“You make me sound like some weird hermit,” I said.
We emerged from the trees at the back of a large, flat-roofed building. It looked like a warehouse, plain and windowless, and seemed at odds with its setting. A bank of big air-conditioning units hummed away against the wall.
“No, I think you just preferred the company of women. You had a select group you hung with at the gym or out trekking and hunting in the wilds. When you weren’t with them, you kept to yourself, mostly.”
I followed him around the building, walking now on a concrete path. I liked to hang with my girlfriends and I didn’t like romantic relationships. And, apparently, I loved the great outdoors. Did I read when I was being all antisocial? Because I couldn’t imagine not being a reader, though I could see the appeal of nature. I glanced back at the forest behind us, so much more inviting than the bare concrete and ugly, industrial-looking building.
Some effort had been made at the front, at least, to beautify the area. Trees and small gardens broke up a large expanse of concrete parking lot. About a dozen cars were there, with room for three times that many. Facing onto the car park was a large glassed section, though the glass was tinted so I couldn’t see in. Automatic doors slid open as we came up the front steps, emitting a blast of frigid air. A young woman in gym clothes, glistening with sweat, came out.
“Morning,” she said as she passed us.
“Morning,” Apollo said.
I turned to watch as she strode across the car park to her car. Did I know her? I could tell she was human, but nothing about her rang any bells. She could have been my best friend and I wouldn’t have known.
I caught at Apollo’s arm as we stepped inside, suddenly nervous. “Don’t tell anyone who I am.”
“What?” He glanced down at me, eyebrows raised. “Why not?”
“Because …” I didn’t really have a reason, just a sudden pit of nerves in my stomach. I wasn’t ready to claim godhood here, when I’d hardly come to terms with it myself. I didn’t want to deal with strangers’ expectations, their disappointment when I didn’t know them. How would that girl have felt if she had been my best friend and I’d had no idea who she was? “I just want to look around and get a feel for the place first.”
“Are you sure? I thought you might want to move back here and take up your old life. People will need to know who you are.” He was clearly disappointed. Perhaps he’d been hoping to get his real sister back by bringing me here.
“Please. Not yet. I need to ease myself into it.”
He frowned, but didn’t argue. Two long rows of treadmills were on our right, with another row of exercise bikes behind them. A large-screen TV was showing a morning talk show with the sound turned way down and music with a driving beat was pumping from the speakers on the wall.
A young girl with a big smile was behind the desk on our left.
“Hi, there!” she said cheerily as Apollo drew level with her. “Need some help?”
That sounded like a polite way of saying, Hey, mate, this is a women-only gym. Where do you think you’re going?
Apollo returned her smile with a dazzling one of his own. “I’m looking for Ophelia. Is she in the training hall?”
“Um …” The girl’s eyes flicked to a big clock on the wall. It was showing just after eleven o’clock. “She’s probably just finished. She might be in her office. Shall I look for you?”
“No need,” Apollo said. “I know where that is.”
He treated her to another dazzling smile and strode on through, even though I was fairly certain that men weren’t allowed in women-only gyms. But the girl was left blinking in his wake, as if she wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. There might have been a little divine magic in that smile. I hurried after him before she decided to blame me.
A song that I thought I’d left behind in Crosston blasted over the speakers and I almost groaned aloud. Ooooh, Lexi, you’re so sexy. In my arms, babe, I feel your charms, babe. What the hell? This hadn’t been on the charts in nearly a year. It had been the bane of my life when I’d first met Syl—she used to sing it all the time to taunt me, fluttering her eyelashes at me and making what she fondly considered to be seductive faces. I shuddered and tried to ignore the insistent mewling of the chorus. I’d probably have the bloody thing stuck in my head for the rest of the day, now.
Apollo strode down a corridor past several smaller rooms for group classes and stopped at a door marked “Office”. A strong smell of heated chlorine filled the corridor—there must be a pool in the complex. None of it was ringing any bells. They could have had a gladiatorial arena, too, for all I knew. Or a circus. Women’s laughter sounded in the distance, and the banging of doors, as if a bunch of them had hit the change rooms at once.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” I said, suddenly jittery. The woman in that office really was one of my best friends, apparently. What if I didn’t recognise her? What if I did?
But it was too late. He’d already opened the door.
6
The office was small and drab. A bank of grey metal filing cabinets sat along the back wall, behind a black, industrial-looking desk, all sharp corners and reflective surfaces. There were no plants or spots of colour, no armchairs or other homey touches. The only thing it had going for it was that the wall to our right was glass from floor to ceiling, and it looked out over the floor of what must surely be the training hall, judging by the mats on the floor. We were up high, with a bird’s eye view of two women in white uniforms sparring in one corner of the room, trading kicks and punches under the watchful eye of another whose white outfit was belted in black. Above them, a large neon sign on the wall proclaimed, “GIRL POWER!” in jagged green letters.
All this I took in at a glance—then my attention was claimed by the woman behind the desk. She looked up as we came in, and her dark eyes lit up at the sight of Apollo. When she stood and came around the desk with outstretched hand, I realised she was nearly as tall as him.
“Apollo!” she cried, and her voice was a deep boom. She had the chest of an opera singer and the longest hair I’d ever seen, scraped back into an impatient plait that snaked its way over one shoulder almost as far as her knees. Given her height, that was an impressively long way. Apollo flinched as she took his hand in a crushing grip and pumped it up and down in an enthusiastic handshake. “Have you found her?”
To his credit, he didn’t even look at me as he lied. “Not yet, but I feel we’re getting close. It’s good to see you again. How are you?”
She shook her great head sadly. “Better for seeing you, but missing her still. This place is no fun without her.”
Fun? Artemis was fun? That surprised me. She always seemed so serious in the legends. Cold and deadly, yes. Fun, no. But I guess even gods had to let their hair down now and then. I stared at the woman, trying to force a memory of her to the surface. If she and Artemis enjoyed each other’s company so much, shouldn’t I be able to remember her?
The woman gave me a curious look as Apollo drew me forward. Maybe the effort was showing on my face. I probably looked constipated.
“Ophelia, I’d like you to meet my friend, Lexi. Lexi, this is Ophelia Rasmussen.”
“Pleasure,” she said, thrusting her hand out.
I shook it, trying not to wince at the pressure. She was strong. It only took me a moment to realise why. I’d been so busy gawking at her hair and her height when I came in that I hadn’t registered the most important thing about her.
She was a werewolf.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and she went rigid. If she’d been in wolf form, her ears would have pricked up at the sound of my voice. All her attention focused on me so tightly I felt like a bug under a microscope.
“Your voice sounds familiar,” she said, glancing uncertainly at Apollo.
Werewolf hearing. You couldn’t fool it. I said nothing—what could I say? She stepped closer, enclosing my hand in both of her large ones. I wasn’t a s
mall woman, but she made me feel tiny and delicate. Her nose twitched suspiciously. She was smelling me.
I mustn’t have smelled enough like the goddess she remembered, because she finally dropped my hand, looking crestfallen. Guilt gnawed at me. Should I tell her? But surely that would only make her disappointment worse? I wasn’t the friend she longed for.
Her skin was nearly as dark as her hair, like a night with no moon. I bet her wolf form was huge and black-furred. A sudden image of such a wolf silhouetted in the moonlight came to me. Memory or imagination? I had no way of knowing.
Apollo was watching me keenly. If he was hoping for a breakthrough, he’d be sadly disappointed. My shoulders slumped. I was sick of this—sick of the not knowing, the pretence, the uncertainty. Sick of the pressure, too. I wanted to remember and I didn’t, all at the same time. No, scratch that. What I really wanted was to go to bed and eat chocolate for a solid week.
“We were hoping to have a look around Arti’s place,” Apollo said. Of course, he didn’t need the big werewolf’s permission to do anything; he was a god. Nice of him to act as if she had a say in it. “I want to show Lexi a couple of things. I think we’re close to finding Artemis.”
Very smooth. He hadn’t actually lied. We could be close to “finding” Artemis—or I could be doomed to spend another hundred years trapped in this limbo. No one could tell.
Ophelia shrugged. “Fine by me. Do whatever you need to do.” She moved behind the desk and pulled open the top drawer, offering Apollo a bunch of keys. “You need the front door key?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You, too,” she said as he shepherded me toward the door. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”
“Will do.”
Back down the corridor we went, past the smiling receptionist and out the automatic glass doors. Warm air laden with the scent of cool pine and hot asphalt hit us as we left the air-conditioned interior. I took a deep breath and felt my spirits lift. I wanted to dive into that forest and never come out again.
Apollo led me back around the building, past the dumpster and the air-conditioning units chugging away, and onto the path we’d followed before. This time, we didn’t follow it all the way back to the little temple in the woods, but instead took the other branch that he’d pointed out previously. It led, as he had said, to a cottage, whose warm wooden walls and green steel roof blended into its surrounds. It sat among the eucalypts and pines as if it had always been there, part of the landscape.
I felt an immediate affection for the little cottage, though no rush of associated memories as we stepped up onto the planks of its wide veranda. The flyscreen door hung a little loose on its hinges and clearly wasn’t locked. If the main door was locked, it wasn’t obvious. Apollo may have been doing his god-thing, but he merely turned the handle and the door opened. It reminded me of Syl’s comment about how he never knocked, just walked right in as if he owned the place, and I smiled as I followed his broad back into the narrow hallway.
The cottage was built on simple lines: a bedroom on our right, a lounge room on the left. We passed one more bedroom and a bathroom opposite before the hall ended in an eat-in kitchen. The place wasn’t much bigger than our little apartment above the bookshop. The apartment smelled better, though—this place had that musty aroma that came from being locked up too long.
I ran my hand over the wooden surface of the dining table, big enough to seat eight. It looked like it often had, too—it was covered in scratches and odd gouges, as if it had seen a lot of company. It made me feel a lot better about Artemis. For some reason, I’d had an image of her as a bit of a stuck-up princess in my head, maybe because she’d looked so cool and unapproachable in the painting Hades had hanging in the foyer of his palace. But this table didn’t belong to any princess. It was down-to-earth and practical.
“What do you think of the place?” Apollo asked, making an effort to sound casual.
But I knew what he meant. “You have to stop doing that. I promise you, if I have any flashes of recognition, you’ll be the first to know.”
His gaze slid away, toward the window over the sink with its cheerful gingham curtains. “I didn’t mean to pressure you.”
“Yes, you did. Trust me, I’m even more keen than you are to remember something—anything—about my old life. But having you check in with me every three seconds is not helping.” I took a deep breath, forcing my irritation down. “So, what are we looking for in here?”
“I don’t know. There might not even be anything. Just wander around and check everything out. Don’t rush yourself. Something might call to you.”
Yeah, right. The only calls I was likely to get were on the phone tucked into my jeans pocket. I stifled a sigh and wandered off. Might as well start in the bedroom. Most people kept their most important stuff there, didn’t they?
“And don’t follow me around watching me as if I’m some performing monkey,” I called over my shoulder. “Go for a walk or something.”
His footsteps, which had started down the hall after me, abruptly halted and headed back the other way. I grinned as I went into the bedroom.
It wasn’t a very girly room, which was another point in Artemis’s favour as far as I was concerned. I really had to stop being surprised that we shared so many traits. We were the same person, in a way, though we had lived such different lives. Changing the outside didn’t change who a person was on the inside. Maybe. Hopefully. I was still afraid that divinity might make more of a difference than I would like, but it was encouraging.
The bed was large, but not piled with pillows, and the quilt was a simple affair in a soft green colour. The curtains were also green—it didn’t take a genius to guess what the goddess’s favourite colour was. Despite the size of the bed, there was only one chest of drawers, on the right side of the bed, which suggested that it usually only had one occupant. On top of the chest of drawers was a photo of three smiling women.
The one on the right was Ophelia, her brown eyes crinkled into a grin of genuine amusement, her outrageously long hair sprouting free from her head as if she were Medusa. I didn’t know the woman on the left, but she was laughing. Perhaps the woman in the middle had said something funny—there was a self-satisfied air to her smile. Clearly, she was Artemis. Even though she was smiling, there was something of that haughty look that I’d seen in Hades’ painting. But there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and her long, dark hair was wild.
The three of them were outside, against a background of trees, and a familiar quiver stuck up over Artemis’s shoulder. Perhaps this was one of those hunting trips that Apollo had mentioned that she liked to take with her friends. Artemis had her arms slung around the shoulders of the other two women in a casual display of affection. The little seed of hope that we might not be so different after all put forth a couple of tiny shoots.
I stared into the goddess’s eyes, envying her free and easy smile. How long ago had this been taken? Before the troubles with the shadow shapers started, most likely, or she might not have looked so relaxed. Her cheekbones were sharp, and her skin was as pale as the moon. The differences between her face and mine were subtle, but enough that she looked like a goddess and I didn’t, despite the fact that our hair and eye colour were much the same. She was only a little taller, judging by her height relative to Ophelia’s, yet no one would have taken us for the same person. Hades had done a good job of “humanising” the goddess. My skin had never been that flawless, nor my nose so fine.
I replaced the photo gently and turned, catching a brief glimpse of myself in a mirror on another wall. For a second, I could have sworn I saw Artemis’s face looking out at me, and my heart lurched in surprise. But when I looked closer, it was only my own familiar face reflected back at me.
Holy shit. I touched my cheek, heart still thundering. Surely I hadn’t imagined that? The person from the photo had been staring out at me from the mirror. I focused on my own familia
r eyes and tried to get that person back again. But, though my face went red with effort and the blood roared in my ears, nothing changed.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled open the top drawer. I was here to search for a way to contact Poseidon. I could try to reshape my face some other time, when I was less hurried and stressed. Whenever that might be. The twin deadlines of Zeus’s possible demise and my own forced departure from my home were certainly making it hard to focus on anything at the moment.
The drawer contained socks and underpants, and I felt like a weirdo as I rifled through them. Hurriedly, I shut the drawer and opened the next one. That one was full of bras and fancier sets of matching underwear, little scraps of silk and lace that I bet she never wore on hunting trips. I slammed that drawer shut, too, before my mind travelled too far down the path of wondering for which occasions she brought out the things from the second drawer. They were all in my size. That red set in particular … I could imagine the hungry look in Jake’s eyes only too well if he saw me in that. Not that that was likely to happen.
Her wardrobe, which took up most of one wall, was surprisingly practical. Most of it was the kind of thing I had in my own wardrobe—jeans, T-shirts, workout gear. There were only a few dressier outfits. I guess there wasn’t much call for cocktail dresses out here in the woods. She could have had whole rooms full of fancier clothes somewhere else. She was bound to have more than one residence.
After I’d checked the shelves along the top of the wardrobe and found nothing more exciting than out-of-season clothes and blankets, I moved across the hallway into the lounge room. So far, this was a bust, and this room didn’t look much more promising. There were a couple more photos on the mantelpiece, a small bookcase on either side of the fireplace, and not much else apart from a comfortable-looking lounge suite upholstered in a deep, rich brown leather. The most striking feature of the room was a stag’s head mounted above the fireplace. Its liquid dark eyes sent a shiver down my spine. I had a hard time reconciling my own deep connection with animals with Artemis’s role as the goddess of the hunt. Maybe I would have to find her memories before I could understand.
Caged Lightning Page 7
