by S. E. Babin
“Always,” I said and bent down to brush my lips against his. “I will always come back to you.”
I just hoped it was a promise I could keep.
We spent the rest of the day involved in activities restricted solely to the bedroom. Even though I didn’t really have the time to spare, there was nothing I’d rather be doing than Hades.
And from his active and energetic participation, I’d wager he had the same opinion about me. But when longer shadows crossed his walls and the sounds of his domain grew louder and restless, I knew I had to leave. Hades had work to do here, and I had to figure out how the hell I was going to win against Typhon. And anyone else who felt the need to challenge me for my hand.
The only person I wanted to be with was right here, and I was angry at the bargain I’d made, although rationally I knew I made it because I had no other choice. If only I had the power then that I command now. Things would be different.
We said our goodbyes in his study with a whispered promise I would return as soon as I could. With a parting and lingering kiss, I blinked back into my own home.
Artie sat on the couch and as soon as she saw me, a wide grin spread across her face. “Well,” she greeted me, “I guess I know what you’ve been getting up to, young lady.”
A bright red blush started from my head and traveled down my toes, but I couldn’t lie to her. “We set the ceiling on fire,” I said by way of return greeting.
She blinked, her eyes wide and owlish behind the dark framed glasses she always wore. “My. Perhaps a fire extinguisher would be in order for next time?” She stood and enveloped me in a hug.
I didn’t see Artie as much anymore. She didn’t live too far away, but her job as a private pet detective kept her extremely busy. So far Zeus was leaving her alone, but I didn’t think she had too much time left before he came calling. Hermes was still in power for now, but Zeus’ banishment was very close to being up. Sooner rather than later, we’d see the results of their battle for the throne, and I had a feeling Artie would become a casualty of that.
I had some peace because of Hades. Zeus still managed to manipulate me every once in awhile, but those times were becoming few and far between these days. His last hold over me was through Typhon. And that damnable mortality spell. Which I didn’t have any plans to use. Perhaps I should just give it back and call it good.
I wrapped my arms around my friend’s thin waist and squeezed her. “How are the missing pets of Asheville?” I asked.
“Mostly found,” she said and grinned. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
I stepped out of her embrace and fiddled with a long strand of her chestnut colored hair. “And...have you talked to Triptolemus?”
At that, her gaze shuttered.
“Oh, Artie.” I sighed. “He’s just a boy. Standing in front of a girl. Wanting you to love him.”
Her mouth wavered and she snickered. “Super lame movie quote, Abs. You need to expand your repertoire.”
“I’m too busy trying to avoid dying,” I answered. “I don’t have near as much time to watch movies as I used to.”
Her violet eyes sparkled. “Not dying this time. Just trying to avoid getting married, right?”
I hesitated, and Artie picked up on it right away.
“Wait. You aren’t trying to get married, are you? If you are why don’t you just call Typhon?” Her eyes flashed in annoyance.
“Because I’m not trying to get married to Typhon,” I answered. “I’m not even sure I want to get married right away. I just -”
Understanding dawned on her face. “You are head over heels for Hades, aren’t you? I wondered. I thought maybe it was the same as Hermes...I’m sorry Abs. I didn’t realize. I just thought you two were still merely having fun.”
I winced at her mention of Hermes. I did love him. The deal with Typhon had torn us apart, and I still hadn’t forgiven myself for it. But the separation from him and my subsequent meeting with Hades had shown me Hermes and I never had a quarter of what Hades and I had. It made me glad in one way and terribly sad in another because Hermes still cared for me. And I for him. It just wasn’t what I wanted eternal love to be. And that’s what I was in this for. Finally.
The Goddess of Love wanted to be in love. For the rest of her life. My life. And I wanted dark haired silver eyed babies running around everywhere driving us insane.
“I love him,” I admitted to her.
She blinked at me in surprise. “You’re for real admitting it? This is the real thing for you?”
I exhaled a deep breath. “This is it.”
She chewed on her lower lip, deep in thought. “Well, I guess we need to get working on the whole Typhon problem then. I don’t suppose you have any tricks up your sleeve on how to beat an immortal monster god?”
I shook my head. This was going to suck.
“Right. When you can’t beat someone in a physical fight, you have to be smarter than them.”
I frowned.
At my look, she snorted. “This, my friend, is why you have me.”
Chapter 4
The games were scheduled for five days away. To some people that would be a long time. For me, it meant cue panic, run around waving your arms in the air, and consuming copious amounts of coffee to try to deal with my racing thoughts.
For Artie, it meant diagrams, cue cards, mind mapping, and a whole lot of pizza delivery.
I stepped into what used to be my office and stared at my best friend. It had been two days since she’d popped over to my house, and she hadn’t left yet. How her business was still running I wasn’t quite sure, but this was Artie we were talking about. Animals were kind of her thing.
Her long chestnut hair was gathered up in a messy bun and long streamers of it trailed down her face. She wore a pair of dirty sweats and apparently had forgotten how to use a napkin because they were covered in streaks of tomato sauce. I reached over and plucked a pepperoni out of her hair.
She blinked up at me, rings of darkness tingeing the pretty violet of her eyes.
“Dude. You need a shower and some sleep. Stat.” I crossed my arms after this pronouncement and glared at her, daring her to contradict me.
She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and frowned at me. Her nose wrinkled. “I guess I do stink.”
“Abby is right,” Clotho announced after poking her head into the room. “You smell like you’ve been wallowing in pig mire.”
“Thanks, Clotho,” Artie muttered, spearing the Fate with one of those trademark glares.
“I speak nothing but the truth,” she said and waggled her fingers in a wave as she continued down the hall.
Artie shifted and crossed her legs Indian style. I winced as her smell wafted up to my nose. “Gack,” I said.
“Shut it,” Artie said with a snort. “I think I’ve figured something out.”
I pulled a chair up, but not too close to her. She really, really smelled.
Artie huffed out a breath but pointed to her hot mess of notes scribbled on the large paper hoisted on an easel. It was difficult to make sense out of, but one thing I did notice was multiple names highlighted or scratched out. One name in particular caught my eye.
Tyche.
I narrowed my gaze at it, then back at her. Back around Halloween, someone had petitioned Fortuna to get me out of a magical cage. At the time I’d thought it curious that a Roman counterpart instead of Tyche had come to my aid, but I never thought too much about it because I was too busy trying to survive. I’d never found out who’d done it, though I suspected it might have been Artie.
But from the expression on her face now, I didn’t think that was the case. If she owed the Roman goddess a favor, she certainly wouldn’t petition Tyche too. So who the hell contacted Fortuna? It wasn’t every day we saw the other gods around. In fact, I’d say it was a rarity indeed. Half the time I wondered if they actually existed. Except for the Christian god, of course. That dude was a serious thorn in my side. It had to ha
ve been someone powerful to rally Fortuna’s assistance for me.
“You want to petition Tyche for the outcome of the games?”
Artie nodded. “It’s our best shot at turning the tides in our favor.”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. I was underwhelmed with the solution she’d come up with. “All of this,” I said as I waved my hand around the hot mess of a room, “and this is what you came up with?”
A deep growl sounded in her throat. I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“I’m just saying,” I said with a laugh. “I just expected something a little more...elaborate.”
She tugged off her glasses and rubbed her face with her hands. Artie was exhausted, and that was a hard point to get an immortal to.
“Do you ever want to just be normal?” she asked after a silence that went too long.
I had to snort at that. “Uh, my whole life has been me wanting to be normal.” I studied my friend. “But I have to say after everything I’ve been through, maybe this is the kind of normal I need.” I’d once dreamed of being left alone, and I’d done my best to stay away from Olympus. But our nature was never far behind us. After a short reprieve, I’d fallen right back into the politics of the gods. Some of it not my fault, some of it definitely my fault. But if I’d taken the easier route, I would have never been involved with Hades. I never would have found out who I truly was or where I’d come from. “Normal is just a word,” I told my friend.
Artie leaned her head back against the couch and sighed. “For so long I’ve lived in a self- imposed shelter and thought it was the right way. The way I was supposed to be. But immortality is not conducive to being alone. Maybe if I were mortal I could have friendships. Relationships.” One thin shoulder shrugged up, and her lower lip trembled.
I wasn’t quite sure how to take that. “You do have friendships,” I said carefully.
She turned wet violet eyes to me and gave me a wobbly smile. “I know. I just...sometimes I just want to be friends with the humans. They come into my office all the time. I work for them. I take their money. I get to see how their relationships are more important because they don’t have a long life span. They put everything they have into their lives. We don’t, Abby. We have forever and forever, and when it comes to people we love it usually means we think we can always have the same thing with them. Until we don’t. Because we’ve neglected them. And it’s because we know we have forever.”
My mouth twisted to the side. On one hand, she was right. A hundred percent. But on the other hand…
“Don’t you think that maybe that’s our own fault?” I asked her gently as my thoughts drifted to Hades. “We are the only ones responsible for the efforts we put into our friendships and our relationships.” I smiled to soften the words. “Our arrogance is what ruins most things, Artemis. We think we have another day. That isn’t always the case.”
“I just want to experience what it’s like,” Artie said.
“There’s no way to come back from that,” I told her. “There’s no temporary way to lose our immortality.” If there was, I definitely would have tried it, only to see if brain freeze was as bad as the humans said it was.
A swish of fabric alerted us to the presence of Clotho. Her expression was blank, but her eyes gleamed as she stared at Artie.
I began to feel very, very apprehensive about her presence after the way our conversation had just gone. As much as I adored Clotho, all of that power she held still made me nervous. If anyone could help Artie, it would be her.
I sighed because I had a feeling I knew where this was going to go.
Clotho kneeled down beside my friend and tilted her chin up. “You’ve struggled with this for a long time, haven’t you?”
I blinked. Artie had never mentioned anything to me about wanting to become mortal. Occasionally we’d talked about what it might be like, but there was never any indication she’d wanted to take it any further.
Artie’s gaze slid over my way. I said nothing, but I raised one eyebrow to let her know we’d be discussing it later. I stood and stepped out of the room. I didn’t want to be a party to what could eventually occur in there. I just hoped they both knew what they were doing.
As I walked away, thoughts of the letter from Zeus nagged at me. I had a mortality spell. I could give her what she wanted.
But did any of the gods really want to lose their immortality? I had. At one point. I think all of us thought about what it would be like, but none of us ever reached out and grabbed it with both hands.
Not that we could. We couldn’t just strip our essence without dying. Becoming mortal took a whole lot of powerful magic.
Magic like Clotho had.
I cursed under my breath and headed back downstairs. Atlas sat in the living room reading a copy of the local newspaper. He looked enormous, blond and adorable, and also a little bit scary.
I nudged him over on the couch and sat down.
“Know anything about Tyche?” I asked him.
I looked down at my super secret classified DO NOT MARRY TYPHON list and groaned. Zeus barely beat the guy when they went head to head and only won because he’d enlisted the help of Athena...the wisest woman in Olympus.
How was I of the average IQ supposed to beat him in a physical challenge?
I sighed. Short answer? I couldn’t. Seeing it on paper only solidified that fact.
Artie was supposed to help me but her wanting to owe a favor to Tyche made me itch under the collar. I wanted to be done with the favor owing business because it had never done us any favors. Nine times out of ten those favors ended up biting us on the tail and sometimes ended with almost certain death.
So. Not Tyche. No favors hopefully.
Just good old fashioned trickery. I smiled to myself. Like the good ole days.
A tingle slid over my shoulders. I jerked my head up and strained my eyes trying to see through the door. But alas, x-ray vision wasn’t one of my superpowers. Someone had just entered my property.
And it wasn’t just someone. It was an immortal. A very powerful one if I had felt it all the way in my kitchen.
I slid out of my chair and tiptoed over to the kitchen window to peek out. The person wore a silver hooded robe.
I snorted and pulled open the door. “You could have just knocked.”
Hecate, also known as the Goddess of the Crossroads and...my mother, pulled down her hood. She was in her maiden face today which was a lot more pleasant than the crone guise. Long black hair flowed down her shoulders to her waist as she glided across my land.
I couldn’t believe she was here, but I was glad she was. I needed her help.
“I like to make an entrance,” she said in her whispery ancient voice. She glided up the stairs until she was standing in front of me. “Your wards are strong, but not strong enough. Allow me to tweak them before I leave.”
I frowned. “Zeus made them.”
A grimace of distaste touched her face. “Exactly.”
I let out a snort of amusement and ushered her into the house. “Just make sure they don’t zap any animals. Artie would be furious.”
“Hmmm,” she agreed. Like with most ancient beings, the house seemed about three sizes too small once she stepped into it. She allowed her robe to fall, and I winced as I waited for her to be butt naked or in an otherwise state of undress, but lucky for me, she wore a pair of silky pants and a cotton blouse, cinched at the waist with a brightly colored scarf. She looked like a gypsy, especially with her hair spilling everywhere and her lack of shoes.
Hecate had helped me survive the last battle, and she’d restored all of my magic. I wasn’t quite sure yet whether that was a curse or a blessing. I’d been working with Hades to test the waters of my new powers, but there was no real way to test it until I was up against a challenge. A major one.
I blinked in surprise as a thought occurred to me.
A challenge like these games.
My mother waggled her eyebro
ws at me. “I see you’ve figured it out, dear child. I’ve been waiting.” Her pretty mouth curved into a frown. “As you’ve never invited me here to help you, I assumed you had your magic quite under control.” She leaned in closer to me and a wide grin spread across her face. “But I can see that you have been...distracted with pleasures of the flesh rather than magical study.”
My face burned so hot I thought I might need the fire department. “Mother,” I croaked out. “Please stop.”
Her merry laugh rang through the kitchen. “Well, it’s not every day Hades has eyes for someone. Based upon the way he looks at you I’d say you two have years of physical past times ahead of you.”
“Oh my gods,” I whispered under my breath.
I headed over to the cabinet and pulled two mugs down. “Coffee?” I offered her.
“You’re going to get the jitters!” Atlas screamed from the living room.
“Immortal being!” I yelled back.
Hecate peered around the corner and gasped. “Atlas!”
I put down the cup and stared at her. I wasn’t surprised she knew him because let’s face it, she was older than most of us, but I was surprised she greeted him so fondly.
I watched as Atlas’ face fell in shock. He tossed the newspaper down, jumped up and grabbed my mother around the waist and swung her around the kitchen.
Well color me confused. The hell?
Atlas laughed with real joy and set my mother back on her feet. Hecate reached up and touched Atlas’ cheek. “How in the world did you ever -?” She trailed off and her curious gaze went to me.
I just shrugged and pretended extreme interest in the coffee pot.
“Aphrodite,” Atlas said. “She saved me.”
“Well,” my mother breathed. “How did she do that?”
Trickery and deceit. I smiled. “I asked nicely.”
Atlas grinned.
Hecate’s eyebrows rose. “Forgive me if I don’t believe that,” she said, her tone drier than the Sahara.
“She strong-armed Hermes.” Atlas sobered at the memory. “She refused to save his father unless he released me to her.”
