“You need a hospital,” he called after me when I staggered toward my cabin.
“Why? So, you can lock me up again?” Fear fought with the anger and pain burning in my chest. It took tremendous effort, every trick that Athena had taught me, but I managed to get my panic under control before I reached the warm, familiar lights of my cabin. “I think I’d be better off taking my chances with your minions.”
“I didn’t ask them to do that.” Narcissus fell into step beside me. “Honestly, I don’t know what got into them.”
“Well, that’s terrifying,” I snapped, pausing for breath when I reached the bottom step of my porch. My side screamed in agony. “Since you’re the one fueling their fire.”
He studied my kicked-in door with a troubled look on his face. “I may have miscalculated their reaction to you.”
“Oh, please. You practically drove them here.” My nails scraped against my palms. “You had a chance to talk them down, to keep them calm. But instead, you pushed them further out of control.”
“I don’t need to control them.” Narcissus straightened the sleeves of his sweatshirt, grimacing as if in disgust at the cheap material. The fastidious demigod had abandoned his fancy suits out of necessity. Another few days wallowing in the muck, and he might even give up his hair gel. “I just need to point them in the right direction and let them go.”
At my flat look, he hurried to clarify. “You’re not the right direction, but you’re the closest thing they’ve got.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “I keep screwing up when it comes to you. First with Tantalus, now this. I am sorry. It was never my intention for you to get hurt.”
“Now, why don’t I believe that?” He’d been baiting the demigods with me from the get-go. Narcissus didn’t get to act surprised when one of them snapped.
“I don’t expect you to. You’ve made your opinion of me crystal clear.” He shrugged. “So let me prove it. You don’t want to go to the hospital? That’s fine. I’ll bring a doctor here for you. Do you know where Medea is? I can send someone to get her.”
So, that was his end game. He wanted her to volunteer for the next blood draw.
He kept speaking in soothing tones, unaware or unconcerned he’d just tipped his hand. “We’ll get you all fixed up. Tomorrow, we start evacuating. I’ll get you off this island. Is there anything else I can do in the meantime? Anything you need?”
“I want to call home.” My voice broke on the word. “Can I just use your phone? I know you have one.”
Narcissus shook his head, golden hair not even shifting with the movement. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Then go fuck yourself.”
To my surprise, Narcissus laughed. The biting sound was all the more disturbing against the otherwise silent backdrop of the island. There was no wind tonight, no rustling of trees, and the conspicuous absence of ocean waves lapping at the island made every other sound seem unnatural. “There’s the Elise we all know and love. I thought I’d lost you there for a minute.”
I couldn’t interpret the look he was giving me. Affection, maybe? Gone was the cold and indifferent jerk from the hospital office. The way he was looking at me now showed he cared. Purely platonic, if so, but there was legitimate concern in his eyes.
This was shaky ground. Narcissus was the only person on this island who knew the real Elise. She hadn’t worked with his modeling agency, but from what I could gather, the two had run into one another on a professional level more than once. I didn’t know what their dynamic had been outside of work, or even if they had one. He could be tricking me. Pretending a false familiarity to see how I’d react.
Fortunately, rage was a completely justifiable response in this situation, no matter what the background. “You used me.” My words held so much venom, I all but hissed them. I was sick of being a pawn for egomaniacs.
Narcissus’s nose wrinkled at my breath. “We are facing our very nightmares. I needed something to unite them, something to keep them in line. Divided, we’ve got no chance.”
Nightmares. A thought sparked in the back of my mind. I’d always hated dreamwalking without another god around to drop me into a dreamstate, thanks to my nightmares. But now that I finally had an iota of my power back, I had to at least try.
“Oh, please.” I shook my head, closing my eyes against a wave of dizziness when the motion set my ears ringing. “You’re too smart not to know the odds. You’re whipping them all into a frenzy for a hopeless fight and you know it. Why?”
“Come now, Elise, you should know me better than that. Self-sacrifice isn’t my thing.” He cuffed me on the shoulder, narrowly missing the blood-streaked bandage covering the place he’d nicked me with Steele. “I wouldn’t pursue this if I didn’t think we could win. We’re going to be fine. Just hang tight while I go get you some help, okay?”
“Hang tight?” I shoved past him, stomping up the wooden steps with enough force to send reverberations up my calves. “I’ll tell you how that works out when they come back with a lynch mob.”
Chapter XXVII
Aphrodite
DESPITE MY BEST efforts, the door remained propped open by its splintered frame. The rest of the living room was in shambles. Medea’s bookshelves lay on their sides, one in pieces, the other simply knocked over. Books and personal items spilled across the floor. A lamp lay shattered against the wall. Panic rose within me, threatening to spill over as I took in the wreckage from my struggle against Calais.
I let it.
Wave after wave of fear crashed over me, leaving a copper taste in my mouth as I slid to the ground, gasping for air. My heart slammed against my chest so hard, it hurt with every beat. Every failure, every frightening thing I’d been through played out in my mind in a continuous loop. The fear I’d felt on that porch, the pain of almost drowning, the shaking of the earth beneath me, watching Ares disappear, the constant terror that we’d be caught, the hatred glittering in Tantalus’s eyes, bottle after bottle of poisoned water, demigods armed with Steele, Zeus’s voice inside my head, all of it came crashing down around me.
I felt lightheaded and tingly by the time the panic attack subsided. Start to finish, it had only cost me minutes, but it felt like hours. Wiping the tears from my face, I pushed myself to my feet ready to assess the damage Calais had done.
Light flooded the tiny bathroom as I threw open the cabinet and dug out the first-aid kit. Patching myself up felt strangely reassuring. The small countertop quickly filled with gauze and wipes as I mopped up the blood and slathered on cold disinfectant that smelled so strong, it burned my nostrils. It wasn’t until I peeled back the bandage on my arm that an important realization struck me.
My powers were back. At least some of them.
Unfortunately, they were killing me.
I still had residual traces of Adonis’s poison in my system. The Steele-based substance worked by attacking a god’s powers, creating a vicious cycle when those powers tried to heal the damage from the initial attack. Worse, the poison was lipid soluble, dissolving in fat rather than water. That meant that while most of the effects burnt out within forty-eight hours, it took a long time to fully clear from the system.
My last dose had been months ago.
Less than a week ago, Ares and Artemis had reported their powers being less reliable than they’d like, but mostly recovered. The pain associated from the poison only flared up on extreme occasions. Like when teleportation broke the entire body down and reformed it in a new location. There was no reason I should be any different.
Except for that cut from Narcissus’s Steele. Before my powers’ return, it had simply been an open wound, dribbling bits of blood. Now it had transformed to something ghastly.
The cut had blackened. A sickly gray cast spread along the skin nearest the wound. When I probed at the darkening skin, I could felt heat
beneath my fingertips. But the skin I touched felt nothing.
I was dead.
Steele killed by attacking powers, supposedly in a matter of heartbeats. But our only case studies had been ancient deities with far more power than I possessed, using weapons crafted by gods, not demigods.
Timing the graying skin spreading on my arm against my heartbeat, I established a baseline to calculate out just how long I had. Midmorning. If I stopped my powers from healing to cut off the feedback loop, and if I was conservative with those powers.
You could cut off the arm before it spreads. I gulped back a wave of nausea, slackening against the white countertop. My arm would grow back. Miraculous healing was par for the divine course after all. But between turning Adonis into a god and the traces of poison still lurking within me, my powers were hardly what I’d consider reliable. There was every chance I’d bleed out or die from shock.
So, plan B. Buy as much time as possible.
Swallowing hard, I forced my powers to stop healing. Self-healing was something that happened without thought, like breathing. It took conscious effort to get the healing to stop. Then, with shaking hands, I ripped fabric from my already torn shirt and tied off a tight tourniquet above the cut.
All hope wasn’t lost. There was still a chance of survival if I could communicate with the Pantheon. It didn’t take much power to dreamwalk. Though it felt like the situation had just gotten worse, the odds of the plan Medea, Otrera, and I had come up with now had a higher chance of working.
Drawing in a deep breath of air tinged with the scent of rubbing alcohol, I realized that in order to dreamwalk, I’d need to force myself to fall asleep. It wasn’t an easy task for me on a normal day, thanks to chronic nightmares. And I didn’t have all night to fight my inner battles.
Narcissus had all but promised to return with a doctor, though I was pretty sure he would wait as long as possible. If he was trying to use me to guilt Medea into donating blood, he wouldn’t want me conscious enough to object to treatment. Either waiting would get me in the state he wanted, or he’d have Calais come back to finish the job.
My chest tightened. The thought of Calais finding me defenseless nearly sent me spiraling into a panic again. I couldn’t even lock the damn door. If I went to sleep, he could sneak up on me. He could—
I imagined a box in my mind and locked that fear inside to deal with later. Right now, I had a plan, a goal. All I had to do was set it in motion.
“You can do this.” Swallowing my fear, I forced strength into my voice as I met the golden gaze of the broken girl in the mirror. My eyes roved over the reflection, for once claiming the glamour instead of rejecting it. The cuts, the layered bruises, the swelling, the glimmer of determination in those gold eyes—those were mine. Elise didn’t strike me as the kind of person to give up without a fight. I was already borrowing her name and her appearance, so why not her strength, too?
“I can do this.” Saying the words made them true. My mind flashed to the bottles of sleeping pills scattered beneath the coffee table. Yeah. I could make myself sleep.
Chapter XXVIII
Medea
OUR DOOR WAS broken. For a second, I stared at the splintered frame dumbfounded, but Otrera didn’t hesitate. She shoved past me, rushing inside the cabin.
Aphrodite lay on the worn, leather couch, pale and limp. Her face was so badly swollen, it hurt to look at her. The torn shirt she wore revealed a bevy of bruises along skin so incredibly pale that I knew something had been damaged inside.
“Oh my gods!” Otrera rushed to her side, snapping her fingers at me. “First-aid kit. Bathroom. Hurry!”
I shot into motion, tripping over my own feet in my haste to get to the first-aid kit. The bathroom smelled heavily of antiseptic. Inside, I found gauze and bandages scattered across the countertop, and I gathered them together in a flurry of rustling paper. “Here!”
I’d felt sorry for the other demigods tonight. Guilty. Talking with each of the shield casters, I’d remembered how nice they could be when they weren’t enraged with grief or being whipped into a frenzy by Narcissus’s manipulations. I’d felt guilty for lumping them together into a single group with a single motivation. For one minute, I’d felt bad for our plan to leave them behind.
Not anymore. They might not have done this, but they hadn’t objected when Narcissus made Aphrodite a scapegoat. And they’d stayed silent, if not shouted support, when Calais bullied her in the hospital. If I confronted them with what had been done to her, they might mutter about how unfortunate it was, but they would do nothing to fix it and even less to stop it from happening again to any one of us.
Their silence made them complicit.
“Otrera.” My voice went thick as I fought back a wave of panicked nausea. “She needs a hospital.”
“I don’t think it’ll help.” Otrera lifted a toned arm and motioned to the place Narcissus had nicked Aphrodite with Steele.
Gray skin spread from the cut, growing darker with each passing breath. Angry black lines sliced through the darkening skin. I caught a whiff of burning flesh, and realized it was the black lines crawling up her arm, so slowly I’d almost missed the movement entirely.
“We don’t have what we need to save her,” Otrera said in a rough voice. “I don’t know that anyone does. But the shield around the hidden wing is down.”
Otrera and I had checked on the hidden wing on our walk back from the party. I’d thrown up a tiny, illusionary shield designed to block the doors from sight so no one would notice, but nothing strong enough to stop anyone from walking through if they knew where to go.
“It’s time, Medea.” The floor creaked beneath her weight as Otrera turned to face me, her gold eyes somber. “Drop the shield around the island. We’ll get Hades and teleport somewhere—”
“We have to contact the Pantheon.” My nails bit into my palms. “I have to at least try. If I’m not strong enough to get us off the island, then—”
“Without her to mediate, they have no reason to listen to us. You moved the island out from under them without warning. Then, the last time our people came to them to talk terms, we attacked them. We can’t offer them the Steele, it’s too scattered. And we can’t offer them her, she’s—” Otrera’s voice broke. She took a deep breath to compose herself, pushing up the sleeves of her Wonder Woman sweatshirt. “Drop the shield, Medea. It’s our only hope.”
“I’m not leaving her.” I knelt beside Aphrodite, the floor hard against my knees.
Otrera lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I can’t carry her all the way down to the hospital.”
“Maybe I can teleport her.” I reached for Aphrodite’s hand, my voice shaking with uncertainty. “It’s not that far.” My fingers brushed against the cuff of her sleeve and found it crusty with something, sour beer by the smell of it.
Aphrodite never drank beer. She said it was beneath her.
“We should get some clean—”
The battered goddess’s slim fingers closed around my palm like a vise.
“What?” I tried to pull away, confused. Aphrodite’s eyes were still closed, her breathing shallow. But something—
A ping of power passed through me and my knees gave way. Rather than darkness waiting behind closed lids, there was a strange, blurry room.
She’d yanked me into a dreamscape.
Chapter XXIX
Aphrodite
THE SLEEPING PILLS tasted like chalk, but they’d worked fast. It helped that I was a nearly all-knowing deity who knew her exact mass and had precise knowledge of every drug interaction known to man. Of course, the fact that I hadn’t slept properly in days and was coming off a series of physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausting events probably didn’t hurt my chances of falling asleep easily either.
Zeus lurked in my dreams
, ever present, ready to transform them to nightmares. His breath stirred the hair on the back of my neck. My fear spiked, made all the worse with the knowledge that I couldn’t wake myself if I wanted to. A low chuckle vibrated from his chest as he yanked me into a sea of corpses.
Ares, Persephone, Medea, everyone I’d ever failed stared at me with dull, accusing eyes. Pieces of them were crushed and broken beyond repair. I inhaled water thick with blood and rot from their horrific wounds.
Then they blinked.
I shrieked as I realized they were trapped within their corpses, unable to escape their pain. Pain I’d caused them.
Don’t cry, Zeus whispered. Never cry.
Water, Aphrodite? Adonis asked, his mouth pressing against mine, forcing the dead tossed waves to fill my lungs.
Fabric tore as Poseidon yanked me away from him. Hands roaming, crushing against me as my screams transformed into useless bubbles. Is my price too high?
When I’m done, Tantalus growled, his fist drawing back.
Calais held me in place, his body pressed against mine as Tantalus’s knuckles met my face again and again with a wet thwacking sound. Did you know about Adonis? About the god wearing his face?
Over and over, I fought my way free, but each time I made it to the surface, another hand was waiting to pull me under.
But then something amazing happened. My nightmare faded to blackness as I emerged to the layer of sleep just below dreaming. I didn’t bolt up screaming, I didn’t just lay there, terrified the rest of the night, afraid to close my eyes. And I didn’t crumble to pieces for Ares to put back together. The dream just ended.
I’d survived. The nightmare had been unspeakably horrible when it happened. But there was something comforting in knowing that eventually, it would end.
Congratulate yourself later, I scolded, as I sucked in breath after breath of fresh, clean air.
Venus Rising: Book 3 Aphrodite Trilogy (The Daughters of Zeus 6) Page 17
