Chapter XXXIV
Medea
I JUST GAVE THE Pantheon permission to kill everyone. My pen scratched the words onto the page as I wrote, still stunned into disbelief. I’d curled up with my journal on the opposite end of the worn leather couch where Aphrodite slept.
We’d tossed a blanket over her, but the cozy fleece did little to disguise the rough shape she was in. The cuts and scrapes and bruises she’d gotten from her near-drowning experience were fading into ugly scabs or bruises of greens and yellow. The earthquake yesterday hadn’t been kind to her. And tonight, she’d been given a fresh layer of bruising, swelling, and splitting skin. Every bit of flesh that wasn’t discolored from cuts or bruises didn’t look gold anymore, but a sickly looking gray. I’d seen corpses with better coloring.
Otrera watched the hospital through the clear tracks drops of water left as they dripped down the fogged-up window. The light overhead blazed against the fetid mist-filled darkness that seemed to press against the walls from all sides. It was claustrophobic and dirty. Between Calais’s attack and Otrera’s desperate search through the cabins for anything she could use as a weapon, the living area was a disaster that even I couldn’t be bothered to clean. All our kitchen knives and a fire poker were piled on top of the wooden coffee table.
Why am I surprised? I killed Glauce, I didn’t think twice before taking those pills, and I basically handed Jason over for torture on a silver platter. Gods, do I hate them all that much? I drew in a sharp breath and ignored Otrera’s questioning look. Maybe I was being rude writing like this when I had a living, breathing person to talk through my thoughts with, but I needed to write. Nothing felt real until it was written down.
Yes. My hand wrapped around the pen hard enough to leave an indention on my palm. I hated them for their complacency. Their willingness to follow Narcissus off a cliff. For not seeing what Jason was doing to me. For choosing, at literally every turn, to stand with anyone but me. But that’s not why I did it.
“How much longer?” Otrera’s soft voice intruded on my thoughts.
“I don’t know.” Did I want the gods to hurry or to slow down? Once I dropped the shield, everything would happen very fast. I didn’t feel ready. But there was nothing more I could do to prepare.
She was so happy to see them, and they were so happy to have her back that I got jealous.
Of my best friend.
For being happy. I scowled down at the lined page, frustrated that no matter what I wrote about, I kept discovering ways I was in the wrong.
I’m an incredibly selfish person. And for the life of me, I couldn’t seem to mind. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be the type of person who saw Aphrodite happy with her friends and didn’t immediately resent her and them and anyone in the nearby vicinity.
Aphrodite let out a soft sigh. My stomach twisted with guilt when I glanced at the battered goddess. I wanted to be the kind of person who reunited Aphrodite with her friends because it was the right thing to do. Not because I wanted something from them. I wanted to be the kind of person who hadn’t dragged Aphrodite into danger in the first place.
I wanted to be the kind of person who could answer, one hundred percent, whether I’d leave someone I was mad at to die if I’d had time to think of an alternative.
I wanted to be the kind of person who told Otrera the truth about Glauce. Hell, I wanted to be the kind of person who hadn’t poisoned Glauce in the first place. Especially not so I could get off the island to take care of something that maybe, if I’d been a better person, I would have never decided to take care of in that manner.
I want to be a better person. My pen was nearly out of ink, so I had to bear down extra hard to get the black lines to fill in the impressions I’d scraped onto the page. But not at the expense of my own life. If I could just have one problem that didn’t escalate to life or death, maybe I’d have room to grow, to change. To become someone that I’m not ashamed to write about. But the stakes are always too high.
Or was that just what I told myself to justify my choices. I’m jealous, I admitted. I want what she has.
Someday, I would have it. People who cared, not just because they needed something from me. Not because I’d lied to them. Just for me. But I needed to stop trying to force it with every relationship I encountered. I was scaring people away or worse, opening myself up to a betrayal like Jason’s.
I dropped the journal to the ground with a thunk and picked my way across the darkened living room to reach the kitchen. When I turned on the kitchen sink, it hissed at me, spitting out more air than water. Damn it. Aphrodite had warned that the water in our cistern, whatever the hell that was, wouldn’t last forever. But couldn’t it have waited one more day? Oh, what does it matter, it’s not like it’s safe to drink. The water from the tap had adopted a strange taste, and Aphrodite had warned the earth quake might have shaken up whatever lined the piping.
But we were almost out of bottled water, too.
“Someone’s coming,” Otrera warned from the living room.
Narcissus’s knock swung the remnants of our door open, letting in a burst of foul air. “Ladies,” he said, inclining his head in both our directions. He cut a dramatic figure in our doorway and seemed to know it. After pausing a moment to make sure we’d drunk him in, he magnanimously stepped to the side to allow an unassuming doctor to pass through the door. “I brought Doctor Harris by to check on Elise.”
Otrera recovered before I did. “You knew about this?”
Narcissus grimaced as he stepped over the threshold. “I tried to get her to go to the hospital, but she wouldn’t cooperate. She can be quite stub—” He broke off when he saw her pale, ghastly form slumbering on the couch. “She wasn’t that bad when I left,” he said, crossing the room at a stumbling run. “Why didn’t you come get help?” The older demigod paused when he noticed the knives strewn across the coffee table. “Why—”
“We didn’t know who did it.” Otrera’s voice was like ice water as she eyed the doctor pulling back Aphrodite’s blanket. “Or at whose order. Or if they’d come back.” She met my wide eyes and inclined her head toward Aphrodite slumbering on the couch. Be ready, she mouthed.
My throat went completely dry. Ready? Oh gods.
Edging closer to Aphrodite, I slid my hand into hers under the guise of duress. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Perhaps with some assistance from you . . .” the doctor hedged, probing at Aphrodite’s ribs.
“You want my blood.” Of course Narcissus would use this opportunity to drain me dry.
I could practically hear Otrera’s eyes roll in her head at the predictability of the scumbag and despite myself, I almost laughed. Hysteria, I realized. Or shock. Get it together, Medea; now is not the time for laughing. The thought only made it harder not to burst into cackles.
“We can—” The elderly man frowned, adjusting his glasses before examining the cut on Aphrodite’s arm. “What happened here?”
Narcissus’s face paled when he saw the cut. “I’ve seen that.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, fingers tapping rapidly across the screen.
I jumped when I felt Otrera’s arm on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” she said soothingly, but I could feel tension radiating off her frame.
Aphrodite went rigid, every muscle in her body tensing up at once. Her eyes flew open, unseeing as she let out a guttural scream.
Otrera jerked forward. “Aphrodite! What’s wrong? What’s—”
For a solid minute Aphrodite didn’t breathe. Otrera and I stared at each other in horror, until the goddess drew in a ragged breath.
“Aphrodite?” Narcissus demanded, looking at Otrera. “Not Elise? T-the goddess that turned Adonis into a god? The one that—She’s been here all along?”
Otrera squeezed my shoulder. “Go!”
I dropped the shield. The relief was instantaneous. As if I’d been carrying a backpack full of bricks and had finally allowed the thing to slide off my shoulders. Feeling like it was the first time I’d truly filled my lungs in days, I drew in a deep breath and visualized the hidden wing of the hospital.
I could sense six people inside. We knew there were three gods trapped in there, so that left us with only three staff members to deal with. One of the glowing impressions I felt had a strange resonance to it. It felt the way someone playing a water glass sounded.
Aphrodite, I realized. It was the same power signature here and there and that was throwing me off. The cloned signature in the hidden wing must have belonged to Adonis.
Narcissus raised his voice, shouting indistinct words, but Otrera met him tone for tone. Something crashed to the floor. I thought I heard the doctor cursing, but I bit my lip, forcing myself to ignore the chaos while I focused on the single figure standing near Adonis. Two others stood a tiny ways off. Guards. Aphrodite said there were two guards at the door when she was in there.
If I could latch onto Hades, I could teleport us all away right now and bypass the wing entirely.
But I didn’t know Hades at all, and none of the other figures felt familiar. I wasn’t strong enough to pull the guards as well, so I couldn’t just ‘port everyone and sort them out later. Drawing in another deep breath, I focused on Adonis’s power signature, drawing Aphrodite’s toward him. They were the same. They wanted to be reunited.
And I was all too happy to comply.
Chapter XXXV
Persephone
I LEAPFROGGED through the coordinates Athena had assigned me in a blur of power. Bright colors, coastal scents, and island sounds whipped by. So far I hadn’t ‘ported to any islands that matched what Aphrodite had described. But I was more hopeful than I’d felt all week.
She’s okay! And Medea had seen Hades. It didn’t sound like he was in great shape, but as of yesterday, she didn’t think they’d done anything to him other than keep him unconscious. All we had to do was find them.
My phone chimed with a text from Ares.
911!
Dread coiled in my stomach as I ‘ported back to the house where I’d left Ares sleeping. The troubling scent of smoke clouded the room. Dusk had fallen outside, and the darkness reached through the windows as shadows that stretched along the yellow walls.
Ares sprang off the overstuffed sofa the second he noticed me, dark hair sticking up all over the place. “She got yanked out of the dreamscape. Something happened. We have to find her, now!”
We were trying to, but I didn’t waste time arguing. Instead, I grabbed his too-hot hand and brought him with me so he could help with the search. I had faith in the grid system Athena had set up. We’d find them. We just had to hurry.
Chapter XXXVI
Medea
THE SECOND WE materialized, Aphrodite started seizing. I’d teleported us into one of the small observation rooms attached to the lab. Light blue cinder block formed three and a half walls, a metal door and two-way mirror filled the remainder of the fourth. Locked, metal cabinets lined the space between the walls and ceilings. I knew the layout because it had been burned into my brain when I’d stumbled into this wing for the first time.
Adonis lay on a metal table, the kind they rolled bodies around on in television shows, with an open chest cavity. The scent of blood hung thick in the air. A startled middle-aged man in a white lab coat stood behind the table, pausing mid-reach to a cart filled with medical equipment. He jerked back in surprise, instruments clattering when Adonis spasmed on the table.
Vivisection? I wondered, realizing Adonis’s chest was rising and falling. I froze, stunned with the painful reminder of my own captivity, but Otrera didn’t. She snatched a scalpel off the table and slammed it into the doctor’s neck.
“Two guards at the door,” I warned her, shaking out of my stupor just as the door popped open.
They shouted in surprise when they saw us, and Otrera leapt into action.
I knelt at Aphrodite’s side. Her slim, brutalized frame arched as she let out an agonized wail. Powers, I realized. Aphrodite had said something about the poison making teleportation hell. And whatever she felt, Adonis felt. Oh gods, had I killed them both?
The guards’ bodies hit the floor with a thud just as the ground beneath us started to shake.
“Medea, shield!” Otrera was in her element, her eyes shining, a weapon in both hands. She’d stripped off her Wonder-Woman sweatshirt, revealing ultra-toned arms, splattered with blood so dark it didn’t look real.
Right. I closed my eyes and focused on casting a shield around the hidden wing, making sure to shield beneath us so the ground would remain stable. “Narcissus is going to hit this shield with everything he’s got,” I told her. “I’ll keep it up. You find Hades.”
Chapter XXXVII
Aphrodite
WHEN MEDEA ‘PORTED us to the hospital wing, a whole new level of pain ripped through me. The world went dark, broke apart, then slammed back together in a nauseating swirl. I lost track of time, body writhing, twisting, bending beneath an onslaught of constant agony.
A cry of pain echoed my own. Adonis. I tried to open my eyes, but dizziness pushed me back under before I could get more than a fleeting impression of the cold, sterile-looking lab.
Urgent voices drew me back out. I finally managed to pry my eyes open, despite the immense protest of my body. Blood splattered the floors and walls. Mine? A quick inventory of all my cuts and bruises revealed no new wounds.
I groaned, struggling to get to my feet. Medea sat in the doorway, her eyes closed. A sheen of sweat plastered her dark hair to her forehead. “Medea?”
She seemed too focused on casting the shield to respond. One look at her trembling, slight frame and too-pale skin told me she wasn’t going to be able to ‘port us out of here. Oh, well. On to plan B.
Taking deep breaths to combat the nausea, I stood, slow movements at odds with the panicked racing of my heart. The heavy scent of disinfectant burned at my nostrils. Gods, I was going to be sick.
I fought past the pain and took a moment to get my bearings. I’d only caught a brief glimpse of this wing when I’d been locked up with Adonis. Medea had filled in the details a bit more, so I knew what to expect.
For the moment, I ignored Adonis, stumbling past three bodies on the floor, one human in a lab coat and two demigods. The demigods can’t die, I reminded myself, edging around them carefully until I reached the human in the lab coat. No pulse. Damn it. What were the odds another human was in this lab at this late hour?
I struggled back to my feet—oh gods, everything hurt—and made my way to the door. The hidden wing of the hospital was essentially a long hallway that hollowed out and expanded in the middle, providing room for a large lab. Even from here, the sterile metal instruments and tables gleamed. Small, glass-walled observation rooms, identical to this one, bookended both ends of the lab. Beyond them lay a shielded door that led to the hospital lobby.
Another groan sounded behind me. Adonis should be my last priority, but I felt like a fishing line had been hooked to my gut, and someone was giving the line a good tug. I staggered to the raised metal table. His silver skin and ghost-white hair were splattered with blood, especially along his bare chest, but I didn’t see any open wounds. They must have already healed. Gods, so much blood. What had they done to him?
Our connection had diminished, but it hadn’t vanished. When I’d stopped feeling him before, it must have been because he was beyond pain. Beyond any feeling at all. But then something, some horrible something, had yanked me out of the dreamscape with Ares. “Adonis,” I gasped, giving him a rough shake.
His pale eyes popped open, and he jerked up in alarm, glancing around the room. He relaxed when he saw the man in the lab
coat lying on the floor. “You came back for me.” The relief in his voice was evident as he swept me into a hug that nearly knocked me down to the table. “I mean—” He let me go. “Leaving me to die is a death sentence for you too. But I still half-expected you to leave me for dead.”
You half deserve it. But the snarky thought wouldn’t surface. Not here. Not with blood still fresh on his chest. “Look.” I dropped my gaze to the tile floor. “We’re complicated. I can’t trust you, but I can’t hate you either. The only certainty I have in our relationship is this—we don’t let each other die.”
“Yeah.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I guess we don’t.”
I glanced up to look him over with a critical eye, pausing when I saw a thin line of graying flesh spreading from his upper arm with jagged black streaks cutting through it.
Every other wound had healed. Not that cut. Dread coiled in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t thought the Steele could affect him through me, and technically, it didn’t. But what I felt, he felt. If I died, he died. It didn’t matter that the Steele had never touched his flesh. When my body shut down, his would mirror the process. “What have they been doing to you?”
Adonis shivered. The room felt cold enough to bite, and the blue, hospital-issued pants they’d put him in looked too thin to be much help. “I think they were going to take me apart. See what I could survive without and what I couldn’t. They wanted to know what makes me tick so they could replicate whatever you did to make me a god.” His pale eyes looked haunted. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to survive everything they did to me. I kept healing, but I didn’t know how that worked for you.”
Venus Rising: Book 3 Aphrodite Trilogy (The Daughters of Zeus 6) Page 20
