Quiver

by Lisa Borne Graves

  “Think about it. Why am I away from war? Why did Archer fall in love? Why does Zeus need spies to see what is going on? Something is amiss with all of us.” Chase paced as he spoke. Then he turned to me. “And why is Lucien taking secret trips, hiding things, and lying?” He challenged me to contradict him.

  They were all staring at me. It was time to fess up. “I had a dream. I saw Archer upset and angry, fire, Zeus afraid, and Callie’s face. That’s all. I hadn’t made sense of any of it until now.”

  “How long have you been sitting on that?” Archer’s eyes narrowed, the accusation apparent in his gaze and voice.

  “A couple days before she came here,” I retorted.

  “And you never felt the necessity to tell us, to warn us. Poseidon’s trident, all of this could’ve been prevented!” Aroha lashed out at me.

  I wished she would redirect her anger toward the deserving. Archer had created this mess. “Really, Aroha. Would it have mattered?” I taunted back.

  Before she could answer, Archer cut in, “No, it wouldn’t have. I was in love with her the moment I met her by the elevator. I never would’ve been able to stay away.”

  “We could’ve better protected Archer, her, if we had known.” Chase gave me a reprimanding shake of his head.

  “From an omniscient god?” I laughed.

  “He’s not. His powers have weakened or, at least, his sight. It has something to do with Callie, but I don’t know what. How could a mortal…”

  “She’s a demigod,” Archer proclaimed.

  All of our mouths dropped. How in Mother Gaia had he figured it out?

  “Isn’t she, Lucien? Isn’t that why you went to France? To prove that?”

  “But why would Lucien even care?” Aroha threw her arms up, lost. She plopped onto the sofa like the drama queen she was.

  “Because he has to understand the prophecies, and more importantly, he wants her immortal one day as much as I do. He wants her after we tire of each other, but we never will. This is true love, Lucien. Bound or not, she never would’ve loved another, and neither will I,” Archer said.

  I wanted to punch him again for his big head. She wouldn’t only love him. He had just gotten to her first. There would be a time for Callie and I to be together, despite his ridiculous notions of true love.

  So, out of jealous resentment, I prepared to use my last piece of ammo that would most likely forever sever our friendship: Callie’s godly ancestor. “I did go to France to research her lineage. And I did find it. She is—”

  “A demigod, yes. My father has the proof in a letter written by one of your kind.” Callie was standing there. She shot me a significant look that begged me not to reveal it. I was powerless to deny her wishes.

  “Who?” Aroha’s perceptive gaze darted between us.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Callie said.

  “Never thought I would ever say this, but the mortal is right,” Hermes piped up.

  I had forgotten he was there. Idiotically, I had been about to reveal something huge in front of Zeus’s pet because of my temper. I should’ve been thinking about protecting her, not giving Zeus the info he longed for.

  “As much as I love to watch you squabble, Zeus will never make her immortal. Her heritage is a moot point, but I’m sure he’d loved to know that ancestor.”

  “The letter isn’t signed,” Callie lied.

  Chase and Aroha also had forgotten about him, because they now were hounding him for information and arguing with him. Thankfully, they turned Hermes away from the subject we’d almost exposed. My attention was turned instead to the couple. Archer had crossed over and pulled Callie into his arms. They were doing that annoying speaking-without-words thing they did—simply looking into each other’s eyes, communicating what they needed. Archer let her go and took up her hand. He led her toward her bedroom door.

  “Eros,” Hermes called over Chase and Aroha’s conversation. “I’ll be watching you.” He punctuated with a leering grin, his innuendo not lost on us, then added, “No desperate attempts to escape either.”

  Archer said nothing but followed Callie into her room and closed the door. We all heard the door lock. That click sound spoke volumes. He would not be escaping, but he sure was going to use his last hours here in the arms of the most appealing mortal I had ever met. I didn’t think Hermes would let them take things too far, but I still burned with envy.

  Chapter 22Callie

  As soon as I locked the door, Archer was kissing me as if he would never see me again. I kissed him with the same fearful lips. I couldn’t tell what was weighing more on my shattered heart: fear or passion. Only, Archer was trying to leave off where we had been before Zeus’s powerful thunder clashes, pushing away from the door and slyly kissing me toward my bed. Despite knowing what he was up to, I fell victim to his kisses, wanting to let go and forget all the unwelcome interruptions: Zeus, Thanatos, Hermes, and all the pending consequences. Consequences? Could I endure it? To give myself so completely to another being, knowing he might never come back? Could I bear that much love and then let go? Last night was different. He was going to stick around then. Today, however, the chief of all the gods was summoning him for trial and punishment. The messenger god was watching us (gross). I was so lost. (Who wouldn’t be?) I could only wonder what Archer was thinking. I needed to see what was going on in his head.

  Then, as if I had jumped out of my own mind and gone into his, I could see what he was really thinking: he wanted me to have a baby. He believed a child would solve all our problems. Zeus would never keep him from his offspring. Archer loved me and wanted a future with me. Zeus would never hurt a woman with child…

  I opened my eyes, and I was myself again. (What just happened?) Archer’s thoughts were all wrong, the circumstances, the situation. (What was he thinking?) People who want babies should be married and in love and older (waaaaay older) and… How could I read his mind? Had he done this before? Impregnated Psyche to get her to be immortal? This was wrong on so many levels.

  “Stop.” I pulled away from his kisses. “Stop!”

  Archer grabbed my hands in his, squeezing them, and buried his face in the pillow by my neck.

  “I can’t.” I shuddered, crying silently.

  “I’m sorry.” He turned and kissed my temple.

  “I can’t have a baby now, not unless you stick around.” I quivered all over, crying uncontrollably. What was I telling him? That I, at seventeen, would do even that for him, that I loved him so much I would put college on hold and start a family with him if he stayed? It wasn’t at all like me (crazy, really).

  “What?” He froze, taking my face in his hands, searching my eyes. “How… You are beyond paranormally perceptive, Callie.” Then he lay next to me, cradling me in his arms, pulling the covers around us tightly. “Shush,” he soothed me. “Please don’t cry, my love.”

  I suppressed my emotions. How could I ruin our last hours by crying the entire time? I needed to be stronger, to show him I was not such a frail and pathetic human. I had to show him I could bear the hardship of our parting. He had enough to worry about.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, wiping away my immature tears.

  “For what?” he asked softly.

  “For not staying in the dark.”

  “I would’ve given it away eventually. I never would’ve left you, and you would’ve realized. I will always look like this. I always have, since I was eighteen.”

  “Oh.” I realized what he meant. A million questions filtered through my brain, preventing me from focusing on one to ask.

  “I wasn’t going to, you know, try for a baby. It was just a thought you weren’t supposed to hear. Hermes and Zeus wouldn’t let me.”

  “Because you tried that move before?” It was out before I realized what I was saying, and my tone, quite accusatory. I felt like I couldn’t control myself; my emotions were everywhere. All in one night, I’d discovered myths were real, and I was thrown into them. I couldn’t process and
was in awe that the being in my arms was a god, a god whose face was squinting in confusion.

  “What move?”

  “Did you get Psyche pregnant so Zeus wouldn’t kill her?”

  Archer let out a sigh. “I don’t want to spend our time together dredging up the past. If—when I come back, I’ll tell you everything. To satisfy your curiosity, the answer is no. Zeus had no issue with Psyche and made her immortal out of pity for all the crap my mother put her through. We had a baby later.”

  “And they died?”

  “I really don’t want to talk about that. Just know, Callie, that I don’t think I ever knew the full extent of love until you.”

  My heart soared at hearing this, and I wanted to tell him how important it was to hear those words, to know he loved me more than Psyche. I was about to tell him the truth about my ancestor, but his lips on mine distracted me. By the time he pulled away to stare at me with those incandescent eyes, my resolve had shifted onto another concern. “Promise me you’ll come back,” I pleaded.

  “Callie.” His voice broke slightly, and he buried his face in my hair. “Please don’t force me to make promises I may not be able to keep. I don’t leave willingly.”

  “Promise me,” I pushed. He was supposed to be a god. Didn’t divine beings have powers beyond the norm? That was another arsenal of questions I had.

  He leaned over me and turned my chin so our gazes met. “I promise you, I will try to come back to you one day. I can’t promise how long or hard it will be. I may die trying, but I will try. I could never stay away from you.” He kissed me to seal his promise. “And you promise me something, Callie: no matter what you hear, no matter what anyone says, no matter what happens, you must promise me you won’t hurt yourself in any way. If anything happens to me, I want you to keep on living. You hear me?” He held me so tightly that it was hard to breathe. His eyes danced across my face in their electric blue hues.

  “I promise,” I told him solemnly. How could he ask me such a thing? How could I easily accept his request? He didn’t realize that I couldn’t live without him. If he didn’t exist, then how on earth could I go on? Without my father or him, I really had no one who loved me. As these thoughts crossed my mind, I began to feel so helpless. How had I let my rationality slip away to be replaced by an overwhelming love that made me quite ridiculous? My rationality returned ever so slightly to remind me that it would be worse if something happened to me and he wished to follow. I wasn’t immortal like him. I wanted to ensure he would not hurt himself without me as well. “I promise. But you can’t either.”

  “I can’t die.” He laughed, kissing me. “You of all people should realize that—seeing me get stabbed, falling off a thirty-story building,” he tried to joke. I could see he was really just dodging the promise.

  “Archer, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I saw how the gods can die.”

  He went quiet for a moment, staring at the ceiling, then at me from the corner of his eyes. “It’s a redundant promise anyway.” He cracked a smile. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” Then he kissed me several times, most likely to prevent any of my protests. “Sleep, my love,” he murmured in my neck. He began to softly whisper a song. From what I could tell, it was in Greek, but I couldn’t keep up with the words. My Greek had improved vastly, thanks to Archer’s tutoring, but this sounded different.

  “What’s that? I can’t keep up.”

  “A lullaby in Ancient Greek. My mother sang it to me,” he said, then he stared off at the ceiling, deep in thought.

  “What are you thinking?” I prompted.

  “Honestly?” He peered at me.

  “Yes, honestly.”

  “It would’ve been nice to have a baby,” he said simply, closing his eyes. “Sleep, Callie. If you are as tired as I am, it won’t take long.”

  I did not want to dwell on his comment. Had Hedone been his only child like the myths claimed? I had so many questions, but I could not sully our time together with them. I was exhausted—lack of sleep compounded with an emotionally epic battle where Death had actually knocked me out. I closed my eyes, thinking sleep was impossible, especially after my short-lived nap earlier (disrupted by Archer and Lucien trying to prove who knows what), but Archer had been right. I was asleep instantly.

  Again, dreams came to me. These days, I couldn’t sleep without the newly vivid dreams, and they were getting easier to recall:

  Archer was humming and singing the same lullaby, but I could only see the back of him in the dim light. He sat in a wooden rocking chair in a room with vibrant yellow walls, detailed with white molding and skirting. The room was glowing faintly from a chandelier that looked like candles, yet I could tell they were bulbs shaped that way. It was decorated like the personal home of someone wealthy, yet with a strange blended style of modern homes mixed with something from a distant past. Archer’s hair was cropped very short, shorter than it was at present. He turned on seeing me enter and smiled brightly. “He’s fussing.”

  Then I peered down into his arms to see a little bundle wrapped up in them. I took a few steps closer, putting my hand on his shoulder. In his arms rested a beautiful baby with fuzzy wisps of warm brown curls, of varying shades of russet and burnt sienna, and the same bright blue eyes that Archer had. The baby cried out a couple of times, and Archer shushed him, rocking him in his arms and singing again. I leaned over to kiss Archer’s forehead, my hair cascading over his shoulder, but instead of my dark brown waves, they were strawberry blonde.

  I woke up in bed. I was back in my own room. And I was alone. Archer had left while I slept. How could he leave me without a goodbye? And why did I have to have a dream like that? I bet Psyche’d had strawberry blonde hair, a nice reminder that this fantasy life I dreamed about had already been lived by Archer before.

  The sadness was overwhelming but not nearly as bad as the waiting.

  The dream and the multitude of questions I had about Archer and his world haunted me for the rest of the day. Lucien helped subdue my fears, let me hear about a sliver of what their world was like. He was a good friend for that, clarifying some of my confusion when trying to grapple with this complex world of immortality. He explained their telepathic abilities to help mortals, some of their common and uncommon superhuman talents, and how they’d willingly left the limelight when the rise of Christianity occurred, which led to an awkward age conversation—they were thousands of years old, so I had heard them correctly Friday night (weirded out to the max). I learned Archer had never married another nor had any more kids—never actually fell in love naturally until me (no pressure there). In all, learning details about the world Archer had tried to keep me from to protect me made me feel closer to him. I still worried about what Archer was going through.

  We hadn’t heard anything from Archer or his sis—his mother (thinking of Aroha as that was weird). It hurt to wait. It was as if Archer were in another world where I wasn’t allowed to follow. I went to bed Saturday night, distraught that I hadn’t heard anything about Archer.

  Sunday, I almost canceled meeting up with my friends, not only because Archer was gone, but also because we had made the plans to meet up prior to Linda’s disastrous birthday dinner. Lucien showed up at my house, surprising us, claiming he didn’t want me to have to face Emily and the others alone. It was thoughtful of him, and it was one issue I had been dreading all morning: showing up alone and having to explain where Archer was. I didn’t know if I could hold myself together, and if I broke down, what on earth would I tell them was wrong? My god-boyfriend Eros is in trouble with the god-law because they tried to kill me, and he wouldn’t stand for it and murdered someone? (Yeah, that would go over well. They’d locked me up.)

  “I’m not sure I’m going,” I told Lucien. “I’ve got a fever.”

  “It’ll be a good distraction,” Lucian insisted. “Come here.”

  I walked over to him, confused. He took my head in his hands, laid his fingers on my te
mples, and closed his eyes like he was concentrating. My head began to feel very warm for a moment, like heat was emitting from his fingertips. Then I felt clarity, like the fog of my fever had lifted.

  Lucien let go, suppressing a smug smile. “Ready?”

  “What did you just do?” I asked him, grabbing the thermometer and putting it on my temple.

  “Callie, you’re fine now.” He crossed his arms and tapped his foot impatiently.

  I slid the thermometer across my forehead and gave him an I’m-not-going-anywhere look.

  He sighed, shuffling his feet. “I can heal people, at least of minor things, like bruises, scrapes, cuts, fevers. God of healing, remember, among the other things I told you about? Let’s go,” he urged uncomfortably.

  I awaited the beep on the thermometer and then read it: 98.6. I had just dropped three degrees.

  “Fascinating.” I gathered my books since we were heading to the coffee house to do homework. I was sure we’d all talk more than study, but maybe it would be a good distraction.

  Dad protested my going, but I showed him the thermometer, and he merely shrugged, confused. Then he turned his attention to Lucien. “The healer. Could you…an illness like mine?”

  Lucien swallowed hard. “That, I’m afraid, is far out of my league. I might be able to see how far it has progressed. Measure out your time left.”

  “No,” I protested, tugging Lucien toward the door. Finding out the day I would lose my father forever was more than I could bear. “I don’t want to know.”

  “I do.” My father looked at me, shocked, as if I should understand why. “It could help me plan out my last days better.”

  “Dad. It isn’t natural. We both would’ve died two days ago.”

  “Callie, wait outside,” Lucien ordered.

  It felt awkward to deny a god, even when I told myself it was just Lucien, but I regretfully stormed outside.

  Two minutes later, Lucien came out, avoiding my gaze.

  “Tell me,” I begged.

  “You didn’t want to know,” he said quietly.