by Nicole Thorn
The words seemed to have no effect on the kid, who thrashed against Verin and Jasper as they tried to restrain him. He ripped his arm free of Verin and punched my brother in the chest hard enough to make him fly five feet back. Kizzy stopped trying to control plants and ran to her husband, shouting his name.
I heard creaking behind me and turned around.
The audience seats made the noise. I could still feel his magic washing throughout the entire building. My heart thumped.
“Aster, Micha!” I shouted.
They jumped out of the way, taking Callie with them, as the seats collapsed. Dozens of demigods screamed as they fell.
I rushed toward the boy, my mind racing. How did one talk to someone who had gone through so much pain? Who had been hurt in so many ways? How would I calm him down?
Before I got even a partial answer, I found myself standing in front of the boy, saying the same words over and over again. “It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you. It’s okay…”
His panicked eyes met mine for a second, and I thought that I had his attention. I kept saying those words, not touching him. I couldn’t imagine what hell he faced down in Tartarus, but I doubted he had any pleasant memories of physical contact.
“Where…” the boy said.
For a moment, I was shocked that he knew English. Then I tried to soothe him again, by answering his question. “This is Earth,” I said. “This is the living world, where people live before they go to where you’re from; if they’re bad people anyway.”
The boy continued to stare at me.
Juniper appeared next to me, and I almost wanted to shove my sister out of the way, to keep her safe from this boy who didn’t know any better.
Juniper held her hand out. “Let’s get away from all these people. I promise that I’ll explain.”
He backed away. Each step felt like a slap to my face. Then again, why should he trust me? Did he even know what trust was, being from Tartarus?
The kid’s eyes darted all around.
I thought that I might have been able to get him to trust me. Or, if not trust, at least to follow me.
And the crowd ruined it.
One of the Zeus demigods roared. Electricity or lightning, I didn’t even know, crackled from the lights above us.
“No!” Juniper shouted.
Verin started running for the idiot, but the damage had been done. A streak of power shot from one of the lights and slammed right into the kid. He flew backward with the scent of burned clothing filling the air.
And that power rose from within him again, stronger and more potent than before. It crackled along my nerves, making it hard for me to breathe. I had two seconds to decide what to do. Did I try to talk to the kid again, to make him trust me, or did I save my family?
I grabbed Juniper and Zander each and threw us all to the side. We hit the ground, curling around ourselves just as that power unleashed into the room.
The entire building shook. I didn’t know if the gods had done something to this building to keep humans out, but I hoped that they had. The creaking turned into groaning, then cracking. Something fell onto my shoulder. I curled up tighter as Kizzy shouted something.
A rumbled started above me. I blinked, opening my eyes. A dome of vines had formed around everyone Kizzy could easily reach. Things fell on the dome, some of them sounding quite heavy.
Kizzy stood off to the side, her eyes wide, her body shaking with effort. Sweat beaded on her forehead, while her teeth ground together.
“Verin!” Juniper shouted.
“Right here, luv,” he called back, pulling himself free of the Zeus demigods. The idiots that had caused this current mess.
Zander scrambled to his feet, cursing. “Kizzy, bring the dome down. I think he’s done with whatever he’s doing.”
My sister-in-law dropped her arms and almost collapsed. Jasper caught her at the last second, pulling her into his lap. The vines vanished before our eyes, leaving us to stare at a dark sky.
The building had collapsed.
The kid had brought the entire building down with about as much effort as I would use to open a jar of pickles.
“Where is he?” Zander asked, turning in a tight circle. I looked around as well, my mouth feeling dry all of the sudden. The baby titan had vanished, which had my heart thundering in my chest.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“That about sums it up,” a familiar voice said.
I turned around to find Hermes standing only a few feet away from us, a scowl on his face. He picked his way through the rubble, ignoring some of the Zeus demigods that Kizzy hadn’t managed to get under her dome. They groaned and shifted, healing rapidly. So at least no one had died. “You were supposed to control him,” Hermes said.
I felt the urge to shout at him for talking about his grandson in such a way. He hadn’t cared about the kid his entire life, but he put the blame on us for not taking control of him immediately? Fucking rich.
Zander turned to the guy and probably would have said something that would get him blasted to next Tuesday if I hadn’t put my hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry if we don’t know how to handle the son of a titan,” I growled.
“Well, you need to figure it out. Find him.”
“Excuse me?” Verin asked, raising an eyebrow. “You ignore him for his entire life and now he’s our problem?”
“Yes,” Hermes said. “That’s what the trials were all about. You had to prove that you could handle him if you wanted him.”
“We didn’t want him!” Juniper said. “We didn’t think it was a him! We thought it was a weapon.”
“He is a weapon!” Hermes shouted right back at her. “He’s the best tool we have for this upcoming war!”
“He’s a person.” Zander growled the words through his teeth. Again, I gripped his arm to keep him from going too far. I wanted to fight Hermes as much as he did, but we couldn’t give in to those impulses.
“That child is not a person,” Hermes said. “He’s a list of traumas and powers, and we need to get him under control, now. Do you think he’s going to be easy on any humans that he comes across? Do you think that he’s going to understand any of what’s going on? He’s a danger.”
“And whose fault is that?” Zander demanded.
Hermes glowered. “His mother’s, for not listening to us when we told her not to go where she shouldn’t. That’s whose fault it is. This boy should never have been born, and that’s why we left him in Tartarus, hoping that that pit would take care of him. You need to prove to us that you can handle him, or we’ll put him down like a dog. Do you understand?”
For the first time, I could see Hermes as a god, an Olympian. The way he stared at us, the harsh line of his jaw, the power flickering off of him, it all culminated into one clear threat. Do this or die.
“That boy could help us keep the world functioning,” Hermes said. “Or he can destroy it. Do you want to be the reason children die? That people who don’t know what’s going on get maimed? Do you want more buildings to fall?”
“Okay!” I shouted. “We’ll figure it out.”
Hermes looked me in the eye. “You better.”
Zander
W e sat in our own living room, silent as this moment that should have been wonderful, only stung. We came home to regroup and plan, though we’d been convinced our homecoming would be peaceful. I should have listened when Heracles said the trials would be the easy part. Maybe I’d just been so miserable and stressed that I’d hoped it had been a lie they told to make it worse.
Persephone and Medusa leaned against the far wall, both with their arms crossed as they stared at the floor. It was easy to hate the gods as a whole for what a few did. I had a few seconds when we got home where I didn’t want to look at Persephone, not realizing that she hadn’t been in on this cruel decision made for a boy who did nothing wrong.
“I must have been topside when he was born,” Persephone said. “And Verin’s d
umbass father didn’t think to mention this to me when I got back home. He’ll be hearing about it next time I see him.”
Even as one of the more empathetic gods, Persephone felt more irritated by this than rattled, like the rest of us. I felt this pain in my soul, and she saw this as a papercut between her fingers.
“We have to find him, obviously,” Kizzy stated. “But I don’t know what to do when we actually find him. Are we supposed to bring him to the house? Our neighbors are human.”
“Mostly,” Aster said from the other couch, where he sat with Callie and Micha. “The problem is that there really isn’t a lot of places we can bring a person like him where everyone would be safe. A field in the middle of nowhere is pretty much it.”
No, I didn’t want to keep him locked up or isolated. “He deserves to have some kind of normal life.”
“He’s not really capable of that right now,” Medusa reminded me. “I know that this is tearing your heart out, but that makes him no less dangerous. He can do a lot of damage. He will do a lot of damage.”
“What does that mean for us then?” Jasper asked. “We have to catch him, and we don’t have any idea what to do with him after. And the gods want us, they want us to use him as a weapon. Do they think we’re going to willingly send a kid off to murder people for us? For them?”
Persephone looked up at him, pausing for a long moment. “Sometimes you have to do awful things, even if it guts you. I understand your feelings, but innocent people could die.”
“He’s innocent people,” Jasmine snapped. “Why does he have to tear himself apart for a war that he had nothing to do with?”
No one answered the question, because we all knew the answer already. Because this was how the gods worked. Everyone had to sacrifice for them, and it didn’t matter if they deserved it or not. The gods didn’t lose things. They didn’t give things up. We all did so they didn’t have to.
“We can try and talk him down,” Juniper suggested. “If we calm him down, then he can come home.”
“Is this going to be his home then?” her brother asked.
“He can stay with us,” Callie offered. Her boys stared at her, eyes wide with fear. She calmly explained. “He’s terrified and that’s why he lashed out. All he needs is to know he’s safe and to have people who can be gentle with him. He’s only ever known violence. He’s only ever known hell. If we show him that there can be more than that, then he’ll be okay.”
“It’ll be overwhelming,” I said. “I don’t know what that would do to him.”
“We have to find out,” Callie said. “Like it or not, that boy is our responsibility and we need to take care of him.”
“Since we all know the gods won’t bother,” Aster added, paused, and then looked at Persephone. “No offense.”
She waved him off.
I let out a breath. “So, we just have a son now? If we manage to calm the kid down… he’s ours?”
“Yes,” Jasmine said. “I think he is.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. It was too much to deal with right after all the shit we’d been through. We didn’t even get to sleep before handling this. Right into the fire we went.
“We should head off now,” Juniper said. “That boy is out there alone and probably causing damage. I…” She looked around the house, her expression mournful as Verin took her hand. “Who’s going to watch Nemo?”
“We can take turns,” Kizzy said. “Persephone, I guess you guys should head off. Let us know if you hear anything.”
They agreed before leaving.
I stayed seated, my eyes fixed on the window. The anger came back to me pretty fast as I thought about how we would spend the next I didn’t know how many days of our lives. This wasn’t fair. It felt like we’d completed our trials, only to get slapped in the face and made to feel foolish. They could have told us we were competing for a person. The gods didn’t want to do that, and I couldn’t help but think that they knew how we would feel. We wouldn’t play such a cruel game when a life hung in the balance.
“Who goes first?” Jasmine asked, her head resting on her chin. “I don’t even know how to go about this.”
“I can go,” Callie said with a raised hand.
“No,” I nearly growled. “You three are staying home and with whoever else is staying back. Aster is the only one of you that’s as strong as me and Kizzy, and I’m not bringing a seventeen-year-old with us.”
Aster sighed but nodded. “I would rather stay with Callie. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said.
Micha shot me a glare. “I’m a Hunter. I can handle myself. This is the sort of thing I should be off doing anyway.”
“Maybe, and if this kid punches you, it could kill you. I’m sorry, but you aren’t durable enough for something like this. The rest of us can heal. We can get our throats slit and our lungs crushed, and we’ll be healed in seconds. This is not negotiable.”
He went silent.
“I’m going,” Verin said. “I don’t know if it would even be helpful, but maybe something about who my father is could help the situation. Maybe I could make some kind of connection.”
If Verin was going, that meant Juniper would too. They already stood together, hand in hand as they prepared. We needed her to transport us anyway, so her going had never been in question. I hoped she would be okay with going on this entire journey.
Then it came down to the last two couples because, of course, it had to go down like that. I stared at my sister, not wanting her to be in any kind of danger. I knew I couldn’t hold her back from everything, and she could fight her own battles. I still wished I could save her from all the hurting I knew she would feel.
“I want to go,” Jasmine said from beside me. “I want to be there when we find him.”
Her brother seemed to agree. “Zander can try and feel out his emotions and influence them if you get close enough. Are you guys okay if Kezia and I stay here?”
“Yeah,” I said, relief washing through me. “We’ll keep you updated and figure out when to do the switching. With any luck, we won’t have to be out long enough for that.”
Everyone stayed silent, reminding me that we didn’t get that lucky.
Juniper moved to stand with those of us leaving, taking a deep breath as she prepared to use magic. I felt her power tingling as it rose around us, and I braced myself for what would come.
I didn’t want this. That went without saying. I wanted to stay in my house, my girlfriend next to me as we bickered about who did the best wooing. That had been taken from us the moment we went down to Tartarus. I wanted it back. I wanted a kid not to be the key to winning a war started because of arrogance. If anyone died, it wouldn’t be on me or my family.
It would be on the gods.
S arah Hall has been writing since her early teens and plans to continue long past her death, via robot body. She spends her days daydreaming about conversations between fictional characters and ignoring the condescending looks she gets from her cats when she does so. During her day in the unforgiving Arizona heat, she juggles her pets, writing, and her neurotic sometimes writing partner. She has no problems with said juggling, as the Force is with her.
N icole Thorn is a writer in her twenties who spends her days discussing fictional characters with her writer friend and having very serious opinions about which house she would want to be sorted into at Hogwarts. Spending most of her life in sunny California and now trapped in sunny Arizona, she likes to write about rainy towns that are infested with the things that go bump in the night.
B urning Willow Press is an independent publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with genres blended into other formats as well. Located in South Carolina, in the US.
BWP has published more than eighty dreams with the interests of the authors at heart since 2015, and that gentle reader will be much higher in 2020.
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