Oh, the irony.
His lips tightened further, and he stared at me. I could feel him holding himself back, but from what—a snarky comment, an insult, or a declaration of affection, I couldn’t tell. I would not break the silence, but I watched him calmly, letting him feel his feelings.
It was probably good practice for him.
I knew as we stared into each other’s eyes—not romantically, even—that we would end up together. It was only a matter of time. I could feel destiny pulling us together, and I sensed Jack could feel it too, even if it scared him shitless.
He finally broke eye contact. “You’re going to break my heart,” he said.
“I would never.” And that, dear reader, was the most honest I had been with him yet.
He looked back at me with something like hope, then carefully rearranged his features to disguise his emotions. “Don’t toy with me, Selene. I beg you.”
“I’m not,” I told him, “I promise.” But I sighed. “But you’ve got to get over this thing where you guilt yourself for having emotions.”
He paused, then approached me, and took my face in his hands. He kissed me, gently this time, but it stung against my already-swollen lips. I lifted a hand to cup his face, and it was wet.
He was crying.
I pulled back. “Jack...”
He came to his senses, as if pulling himself out of a trance. He wiped away a tear, and his face transformed with a level of shock, as if he hadn’t realized he’d been crying.
“I should go,” he started.
“Jack, wait-”
He shook his head. “No. I’m not putting you through this. You have other options.”
I reached for him, but he was already too far away, already slipping his shirt back on and reaching for his shoes. For all that he was afraid of being desperate, I felt desperate at the sight of him leaving, even as I knew in my soul this wasn’t really good-bye.
“You don’t need to leave,” I tried to tell him.
He waved me off. “Yes, I do,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m not a better man.”
“Call me when you miss me,” I told him as he opened the door to the hallway. “We can go on an actual date or something.”
“I already miss you, Selene,” he said, but left anyway, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
Chapter 9
I hadn’t heard from Noah in days.
It was a tricky situation to find myself in, if for no other reason than, really, it was nearly impossible for me to know whether he was in danger from the other creature moving about—the one that had been leaving the black goo in their victims—or he was doing his emotional distancing thing with me out of anger.
Again.
I sighed as I climbed the stairs to his loft. He’d come back to me last time, and it was my turn to go to him. I’d tried to call, but there were only so many voicemails I could leave.
I was deeply in love with him. That much I knew. Perhaps a more sensible person would have regarded his hot and coldness as a reason to be more cautious with him, but I understood it as a sign of how his passion flowed. And, well, that was something that, over time, I would help him work on, assuming he so desired to.
Which he did, even if he hadn’t admitted it yet, because he loved it and it was making him miserable.
So maybe I didn’t love the coldness, but I definitely loved the passion that drove it, and I definitely, without a doubt, loved him.
Besides, I was hardly someone who could hold my romantic partners up to a standard of perfection, given the kinds of half-truths and tall tales I dealt in.
The door to his loft was cracked open when I arrived. My breath caught in my throat at the site. I had, truly, hoped he’d been angrier with me than I’d realized, and that his ignoring my calls had been out of willful stubbornness and not something like mortal danger. I tried to push down the guilt that crept up at the sight of it—how long had he been in trouble? Was he already dead? Had, after everything, my last words to him been those spoken in anger?
I ran now, thankful I had made the last minute decision to wear flats instead of heels for this. I slammed the door open, and it slid along its rails loudly, ending with a metallic bang.
I held my breath, expecting to see a gruesome scene before me, but everything looked... fine. At first. As far as I could tell there had been no struggle; nothing looked to be in more disarray than it had been when I had initially come, just a few stacks of scattered papers, and a coffee pot that had long gone cold.
The coffee clued me in: he hadn’t been expecting to leave.
I looked around further, then moved into his bedroom, and that was when I found him.
Until this point, I had not known what the other creature in town was. My absence of memory of my own life notwithstanding, beyond my knowledge of muses I also seemed to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of other beings throughout the realms, and I knew immediately upon seeing him.
Noah had not been killed. No, Noah had been turned to stone.
I gulped. He was made of a solid white marble. His pose was casual, or nearly, though he had something like extreme fear and surprise on his face.
He’d come face to face with a gorgon.
That at least explained why he hadn’t called me back.
“Who did this to you, Noah?” I asked him. Or no one in particular, depending on how you looked at it. He still sparkled with inspiration, somehow, and I couldn’t tell if that meant he was still alive or if he was just shining as a work of art.
Maybe both.
I chose to believe he was alive. Or at least, I tried to, but I couldn’t quite shake my tears.
One of the particular things about the way Noah worked that I hadn’t quite made a note of before was that he had multiple desks. I remembered him mentioning it in passing on our first date at the little Italian restaurant, that he liked to pick up and move from room to room when he felt fatigued or was stuck on a piece. Now, he stood only a few feet away from his desk in his bedroom, and it seemed reasonable enough that the gorgon had perhaps interrupted him in the middle of his work. So I made my way to his desk, just to peek at what he was looking at, and the few tears I cried turned into a downpour.
He was writing a poem. About me.
It was meant as a letter, if the way he wrote it on beautiful stationary and the careful lettering he used told me anything. It was nearly finished, taking up about three quarters of the page, but he’d stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. It was, frankly, beautiful.
I thought he’d been angry with me, and perhaps he had been.
But, fuck, if I had doubted he was also deeply in love with me back? Well, I now had specific evidence to show me he was truly, truly into me.
He wanted to spend forever with me, if the text on the letter was right, fights or not.
I didn’t know then what he had been planning. Perhaps he would never return my calls, perhaps he would give me this letter only after we’d made up, or perhaps he would give me this letter as his way of apology. It didn’t particularly matter to me; what mattered to me was that, all of our fighting aside, we were on the same page, and it was that we wanted to figure out a way forward that was more consistently doting.
But still passionate, because geez, look at who we are.
So I sobbed. I held the love poem in my hands and stared at my handsome playwright and sobbed. We were so close to our happily ever after, and yet we were so far from it, and for all of my lying and for all of Noah’s moodiness, it wasn’t our fault.
I was going to find this gorgon.
And then I was going to kill her.
And then Ryan was turned to stone, too.
The first clue was that he wasn’t answering his text messages. While Noah was definitely the kind of artist to get distracted and forget he had a phone entirely for days at a time, Ryan had never taken more than a few hours to get back to me.
No matter when I texted him, actually, which probably said something not
great about his ability to sleep through the night, but I digress.
I’d been trying to get ahold of him for several days to tell him Noah had agreed to work with him on his comic, if he was ready to take the next step with it. Even if he hadn’t been, it would have been much more like him to text me back a snarky retort or something than to ignore me.
Then I found Noah turned to stone, and I went from being a bit concerned to absolutely, out-of-my-mind, terrified for him.
There was a gorgon on the loose and it’d already gotten one man I was in love with, I sure as hell didn’t want to let it get the other one, too.
I put on the most practical outfit I owned, grabbed my purse, and nearly ran out the doors downstairs, avoiding eye contact with the man at the front desk. He’d taken to trying to get information about my plans to pay him under the guise of chatting me up every time he saw me, despite that I hadn’t been late on payments for several weeks now.
I’ll tell you, part of me was thinking he was a creature sent just to spy on my dealings here. It would have explained his complete lack of inspiration, at least.
Anyway.
I wasn’t sure where I was going. Sure, Ryan had programmed his address into my phone so I could show up whenever I felt like it, but I hadn’t followed through on that. He also hadn’t given me a reason to worry about him yet, either.
My phone rang.
It was Jack.
The sad thing about the progression of events was that I would have been extremely excited to hear from Jack under almost any other circumstances. But now, well, his feelings would have to wait. I refused the call, only for him to call back almost immediately. I refused that call as well and did my best to ignore the notifications that he had left me voice mails as I put the phone on silent.
I ran.
I made it to the apartment building Ryan lived in, and, honestly? The place was nice. It wasn’t the kind of place where people flaunted money or where there was artful graffiti, but I had questions about what Ryan did for a living as I made my way to the elevator and down the hallway.
I was taking it for granted that the door would be unlocked, but I was mentally preparing myself to kick the door down as I rounded the last corner before his door.
But the door wasn’t only unlocked; it was ajar. And I was right: I’d been too late. Ryan had been turned to stone.
The difference, though?
He wasn’t alone.
In the time of Ancient Greece, they called them “gorgons.” The most famous one is Medusa, but I wouldn’t want to tarnish her legacy by comparing her to the one in this story.
Lucy turned to me slowly. Her silhouette was beautiful, even if the way her hair gyrated should have clued me into what I was about to see before I saw it. She moved dramatically, a planned motion that drew attention to her and made me feel that it was quite a shame she was here to steal inspiration from the world given that with the smallest amount of work she’d be a fitting subject for a painter’s greatest show.
But, yes, she was beautiful, if otherworldly. The Greeks called the gorgons monsters, assumed the worst of them, and when juxtaposed with the women of the times it isn’t hard to understand why. Lucy would grace no fashion magazine covers, for skin covered with scales, glowing yellow eyes with slits for pupils, and long fingers that curved into long nails are more this society’s image of a horror monster.
And then there were the snakes.
Hers were beautiful, all colors of the rainbow, blues and reds and blacks and yellows and greens that amassed on her head. They moved quickly, the way snakes are prone to do, but stuck as they were on her scalp, the effect was nauseating. It was a struggle to meet her eyes given their movement, and when I did it was like she looked straight through me, like she was not used to people with the audacity—or the ability—to meet them.
“Why did you do it?” I asked her. There was more to this meeting for me than a desire to stare at her snakes and to offend her by looking back. “What did the artists do to make you so unhappy with them?”
She cried, a few tears falling slowly from her eyes. The tears were red, and I wondered if they were blood, but I had to focus, and now was not the time for such impolite questions.
She shook her tears off, wiping them with clawed fingers in a way that made the red smear across her cheekbones. “I didn’t take the inspiration because I was upset with the artists,” she started, “I didn’t mean to take it from anyone at all, really. I just...”
I blinked at her. “You just what? You turned my boyfriend to stone. Literally.” I knocked on Noah’s shoulder. The roughness of the stone scratched at my hand, turning it red, and I rubbed it without removing eye contact. “Which, by the way, if you can undo that it would be phenomenal.”
She sighed. “I wanted to rewrite the stories about us,” she said. “I wanted just enough inspiration that for once I could tell a myth and have a gorgon as a hero.”
I crossed my arms. “So you expect me to believe this was all just a big misunderstanding?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t expect you to believe anything. And honestly, I’m not even sure I can destonify”—I opened my mouth as if to challenge her on the word but shut it when she glared at me—“the men. I wasn’t even sure I could turn people to stone in the first place, to be honest.” She inhaled and exhaled deeply, looking down for a moment in thought before once again meeting my eyes. “And that,” she added, “I fully don’t expect you to believe. Because there’s no good reason to believe anyone would believe that I popped into existence with a thorough understanding of how my kind has been harmed over millennia and also with no knowledge at all about where I’d been prior to that.”
I swallowed. There was no good reason to believe that at all except that the same exact thing had happened to me.
“I believe you,” I told her.
She met my eyes, and her snakes stopped moving. “You do?” she asked.
“I do,” I said, “and I have a feeling there’s something else going on here. So here’s the question: a muse and a gorgon pop into existence in the same place, thousands of years after Ancient Greece has ended. Why?”
She shrugged. “Atë got bored?”
I shook my head. “There’s something more. There has to be. So what have we gotten ourselves into now?”
She was silent. She took her eyes from mine again, her glowing yellow orbs and all snakes staring at her feet. “I don’t know what there is to be done,” she said, quietly.
“Neither do I,” I told her, “but I’m going to figure it out. And you’re going to come with me.”
“But all I do is steal inspiration,” she countered.
“First off, that isn’t true. You also turn people to stone. That could be useful, plus I have a feeling I’m going to need you to help me turn these men back to human, since you discovered the stone making ability on accident.”
She nodded, not making eye contact as she did so.
“Secondly,” I said, “It seems to me like someone sent us both here in hopes we’d undermine each other. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. So let’s see what happens when we take the narrative back into our own hands and work together. You in?”
Her lips lifted into a smile and she looked back at me, all of her snakes once again moving wildly. “I’m in,” she said, “let’s get to work.”
On Lucy’s word that she had been sent to New York by an unknown someone to counteract everything I was doing, I was determined to do the only sensible thing I could think of: go to the gods realm.
Now, here’s the thing: you’re likely wondering why, as a muse, I had to leave the human realm to find answers. And here’s the thing: I probably didn’t.
Honestly. Truly. There was probably another way that theoretically would have been much easier for me to contact those who may know things about the situation we were in, or whether it would progress without us taking part in it.
Because, while I trusted Lucy to work with m
e so we could find a solution, if there was some being with more power than us calling the shots, they were unlikely to give up their games just because we had called a truce.
But the truth of the matter was that none of the less direct forms of communication with the gods realm were likely to get me my answer, partially because the other end would need to agree to such communication—especially if it’s a lowly muse trying to contact a god instead of vice versa—and partially because I wasn’t even sure who exactly I was trying to reach.
There’s a certain level of magic involved in journeying through the gods realm, so I could not trust that I would know who I needed to talk to until I had wandered through the divine wilderness and stumbled upon them via the fates.
So instead of trying to enchant a mirror or track down a suitable crystal ball, there I was writing letters to all of my men, trying to explain to them where I was going without explicitly saying it and coming off as a lunatic, but also trying to give them some closure in the event I did not return.
Because that, too, was always a risk with the gods realm: They do what they want with you there, and time often moves in ways that make no sense, so it was possible I would never return, and it was possible I would return in five hundred years, and it was equally possible that, to everyone other than me, it would be a mere millisecond, as if I had never left.
And, all of that done, I took a deep breath, spun in a circle three times, and said the phrase I knew from a memory I could not place.
It was that simple.
And then I was gone.
Chapter 10
I landed near the Original Three.
The first muses were ethereal creatures that were both beautiful and terrifying, too glorious to gaze upon and too enchanting to look away from. Their names were Memory, Song, and Practice, and they were something like my great-great-great-great-grandparents.
I was from them and I was of them and I could still barely handle being in their presence. Which explained a lot, really.
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