by Kieran Scott
“Why would she do that?” I whispered. “Why set him up there to be chased by that monster forever?”
“Because she wanted to punish him too,” Deimos said. “As much as she wished she could save him.”
“But why?” I asked, agape.
Harmonia looked at me, her blue eyes full. “She punishes him,” she said, “for leaving her.”
• • •
Outside the window, headlights flashed. Slowly I walked over to my bed, carefully removed my new sneakers, and slid under the covers, trying to shake that memory of Orion—the sight of him drained, pale, lifeless. Curling the bottle of wine toward my chest, I settled in for the night.
“I’m coming for you, Orion,” I said, touching the arrow pendant against my chest. I stared at the pencil, imagined him alive, well, and happy, and smiled. “I’ll be there soon.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
True
I couldn’t open my eyes. They were welded shut. I tried to move my arms, but they didn’t budge. It was as if they had the weight of the gods on them. I brought my hands to my face, but of course, that did nothing, so I took a breath and tasted bile and wine. It was so potent it stung the back of my nose.
What new torture was this?
Concentrating, I rolled onto my side. My hands hit a cool, dry pillow. Still in bed. That was something. At least I hadn’t been transported to the underworld in my sleep. I focused and forced my eyes to open. They were as dry as the sands of the Sahara and the bright sun sliced through my retinas, sending a bolt of pain sizzling through my skull. Tears squeezed out, dripping down my face.
I groaned. “Bad idea. Opening eyes, bad idea.”
But the sun continued its assault, turning the insides of my eyelids a bright, blinding pink. I shoved myself out of bed. My head weighed five million pounds. No. Five trillion. I pried one eyelid open, staggered toward the window, and somehow found the string for the blinds. With a yank, they mercifully fell shut. I turned, tripped, and went sprawling onto the cold, hard floor.
My stomach clenched, sending an awful, heaving feeling up my airway. A sour, burning sensation filled my throat. My head still ached. So much for my mother’s suggestion that wine would solve that problem.
Wine. The very thought made me heave all over again.
On the street a horn honked, and I heard the school bus’s air brakes release. My eyes darted open, and I blearily found the clock on my nightstand. It was eight fifteen, Tuesday morning. My second day as a mortal. And I had fifteen minutes to get to school.
Another groan escaped as I sat back against the side of my bed. My foot hit one of the wine bottles and it rolled toward the window, clinking against the second, which I’d removed from the basement around midnight and finished at about two a.m. More than anything I wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep. Sleep was the only escape from this headache, not to mention these new and disgusting symptoms. Did humans feel this way all the time? How did any of them function? Perhaps I had underestimated their fortitude.
I pushed myself up, and the whole room tilted, including the evil sand timer, which continued to run. Apparently, Charlie and Stacey had yet to find love, but was there really anything I could do about that today? No. Not in this state. Bed. I was going back to bed. I flopped onto my stomach, and Orion’s arrow pierced my skin.
My heart all but stopped, and I sat up again.
Orion.
I had a job to do. I had to save him. Maybe I couldn’t make Stacey and Charlie move any faster, but I could start trying to find a second couple to match.
I slipped to the floor and tried to stand, but the room and its many colors and lights and shapes spun around me. The floor seemed the safer route. I crawled into the closet and closed the door. The mirror on the back of the door startled me. I sat there and stared.
This could not be my reflection. The hair in tangles, the gray swipes of color under the eyes, the red nose with its skin peeling along its bridge. I leaned forward, horrified. Was that a pimple on my chin?
“No!” I cried, the tears flowing freely now. “This was not part of our deal! No one said I was going to deteriorate!”
Back home, my skin had never been marred by anything—not a blemish, not a wrinkle, not a scar, and certainly not this awful burning sensation. And I didn’t have to do anything to keep it that way. I was simply beautiful, every moment of every day and night. As were my mother and my sister and every other female on Mount Olympus. It was who we were. Goddesses. Unless an upper god chose to take my beauty, that was the way I was to be. Always. But here on Earth . . . here on Earth I was turning into a Harpy.
I lay down on the floor and cried, clutching Orion’s necklace. If he saw me right now, I was sure he’d turn away in disgust. Imagining his face at the sight of my own made the sobs turn to convulsions. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t go out there like this. I was going to fail him. I was going to fail us.
Eros, stop this now. This is not about you.
I took in a broken breath. Harmonia’s voice surrounded me.
“Sister?” I said, my voice cracking.
This is not about your vanity, she said. This is about saving your love. It’s about proving yourself. It’s about being the goddess I know you to be.
“But how?” I whimpered, pulling my knees up under my chin as another awful wave of discomfort hit me. “I can hardly lift my head.”
Find your strength, Eros. Pick yourself up. Focus on your mission. You only have a short time to complete it.
I opened the door a crack and peeked out at the sand timer. Still running. Taking a deep, broken breath, I dried my eyes with the backs of my hands. I wasn’t sure whether Harmonia had found a way to communicate with me, or whether I was deluding myself, but either way the voice in my head was right. This was no time for self-pity. I pulled on a pair of baggy jeans, shoved my aching feet into white socks and the blue-and-white sneakers, and tugged on a flowing white top. When I touched my hair, I winced. It even smelled awful. If only Harmonia were really here to brush and braid it. Instead I wrapped it into a bun as best I could and found a red baseball cap, which I jammed down over the mess.
On my way down the hall, I passed the bathroom. The bathroom. Of course. A bath. That was what I needed. I had always enjoyed baths in hot springs and cool lakes as a matter of pleasure, but here they were a clear necessity. I eyed the faucet longingly, but there was no time.
Bathing would have to wait. Right now, I had to find my next lucky couple. I teetered to the top of the stairs, clung to the railing, and somehow found my way out the door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Charlie
My phone beeped as I locked my bike to the bike rack on Tuesday morning. It had been beeping for hours. Since before I woke up. Stacey telling me what she was having for breakfast. What she was wearing. Who was being interviewed on Today while she ate her Special K. Stacey texting me her address, her home number, her favorite color. Every time the phone beeped, my shoulders tightened a bit more. There was also one text from Corey telling me to call him—like that was gonna happen—but most of them were from Stacey.
I mean: What. The. Hell? I didn’t have a whole lot of experience with girls, but this couldn’t be normal. I knew for a fact that Chris and Corey had never had to deal with this kind of thing from the girls they’d gone out with. Of if they had, they’d never told me about it.
I let the lock clang against the bike as the next text came in. The sun beat down on the back of my neck. I scanned the crowd hanging out in front of the school doors. True. I had to find True. So I could strangle her.
A car door slammed behind me. “There you are! Charlie!”
I stopped and closed my eyes. The sound of my name had never made me so tense. I reached for my drumsticks and gripped them both in one hand, wishing there was a kit nearby. These flashes of irrational anger were the one thing I had in common with my dad and brothers, and I hated them. Of course, my brothers used to take out their angst on me
or each other with surprise wrestling matches, but I had no one to pound on like they used to. Instead I had my drums. So I took a deep breath, started playing my jazz solo in my mind, and gripped those sticks. There. Slightly better.
Slowly I turned to face Stacey, who was jogging up the steps after me. She wore a purple T-shirt with flowers embroidered around the collar, and her hair was in one long braid. She really was pretty. Or she would have been. If she wasn’t psycho.
“Where were you? Didn’t you get my texts?” she asked, her brow wrinkling.
“I . . . I turned my phone off last night, and I guess I never turned it back on this morning,” I lied, twirling one stick between my fingers.
“Oh. That sucks.” She pouted slightly. Behind her, a school bus pulled up and a bunch of kids poured out. No True. “I thought you were gonna pick me up.”
“Pick you up?” Not one of her texts had said anything about picking her up.
“I texted you my address,” she said, like that made sense.
“I didn’t get it,” I lied again. Twirl, twirl, twirl. Faster, faster, faster. “And I don’t have a car.”
“You don’t?” She seemed disappointed. Good. Maybe now she’d break up with me. Not that we were together, but it was pretty clear she thought we were.
“Nope. My dad dropped me off yesterday and I rode my bike today,” I told her, nodding my chin toward the half-full bike rack.
“Oh.” She looked slowly over her shoulder, and for a moment I was staring at her braid and a tiny brown mole on the back of her neck.
Please let this be a deal breaker. Please let this be a deal breaker.
“That’s okay,” she said finally. “Walking together is much more romantic anyway.”
She reached for my hand, but the drumstick stopped her. Caught between giving her what she wanted and having no desire to hold her hand, I shrugged. So she wrapped her arm around mine instead. Right. So Stacey was smart, but not so good at the hint taking.
Ugh. Why couldn’t I be a man and tell her I wasn’t interested? Honestly. There was something wrong with me. It was like I’d been born with my default setting on “polite” and that’s where it would always stay. Even if it meant I had to go out with someone I didn’t even like.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me close to her side. “I want to introduce you to my friends! They’re dying to meet you!”
I didn’t know how she’d had time to tell them about me, considering how many texts and e-mails she’d fired at me last night. Obviously the girl was an overachiever. I saw the pack of them notice us as we approached, nothing but bright colors and big smiles and lots of giggling. One of them looked me up and down like she was sizing me up for herself, and my fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. If I got in with Stacey’s friends, it would be that much harder to get out. At least, that’s what my instincts were telling me.
“Actually, I gotta go,” I told Stacey, slipping from her grasp. “I told Roon I’d stop by before class.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I . . .”
Have to lay into the drums before I explode?
“Told him I would,” I mumbled instead.
“Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll see you—”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the guilty, embarrassed pounding in my ears as I sprinted toward the front entrance. First I was going to hammer out some aggression on the drums, and then I was going to very calmly, very rationally, kill True Olympia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Katrina
“Honors English? Seriously? Isn’t that, like, a lot of work?”
Lana leaned back against the windowsill next to me and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. She’d finished applying false eyelashes seconds before, and now she couldn’t stop blinking.
“I did it last year,” I said, scrolling through the calendar on my phone to check my mother’s schedule.
I saw that my mom was working this afternoon and evening and breathed a sigh of relief. I could go home, do some laundry, and be out of there before she got back.
“Yeah, and you flunked out of it,” Raine pointed out.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“What?” She raised her hands, then ashed into the cup she and Gen were sitting around. “Do I not speak the truth?”
“Well, now I got back in,” I told them, bumping the toe of my boot against the floor. I dropped my phone back into my bag and zipped it up. “And I don’t mind doing the work.”
“Really?” Gen asked.
“C’mon, KitKat. I was psyched we were in that class together,” Raine said, pushing her legs out and crossing them at the ankle. “Who’m I gonna cheat off of when we have a quiz?”
I laughed. She didn’t. Neither did Lana or Gen. They really did think I should stay in CP English for Raine. So she could cheat. Suddenly I was reminded of the fact that Lana and Gen had been Raine’s friends first. And clearly, still were.
“Raine, you’re going to be fine. Ms. Day is a great—”
At that moment, the door flew open and we froze. A tall, scrawny girl in a red baseball cap lurched into the room. Her nose was clearly sunburned, but the rest of her face was so pale she was practically see-through. Before any of us could react, she opened her mouth, let out this awful, choking burp, and spewed all over the floor.
“Holy shit!” Gen shouted, jumping up. A dark brown chunk slid down to the hem of her skirt and dropped off, splatting into the puddle that was oozing over the tiles. My nostrils filled with a horrible, sour stench.
“Omigod, I’m gonna barf. I’m gonna barf,” Lana rambled, waving at her face with her free hand while she held her cigarette at arm’s length with the other. She was blinking like crazy, and I was sure she couldn’t see where she was going.
“You’re supposed to puke in the toilet!” Raine shouted, flattened back against the wall. I didn’t even know how she’d gotten there. Two seconds ago she was sitting on the floor, where the vomit lake was slowly expanding. Now she strong-armed Lana, almost slamming her head into the paper towel dispenser to keep her from stepping in barf.
The puker didn’t hear a word anyone said. She was bent over in the doorway with one hand clinging to the handle as she heaved for breath. Her long dark hair hung forward over her face, a whole clump of it tangled and dripping.
“Are you okay?” I asked, not breathing.
“What was that?” she demanded, looking up with her eyes without moving her head. Even in the chaos, the gorgeous shade of blue stunned me. But she looked totally terrified. Like she thought she might be dying or something. “What did I just do?”
“Uh, you upchucked everywhere, you freak,” Raine said, skirting the lake of barf and dragging Lana with her.
The girl moaned and leaned against the doorway.
“I have to get out of here.” Lana tossed her cigarette into the nearest sink and blindly shoved past the puker into the hall. Gen and then Raine followed.
“Are you coming?” Raine demanded.
“Shouldn’t we, like, help her?” I asked.
Raine’s eyes widened and her lip curled. “Girl, that is gross.” And then she was gone.
The puker turned her head and groaned. A tiny drip of brown goo clung to her chin. I grabbed a paper towel, wet it, and tiptoed around the ooze, pulling her out into the deserted hallway. Once the door closed behind us, I sucked in a huge breath.
“Here.” I dabbed at her chin with the towel, and her face fell forward. She let out a rancid sigh and I almost heaved. Alcohol. I could smell alcohol behind the stench of puke.
“Are you . . . hungover?” I asked, scrunching up my face.
The girl’s eyes popped open and she stared at the floor, unfocused. “Oh my . . . maybe!” she said, her forehead wrinkling. “But that’s not possible. I had only two bottles of wine!”
“Two bottles? Yourself?” She was definitely tall, but even skinnier than Gen. A lightweight like her could never handle that much wine.
> “What? It’s never affected me before,” she semi-whined, leaning her shoulder into the wall. She slid forward and went down on her knees. I somehow managed to catch her before her face hit the floor.
“Okay. This is not good,” I said, hooking my arms under hers and dragging her to her feet. She weighed practically nothing, but she was limp. As I tried to get her to stand up, we both slammed against the wall.
“Hey, Katrina! What’re you—”
Zadie stopped in her tracks as she came around the corner, her thumbs crooked around the straps of her pink Hello Kitty backpack. She looked at the puker and grimaced.
“Is she okay?”
“Not exactly,” I said, pushing the girl against the wall. Her eyes were at half-mast. “You’ve gotta go home,” I told her. “If any of the teachers see you like this, you’re screwed.”
“No!” the girl wailed loudly, her voice bouncing off the walls. She threw her arms around my neck and let herself go, hanging her full weight on me. “I can’t go home now! I have work to do! One down, two to go!”
Somewhere nearby a door slammed. A hushed conversation echoed down the hall.
“That’s my dad!” Zadie hissed, her eyes wide.
“Crap,” I said under my breath. “We have to get her out of the hall.”
“What about the bathroom?” Zadie asked.
I shook my head emphatically. “Not an option. Trust me.”
The girl hiccuped and burped. It was totally foul.
“Okay. I have an idea. Zadie, can you take one side?” I asked.
Zadie nodded and ducked under the girl’s arm. “Got it.”
I slung her other arm around my back. “Band room, on three,” I directed. “One, two, three.”
