Love & War

by Kaitlin Bevis

  “Some of them can do glamours now,” I reminded him. “It’s possible she wants to set herself apart. Maybe she just got tired of looking like everyone else?”

  “Maybe . . .” Ares still sounded troubled. “I’ll find out more.”

  “You’ve already discovered a lot more than we knew before,” Persephone said, though even I could tell the brightness in her tone was forced.

  “But not enough to plan around.” Athena reached across the table to grab the map. “We need to find out where this island is located.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” Poseidon grunted.

  “Not a very large haystack,” I argued, leaning back in my wicker chair. “It has to be somewhat near the island Tantalus kept us prisoner on. The boat ride between the two wasn’t that long, was it?” I hadn’t bled to death, anyway.

  Ares shook his head. “It felt like eternity, but no. We weren’t traveling for long.”

  “Their base is likely somewhere near the area where demigods were disappearing from the cruise ships.” Artemis’s fingers drummed against the white tabletop. “I mean, there’s gotta be a reason they picked that span of space every single time.”

  “An entire island couldn’t have always been shielded from sight.” Persephone brightened, flashing me an excited grin. “We could search older maps—”

  Poseidon shook his head. “Not every island makes the maps.”

  Persephone raised an eyebrow at that. “Have you seen the maps we make now? Satellite imagery is a thing.”

  “Plus, you said the demigods went missing in one of the most well-traveled paths in the entire ocean,” I reminded him, digging my feet into the sand beneath the table. “Well-traveled means well-mapped, right?”

  Poseidon considered that for a moment. “Worth a shot. We’ll work on finding the island from the outside. You two keep digging for information from within. Let’s get back to the waking world and get to work.”

  As the gods said their goodbyes, Persephone slipped her hand in mine. “Come with me.”

  Poseidon’s dreamscape dropped away, replaced by a flowery meadow.

  “What happened to Hades?” I demanded as soon as the dreamscape materialized around us. “The whole story. When did he go missing?”

  She drew in a deep breath, clenching and unclenching her fist. “I don’t know. He’s gone, and I can’t—I can’t sense him, Aphrodite. And I can’t fall apart. I have to—” Persephone sucked in a breath, her green eyes going hard as she struggled to pull herself together.

  I tugged Persephone into a hug, meadow wheat or whatever the hell this was, crunching beneath our feet. She’d never wanted this. Any of this. But she kept rising to every challenge, bending but refusing to break.

  “At least you know they aren’t torturing him or anything,” I offered. “Hades felt everything Zeus did to you.” That was another reason I was sure he was being kept unconscious. Hades would fight.

  Her shoulders went slack with relief. “You’re right. Thanks, Aphrodite. Gods.”

  “Not a problem.” I flashed her a grin as her daisy-print picnic blanket materialized beneath us. “And I’ll find out everything I can while I’m here.”

  “I can’t ask you to—”

  “What you said before about owing you? I’m not staying because of that. Or because of Zeus’s programming.”

  She pulled away, her green eyes searching my face. Beneath the false light of her dreamscape’s sun, she almost seemed to glow.

  “You’re my sister. I love you.” I smiled at her. “And you’re the first person who ever loved me back. The first person who worried about me, who cared about what was happening to me. If there’s something I can do to help you, I’m going to try my best to do it. I know if the situation was reversed, there isn’t much you wouldn’t do for me.”

  Persephone took a shuddering breath. “When I saw you on the floor, Aphrodite. All that blood. I thought—I thought—”

  “I did too for a minute.” Uncomfortable, I glanced around the dreamscape to get my bearings and regain my composure.

  Persephone’s dreamscape was a meadow filled with wild flowers, but she kept the power to fuel it down to a minimum, so the flowers were more like indistinct splashes of color against a blurred yellow background. She hadn’t even bothered with details like ambient sound or wind. So rather than feeling relaxed by the familiar surroundings, I felt as if I was trapped in a painting. Beautiful, but lifeless.

  “Are you okay?” Persephone sat on the blanket, motioning for me to join her.

  When I dropped to the spot beside her, fabric crinkled beneath my legs. “He poisoned me.”

  “I know.”

  “Adonis . . . he poisoned me. I trusted him, I—I—”

  “I’m so—”

  “I slept with him,” I admitted, clutching at the bright fabric so hard, it rippled as it gathered beneath my palms. “For a minute, I thought I might even—” I broke off with a great, hiccupping sob. Not just for Adonis’s betrayal, but for the sheer amount of everything I’d been through over the last few days.

  Persephone pulled me to her and let me cry until my tears were spent. “I can throw him into Tartarus if you like.”

  I laughed. Adonis was hanging out in the Underworld for his own protection and ours. No one trusted him and more than a few gods had reason to want him dead for his betrayal.

  The real Elise was down there, too. But that was just so she couldn’t accidentally blow my cover. Unlike Adonis, she was glad to be out of the fray. Elise had never wanted to be involved in all of this.

  “You think I’m kidding, but it’s not like it’s far from the palace. I could do it. I’m mad enough to actually throw him there.” But the mirth in her voice undermined the threat. She drew in a deep breath and laid back on the blanket. “I’ve never seen you cry before.”

  “Zeus told me not to.” I laid next to her and looked up at the sky, feeling strangely better for having cried myself dry. Since Zeus built me to follow his every order, I’d been physically unable to cry so long as he lived. “And after he died, I never . . . I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think I was capable of it.”

  Persephone shifted to her side to look at me. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

  “I don’t know.” I kept my gaze locked on the brilliant blue sky. “In retrospect, it doesn’t make sense, but it felt right not being able to cry. It made sense for something not to work. It’s like pieces of me are missing and that was one of them.”

  “I know that feeling,” Persephone murmured.

  I was starting to wonder if there were any of us who didn’t.

  “KNOCK, KNOCK,” called a familiar voice the next morning.

  I glanced at the doorway, expecting to see a nurse, but instead, a slim, dark-haired, teenage girl with the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen stood just outside the room holding a large gift bag.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, holding the bag up in offering. “Jason sent me.”

  She was the girl who’d questioned Ares yesterday, I was sure of it. “Uh, sure.” I winced at the pain speaking caused and turned off the television. Ares had left a little while ago at Jason’s behest, but he’d promised to come back soon. At least, I thought that had been a little while ago. Time passed in odd chunks because I kept fading in and out of consciousness. “Come on in.”

  Surprise clouded her expression when I spoke, and she nearly stumbled as she crossed the threshold. “You speak Greek, too?”

  Crap. Humans heard gods in their native tongue and hers must be Greek. Divine speech didn’t require translation, and any words we heard rooted in our tongue, we could understand. Back before human souls split into half, they spoke the divine tongue. But that, along with every other aspect of their being, divided during the split. Every language created since had pieces of o
urs embedded into it.

  Think. Adonis and Elise were hardly typical demigods. There had to be unknowns when it came to how their powers worked. Heart thudding, I took a risk. “Not consciously,” I said with a shrug, wincing when the motion pulled on my stitches.

  “Not consciously?” She pulled a chair up beside my bed, her violet eyes wide, though they shone with curiosity, not suspicion. “So . . . you’re like them? The gods? You can speak everything, understand everything?”

  “Can other demigods not do that?” I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise and gasped at the pain it caused. Why did I keep forgetting how much damage Tantalus had done to my face? “Adonis can.” I choked on the words through pulses of agony. And he could. Now.

  “It’s not a common ability. Trust me, I’d have noticed,” the girl said, leaning back in the hard plastic chair with a laugh, very intentionally ignoring my signs of discomfort. “But you and Adonis are both pretty special. So maybe it’s a unique trait.”

  “Huh.” I kept my face neutral. Lesson learned, at least for the next five minutes until I inevitably forgot again. “Cool. So . . . Jason sent you?” The leader of DAMNED had dropped by for a few minutes yesterday, mostly to offer his apologies. I’d resisted the urge to spit in his face. Barely. “What’s up?”

  “He just asked me to check in when I could.” She crossed her legs beneath her, and set her bag on the tile floor. “I was getting some lab work done and decided to swing by. The nurses said it was okay. I mean, as long as you’re okay with having company.”

  “Great.” I plastered a smile on my face, ouch, as I tried to figure out who this girl was. She wasn’t a demigod—she wasn’t golden—but she didn’t seem charmed into oblivion like the handful of human nurses and doctors here, either. Plus, there was something about her that set me on edge. She looked human except for her eyes. They were an intense violet, which was unusual enough, but they also had the same kind of unnatural brightness typically associated with gods.

  “Elise.” I held out my hand over the plastic railing of the bed, deciding the best way to find out was to be direct. Hopefully she’d infer Elise was my name from that statement and not actually ask me point-blank. I never worried about that with normal humans, but demigods had long been victims of gods misrepresenting themselves and she was, at least, associated with the semi-divine beings.

  “Medea,” she said, giving my hand a gentle shake. “I’m Jason’s . . .” She flushed, glancing down. “Wow. Wife. It’s really weird to say that out loud. We’ve only been married a few months, but I’ve not really had to introduce myself since then. I mean, everyone around here knows each other. You know?”

  I opened my mouth to congratulate her, but the words lodged in my throat. Gods can’t lie, even to be polite. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said instead, because for now, that at least rang true.

  “You, too!” She beamed at me. “Anyway, feel free to tell me to go away if I’m bothering you. I spent a lot of time in hospitals, so I know what it’s like to try to entertain well-wishers when you really just want them to get lost.” Her lips twisted in a self-deprecating smile. “But I also know you get bored, so I brought presents.” She pulled the bag up to her lap with a grunt. “Movies, books, magazines, actual clothes, and jammies. I found your size online,” she added, pulling out each item she named and stacking them on the small, wooden bedside table beside me.

  Geez, how much information did Elise put out about herself? I’d have to Google her later, make sure I didn’t contradict anything she’d said.

  “And . . .” Medea delved into the bag. “Ahhhhh,” she sang as though unveiling a holy artifact. “Communication with the outside world.” She pulled a tablet out of the bag and showed off the keyboard she’d attached to it. “Okay, no, I lied,” she admitted. “You can’t communicate with the outside world at all. Not just you! I mean—” She held out her hands, eyes wide. “You’re not like, being punished or anything. It works like that for most of us. Safety protocol, you know? But you can still read and watch stuff, so it’s almost the same.”

  I blinked, trying to follow that string of information. Well, she said she lied, which meant she wasn’t a god, no matter how minor. “Um, wow. Thank you.”

  She beamed, dropping the now empty bag onto the tile floor with a thwack. “No problem. I’m sure you’ll be out of here soon. But in the meantime, it just wouldn’t be fair for you to have survived so much only to die of boredom, am I right?”

  I laughed and then winced, my hand going to my side.

  Concern flickered over her face, but she quashed it. “You’re going to love it here. I mean the weather alone is fantastic.” Medea released an exaggerated sigh of contentment. “Assuming you’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to be inside an oven.” She laughed. “I’m kidding, it’s not that bad. Most days. Oh.” Something like fear flickered across her face when she noticed the nurse lingering in the doorway. “I should leave.”

  “I’ll only be a moment,” the nurse said. She walked over to the machines, picking up my chart on the way. Medea sat in silence as rigid as a board the entire time the nurse scribbled down notes and fiddled with my IV. The morphine pump beeped as the nurse left.

  Smiling, I turned my attention back to Medea. In another a minute or two, I’d lose coherence, so if I was going to find out anything, now was the time. “What are you?” I asked, figuring if that was too direct, I could always blame the meds. “I’m not trying to say . . . I mean, I don’t . . .” Trailing off, I tried to regroup my thoughts as the morphine kicked in. “You’re not . . . you’re not a demigod. You don’t look like—I mean, you’re not . . .” I broke off, frustrated. I’d never had reason to build up tolerance to medication, so the side effects hit me hard.

  Her eyes sparkled and she leaned closer to me, as if she was about to whisper a secret. “I’m what comes next.”

  Chapter VIII

  Medea

  I’M WHAT COMES NEXT? I scoffed, rolling my eyes at the ridiculous dramatic statement I’d used to explain why I didn’t look like the other demigods. What was I thinking, telling Elise that? Jason said to be careful. But . . . I like her.

  The glare of the sun made writing on the white pages of my journal difficult, so I hunched over to create a shadow, holding the corners of the page so they didn’t flutter against the wind. But the warmth of the sun bathing my back made the inconveniences well worth it. I tried to stay in during the heat of the day, but these late afternoon hours were too perfect to waste beneath a roof.

  Not that spending them on this god-awful beach was much better. But Otrera had asked me to hang out while she ran. So I sat as far from the water as I could possibly manage while still being able to claim I was on the beach.

  Being the one visiting someone in the hospital is weird on a lot of levels. Sitting beside the bed instead of being in it feels wrong and kind of amazing all at the same time. Maybe that’s what made me so bubbly. I could hear myself sounding more and more upbeat and hyper as I spoke, but I just couldn’t make myself stop. There was just this feeling I got when I talked to her. Like, I don’t know, we clicked. We speak the same language, literally and figuratively.

  Maybe it was just the relief of being able to speak coherently that made me feel this . . . connection. Not second-guessing every word I say. Or wondering if she actually understands, or if she’s just nodding impatiently because she’s tired of trying to hear the words behind my accent.

  I straightened my back and studied the waves creeping up the sand. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know the language. I’d grown up speaking English as well as Greek, and considered myself fluent in both. Then I got out of the insular world of that hospital. Now, every time I opened my mouth, people started doing that weird, head-tilt thing while their eyes glazed over.

  Between the accent barrier (I refuse to call it a language barrier because I know the lan
guage) and looking different from literally everyone else, I feel kind of isolated.

  But I don’t think it’s just the language with her. The more I talked to her, the more I felt this connection and the happier it made me. I haven’t felt like that since I met Amber.

  Smiling, I thought back to my childhood friend. Man, we’d had the best time playing dress-up. Where was she now? I rubbed the back of my neck, inhaling the salt-tinged air. Did she even remember me?

  I thought I’d imagined the exhilaration of instant friendship. Or exaggerated the memory. Or maybe outgrown it now that I’m old enough for romance instead of friendship. Because when I met Glauce and Otrera, I didn’t feel. . . . I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a palpable relief almost. Like all your muscles go slack and you can take a deep breath for the first time since holding it. It’s nothing like the way I feel about Jason. That’s love, that’s lust, that’s romance. You know?

  Is it weird to refer to your journal as “you?” I mean, I guess I’m writing to it like I’m talking to a person. Or am I talking to myself when I write here? Who am I expecting to read this?

  No one, right? I lifted my head, squinting at the bright sunlight. Would I even reread this? Going back and reading my entries from yesterday had been weird enough. Shrugging, I returned to my writing. Can’t be any weirder than writing “Dear diary,” so very well, I’m writing to you. “The Journal,” I guess.

  Anyway. I felt it. Elise and I are going to be best friends. Gods, that sounded so juvenile. Snickering at myself, I wiped my sweaty hands on the beach towel to get a better grip on my pen.

  I wish that visiting Elise had been my only reason for going to the hospital. Unfortunately, I had an actual appointment. They had to take blood. Ick.

  I’m measuring at three weeks pregnant, which I guess is super early to test positive on most pregnancy tests. So. based on my whatever levels, my doctor thinks it’s possible I’m having twins. I got sick on the spot. The vomit on her shoes tipped her off that I might be experiencing “an unwanted pregnancy” and she outlined all my options.