It was late when I gave up for the night. I went to bed, but despite being tired, I didn’t fall asleep. My mind wondered about Archer and how his date with Callie had gone. I couldn’t help my curiosity as it strayed toward truth-seeking, and I found myself in Callie’s room, mentally that is. She was fast asleep, a small smile playing on her face. Satisfied, I returned to my own room—admittedly, after I watched her sleep for a while. I fell asleep thinking of her.
I woke up the next day with two problems: first, the realization that I had developed a full-fledged crush on Callie, and second, an awful stomachache of guilt. How could I be so weak to let myself fall victim to a mortal, especially one my best friend was hopelessly falling in love with? Another thought crossed my mind as I lay in bed feeling terrible: perhaps there was something special about Callie we were seeing, something otherworldly that drew us in? Because I’m the god of truth, because I was irrevocably drawn in, I needed answers. There had to be a reason we felt this way about her, and I bet it had everything to do with the prophecy.
I decided to call out sick from school, pretending to be my overworked absentee dad, so I could find some answers and, more importantly, not to face Archer. I was afraid he’d see through me and get angry. Our friendship had gone through a lot in the last couple thousand years, but we’d never had issues over a girl before. He’d been as cold-blooded as Athena when it came to passion for ages now, and I would never have called us good friends during his first millenium when he had been in love.
After I called out sick, I wasted no time. I flipped open my laptop and went online. I set to my first task: finding out who Callie’s dad was. I Googled “Sikes” and then “Sykes,” searching for that old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon name, but nothing pertaining to Callie or her father cropped up. I tried to remember how she spelled her name, but over the short duration she had been here, I’d never watched her write it. I hacked into the school’s database quickly and pulled up the school rosters. That’s when I found it and saw it was spelled strangely: S-y-c-h-e-s. I felt a chill go down my spine for some reason, and my mind made a connection to a long-dead goddess. Surely, I was making leaps here in logic, no?
I let it go and Googled her father with the proper spelling and first found internet companies, and then a yellow page site for Syches Incorporated. I clicked on it. The company was a restoration service involved in the buying and selling of antiquities, which was owned by a David N. Syches. I got wrapped up in reading his biography and achievements. He had published dozens of articles and a few scholarly-sounding books. Just as Callie had said, they were all based on Ancient Greece and mythology from different lands. The bio said he was currently expanding an article, “Mythology or History? What Artifacts Are Really Telling Us about Greek Gods” into a full-length book. Was he really implying the gods existed? How much did he know or assume? This did not bode well for Archer. He would have to hide everything from this man. And mortal men are extremely observant when it comes to evaluating their daughters’ boyfriends. I know from experience.
The site also mentioned Callie as the sole survivor of Dr. Syches’s family. No other directly related Syches were alive, which might make tracing Callie’s ancestors pretty straightforward. It also mentioned his illness. Even I, as a god of healing and father of medicine, could not cure him. The illness had all the tell-tale signs of godly influence—most likely, Zeus was trying to silence him. I would not doubt it from the amount of information Dr. Syches could have if he surmised our existence. The only reason, perhaps, that he was still alive was the fact there wasn’t proof out there. We gods cleaned up after ourselves these days. We avoided photos when possible—an ever-increasing problem in the digital age—avoided any careers dealing with fame, and had to use aliases and avatars if we made online accounts of any sort.
I saved Dr. Syches’s website to my favorites and planned to use his full name instead of Callie’s for my genealogy search. I went to the Mormon website I found most useful in researching genealogy—you have to hand it to the Mormons, they keep some of the best records in the world. It was a website I always used to keep track of my little mistakes. I’m not that bad, not like Zeus; in fact, I’m very careful about things, but one does tend to fall for women several times over all of eternity, and with that comes marriages and children. I only had one living mortal child left, if you could call him that since he was middle aged now, but all my past children had had children, and so on and so on. I had a few immortal children as well, but that is an entirely different story.
Aroha hardly ever had to keep track of these things because immortal women were not as fecund as mortal ones, but when in a scrape, she gave her children away. I was more responsible and always kept a guardian’s eye out for my descendants. Archer, on the other hand, somehow had no living offspring with mortals or goddesses, which I found irritatingly moral.
On the genealogy website, I was successful in finding Callista Ellen Syches, daughter of David Nelson Syches and Ellen Thea Corbitt Syches. I traced Dr. Syches’s lineage and was surprised at how far back the records went. Records began, or shall I say ended, with his ancestor Marshal’s death in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The only other record I could find was Marshal’s marriage to an Émilie Jacques in France. But everyone must be born. Although birth certificates weren’t issued back then, churches kept punctilious accounts of baptisms. An hour search yielded nothing, so I tried alternate spellings. What I found made my skin crawl: in 1571, a Marshal Psyches had been baptized at a Grâce de Dieu orphanage.
I shut the computer down, feeling even more ill. The earliest Syches, who actually was born as Psyches, was left in 1571 in a French orphanage. The spelling of Psyches, and how it was pronounced in French, as a nod to the goddess Psyche could not be pure coincidence. Had Psyche herself given birth to the child and bestowed upon him that name in hopes one of us would one day find him? If so, the child, Marshal, was not fully a deity, or we would have known of his existence, and he wouldn’t have died decades later as the records stated. Callie’s ancestor could possibly be Psyche’s child with a mortal man. His changing his name’s spelling before his marriage was highly suspicious. I tried to remember that far back into the past. Psyche was killed in the witch hunts, along with Hedone, her and Archer’s only child. After their deaths, I returned to Archer’s side, but he hadn’t been with Psyche in the end. They had separated roughly two thousand years prior to her death.
One thing was clear: Callie was possibly Psyche’s descendant. The thing that wasn’t clear at all was whether to tell Archer about it. How would it help him to open old wounds? But was it right to hide the fact he might be falling for perhaps the last fragment on earth of his once-beloved Psyche? Was it this and this alone that made him love Callie? If so, was that fair to Callie?
I needed tangible facts. I’d go to France. I’d find out everything I possibly could before I told anyone anything. Absolute truth was necessary.
Chapter 8Callie
The messages from my Somerset friends began to dwindle. It was less their fault than mine because everything in New York was new and exciting or equally stressful and depressing, and they were always talking about stuff I had already done or didn’t care much about. I didn’t want to lose them but was at a loss of how to keep the connection going. If I lost old friends, I would need to make new ones, so I invited Linda and Emily over after school a couple days that first week, even though I wanted to hang out with Archer and his clique. I didn’t want to become one of those girls in my old high school who obsessed over a guy and ignored her friends completely. If I dated him (like I desperately wished to), I didn’t want to lose my friends. If it ended badly (ugh, I would die), then I’d have no friends left.
So here I was with the two of them after turning down poor Archer, who had tried to get me to go shoot pool with them all before. Emily filled me in on gossip about everyone at school. Linda filled me in on the who’s who in family circuits in the Upper East Side. I never realized there were such pol
itics and schmoozing in high school society. I could tell Linda was a socialite, and I thought the Ambroses would be as well, but Linda said they kept to themselves. Apparently, it was all about parental connections, and Archer’s parents were consistently MIA.
It was fun hanging out with them that first week, but then something profound happened. Archer asked me out, for real, to the movies. Only, he didn’t actually do the asking. He spun circles around me and made me ask him (weird, but it got the job done).
And here I was, in a darkened theater with the most attractive boy I had ever seen, feeling a little guilty about not spending time with my dad. My father had insisted I go, and I was glad because there was no way I wanted to cancel on Archer. Dad wanted me to have as normal a life as possible. I should have been in complete bliss, but I felt rotten. I could hardly pay attention to the cheesy love story’s plot. They’re all the same, though: boy and girl meet; they fall in love; some kind of crisis or deception occurs; they forgive each other and live happily ever after. None of that ever seems to happen in real life. In life, there are no endings—you can’t just stop life at the happiest moment. Sometimes, I wish you could, but the only true ending in the story of life is death…
A soft fingertip touching the back of my hand broke me from my morbid thoughts, and I glanced over to Archer. He peeked at me slyly from the corner of his eye, not paying any attention to the movie either. His perfectly sculpted lips curled up in a mischievous grin, dimples exposed briefly (how had I missed those puppies?).
I peered down to see his index finger brushing the back of my hand. I didn’t want him to stop, so I flipped my hand over to force him to touch my palm. He intertwined his fingers in mine, holding my hand gently. I met his gaze, and his hand tightened on mine. His eyes flickered to and danced across my face, and his other hand reached across and gently touched my cheek. I thought he might kiss me then and there, but his smile faded, his hand smoothed my hair back, and he tore his gaze back to the screen. The tension was excruciating, at least for me. He, on the other hand, was a mystery to me. I just couldn’t read him as well as other people, not yet, at least.
I thought he liked me: the way he looked at me, lighting up with a smile (as I did) when we saw each other, the flirting, compliments he gave me, handholding, an occasional touch of my hair, my face, a half hug. Yet with all these flirtations, nothing seemed to progress between us. It was like he was awaiting something or hesitating for some reason. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t as if I wanted to tap that right away. Well, that’s a lie. I should rephrase—I wouldn’t do that. All I wanted was a kiss, to know how he felt, to have him ask me to be exclusive. Was that too much to ask? After all, it had only been a week, but it felt like much longer. Archer understood me instantly, better than anyone I had ever known. It sounded peculiar, but we had a strong connection, that if he would just let me in a little more, then I could read him like a book with my uncanny intuition. However, I had no idea what made him act the way he did: so distant yet so drawn to me, fighting off the very urges that were natural for two people who are falling in love to feel.
I heard him sigh deeply with a hint of frustration in his breath. He flipped up the armrest that separated us, put his arm around my waist, and pulled me snug against his side. I felt his oddly sweet-scented breath curl around my ear; he was that close. If I turned…he’d have to kiss me. My heart skipped a beat, and I froze. I couldn’t move an inch. My stomach fluttered, full of butterflies. I willed myself to turn, but my body didn’t respond to the command.
“Callie?” his voice broke in its whisper.
“Hmm?” was all I could get out.
“I’m not sure how much more I can endure,” he said quietly, his hands gripping me tightly, one around my waist, the other on my hand. Archer’s hands were clammy and warm. He was nervous as well.
“Endure?” was all I could ask, still insecurely hesitant. Did he mean the movie? Or did he feel (as I did) that he might burst at any moment unless he could kiss me? I was powerless to control the turmoil of feelings and urges echoing through my frame.
“Can you?” he asked cryptically. His nose burrowed under my jawline where it met my ear. Goosebumps spread down that side of my body.
“No,” I breathed so quietly, I wasn’t sure if he heard me at all.
“Neither can I,” he whispered in my neck, his lips against me, but he applied no pressure. I couldn’t qualify it as a real kiss (oh, but I wanted to).
I turned my body slightly to him, which made his hands grip tighter, almost painfully on me. Archer backed away, his eyes ablaze with what seemed like an intense I-want-to-kiss-you-damn-it look. I swore his eyes were aglow, but it must have been a trick of the light, a reflection from the screen. He let go of me, grabbed my face in his hands, and brought his lips closer with a struggling pant. His breath was sweet like honeysuckles. My mother popped into my mind (freakin’ inappropriate and weird), but I banished her, focusing on the adorable boy who was about to kiss me. I closed my eyes, awaiting our first kiss, but instead, his hands tightened and pushed me away gently.
My eyes shot open. What had I done wrong? Did my breath smell? It couldn’t. I still had gum in my mouth. Archer had his face in his hands, his body tense. What had happened to make him go from wanting to kiss me to bugging out like he was?
“Archer?”
“I’m sorry. I really am,” he murmured. Then he stood up, took my hand, and pulled me up with ease. “Let’s go.” It wasn’t a question or a suggestion, but a command.
Shocked and confused, I allowed him to lead me out of the theater, even though the movie wasn’t over. Once we were outside, I stopped, which pulled Archer off balance and against me.
His hands gripped my waist for balance, and he stared down at me with a torn expression. I couldn’t deny the oddity of his eyes now that we were outside. They shone as if the sunlight was in them, brighter than usual, and I couldn’t blame it on the lighting or the movie screen this time. I dared to reach out and touch his cheek. He pressed his cheek against my hand, closing his eyes with a ragged sigh. Then he pulled me into a tight hug, his warm body pressing against mine. So many sensations and images flittered through my mind. I had to focus before I forgot what I was about to say. Being a head taller than me, he rested his chin on my head.
“Archer,” I murmured in his chest.
“I can’t.” His voice choked. What was he trying to tell me? He couldn’t…what? It was obvious he wanted to kiss me, and that wasn’t some dreamed-up fabrication of an overactive mind. He was fighting so hard not to give in, it was now obvious what he truly wanted.
He let go of me, took up my hand, and led me toward the parking lot. The moment was leaving us. He had denied what he wanted to do, what I wanted him to do, and I refused to leave without some answers as to why.
“Can’t what?” I tried to hide how terrified I was of what he meant, unable to conquer the growing insecurities in my mind. Can’t like me? Can’t date me? Can’t be with me?
“Kiss you,” he said simply, not looking at me, but staring straight ahead. “I want to,” he said wryly. “Trust me, I really want to, but…” Shock spread across his face as if he realized he said too much.
“But what?” I asked.
He opened the passenger door of his car for me and left me standing there as he headed to his side and climbed in without a word. He was buying time.
“But what?” I pressed, being firm after I climbed in.
He started the car and pulled out quickly. “You wouldn’t understand,” he muttered. It was obvious he was hiding something from me.
I wasn’t about to let this go. It was a wall between us, one I couldn’t see through to truly understand him. “Try me. After that, what happened in there, I deserve some kind of explanation. Do you have a girlfriend already or something?”
“No,” he said firmly. His eyes flickered to me, probing, searching for something on my face before his gaze darted back to the road. As soon as he pulled o
ut onto a main road, we were stuck in traffic, hardly moving.
“Then…” I tried to urge him.
“Callie, you can’t possibly understand what I’m thinking.”
“Try me,” I challenged.
Archer was taken aback by my tenacity. This time, his stare rested on mine. I met his gaze steadily, trying to appear firm but understanding. He gripped the wheel tightly, taking his frustration out on the steering wheel, and sighed deeply. His eyes were dimming, the light beginning to fade from them.
“It’s against the rules, kissing you.” His face reddened, his eyes focused on the slow-moving traffic. After such a weird statement, he didn’t dare look at me.
“The rules?” I asked skeptically. A strange Kool-Aid-drinking cult came to mind.
“Yes. You have to kiss me first. I can’t make the first move.”
Now I was confused. He hadn’t fully answered my question. “Whose rules are these?” I decided to play along with his explanation to get the details before I judged him.
Archer’s face screwed up in indecision: he was choosing what to tell me, what to hide. He was serious about these silly rules, but I was lost as to why there was such a high need for secrecy.
“Call them self-imposed if you must,” he growled, beginning to get frustrated.
“Any other rules I should know about?” I countered mockingly.
“I won’t ask you out either. That’s up to you.”
This was ridiculous. “You’re right. I don’t understand you. You appear all old-fashioned and chivalrous—”
“Old-fashioned.” He laughed dryly.
“And then you want some ultra-modern woman who has to make all the moves?”
“You understand me much better than you think,” he said quietly.
“It doesn’t fit.”
The car was stiflingly silent for a moment.
“I’ll take you home then,” he said, defeated. I could tell he wouldn’t explain any further. His voice and eyes were extremely sad and solemn. I could tell I would have to let it go for now, or he’d never talk to me again. The thought of that frightened me; he had become the only light in my dark world right now. Moronically, I’d allowed myself to depend on him. It wasn’t like me, but here I was (stupid girl).
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