Love & War

by Kaitlin Bevis

  “There you are.” Maybe there was a way to get to it from the other floors.

  But the patient rooms on the floor above and the gym and the offices on the floors below extended the entire width of the hospital. There were no more inexplicable gaps between the walls and exterior doors. Searching didn’t reveal any other ways down to the ground floor that would get me to the missing wing.

  Puzzled over how to get behind that shield, I exited the hospital. Who was authorized to pass through the it? Jason obviously. Glauce, for sure, since this was her shield. None of the other demigods could create an aversion that strong or a shield that blended so well. But did any other demigods have access, or better yet, any staff? It’d be useless to question them. If Jason didn’t want them remembering what lay beyond the shield, they wouldn’t. But they were programmed to follow my orders. I could use that. Somehow.

  “Medea?” Glauce’s voice intruded on my thoughts.

  I started, turning to find the slim demigoddess on the dusty road that led from the dining hall to the cabins, curving to swing by the hospital. Her neon green shirt threatened to burst apart with her every breath.

  “Were you in the hospital?” A frown marred her face.

  “Just running an errand.” I glanced over my shoulder at the looming building. “Where are you headed?”

  She stared at me for a moment, as if puzzling out my words. “I’m meeting Otrera at the gym. Want to tag along?”

  “Not if I’m going to get through all the reports by lunchtime.” I fell into step beside her as she walked back toward the hospital, dust rising with our footsteps. “He run you through the shields again?”

  She nodded. “I don’t see what good it’ll do. If they find us, my shield won’t stand a chance against actual gods.”

  “You ever wonder if we’re jumping at shadows?” The more distanced I felt from Jason and the demigods on the island, the more I found myself wondering about the gods.

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  “I mean . . .” I lifted the hair off the back of my neck, twisting it into a hair tie in an effort to combat the sweltering heat. “We’ve been told how scary and horrible the gods are. How strong. How evil. But their numbers are dwindling—”

  “Growing,” Glauce corrected. “At least by two.”

  “Two additions in a thousand years isn’t growth,” I scoffed, inhaling the heady scent of salt and plant life that permeated the entire island.

  She shrugged.

  “And we know they aren’t as strong as they were. I mean, hell, that one god was actually killing us off to grow stronger. Maybe they couldn’t break your shield. What if it’s not just numbers we have over them?”

  “Yeah?” Glauce stopped in front of the hospital door.

  “Maybe . . .” I ventured. “They wouldn’t even want to break your shield. Maybe if we just left them alone, they’d ignore us all together.”

  She snorted, turning to study her reflection in the sliding doors. “You’ve been listening to Elise.”

  “Well, she’s actually met them.”

  Her hand paused in smoothing her hair, and I saw her eyes harden in her reflection. “They killed my parents, Medea. It was sheer coincidence I wasn’t home. If Jason hadn’t found me first, Zeus would have killed me, too.”

  I ducked my head, feeling guilty for bringing it up. But . . . “What if that was just one god being evil? What if the rest of them are different?”

  Glauce turned to give me a level look. “We’ve heard about the things Poseidon has done—”

  “We’ve heard myths.” I scuffed my feet against the concrete slab extending from the hospital. “Not facts.”

  “Medea . . .” Glauce gripped my shoulder, giving me a look that somehow managed to convey an eternity stretched across our two-year age gap. “You can’t talk like this. Not to anyone else. I get that you’re tired of the drills and the worrying and the constant fear that the gods are about to descend on us. Living with Jason, I’m sure you get that a lot more than the rest of us do.”

  No, actually. But then, he’d barely been home since Adonis and Elise arrived. I shrugged out of her grip.

  “But all that worry,” she continued. “All that fear? It’s grounded. People are actually dead. Elise barely met them, and look how badly that turned out for her.”

  “Tantalus—”

  “Is a symptom. At the end of the day, anything he does while insane falls on their shoulders.” Hatred glittered in her eyes, hardening her face. “Don’t. Listen. To. Elise. Not about this.”

  “Okay,” I said, shivering, despite the oppressive heat of the island.

  “Good.” She brightened, then flashed a smile and waved over my shoulder. “Otrera!” She glanced back at me. “See you after lunch?”

  “Absolutely.” I waved to Otrera as she approached the hospital doors, then walked back to my cabin to catch up on the morning reports. My mind was only halfway on the task though. I kept seeing that look of utter hatred in Glauce’s eyes.

  As soon as I finished the reports, I headed to the dining hall, journal in hand. I recognized that look in her eyes, I wrote once I got settled at my usual table, pausing every so often to take a bite of my sandwich. I’ve seen it in my own reflection. Thinking back to the other hospital, I remembered my stepfather calling, trying to negotiate my release. He acted like I was some sort of hostage, held against my will. Like all of a sudden he cared about that? When Jason hung up, I told him everything I could do. Then I teleported my stepbrother to us. If my stepfather wanted to pretend it was a hostage situation, I was going to give him one.

  Chapter XXIII

  Aphrodite

  DESPITE THE FACT I almost died trying to get to the stupid shield, I wasn’t making enough progress for Poseidon.

  “I cannot believe we’re at a complete standstill because you’re too weak to swim,” he exclaimed, pacing back and forth along his perfect beach, stirring sand in his wake.

  “I’m trying.” Forcing myself back into the ocean after nearly drowning hadn’t been easy. My fear tempered my haste to reach the shield, and now I was back to following my program to the letter, thank you. “The island is a weird shape. The part they’ve sanctioned for swimming isn’t that close to the shield. It’s—”

  “Then use another avenue. Or better yet, send Ares.”

  “Are you sure that you can shatter the shield right away?” I demanded, green foam scrunching beneath me as I sat up. “And that you’ll teleport Ares and me out of here”—since I wasn’t hovering at death’s door anymore, I felt pretty confident I could handle a one-way trip—“before they catch us?”

  When Poseidon didn’t answer, I smirked. “Exactly. They don’t trust Ares. If they catch him messing around with the thing that keeps them safe, what exactly do you think will happen to him? And there are no other avenues. The dining hall looks right out to the dock. That’s like, island central. There are always people there, so I’d be noticed if I went—”

  “You’ve accounted for two spots you can’t reach.” Poseidon said scathingly, raking his hand through his bleach blond spikes. “The shield circles the island.” He held up his index finger and made the shape, as if he wasn’t sure I was familiar with it. “If one point doesn’t work, go to another.”

  I gathered my hair in a ponytail to protect it from the whipping wind and shot Poseidon an annoyed look until he took the hint and dialed the gusts down. “There’s only a bit of beachfront. The rest is all steep coasts. Sorry if I’m not willing to fling myself off a cliff, but I think I’ve taken enough for the team.”

  “If it’s flat here,” Poseidon held out one hand, “and high here,” he held another above it, “that means there’s a slope between the two.” Poseidon’s voice couldn’t have sounded more condescending if he tried. “Go up the slope a bit.”
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br />   I stared at him. “Okay, you’re not getting it. Can you summon Ares’s map?”

  Poseidon did, as well as a table that fell between the lounge chairs.

  Swinging my feet over the edge of the chair, I studied the map. “This area—” I motioned to the space between the dining hall and the hospital. “—is just trees and waterfalls and pretty paths. The shield doesn’t brush up against anywhere I can walk. I’ve looked. It’s out here somewhere.” I jabbed a finger at the white space around the island. “As for these slopes? We get into instant death territory here.” My finger shifted to a spot about a third of the way up from the beach.

  “So . . .” Poseidon summoned a pencil and drew a line on either side of the island. “What about here? Or here?”

  “Visible from the dining hall.” I took his pencil and scribbled out half of his line. “And from the docks until you get about . . .” Studying the island filled with Ares’s X’s, I considered. “Here.” I sketched a path farther up, between the dining hall and the hospital. “But all of this is off the maintained path and it’s still steep enough to be dangerous. If people saw me trying to climb down to the water, they’d ask questions I can’t answer. And for all I know, the shield is even farther from land at that point, since they don’t bother flagging it out there. It’s not worth the risk of discovery.”

  “Swim at night.”

  Because that was safe. “I’d be even more conspicuous. What if I was caught, Poseidon? I know swimming to the shield is taking more time than you’d anticipated, but we’re not just here to escape. We’re trying to get information. Their numbers, their purpose, their weapons, their plans. Hades. You knowing where we are would be great, but until we have what we need, it’s not more important than us finding answers.” Though I would feel a lot better with a viable exit strategy.

  Poseidon grumbled, but stopped arguing, which was as near approval as I was likely to get, so I leaned back in my lounge chair and changed the topic.

  “Why do you put so much power into your dreamscapes?” This didn’t feel like a dreamscape of a beach. No detail was missing, no sensation forgotten. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was all real.

  Poseidon gazed out at the sea. “Because,” he said after a long moment of silence. “I’ve always been good at this.” He moved his hand, encompassing the whole dreamscape. “In The Before . . .” He trailed off, his eyes shifting to a darker shade than the ocean before us. “We all did our part keeping each other sane. This was mine.”

  My lips parted, but I paused, not sure how to respond. Poseidon and his siblings almost never talked about The Before.

  Before Creation, before anything else, there had only been the void and Chaos. But Chaos gave birth to Order and soon the ether was filled with Primordials.

  Primordials didn’t resemble gods or humans at all. They were incomprehensibly vast beings of immense power. The Primordial of the Sky, Uranus, didn’t just represent the sky, he was the sky and a sentient being all at once. He and others like him gave birth to the Titans, who were less powerful than their Primordial counterparts, less vast, but they still contained the void, the elements, and the raw powers of Chaos within them.

  The Titans killed their parents and twisted their powers for their own use. No longer were the gods suspended in the void, but now the sky hung above them, its power fueling all the gods of that realm. Tartarus was below, giving birth to the Chthonic deities and the monsters. Gaia lay between. It wasn’t the world as we knew it, but it was a start.

  Cronus, King of the Titans, never forgot how his generation turned on their parents. Every time Cronus’s Queen, Rhea, gave birth, Cronus ate the child rather than allow it to live, grow, and potentially kill him. But the gods couldn’t die, so they just lived within Cronus. The Titans were huge too, so it wasn’t as if Poseidon and his siblings were bathing in stomach acid for all eternity. There was a world within Cronus.

  “What was it like?” I asked when it became clear Poseidon wasn’t going to elaborate. Choppy waves slapped at the shore, as dark as the sea god’s mood. “The Before?”

  A muscle twitched in Poseidon’s jaw. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. A cold, dark, empty void. But I was lucky. Hestia was born first. She was all alone for a long time. I, at least, had the others.”

  Swallowing hard, I thought of my own claustrophobia and wondered what it would have been like to be trapped in an eternal void, completely alone. I’d go insane. No question. Looking out at the vast dreamscape—the sea, sand, and sky extending endlessly in every direction, each grain of sand sculpted in the finest detail—I thought I understood why Poseidon worked so hard. The darkness of sleep was as terrifying for him as my nightmares were for me.

  “My dreamscapes didn’t offer much,” Poseidon continued. “Demeter was the real force that kept us together. But every now and then, our dreams allowed us to escape the darkness. To imagine something better.” He sifted his fingers through the sand. “So, in my book, this is always power well spent.”

  “Well, it’s beautiful.” I glanced around, taking in the tiny details with a renewed appreciation. The coarse sand, the shapes in the clouds, even the taste of the air. Poseidon was slime and rude and entitled and impatient, but when he looked at the world, he saw it with an artist’s eye.

  Did he have anyone he shared it with? Or did he escape into his dreamscapes every night and sit out here alone, remembering The Before?

  I wanted to know what happened to that terrified group of siblings. How they’d gone from leaning on each other to survive to hating each other. My mind flashed to Ares. How he’d run away, back when I’d told him everything Zeus had made me do because it echoed too closely what Zeus had forced upon him. Was that what happened when you escaped hell? Did every reminder, even the very people you leaned on to survive it, send you running in the opposite direction?

  OF COURSE, THE next morning, I reached the shield. I didn’t realize how close I’d gotten until I brushed against it. Shivering at the sensation of foreign power, I stared dumbly at the shimmering space that marked the barrier.

  “Poseidon’s going to take credit for shaming me into this, isn’t he?” I muttered before drawing in a deep breath and diving, keeping one hand on the shield as I worked my way down. The shield extended all the way to the ocean floor. There was no way to get under it. But I could feel currents passing through the water. Testing, I pushed a swell of water toward the shield. The water didn’t bounce back, though my hand was repelled.

  Okay, so Poseidon was right. Water could pass through the shield. Could any fluid? Blindly groping at the sand, I found a bit of jagged shell that would do the trick. Then, rising to the surface, I swam for a bit longer, just in case anyone was watching, then rolled onto my back and allowed myself to drift toward the shield again. I’d seen enough demigods doing this before to feel fairly confident I wouldn’t arouse anyone’s suspicions. When I got close again, I sliced open my thumb with the shell.

  Or, at least, I tried to. It was surprisingly hard to cut myself enough to draw blood. I’d never realized how much my divine healing numbed my tolerance to pain, but I felt like I should have drawn blood long before I did.

  Finally, I managed a deep enough cut. Swallowing hard, I squeezed my finger until red droplets expanded in the water. My mind flashed to the image of Pandora’s box I’d seen in my dreams, deception cracking open the lid and escaping with a puff of smoke, followed closely by destruction.

  Poseidon, I thought. I didn’t have any power to send with the summons, but it shouldn’t matter. He’d be on the lookout for any unusual activity in his realm. And my blood was still divine enough to draw attention.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then something looped around my ankles and wrists, yanking me beneath the water. Twisting, I tried to pull free, and panicked when I met resistance. I hadn’t had time to take a breath, so I’d swal
lowed a lungful of water on my way down.

  “Calm down,” Poseidon said, his voice muffled through the shield. “I can’t hurt you, remember?”

  And under water, I couldn’t make any demands.

  “I’m just letting you know it worked. I know where you are now. I’ll figure out how far this shield expands. Let’s meet up tonight and strategize.”

  Unable to verbally reply, I nodded, hoping that would be enough to get him to release me. The water holding me down dispersed. I kicked toward air, but must have gotten turned around because all the sudden I was touching sand. Pushing off the silty surface, I rose toward the light of the sun then came to an abrupt stop as I slammed into the shield.

  Go up! My panicked mind screamed as my lungs burned. How hard can that be? Up! But everything was spinning and I couldn’t—

  Hands grabbed me, pulling me the rest of the way up to the surface. “Are you okay?” Jason demanded.

  I couldn’t stop hacking long enough to reply.

  He dragged me toward shore. After a few minute of coughing up a lungful of salt water on the pristine sand, I finally regained the power of speech.

  “Thanks,” I croaked, glad that despite nearly drowning again, this time I only felt angry, not all fragile and terrified. But Poseidon had the unique ability to transform my every emotion into rage. I glanced over at Jason and winced when I realized he was fully dressed.

  “Not a problem.” Jason pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his shorts and winced. “I saw you out there, then all the sudden, I didn’t. What happened?”

  I considered that question carefully. Had he heard Poseidon? Felt the water change? “I don’t—I thought I was going up. But then I wasn’t.”

  Jason nodded. “When you’re that close to the shield, it can look like the shimmer is the top off the water. And water passes through it, so it kind of creates a weird—” He waved his hands. “That’s why we have the flags to mark it. Didn’t anyone tell you?”