by Nicole Thorn
Erebus chuckled. “I like your confidence. This part of downtown isn’t hidden from humans. They would see a fight, as well as the guards stationed there. I wish you luck, and hope you don’t completely ruin this chance for yourselves. If you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”
“I bet,” Zander said, earning a smack on the arm from Jasmine. He actually winced.
Erebus left, and my brother already had the keys in his hand. Verin got the other set, and we started for the door.
“Are we going without weapons?” Jasmine asked. “It might be a bad idea.”
“So is carrying around a sword where people can see,” Zander pointed out.
That made Jasmine frown for a moment. “I can get my dagger and keep it hidden. No problem.”
“Or, and hear me out . . . you don’t carry a weapon, because that would only make you fight.”
We collectively sighed at Zander, and I glared at him. “They’re gods. Jasmine could beat you to death if she wanted to, and you wouldn’t be able to do much about it. We’re the weak ones now, and you should get used to it.”
I knew what Zander thought when he looked at Jasmine. He wouldn’t ever see her as someone who could take care of herself. Not only because of who he was as a person, but because he came home to her dead. I would feel similar with Jasper, but I accepted that he could take care of himself. I didn’t have to fight for him anymore.
Jasmine made an executive decision to get her weapon, and I didn’t let Zander stop her. It only took a look from me to make him stand still.
Then we split up into two cars so that everyone could go. I suppose we should have all been happy that Zander didn’t try and make the seers stay home. It didn’t work out so well the last time.
“I don’t like this GPS,” I said, staring at my phone while Zander drove. I handed it off to Jasmine in the front seat. “Do you think you can find it?”
“Not a problem,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if I had some god-like power to find shit? I would only use it for good, I swear.”
Jasper snorted. “I worry constantly about the trouble you’ll get in now.”
“Don’t.”
“Well . . . I’m cured.”
I laughed at him, and Jasper pulled me closer in the backseat of the car. Jasmine took over in navigating, and the others followed behind us in their car. We didn’t have much of a plan on what to do when we got to Argus, other than kill him. That meant we had to work around humans seeing it, and Zander might have needed to do a little Charming in order to get us out with no handcuffs involved.
Erebus didn’t properly explain what we would be up against, but we knew when we saw the building. It was in the middle of a busy street, filled with cars, stores, and people on the sidewalk.
“Shit,” I muttered. “We can’t fight here. Someone could get hurt.”
“We have to lure Argus away,” Jasper said. “If we can get him away from the people, then we should be good.”
Easier said than done, but he wasn’t wrong. Though how we could get Argus to wander out alone when he had three people to fight, I didn’t know.
We all met up after we parked along the sidewalk, and we hurried to stand under an awning. The rain wasn’t all that hard, but I didn’t want to freeze my ass off when I didn’t have to.
“There it is,” Juniper said, pointing across the street. “Those guards have guns.”
“Should I charm them?” Zander asked. “I can get them to let us in the building. If nothing else, we can wait for Argus in there. If we attack him by surprise, we can end this today.”
What a wonderful thought, but I had my doubts. If Argus had any brains at all, he would have assumed half of us would be coming for him soon. I figured he would have been prepared to some extent.
“We can try,” I said. “Maybe we can move the rest of the weapons so that he can’t see them.”
We started trying to cross the street, waiting for the light to change so that we didn’t get our asses run over. While it wouldn’t kill any of us, it would hurt like a bitch. I would rather my bones not get broken.
Jasmine bounced on her feet, groaning. “I can just jump over the cars.”
“No, you can’t,” Zander informed her. “Stay right here.”
She turned to fight him on that, but then she stopped. Her eyes found something, and I followed suit.
I saw him walking. I saw the man who killed my family, and then walked away from my bloodied house like he had just done a chore. He took almost everything from me, and Zander, and Verin. His blood must have been boiling as we stared the giant down. Not one of us felt any less hatred than the other, knowing what this man had done.
Then he saw us, and I watched as he had a moment of doubt. Argus stared, counting six when there should have only been three. It made me smile when I saw the fear.
He took off, and we followed him as quickly as we could. We couldn’t get across the street, thanks to the cars, so we had to work around it. I found myself last in line, being the slowest one. I had never dealt with that before, and it felt strange to me. I caught up as best I could. I saw him moving through throngs of people, slipping away from us.
We cut through an alley, hoping we could get there faster than him. Then we broke through the other side, getting to a strip mall. I looked around, searching for him as best I could. I couldn’t find the man.
“He can’t be gone,” I said through my teeth. “He was right there. I saw him. He was right there.”
Jasper put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me back to him. “It’s okay. He’ll show up again. I know he will.”
I knew it too, but that wasn’t the problem. It was that our hand got shown, and we had nothing for it. We didn’t get closer, and we didn’t kill him. Argus knew that my family lived, and now I had to fear for what he would do with that information.
***
I pouted the whole way home, fretting about the giant we didn’t catch. He could try and ambush us again, but a fight would have ended in his death. If the six of us stayed together, then we had a better shot at staying safe. Though we didn’t know what he had in his back pocket.
We shuffled back into the house, beat from our afternoon of losing. I wouldn’t have thought anything was different, but Zander grabbed my arm, keeping me from stepping forward.
“Someone is here,” he said.
Jasper moved ahead of us, and my instinct was to pull him back. Instead, I walked at his side, going to investigate who busted into our home.
I felt hot when I saw my mother and Aphrodite sitting at our kitchen table like they owned the place.
“Get out,” I growled.
Mom stood. “Kizzy, we need to talk.”
“Get the fuck out of my home. You’re not welcome here ever again. You wanted to not meddle in human affairs, congratulations, we’re done with you.”
“We aren’t done with you.”
I laughed once. “Okay, so you wanna talk? We can talk. Should we start with the spot your standing in? That was where me and Verin found my sister-in-law with a hole in her throat. You’re standing in the ghost of a blood puddle so big that I literally have constant nightmares about it.”
I started stepping back and into the living room, pushing my family aside. “Hey, Aphrodite. This is where your son found my other sister-in-law dead. Yeah, that girl you matched to him, she died in there. Her siblings watched her die in that room, knowing that they were next. How about we go into the studio garage? I haven’t been able to step foot into it since I found my fiancé hanging. Were you both on Olympus, watching me as I performed CPR on a dead man? Did you hear me scream when I broke his ribs? Did you watch me sit there, covered in blood as I realized I couldn’t do anything to fix it?”
The goddesses were silent, and Jasper took my hand. It was the only thing to keep me from screaming.
“They were watching,” Zander said. “They always watch, but they never lift a finger. And it’s not because they can’t. Mom,”
he said. “Did you know that Verin’s father didn’t hesitate to help us out? His parent actually gives a damn about him. What a concept.”
His mother also stood, her expression getting angrier. “You know that we follow rules. Hades doesn’t care.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Verin said. “Because he knows it’s all bullshit. You can do whatever you want, and you fucking do. You just don’t care enough about us to help.”
My mother tried stepping closer to me, but I moved back. “Kizzy,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
“Neither do you. You made me walk in on the bodies of the people I love. You knew that they would die, and you didn’t tell us. You didn’t even hint at it. Don’t pretend to care about us anymore, because it’s tiring.”
“We aren’t pretending.”
I swallowed, gathering up the courage to say what I needed to. “I bought it when I was little. When I was getting violated and beaten most days. I believed in you, because you said you loved me, and I trusted that. Day after day, I kept hoping something would change, and you would come get me. You didn’t even do anything to make my life easier. Why is that? And don’t tell me it’s because you aren’t allowed to. You kill the earth for half a year because you can’t be with Persephone, but you can let a woman drug me, touch me, and then let her husband beat me with a bat. That isn’t love.”
My mother had nothing to say, and it didn’t surprise me in the least. Zander clearly had a lot to say as he rubbed the side of his jaw, staring at the floor. “You didn’t even fight for us when we went to see you. You were willing to let us go the rest of our lives, missing the people we love and need. For once, I want you to explain yourselves.”
Our mothers looked at each other, and his tried to speak. “We take care of the whole world. There is so much more to it than the six of you. Billions of people need us.”
“We’re your children,” I said. “We need you. Mom, I needed you. We asked you what was wrong with Jasmine, and you knew. You didn’t tell us, and you didn’t give us a chance to fix it.”
“We told you that there wasn’t any fixing it. The fates decided.”
“Fuck the fates,” Verin scoffed. “Things can be rewritten. Christ, Aphrodite was so jealous of a human woman being beautiful, that she changed her into a god so that she wouldn’t be on earth. You’re all selfish. Accuse my father of rule breaking all you want, but at least he cares for other people.”
“At what cost?” my mother asked.
I pointed to the seers. “At that cost. They get to stand here with us, fighting the fights that you got us into by being our parents. We all pay the price of you every day, and not only do you not care, but you don’t help. Every time you’ve needed something from us, we’ve done it. Our reward was finding corpses.”
“Your reward is keeping them,” Aphrodite said.
Zander snapped. “Don’t you dare pretend that you didn’t do that for some other reason. We’re smarter than that. You’ll call on us sooner or later, and we won’t have a choice. You stay safe above, and we get to go to bed having nightmares. You don’t get to pick what parts of us you want anymore.”
His mother flinched back. “You can’t reject us like that.”
“Why not?” I asked. “You rejected us.”
“Don’t do this,” Mom said. “When you’re older, you’ll understand that not everything is so black and white. And if your seers stayed dead, then you would have loved again. You would have had a family, and healed, and you would understand that sometimes, bad things just happen.”
Again, I had to laugh. “I know that a hell of a lot better than you do. And them dying isn’t the point. It’s that like always, you manipulate everything. You use us as chess pieces for your entertainment and as tools. Like we were made to be your servants. But I guess I was, right? You only had me because your last son died.”
Mom stared hard at me. “You think I love you less because of that?”
“I think you don’t know how to love me. I think all you gods see is what mortals can do for you, and nothing else matters. Do you know what we were just doing? Out trying to clean up a mess that you people never bothered to. Argus is running around killing people, even though any one of the gods could come down and kill him. You choose not to, and I don’t know why.”
“That’s a good point,” Zander said. “You complain about how much work you have to do, even though if you did more than send others to do it, it would be finished in a snap. We suffer and we bleed for you, and we don’t have to. The worst part is that I know this isn’t over. You’ll keep coming back, and you’ll keep trying to bleed us dry. You even might.”
Aphrodite put her hands on her hips, watching her son. “There are certain prices you pay for being what you are. We can’t undo that.”
“No, but you could help. You could take five minutes, and fucking help us. You could say ‘hey, your girlfriend can’t see because she’s going to die. Good luck’. Even a warning would have been helpful. We don’t ask for much, and we certainly don’t ask you to solve all of our problems. Just . . . act like you care, even when it’s not for you.”
The goddess dropped her hands, and then laced her fingers together. “It would seem that you’ve decided we failed as mothers.”
He snorted. “You decided that. How does it feel, being the one burdened for once?”
Mom pressed her lips together, and she tried taking my hand. When I didn’t let her, she sighed. “Congratulations on your engagement.”
I wanted to hurt her. “Thanks,” I said flatly. “I’ll be sure to invite all the gods that actually lobbied for Jasper to get to live. Since that wasn’t my own mother. I hope I don’t see you in my home for a really long time, because I want nothing to do with you.”
“I can see that.”
I fumed, wanting her so far gone. When the chance to turn the seers into gods came up, she should have been screaming in favor for it. She let me down instead, and I couldn’t forgive her for it.
“Goodbye,” she said to me, walking back to Aphrodite.
I didn’t say it back
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
So That’s What Hera Meant
Jasper
I TUGGED ON Kezia’s arm, pulling her over to me. She came willingly, and leaned against me, resting her cheek on my chest. I looped an arm around her and bent to put my lips to her hair. “Are you all right?” I asked, softly as I could, though everyone in the house heard me.
She shrugged.
I lifted Kezia up easily, and she squeaked in surprise. I brought her upstairs, and to our bedroom, where I laid her on the bed. A soft smile picked up the corners of her lips. “Thank you, but I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, laying down next to her. I put my arm over her stomach, and gently rotated my thumb on her hip, making small circles. She closed her eyes, which made me think she didn’t hate the feel. “I know how much a parent can screw you up.”
Kezia opened her eyes and looked at me. “Exactly. You know how much a parent can hurt you, so I shouldn’t be complaining about mine.”
“That’s not how this works,” I said. “You can’t banish hurt, just because you think someone else has been hurt worse. Besides, I wouldn’t let you, even if something like that were possible. Do you want to talk about it?” If she said no, then I probably would have let it drop, but she didn’t say no. Kezia sighed, and looked up at the ceiling, silently, with a pinched brow.
“I can start, if you want,” I said.
She glanced at me. “How?”
“My father didn’t like being disrespected,” I said. “He’d get so angry when someone said something rude to him, interrupted him, called him a name. Anything that could be considered disrespect. He’d hit me a lot, because of that. He would tell me that I disrespected him by talking to someone on those rare occasions when we left the house. And he would hit me when I said something to him that I maybe shouldn’t have. I learned to keep my mouth shut at a pretty yo
ung age. It was safer than talking, I thought. My father didn’t like that either. He would say that I was being rude, by keeping silent, but it still felt like the safest option.”
Kezia’s face tightened as I spoke.
“Which is one of the reasons why I never fought him when he wanted to punish us. I’d just try to draw his attention over to me. I figured that whatever he did to me, it would be better than watching him do something to my sisters. Most of the time, that worked in my favor, though I can’t imagine how Jasmine and Juniper felt about having to let me take their punishments.”
“I can,” Kezia whispered. “I can imagine it just fine. They probably felt like hell. Or weak, maybe. They probably wished that they could’ve been stronger, to save you from having to go through that. I’m sorry that you got that man as a father, Jasper.”
I shrugged. “I could be sorry too, but it could have been worse. My mother just wanted to get pregnant, so she could free herself from the visions.” And we had done that to a woman with three babies of her own. I couldn’t imagine what she would think, when her children started telling her that they saw things that happened or would happen. She’d think that they had all gone insane at first, until the gods finally decided to let her in on what we had done.
And what if that job fell onto us? What would she think of my sisters and I for condemning her children to a fate such as that? And her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.
I shook those thoughts off because they would only hurt me.
“So, what are you feeling for your mother?”
“Numb,” Kezia said. “No, not numb. Furious. I’m so furious that I wouldn’t be able to feel anything else if I focused on the fury, so I’m choosing to be numb about it. I’m so . . . furious.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“And sad,” Kezia continued, a shine developing in her eyes. “I used to think that she loved me. I used to think that my mother would’ve saved me if she could, and I don’t understand how I deluded myself into thinking that. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know,” I said. “My sisters and I are masters of denial. We’ve stuck our heads so far into the sand, that sunlight didn’t look right when we came back up for air.”
