by Abbie Lyons
The team had started to disperse and I realized that this was my chance to explore a little bit. I didn't want to pry, but at the same time, all my usual would-be chaperones were occupied doing other things. I found my way back out into the hallway, through the pillars, and stuck my head into a side room, a kind of parlor or sitting room with more elegant bookcases, a desk, and couches that were to my surprise, a deep red, a color I'd almost forgotten had existed since I came to true-blue Elysium.
“Quinn.”
I spun around. Marius was standing in the door frame in silhouette, his hands in his pockets. He’d changed out of the uniform for the game and into a simple white button-down with dark blue dress pants, but no tie. The buttons were loose at his throat. He raked a hand through his hair, which was a deep brown when it was still wet. Just a hint of auburn.
“Hi,” I said, “I'm not—”
“It's fine,” Marius said. “This is just a sitting room. There's nothing here that you could uncover unless you're interested in reading Ancient Greek dictionaries.”
“I can't read Ancient Greek,” I said. “I'm a human.”
“So were the Ancient Greeks.” His lips twitched in that almost-smile. I pressed my own mouth into a hard line, so I wouldn't smile either, and folded my arms.
“That was an impressive display today,” I said.
Marius shrugged, but nodded, and took the compliment. “I try my best. A good captain doesn't brag. It was really all the guys.”
“Don't be cute,” I snapped. The words escaped before I could grasp their full meaning. “You know what I mean. You saved me from almost getting slammed in the face with your disc thing.”
Marius's face darkened. “No, I didn't,” he said.
A pause stretched out between us, with nothing but the thumping of the party a few rooms away. It sounded like someone was playing a harp heavy version of The Killers’ Mr. Brightside.
“You mean...” I said. “Wait, no. You saw that the thing was going wild and about to kill me. And you knew since I'm human, I wouldn't survive. So you fired some sort of beam at me. Yeah. Burn it up like Armageddon. Stop the asteroid before it hit the earth.”
I was babbling.
“Quinn,” Marius said, his voice firmer. “I didn't do that. I thought it was one of your friends. I was defending two strikers. I only saw the aftermath.”
“No,” I said. “It was you. It had to have been you.”
Marius was silent for a long moment. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “You're human,” he said. “Quinn, you're human.”
“I know that,” I snapped. “You don't have to keep repeating it at me.”
“Then how did you do that?” he said. “Did you lie to me?” He took a step closer to me, his eyes gleaming.
“What? How could I lie to you about something I didn't even know was possible? I didn't know any of this was real until you came for me. You and your Order.”
“Don't say that.” Marius took another step closer.
I felt anger bubble out of my panic and not knowing what had happened. I was so sure that he would confess to firing the laser beam that finding out that it hadn't been him was throwing me for a total loop. A lot of them.
“This would go faster if you just tell me what the Order does,” I said. “It's a stupid open secret. Everyone knows the Order of Eden—”
My words were muffled by a firm hand, warm over my lips. Marius's face was just inches away from mine.
“You have to stop talking,” he said, his voice low and slow in my ear. “I won't let you go unless you stop talking.”
I was frozen. Then nodded my head a tiny bit. His hand dropped away.
“Gods. I don't like being this person,” he said. “I don't like that I have to be so strict. But you're making it really difficult, Quinn.”
He paced away from me across the marble floor, then looked over his shoulder. All the light was coming from the hallway, so his face was sliced by shadow.
“Everyone here knows what they know and that's enough for them. It has to be enough for you too.”
“Well, it isn't,” I said. “And I don't like being controlled.”
“Bad news: You don't have any choice,” Marius said, his voice a little louder now. “We're all controlled. That’s the big secret we’re sitting on here at Elysium. We're controlled by the need for balance so that Chaos doesn't take over. And if that balance falls, we're controlled by Chaos. It's just a matter of which one you want. And me, I choose balance. I choose order. I choose doing what's right. And I know that sometimes that means I have to stay in my place. I have to do what I'm told.”
I uncrossed my arms and set my goblet on a side table. I didn't need ambrosia to feel buzzing in my veins now.
“I would be happy to do as I'm told,” I said, “if you would just tell me what I need to know. Okay?”
“I don't know how much plainer I can say it, Quinn,” he said. “We—I—had nothing to do with your brother dying. We would have stopped it if we could have. It's not our fault. We regret it. I regret it. Trust me, if your brother was anything like you, he would've made a damn fine guardian. But there's nothing we can do.” He let out a long, hard breath through his nostrils. “Maybe it's better if you just leave.”
“What?” I said. “No.”
“You wanted to leave before. You should leave. Clearly there's something about you that's unstable.”
“I'm not crazy.”
“I don't mean mentally unstable.” That almost-smile again. “I mean, what happened today? If you're a human, and I believe you're a human, because otherwise we would've known you existed, then what happened might be the first of many dangerous things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Imbalances?” he said. “I genuinely don’t know, Quinn. It's all so theoretical. Having a human here for this long has never happened. The closer we get to the ball, the closer the ultimate moment of balance...it's just making it worse. It's throwing things off. And I'd have to think that the Chaos energy would be looking for the weakest point to break through. The weakest vessel.”
“The human,” I said.
“In so many words.” His voice was clipped. “Yes.”
“So you weren't saving me today at the game. That was just a random burst of energy because I'm throwing things off and I'm the weak link in the barrier between, what, reality and Chaos?”
Marius sighed. He leaned back so he was resting against the doorframe.
“I don't know why you need to know so much. You could just leave and then you'd be safe. Isn't that good enough for you? Don't all humans just want safety? ”
I thought about it for a while. That's all I had wanted. That's why I had been living with Scott. Let my big brother raise me because I was afraid to try anything on my own, because I needed someone to take care of me.
But now safety felt fake. It felt hollow. It felt, in its own way, unsafe, because even if my body was physically protected, my mind knew too much.
“I can't be safe if I can't rest,” I answered. “And I can't rest until I know why a good person like my brother threw himself off the Golden Gate bridge.”
It was the first time I’d said that out loud.
Marius studied me. He rubbed his jaw. “Come here,” he said. He gestured for me, and I took a step closer. He gestured again. Closer. Another step, and my face was lit up by the light from the hallway. We were still alone, but the party was only a few feet away, still audible, still thrumming, yet somehow in all that chaos, this little portal of stillness had formed between me and Marius.
He straightened up from the doorframe and looked into my face, searching with those steely eyes of his, into mine, and his gaze was so intense, it felt almost physical, like the beginnings of a sunburn, like the first tingles of a fever, like a flush that wouldn't go away.
“Who are you, Quinn?” he said
I shook my head, my throat and lips too dry to answer.
“I'm sworn to protect humans,�
� he said. “That's what I do. That's what I'll always do. That's the only thing in my life that matters, more than any other person.” He flashed a gaze back up at me. “But if you stay here until the ball—”
“Who cares about the ball? How dangerous could it possibly be?”
“I told you, Quinn. There’s a ritual. One demon with one guardian. It’s all about balance.”
“And I’m not.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. “What I’m saying is, if you stay, I don't know if I can keep that promise. I don't know if I can keep you safe.”
“I don't need anyone to keep me safe,” I said. “I just need answers.”
Marius exhaled, and I remembered the first time I'd seen him in the temple when I just arrived and I'd almost stumbled on...I didn't know what. This felt just like that.
“What were you doing?” I said. “That first day.” I kept my voice low. “What did you say I needed to forget you seeing?”
“I can't tell you,” Marius said. “Especially now.”
“Stop saying that!” I threw my hands in the air.
“You stop, Quinn,” he said. “You stop and you listen. I'm not saying you can't know. I'm just saying I can't tell you. And the more I see of you, the more I think you could maybe figure it out, but there's just not that much time. If this kind of thing keeps happening”—he gestured toward the stadium, meaning the Chaos outburst—“then you'll be lucky to make it to the ball at all.”
“I should go,” I said abruptly. I took a step for the door.
Marius looked alarmed. “Quinn, I didn't mean to—”
“It's nothing you said,” I said. “But you're right. If I don't have that much time, then I shouldn't waste it here at parties with people who are going to be useless.”
I was halfway across the foyer when he caught up with me.
“Wait,” he said.
I waited.
He took my wrist, and I didn’t resist. When my hand was held out, he swirled his free hand in the air and a silver flame blazed around his fingertips. He placed it in my palm, where it rustled softly, with no heat and no burning, but plenty of light.
He dropped my wrist and turned away back toward the party.
“It’s dark out there,” he said. And then he was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
If I was nervous about the ball, everyone else was excited.
Or Lucy was, at least.
"I don't have anything to wear," Lucy said. She was tearing through her wardrobe, pushing dresses to the side. "I just want to look good."
I fidgeted with my hands in my lap. "Isn't it all just ceremonial anyway?"
“Well, yes, there is a ceremonial aspect,” Lucy said. “It’s a sort of dance we do, one guardian with one demon. It generates just a tiny little balance buzz. Well, I suppose in aggregate it’s probably quite powerful.”
"Why does it matter what you wear to the ball?"
"Oh, you know. People are there, Hades will be there...you want to look nice,” Lucy
said airily, not meeting my gaze.
“Lucy wants to bone the jock.” The voice was her roommate. Which scared me. I'd forgotten the girl was even there. I swiveled to see her sitting in her desk chair, her legs straight out in front of her, arms crossed, and head cocked in amusement.
"I do not!" Lucy said. "Rowena, honestly! You're embarrassing me."
"It's just natural, man," the roommate—Rowena—said. “Those guys look like they know their way around a bedroom. I'd like to throw down with the captain. Bet he looks good in leather handcuffs." She held up her own wrists, pressed together as if to demonstrate, and ran the tip of her tongue over her black-painted lips.
I felt a little uncomfortable, although I couldn't deny that her assessment of Marius was
probably right.
"I think I'm done looking, Quinn," Lucy said hurriedly. "Shall we go look at your wardrobe?”
She grabbed me by the elbow and all but dragged me out of her room. As soon as the door was shut, she sighed. "Oh Gods, you see what I have to put up with? And it's not like I'm a bad roommate, I swear. I shared a room with four of my sisters growing up, okay? I know how to maintain my own space and not intrude.” She huffed out a sigh as we trudged up to my room.
“You like Aidan,” I said. Not even a question—an observation. Lucy went pink.
“Yes, but...” She sighed. “It’s a little complicated between us. I’m trying to take it slow.”
“Complicated? Like you have a history?”
Lucy fiddled with the end of her strawberry-blonde ponytail. “You could say that.”
I pushed open the door to my room, having no intention of looking for formalwear that I knew I didn’t own in my closet, and found Violet at her desk. As usual.
“Hey,” I said. “Okay if we hang out here?”
“Rowena is being...” Lucy sighed. “Rowena.”
Violet nodded, pushing away her papers. “She’s the goth one? Looks like she eats small animals whole?”
“Yes!” Lucy cried. “I swear, I am trying to be super tolerant and include her in things, but she’s just beyond. I’m convinced she belongs at Hades and she’s only here because of some clerical mix-up.”
“How would a demon end up at Elysium?” I said. “Isn’t that, like, the opposite?”
Violet got up from her desk, stretching her neck. “Actually, there’s not a ton of difference between demons and guardians. The whole fine line between good and evil thing? Is kind of true. Now, with someone who’s half, like you”—I winced, but played along—“it’s going to be one or the other pretty clearly, because you don’t have as much essence competing inside you. But it’s not unheard of for two guardians to have a child who ends up a demon, or vice versa.”
“I see,” I said. “And what if a guardian and a demon have a baby?”
Violet and Lucy shared a look, then burst out laughing. “That...doesn’t really happen,” Violet said after a minute. “I mean, I guess it could, theoretically, but—”
“But who’d want to have sex with a demon?” Lucy cried, and they both giggled again.
Cool. Great girl talk, ladies. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
“Okay, but like...why have a ball, then?” I asked. “If you’re going to throw a prom and invite the demons, isn’t the idea that you’ll hook up with someone?”
“Sure, maybe for fun,” Violet said tepidly. Her face had gone back to serious. “But long-term, you just wouldn’t. It would be...frowned upon, I guess.”
“You’d get disowned,” Lucy said. “Well, depending on how snobby your family is, I guess. Humans are like, harmless, right? So you can marry one, soul bind, the whole bit—NBD. But a demon...it would just be weird.”
Violet was studiously quiet for a long moment.
“No, but in all seriousness, I find it all fascinating,” she said at last. “I’d love to study this kind of theoretical stuff one day. There’s so much we don’t know about how it all works—our magic, demon magic, Chaos—”
The word sent a chill down my spine. “How big of a risk is Chaos, anyway? Like have either of you guys seen it happen?”
Lucy flopped into an armchair and cocked her head. Violet leaned back against the wall, staring pensively at a tapestry as she thought.
“Well, there’s the big stuff,” Violet said. “The more legendary things. The rise of Abaddon. The...” she trailed off.
“The Vanishing,” Lucy said, her voice a little thin. I felt bad for bringing it up.
“But theoretically Chaos can emerge anywhere the balance is thrown off.” Violet nodded at her desk, where several thick leather bound books lay open. “Where it ends up permeating through to this plane of existence is what’s hard to find out. Because it’s Chaos, right? So the balance might be thrown off somewhere locally, but we have no way of knowing where in that unbalanced area the Chaos is going to burst forth. The leading theories think that it just finds a vessel that’s easiest to break t
hrough. Like a conduit, basically.”
She shuffled around on her desk and picked up a parchment with a bunch of diagrams on it that looked like the electrical wiring plans Scott used to use when soldering together his nerdy homebrew electronics.
“Sure,” I said. “Makes sense.”
“Okay, change of topic,” Lucy said. “Because speaking of the ball, Violet, what are you wearing?”
“Wearing?” Violet said. “Oh. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“What?!” Lucy squealed. Then she calmed down. “Right. Well, you have a boyfriend, so—”
“So I don’t have to try?” Violet said, amused.
“No,” Lucy said. “Well...maybe.”
I was starting to feel a bit left out at all this banter between the two girls. There was a whole world that they’d known their entire life, and that I could never catch up on. That I might even be an existential threat to if I stayed here.
“What’s it like, dating the captain?” Lucy said, stretching her arms out overhead. “Because just a warning: if you ever break up, Rowena seems to want dibs.”
“Ha.” Violet plopped onto her bed. “It’s...well, it’s Marius.” She smiled. “You’ve seen what he’s like.”
“Not in any of the ways that count!” Lucy groaned.
“Lucy has a crush on—” I started.
“Shh!” Lucy hissed, but it was too late. Violet lifted an eyebrow. Lucy relented.
“Aidan,” she said with a sigh.
“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Violet said, nodding. “I approve. For whatever that’s worth.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said, giggling. “So yes, that’s why I’m curious about the whole experience. Well, that and because maybe I’ll write about it. By the way, do you want to join my newspaper club?” She perked up. “I’m recruiting writers now. It was Quinn’s idea.”
Violet looked at me. I did a palms-up. “It was only in passing. She took the idea and ran.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got a lot on my plate,” Violet said, and smiled. “What with my fascinating dating life and all.”
Lucy sighed. “Gods, do you two even...you know? You’re both so...serious.”