by Molly Ringle
Quentin lowered her face. The firelit stone walls shone through her translucent body, only the vine rope solid and opaque. “Poor boy. I shouldn’t have brought him into it.”
“My father. Will the group go after him?” She would have to tell the truth, at least. Souls always did.
“We’ve considered it. But you seemed not to care about each other anymore, so we chose someone you did care about.”
Sophie. And Goddess everlasting, hadn’t she and her loved ones paid the price. He shut his eyes a moment, then opened them. “Who are the likeliest next victims? Who will your people go after?”
“I expect they’ll try again with Tabitha Lofgren. And they’ll probably try to find out who the man was who killed me. He must have been one of you.” She glanced at him, faint curiosity rising in her face for a moment.
He said nothing. Even though she couldn’t communicate with her Thanatos associates anymore, he felt a profound disinclination to tell her any truths about his friends and family. “What about my father?” he asked again.
“They’ll keep investigating him. It’s likely they’ll try something if they can’t find a better hostage.”
He exhaled and glanced away, tightening his grip on his elbows. “He’s innocent. So were Sophie’s parents. You can see now, can’t you, how evil you all are?”
“The group perceives you as a dangerous threat. Even now I’m not sure they’re wrong.”
Adrian jerked his gaze back to her. “But you must see it now. Don’t you regret it?” Quivering in rage, he took a step closer. “I want to hear you say you regret it.”
“Regret isn’t a strong enough word for what I feel down here. Were you ever one of these souls?”
“Not down here. Not this bad.”
“Yet surely you feel regret too, now.”
Though she spoke with the bland depression of every other soul in Tartaros, rather than with the malice she had shown in life, the words penetrated with a sting. “At least I’m alive,” he said, and turned and left.
Chapter Three
Dionysos and Hermes both slept in the Underworld near Hekate, or sat awake outside her room, for the first several nights after her parents and grandmother were killed.
Dionysos had lost his parents too, a few years ago during the plague. “Your trauma’s so much worse than mine,” he told her that first night. “But I do know your grief, and will do anything I can to help you through it, and to make things right.”
Then as she was walking dispiritedly toward her bed, Hermes stepped in front of her and held her shoulders. “They are not gone,” he said. “No one is ever gone. You’re blessed, because you know this better than most. I loved them too, and you know I grieve.” Indeed, his green eyes shimmered as tears filled them, and at his touch she sensed the heartache emanating from him. “But we will not despair. Agreed?”
She smiled despite the lump in her throat, and nodded.
But now, three nights later, she had lost another cornerstone of her life. Her magic was gone. She had brought it on herself, and didn’t even have the strength to tell her friends yet.
All of them were silent and shaken upon returning from the massacre, where they had released wild spirit-world carnivores upon a band of Thanatos members. They’d left only carnage behind, and the message inked in blood upon a few tree trunks nearby: These were murderers. The Goddess has taken her justice.
The message might scare some of the mortal world into behaving. Then again, it might also incite hatred and spur a new rush of membership into Thanatos. Was there anything the immortals could do to prevent that, though? They had tried the diplomatic route. They had healed people, defended coastlines against invaders, thrown festivals full of ribaldry and enlightenment. The killer cult had attacked Hekate and her friends anyway, and murdered Persephone, Hades, and Demeter, along with several others.
So the immortals had retaliated, and now the specter of murder shadowed them all. Hekate saw it in the avoidant faces of those who stayed in the Underworld with her that night: Hermes, Dionysos, Aphrodite, and Rhea. And she felt it in the blankness that met her fingers and mind when she reached out to the world, the rocks and water and trees that used to sparkle and sing with magic for her.
She plodded to her bed in the small cavern just off her parents’ larger chamber. Their possessions still sat about where Persephone and Hades had left them. Hekate didn’t allow anyone to move them. In the previous three days, she had entered the chamber and touched things—her mother’s faded red robe lined with rabbit fur, her father’s green rope belt, the wool blankets of their bed, their combs and the leather strings they used to tie back their hair. The residual energy of their living selves had shone forth as she rested her fingertips on each item, so strong and real it made tears stream down her cheeks, but comforted her heart as well.
Now that comfort would be gone. Their possessions would seem to her the sad, empty relics they seemed to everyone else.
Aphrodite and Rhea had made up beds on the floor in a different room of the cave, and had stayed for the past few nights. They had run errands or provided help as Hekate needed. But tonight they retreated in silence, surely disturbed by the bloody revenge.
Though Dionysos had been sleeping on the floor of Hekate’s room on previous nights, she now stretched her hand in silent invitation to him. His gray eyes solemn, he followed her to her bed, and they curled up together. They hadn’t touched intimately since the one encounter at the deadly Dionysia those few nights ago, and wouldn’t tonight either. But human warmth was one of the few consolations left to her, so she took it. With her back curved against his chest, and his arm latched over her, she tried to relax enough to sleep. Hermes took up the spot on the floor he had occupied the past few nights, and pulled a blanket over himself.
Dionysos eventually fell asleep, his breathing steady. Hekate still couldn’t. She opened her eyes. Beside Kerberos lay a leashed ghost dog, whom she had brought in so his glow could serve as a flameless light during the night. The faint green shimmer illuminated Hermes’ profile as he lay on his back, arms folded behind his head, gazing at the stalactites on the ceiling.
Hekate shifted, pushing down a fold of her blanket. Hermes’ gaze moved to her, dark and complicit, bereft of the merriment that usually cavorted there. Her desolation became unbearable. She slipped away from Dionysos and dropped her bare feet to the cold stone. Hermes scooted over to make room for her on his mattress of folded wool. She sat on its edge and drew her legs up beneath her long tunic. Hermes’ body warmed the small of her back.
“Show me something,” he whispered. “I need some happy magic tonight, love.”
She lowered her forehead to her knees. “I can’t. It’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“The magic left me,” she whispered into the cloth that covered her legs. “It’s my punishment.”
He drew in a breath. His hand slid onto her back, smoothing the tangles of her long hair. “You should have let us go there tonight without you.”
“How would you have? My magic called the beasts to us. Then it left me after I used it for murder.”
“It will come back. I’m sure it will. No one’s ever punished forever, not even in Tartaros.”
“It might come back someday.” She kept her head upon her knees. “And someday my parents will be reborn, and someday we might make them immortal again. Someday life will be happy once more. It’s a long way ahead, though. How do I get through all those years until ‘someday’?”
Hermes pulled her hand away from its clutch across her shins, and kissed it. “With us. We’ll all get through together, love.”
She sniffled, and lifted her face. “Am I still your ‘love’ when I can’t do my tricks anymore?”
“Always.”
Chapter Four
Sophie paced along the beach, the smooth gray and white rocks shifting under her feet. Liam darted around near the surf, and Zoe and Kiri wandered nearby, serving as their pr
otection against spirit-world animals.
They had attended their parents’ funeral a week ago—a strange experience, having to play the part of shocked, grieving children when in truth they were still hanging out with their folks and talking with them every day. She and Liam had let the police’s protective escorts stand around them like a wall, and had kept their eyes and voices down during the service, letting everyone think they were too damaged to interact.
She’d felt like she was lying to the whole extended family and all her parents’ devoted friends; torturing them needlessly, in fact. A few days later she talked to Liam and they decided to make it up to at least one relative, their grandmother, their dad’s mom. So Grammy was down in the cave right now, on a two-day visit to see her deceased son and daughter-in-law, along with her husband, Sophie and Liam’s grandfather, who had died over a year ago. Zoe had fetched her here at Sophie and Liam’s request. Sophie couldn’t bear to let Grammy live the rest of her years without ever speaking to her son again, and letting Grammy in on the secrets helped with some of her guilt. But plenty more guilt still howled around in her mind like a hurricane.
After all, hell, she’d even gotten her dogs hurt. Sophie glanced at the boxer Rosie, who hobbled around on her bandaged leg, sniffing logs and seaweed. Zoe had been giving Rosie daily doses of healing magic with her supernaturally talented hands, and said the dog was well on her way to recovering from her broken leg. Bones took longer to heal, even with the help of magic, than a flesh wound did, like the one Sophie had incurred from Krystal’s bullet.
Sophie touched her stiff shoulder, where a bandage still covered the stitches. But it was a lighter bandage now, and the muscle seemed to be limbering up and giving her fewer neckaches than she’d suffered the first week. Zoe had, of course, been speeding Sophie’s recovery along too, and when Sophie flew back to Washington for her check-up yesterday, they’d been impressed at how quickly the wound was healing.
Good to know magical people, Sophie supposed. Except for how it also was the entire reason she got shot in the first place, and got her parents and Pumpkin killed.
But she chose this. She could have turned down Adrian’s outstretched hand back in fall, and she hadn’t. So now, to figure out how to heal the rest of her life, beyond just her shoulder. As to that, she didn’t have any ideas yet.
The police and doctors had begged, practically forced, Sophie and Liam to accept psychiatric counseling. After such a devastating experience, people freaked out if you didn’t have a counselor. So Sophie and Liam each visited the assigned therapist for half an hour a week, meetings they fit in around the other police and medical check-ins, and they also took regularly scheduled phone calls from her a couple of other times a week. It didn’t help much, since Sophie and Liam couldn’t tell her much of the truth.
Sophie did morosely ask the therapist if she had PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Or just PTS if you were going to be modern about it; some people felt taking “disorder” off the name made it less of a stigma. Sophie had already Googled it, certain she had it.
But the therapist said it was too early to call it that. At the moment Sophie just had “trauma,” which was a completely normal reaction to such an ordeal. If her mood and coping ability didn’t improve gradually over the next few weeks or months, then maybe it would start to be called PTSD.
So that was her future: everlasting PTSD. She felt convinced of it. Liam suffered from trauma too, but less so than Sophie. His mood was improving lately. Even though it’d been less than two weeks since their parents died, he’d been able to have fun once in a while during the last couple of days, which was still not something Sophie could manage. It seemed to make him feel better that he could talk to Mom and Dad, and it should have made her feel better too. Instead she continued to have panic attacks and nightmares—or at least, she’d had nightmares until Zoe had noticed the issue, and had laid a nightly spell on her to put her sleeping brain at peace. She’d done the same for Liam, who had awoken shrieking a couple of times.
Sophie had shut off her past-life memory-dreams, because they were all tied up in her problems too. Therefore not much was left for her agitated mind to do but scurry around and around in frightening rumination.
The therapist told Sophie to make a list of triggers, things that set off her panic and flashbacks. Sophie didn’t have to show the list to her or anyone else; it was an exercise for herself alone. So now, on Sophie’s phone, in a note-keeping app, she had typed in a list:
visiting the house
fire
explosions
the people who took me
Adrian
Naturally it would still upset her to see the ruins of their house, or to be near fire, or her actual attackers. (One of them was now dead, but even the thought of visiting Quentin’s soul made Sophie’s throat close up.)
But that last item—that really made her feel like crap.
Still, if the therapist was right, you could take baby steps toward facing each trigger, build your tolerance back up, and one day cross each item off your list.
“Trauma can be, and regularly is, treated,” the woman told her. “You do not have to live in fear forever.”
Unless maybe you had Thanatos after you. Then wasn’t fear sort of the smart thing to feel?
She watched Liam, who flirted with the breakers, darting at them when they retreated and skittering back when they advanced, his bare feet splashing in and out of the foam. He had scrunched up his skinny black jeans to his knees, but the Mediterranean had sloshed high and soaked them. At least playing on the beach had to be healthier for him than spending yet another stretch of hours down in the Underworld with the souls of their dead parents. Still, she longed to return to them, and felt itchy and anxious every minute she spent above ground.
It was the day before Christmas, and even here on the southwest coast of Greece it got cold. The wind had brought the temperature down to refrigerator levels, and the sea was chilly too. Though she wore her ski coat, Sophie shivered as she paced. She couldn’t imagine why Liam would enjoy wading on such a day.
“Be careful,” she shouted after an especially large wave thundered around his legs and sent driftwood spinning like chopsticks. “There are sea monsters in this realm. I have it on good authority.”
“Cool!” he shouted back, and turned his attention to the waves in search of one.
Of course, Liam was the reincarnation of Poseidon. That probably explained his fondness for the sea.
He must have been thinking about that himself. After chucking a stick and watching it tumble under the next breaker, he ambled up to her, wobbling on the sliding rocks. A trail of wet footprints darkened the stones behind him.
“When am I going to remember the Poseidon part?” he asked.
She handed him his coat and frowned as he sat down and used it to dry his legs off. “Depends. Are you scooting the memories back like we told you?”
“Yeah. Well, I’m trying.”
“Then how far back are you?”
“I don’t know. Last one was, um…” He retrieved his socks from inside his shoes. “I lived on some island. With palm trees. If you mean, like, what year was it, I have no idea.”
“You say that for practically every life you’ve remembered so far. ‘Some island, no idea what year.’”
“I lived on a lot of islands.”
“I guess your soul likes to be born near water,” she said. “Or move to it if you weren’t born near it. Anyway, you only ate the pomegranate a week ago. So it could still be a couple more days before you get to the immortals.”
He tugged on his black sneakers and tied their teal laces. “Are we doing anything for Christmas?” He didn’t look up as he asked it, and his voice had become guarded.
The question triggered a swoop of sickly dizziness inside her. Her mind conjured an image of their Christmas tree and the gifts under it burning up in a roaring inferno. She hadn’t even seen that happen—the destruction of the tree
and gifts specifically—but having seen the house collapse in flames from the outside gave her plenty of ability to imagine it.
“We’ll…try to get something good for dinner,” she said. “Send someone out for food, maybe. I don’t think we’ll do much in the way of presents, other than bringing Grammy here. That’s the main present we can give her.”
“It’s a good one, though.”
Zoe trudged up to them, Kiri at her side. “Ready to go back down?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Sophie said.
Liam hopped to his feet.
They climbed over rocks and threaded between boulders on their ascent of the hill. Souls flowed past in the sunlight, looking like the streaks of iridescent color on soap bubbles. Halfway up the slope, the souls joined into a glimmering torrent that poured down into the cave’s mouth.
A figure in black rose from behind a boulder where he’d been sitting. Since meeting him in September, the sight of Adrian approaching had regularly thrown Sophie into a blend of alarm and attraction. She had learned to balance the feelings better for a while there. Attraction had even won. But imbalance had now become the definition of her life, and when he walked toward her, her heart thudded, sickening chills raced through her, and she couldn’t meet his gaze for more than a second.
Considering he had been sleeping on a mattress in a different part of the cave for the past week and a half, and had barely touched her and only spoken to her to ask softly if she needed anything once or twice a day, he apparently understood. But she felt guilty that her body went into such a reaction, and wished the sight of him didn’t do this to her.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, as her dad used to say. No, he still would say it, wouldn’t he? Seeing her dead parents on a regular basis did make life strange and complicated—another piece of her imbalance.
