windows covered in the thickest curtains I had ever seen. Luckily, she had to go out and get things for the apartment. We’d moved so often that we had learned a few things. One, you always lose something in the move. Always. It didn’t matter how careful you were in packing up your belongings, something went missing. Two, something always broke. It might be something you owned. Once, my mother broke her ankle falling off the back of a moving truck. Three, no matter where you moved, you’d find something you needed to buy for the new place.

  We had lost our oven mitts in the move, our dishes had broken, and Mom decided that we needed to repaint the living room. Apparently gross topaz didn’t suit her.

  And I still needed bookshelves.

  It took me almost thirty minutes to find the store, since I took a wrong turn twice. The GPS seemed to be acting up, too, since it wanted me to go down an abandoned street, and then turn into a residential neighborhood. I thought that randomly driving around someone’s street, lost, would attract the kind of attention that I most certainly did not want.

  It then took me an ungodsly long time to get the stupid shelves. It actually surprised me that my mother hadn’t gotten back to the apartment before I did. I’d just hauled the first set of shelves out of the box when my phone went off with Mom’s ringtone.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “There are seventeen different plate patterns here,” she complained immediately. “Why would they have that many plate patterns? I’ve found oven mitts with owls on them that are just adorable, and I’ve decided that the entire apartment should be earthy colors. I’m thinking yellow for the kitchen and the living room, but none of the plates match. Ugh!”

  “I like yellow,” I said.

  Mom huffed. “But everything has to match, Aster. That’s the entire point of having a theme for your house, so everything can match.”

  “It could be contrasting,” I offered.

  “Then again, yellow is such a nasty color,” she said. I couldn’t help but feel like she didn’t like yellow because I did like it.

  “And everything in the apartment is already such an ugly brown color,” she continued. “Maybe I shouldn’t make it worse by adding earthy colors. I know! We can have an underwater theme. I can get different oven mitts and swap the yellow paint for something more subdued. Like baby blue. Not that nauseating baby blue that people put in their children’s rooms, but a pretty baby blue. The kind that is soothing. Which means that I need to put everything back and start over.” She growled these last words, and I wanted to point out that she could just come home. It wouldn’t be that hard to live with the apartment as is.

  I didn’t get that option. “All right, I’ll start over. Which means that we’ll have to wait another day to do grocery shopping. Lord knows that I can’t trust you to do any shopping. You’d buy all the wrong things, and then I’d have to return them. They always give you the worst looks when you return dairy products, and what a bad first impression that would make on the people working there.”

  “They won’t remember you after five seconds, Mom,” I said.

  She huffed indignantly. “Really?” she asked. “You think that your mother is so forgettable that I leave everyone’s mind the second they see me? Well, your father didn’t think I was so forgettable. He thought that I was a great beauty. That was before you, of course, who ruined my body and my life at the same time. Such a disaster, I didn’t know what to do with you.”

  My stomach dropped, my teeth grinding together. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “You couldn’t even stay in school through graduation. Dropped out with two years to go, and then had the audacity to blame it on me?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said again, squeezing the words through my teeth to keep from arguing. I s
hould have just kept going to school, but it had seemed easier not to. She kept moving us around, and the schools had started to ask questions. I couldn’t tell them that, as a son of Apollo, sometimes we had to move unexpectedly. A lot of them thought that my mother had been doing something wrong.

  She sniffled now, and I wanted to bang my head against the table. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the mother that you wanted, Aster. You know that I love you very much, and I would do anything to keep you safe, but I can’t be expected to be perfect. No one is perfect. I’ve done the best that I could. To hear you talking about how I’m the reason you didn’t finish school, and I’m the reason that you turned out the way you did, and I’m the reason that your life isn’t what it should be . . . well, it hurts. It hurts a lot. I’ve given up so much for you. I’ve given up everything. Any semblance of a life, my career, my happiness. I just want what’s best for you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Some more sniffling from over the phone. I wondered if she was actually crying in the store, and then felt so guilty that I apologized to her. It was uncharitable to assume that Mom would fake something like that just to hurt me. She had given up a lot, including her family. She had four brothers and sisters, all of whom she had to stop speaking with when I was born.

  Hard to explain the demigod child to a bunch of humans. She said that she had taken off the first time I’d set the grass on fire by accident. Since I didn’t remember that, I had to assume that her siblings had noticed me doing something unusual to their human minds.

  “Well, I certainly hope that you won’t be acting like this when I get home later,” she said. “We can order some food and watch some movies, maybe. We really should celebrate having the new apartment, after all.”

  “Sure thing, Mom,” I said.

  “Good, honey. Well, I’ll be home in a few hours. I need to figure out how to get an underwater motif going for the apartment. Bye. Love ya!”

  She hung up before I could respond. I took a few seconds to recover from the phone call before turning around.

  The shelves that I had barely taken out of the box had been completely assembled, and someone had changed their color from white to black. I just stared at them before my shoulders slumped. “Dad?”

  He appeared next to the shelves, grinning at me. Apollo and I looked even more alike than normal, since he had taken on his teenaged façade at the moment. The two of us looked the same age, had the same piercing blue eyes, the same sharp features and height. He looked more muscled than I did, though, and his cocky grin was something unique to him. I’d never seen someone who could match it.

  I sighed. “You know it freaks me out when we look the same age.”

  Apollo glanced down his front. “Right, hold on.”

  Before my eyes, he added about fifteen years to his appearance. Just enough that we no longer looked like brothers, but not so much that he’d have to add gray to his hair or wrinkles to his face. He also grew about two inches taller than me. “There we go. Is that better?”

  I closed my eyes. “You know that freaks me out too!”

  He threw his hands up. “I can’t win with you, I swear. Ever since that time I enrolled in your class and accidently made everyone in the school fall asleep for an hour.”

  I stared at him. “You brought wine into the school and gave it to everyone. Wine that you had magicked so that they would fall asleep. You roofied everyone in my school so that you could try and kidnap me!”

  Apollo waved his hands, flinging himself backward onto one of the couches. “I wouldn’t have had to do that if you would just listen to me when I asked you to.”

  “You mean when you were standing outside on the balcony, having just introduced yourself, and when you asked me to step into a chariot that was floating in midair? Gee, I wonder why I didn’t do that.”

  “The attitude is a bit much.”

  I felt like my head would blow off my shoulders. Sighing, I sat down next to my father, breathing out. “Sorry.”

  He patted my shoulder, grinning at my again. “And hey, I just wanted to introduce you to your brothers and sisters. You know, most of them listen to me when I show up in my chariot.”

  “Is it always a chariot?”

  His mouth twisted. “I thought it would be cool to you. What eight-year-old doesn’t want to hop onto a chariot for a quick spin around the park?”

  “One whose mother would always warn him off them, saying that his father is why he’s a freak.”

  Apollo’s face lost the cocky grin. He looked at me much more seriously now, with his arms stretched to either side of the couch. “That’s precisely why I keep trying to take you away. I know that your mother calls it kidnapping, but your mother is not the same woman that I cared so deeply for.”

  My eyes went to the carpet. “She isn’t all that bad, really.”

  Apollo snorted, leaning forward. “Actually, she is. If not for the rules that Zeus put forth, I would have taken you away from her ages ago, back before she had poisoned you against me.”

  “She didn’t do that.”

  “Really. Which of us do you like more?”

  I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know. My mother had always been there for me. She’d also let me down more times than I could say, made me feel about an inch tall, and liked to point out whenever I screwed something up. Especially if it involved her in any way. Whereas Apollo only popped up sporadically, when he remembered that I existed, and usually caused my mother to flee the city with all of our belongings. He had attempted to kidnap me thirty-seven times, at last count, got me into a lot of trouble, and clearly loved me more than my mother did.

  So, yeah, it was hard to say. Neither of them could be called an ideal parent. If I left with Apollo any of those times that he tried to take me, I found it hard to imagine that I would still be alive.

  Apollo nodded, patting my shoulder again. “Exactly. She’s poisoned my own son against me. If I didn’t have twenty-nine more children, I would be more upset over this. As it is, I’m just really unhappy with the woman for doing that.”

  “Twenty-nine?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  I rubbed my eyes. Sometimes, dealing with Apollo gave me a headache that would last for days. At least he hadn’t gone off on a tangent about how Artemis would be more than happy to rip someone’s head off if they continued to bother me. I felt like he enjoyed bringing his sister into his messes.

  When I looked up again, the bookshelves had disappeared. Alarmed, I jumped to my feet. “What did you—?”

  “Relax,” Apollo said. “They’re just in your room now. I’ve also put the books on them, in order of author. If you don’t like that, then there’s something wrong with you, not me.”

  I walked into my room to find that he had done more than just put my books on the shelves. Every piece of art that I had done also had been put on the walls, until they fought for space. The bookshelves had been filled to the brim with my books, and even more pieces of art had been pinned to the sides.

  I rubbed the back of my head. “Uh . . . thanks.”

  “Finally, some recognition!” Apollo said. “Here I am, visiting my children a lot more frequently than you see the other gods visiting theirs, but no, they only thank me when I give them something. I don’t even ask for a sacrifice in return.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I haven’t even gotten ‘The World’s Best Dad’ mug for Father’s Day, like I’ve asked for several times.”

  I tried not to picture him drinking from that mug.

  “By the way, have you seen a girl of about twelve or thirteen walking around outside? Maybe she talked to you for a second?”

  “What? No,” I said. “Why. What’s going on now?”

  He waved his hand. “Nothing to worry about then.”

  “You’re starting to scare me again,” I said.

  “You’re being dramatic,” he informed me, offering a bright smile that I didn’t trust in the least.

  “W
hat are you doing here?” I asked, because I felt like he had something brewing in that crazy head, and I’d get dragged into it. I supposed if I didn’t end up dangling off the side of his chariot again, then I didn’t have much room to complain. I still hadn’t gotten used to heights after that.

  Apollo rubbed his hands together, a grin spreading across his face. “I thought that since you’re in Seattle, there was someone that you should meet.”

  “Oh?” I asked, already getting ready to turn around and run.

  His grin stayed firmly on his face. “C’mon.”

  I did not take a single step forward. “I think it would be best if you told me where we plan on going.”

  Apollo glanced at me, and the world around me changed so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do more than blink. One second, I stood in the living room to a new apartment that I disliked, and the next, I stood in front of that apartment. People around us didn’t seem to notice our sudden appearance. They walked around and kept talking with their companions, on the phone, or staring blankly straight ahead.

  I leaned against the apartment building, trying to get my bearings. “You know that I hate when you do that,” I said.

  Apollo laughed at me. “You hate everything that involves magic.”

  “And yet . . . ”

  He waved his hand again, and a car appeared out of nowhere. It looked like a nice car, which distracted me. It wasn’t a make or model of anything that existed, which made it hard to describe. The body was sleek, though, with only rounded wheel wells for curves. It was screaming orange with yellow streaks down the side, and low enough to the ground that I’d be worried about going over potholes. I almost started to drool.

  Apollo walked over to the car, smiling at it fondly. “Now, will you just follow me?”

  “This is a bad idea,” I said, stepping forward. “This is the worst idea that I could have.”

  My father waggled his hand back and forth. “Perhaps.”

  “I shouldn’t do this,” I continued.