Tapping my nails against the glossy table, I thought back.
“Okay, so way back before Persephone knew about the way I’d been programmed into obedience to anyone who outranked me, she told me to treat her friend Melissa the same way I’d treat her.” The memory still chafed because Melissa was such a pain. “I tried being deferential for a while, but she could just be so annoying that I ended up changing the way I treated Persephone just so I could snap back.”
“An interesting workaround. Can you think of any ways that continues to impact you?”
“I liked being blunt. I liked being able to use the truth as a weapon. But mostly I think it let me . . .” I trailed off, looking past Athena to the books lining the shelves.
“It let you . . . ?” Athena prompted.
“This isn’t really fair when I can’t lie.”
“But you can deflect or avoid the topic. We’re here because you want to be. What you tell me is entirely your choice.”
I tore my gaze off the books, forcing myself to meet Athena’s steely eyes, head on. “It gave me a way to test myself. I can trust what I say out loud.”
“As opposed to?”
“Sometimes Zeus would tell me how to feel. And when he did, it felt like the thoughts in my head weren’t mine. But out loud. . . . Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it.”
“A dangerous habit for our kind,” Athena noted, smoothing her gray suit as she pushed her chair farther away from the table. “And a trait I’d argue is more or less unique to you, at least in its consistency.”
“Yeah?” I grinned at her. It seemed like such a small thing, but I held onto it. A personality trait that was inarguably mine. “Can I ask you something?”
Her lips tightened into another of her thin smiles. “I won’t promise to answer, but go ahead.”
“How come you’re so nice to me?” And such a bitch to Persephone, I thought, but didn’t vocalize the second half of my question.
She pursed her lips, considering her answer. “I’ve nothing to gain by being cruel to you.” Athena let out a breath as her hands went slack against the wooden tabletop. “That’s not the entire truth. I suppose . . . you remind me of myself.”
“Me?” I couldn’t think of two people more different. Glancing around the book-filled room as though searching for the punch line, I finally sputtered, “How?”
“We were created in much the same way.”
I blinked, her origin story clicking into my head, and realized she was right. Suddenly, I saw the goddess before me in a whole new light that had nothing to do with the pale imitation of sunlight filling her dreamscape. We were the same.
“You and I were both instantly reduced to one single definable trait,” Athena said, echoing my thoughts. “I’ve seen you fighting it, trying to discover the rest of yourself, and there is more, dear. So much more. And I remember that struggle.”
“Did he—?” I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
She shook her head, a smile lingering on her lips. “I rather disgusted Zeus. He could never quite come to terms with the fact that I grew within him, came from him. That my own creation was a battle of wills that I won and he lost. But I do know something of what you’re going through. And I know what it is to wonder whether or not you’re real, whether you count. To push past all the many ways he boxed you up into a solitary definition. Knowing that even if you should succeed, and you will, dear, that you will always be different than the rest. One day, you’ll see that as a strength.”
“But I’m not different than the other gods.” Though I desperately wanted to be. My fingers traced the wood grain of the table. “I’m every bit the god the rest of you are, flaws and all.”
“You’re thinking of her.” Judging by the acid in her tone, Athena was referring to Persephone.
“Why do you hate her so much? I mean, you keep siding with Poseidon over her. Historically. that’s almost unprecedented.”
“He’s predictable. She is not.”
“So you’d rather deal with someone who is predictably the worst jerk you can possibly imagine in any given situation than a genuinely nice—”
“You worship her,” Athena said, her hand snaking across the table to grab mine. “You’re not alone in that, even among the gods. But kindness can be every bit as dangerous as cruelty with enough power behind it. I know whatever Persephone chooses to do in any given moment will be with the best of intentions. Then again, a child may be well-intentioned in striking a match to keep their favorite doll warm. But those intentions won’t put out the fire.”
I yanked my hand back. “She’s not a child.”
Athena arched a brow and leaned back in her seat, looking unconvinced.
“You guys keep underestimating her.”
“And she continues to disregard our counsel.” Athena crossed her arms as her chair tilted back further. “We’ve given her little reason to trust us, I admit, and I won’t insult either of you by attributing her success thus far to luck. But every success makes the potential for her fall that much greater. With every stroke, she has accumulated more power, almost unintentionally.”
“That’s why you’re so nice to me and mean to her,” I realized. “I’m not a threat to you.”
“Not in the least.”
Chapter XXX
Medea
HE’S A MONSTER!!!!!!!! My pen dug into the page, nearly ripping the paper. How could he sleep with her? How could he think that’s okay? How could he, how could he, how COULD HE!
When Jason came home tonight, I faked a smile while he tugged my clothes off, reciprocated each kiss and more. I was good at pretending. Once he fell asleep, I crawled out of bed, grabbed my journal, and locked myself in the bathroom. Curling up beside the toilet, I let myself crack.
It has to be Glauce. Otrera’s not even interested in men, and Jason wouldn’t sleep with a charmed person. He just wouldn’t. I can believe all kinds of terrible things about him, but not that. Not after what happened with his mother.
From what I’d heard, Jason’s mother had been resistant to charm, but not entirely immune. Not when Zeus came calling nine months before Jason’s birth, and not when he visited again and charmed her into slaughtering her entire family while Jason was off recruiting demigods for DAMNED.
No. He wouldn’t do that to someone charmed. It has to be Glauce.
Gods, I remember when I met Glauce. She was so painfully shy. I was so happy once she started gaining some confidence, but then she skipped right past the normal, happy, confident person place and went right into super slutty bitch mode. What happened?
I took a deep breath and scratched out those last two sentence. She’s not the one who broke a vow. That was all him.
Gods, what am I going to do? I can’t stay with him. And I’m sure as hell not staying pregnant with his children!
I have to get Glauce to drop her shield for a minute so I can teleport away. Just one minute. I’ll need money. And clothes. And . . .
My thighs pressed down on the cool tile as my body went rigid with suppressed sobs. Gods, this is hopeless. I’ve never even actually seen money. I can’t pack up all my stuff, otherwise Jason is going to notice.
I wonder if the gods would take me. Sure, they’re supposedly evil, horrible beings, but Elise has talked to them and she said they aren’t that bad. I mean, we do have that wall of casualties behind the dining hall, but if you collected all the victims of humans or demigods and pasted it up instead, would the wall lose a single photo?
My thoughts flitted to the people we’d charmed into fighting the gods for us on that cruise ship. Beyond the closed door of the bathroom, Jason stirred. I held my breath for a moment, but when I didn’t hear footsteps, I resumed my writing. I don’t think we would.
If I’m what comes next, maybe I’m one of them. I w
ish I could talk to someone about this. I keep almost telling Elise, but . . . I can’t make the words come out of my mouth.
Besides, I can’t leave. Hell, I even voted on that rule. Demigods too strong to be charmed cannot be allowed to leave DAMNED. I voted on my own imprisonment.
So what am I going to do?
I thought back to the other island. How strong I’d felt. How powerful. Flipping back to an earlier page in the journal, I drew in a deep breath as I read.
To say the army was surprised when their own people turned against them was an understatement. I kept my concentration on the soldiers I could see with the help of Jason’s binoculars. I’d focus on them, then pull them to me. They’d pop into the room surprised, Jason would charm them into fighting for us, and then I’d send them back. Shots and panicked shouts rattled the hospital, and eventually, they stopped all together.
The surviving soldiers got us safely to our boat, torched the island, and still do a lot of our grunt work. Charm is handy like that.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the fire as we sailed away. I watched it burn until I could no longer tell my hospital, my home, from any other star flickering on the horizon.
That’s when we sent back our hostage.
Closing the journal, I moved to my feet in a stretch. I was not weak. I was not helpless. The gears in my brain worked as pieces of a plan clicked into place. A terrible, horrible plan. But one that might just work.
Chapter XXXI
Aphrodite
GODS ARE INSATIABLE. It is our biggest flaw, and yeah, we absolutely passed it along to humans. We couldn’t help ourselves. So now that Ares and I were together, we were together every chance we got.
“Did I wake you?” Ares leaned his sweaty forehead against my equally sweaty shoulder, still out of breath.
I laughed. “Now you ask?”
“Well I couldn’t risk you going back to sleep,” he teased, squeezing me closer. Ares kept pulling the short straw, doing the worst possible jobs. Every night before he left, he’d drop me into a dreamscape and, when he got home in the predawn hours, we’d have our fun, then talk until the sun came up, sharing secrets.
“It’s okay.” More than okay. This was my favorite part of the day. “I wasn’t sleeping that well anyway.”
Ares shifted, moving his head to the pillow and easing back so I had a bit more breathing room. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just . . . it’s hard to be around Persephone right now. I feel weirdly guilty,” I confessed, pulling the sheet over me despite the heat from Ares’s body beside mine. “I’m enjoying us, a lot. And then I go into the dreamscape where Persephone’s worried sick and then I wake up to Medea . . .” I trailed off, unsure how to describe what Medea had been doing these last two days.
She was pretending for sure. Pretending everything was normal. Kissing Jason’s cheek, laughing and talking with Glauce. And I had no doubt that if Jason was sleeping with anyone on the island, it was Glauce. Otrera wouldn’t have given him the time of day. And the more I saw Jason interact with the charmed staff, the more convinced I was that Medea was right. He didn’t see them as options.
Medea was so convincing, so bubbly, that I couldn’t help but wonder if her bubbly perk had always been an act. If so, who was hiding beneath it?
“We’ve had our fill of hell,” Ares reminded me, working his arm between my back and the mattress. “And I’m sure we will again. Enjoy any reprieve you get.”
“It’s just not something I’m used to.” I turned to my side and wriggled around until I found a comfortable position tucked up against him. “But I’m tired of talking about it. So, it’s your turn. What’s your deep, dark secret of the night?”
“I . . . ,” he paused, letting the silence stretch, “like dogs.”
Despite my best effort, I burst out laughing.
“What?” He drew back offended, pulling my sheet with him.
“Just the way you said it, like it was this horrible confession.” I giggled, yanking back the sheet. “We can get a dog.”
“Yeah?”
I blinked, realizing what I’d said. The presumption behind the “we.” “Yeah.”
He grinned and settled back down beside me, bunching up the pillow behind his head. “Maybe. It’s been a while. I made the mistake of mentioning they were my favorite animal within mortal hearing once. Next thing I knew, people were sacrificing puppies to me to help them win their wars.”
I gasped. “That’s terrible!”
“Tell me about it. Puppies. I mean what kind of sick—” He shook his head in disgust. “What’s weird is that it caught on in relatively modern times all over again. People raise and kill dogs to prove they’re some kind of fierce, detached super warriors, like that’s a good thing. It’s always dogs.”
Struggling, I tried to come up with something to say to that. I couldn’t. So I brushed his golden hair off his damp forehead, my arm pricking with goose bumps when it left the warmth of the covers, and offered my own secret. “Sometimes I like being Elise better than I like being myself. She has all this history and these likes and dislikes and she seems to really have a handle on who she is, you know?”
His arm tightened around me. “That’s actually why I always volunteer to do this kind of thing. It’s nice sometimes to slip into someone else’s persona.” He fell silent for a moment, thinking. “I’ve never actually won a battle without Athena’s help.”
“What?” I burst out laughing, inhaling the briny-ocean air mixed with the lavender laundry detergent we’d used to wash the sheets, and the ever-present scent of burnt cinnamon that always seemed to accompany Ares. The way the scents mingled made something so us, I knew I’d never be able to smell it again without thinking of these moments. Or maybe I was just getting way too sentimental.
“Check the myths. Getting involved without her, or, gods forbid, against her, was a death sentence for whichever side I joined. She’s the strategist. I was just there for the chaos.”
Myths, true and otherwise, clicked into my mind and I realized he was right. I swallowed my laughter. “Hephaestus thinks I’m annoying.”
Ares scoffed. “He’s obsessed with you. You have to know that.”
“Not anymore.” I filled him in on our last conversation, propping myself up on one arm. “Now that he’s bothered to get to know me.”
“Yeah, well, Hephaestus is an idiot.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know if I saw past it, either. See.”
Ares touched my cheek, brushing back a strand of gold hair that glimmered faintly in the first rays of sunlight pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows looking over the cliffs. “You are so much more than what he made you.”
I didn’t have to ask what “he” Ares meant. In this context, it could only be Zeus. “How? I mean, beyond just the looks and the skills and the orders and the lies. Everything about me was . . . sculpted. Even my personality,” I said darkly, remembering something Poseidon had said to me once before. “Maybe there’s nothing to see past. What if I’m just a mirror? All reflection.”
“Everyone starts out that way. Not to the extent you did, but everyone starts life under the complete influence of other people. Every person you talk to is going to shape you, every challenge you encounter, every experience you have will change you. The choices you made, how you handled the ones you didn’t—those were your building blocks. You’re a completely different person than he designed you to be.” He fell silent for a moment. “Does it bother you? That I look like him?”
I knew he meant Adonis. “Yes and no.” I studied the way the pale sunlight played over his face. “Sometimes it catches me off guard, but most of the time I . . . I don’t know, see you through him? Does that make any sense? Like your eyes are his, but the way you look at me . . .” I touched his cheek. “That’s all you. Your
mannerisms. Your expressions.” My lips brushed against his. “The way you kiss.”
Ares’s grinned. “Like this?” His lips burned against mine.
I pretended to consider. “Why don’t you show me again, just to make sure.”
“THE NEW SHIPMENT came in,” Medea announced later that morning at breakfast, her violet eyes sparkling.
“I know,” I yawned, adding more cream to my coffee, too tired to deal with her fake perkiness this morning. “He”—I jerked my hand toward Ares, still waiting in line—“was out all night unloading it. In the rain.”
Medea pushed my shoulder. “Act excited, darn it! All your new clothes are in that shipment, just waiting to be boxed and sent to your cabin.”
“Mine, too?” Glauce slid into her seat and set her tray down. “Is Otrera up yet?”
Medea shook her head. “She pulled the night shift last night, as well. Save her some breakfast?”
“I can,” I offered. “I’m meeting her later at the gym.”
“Great. So, today after lunch,” Medea continued, “we should meet at your place.” She motioned to Glauce across the table, raising her voice to be heard over the din of breakfast chatter. “Then we’ll try on everything.”
“My place is a wreck,” Glauce complained.
“Yeah, but it’s also the only one not occupied by a guy,” Medea argued.
“Otrera—”
“Might still be asleep,” I said, following Medea’s logic. My eyes tracked Ares through the line. He was almost at the end. To my absolute disgust, my stomach grumbled. That definitely never happened when I was a fully functioning goddess.
Glauce scowled at me for ganging up on her. “Is there even a point to trying everything on? It all looks the same under these.” The slim demigoddess lifted her arms under her poncho.
“I could really use a girls’ day,” Medea said softly.
Glauce glanced at her and seemed to notice the pain in her voice. “Okay. Yeah. After lunch.”
Ares returned with my tray and the conversation shifted to accommodate him. After breakfast, he headed back to the cabin early to get some rest while I lingered with Medea to help separate the luxury items in the order into separate boxes for each demigod. No pony porn this time, but we did find a few embarrassing things. I tried to joke about them to Medea, but when she was out from under the eyes of other demigods, she didn’t bother to fuel her peppy charade.
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