by Lucy Auburn
Jerking my eyes away from both of the men, I ask Kayla, "Why isn't everyone wearing cuffs around their wrists like me?"
Before she can answer, Damien says, "Mind your own business. You're in the women's wing—to the right, this way. Only the communal area is mixed sex, and don't forget that no matter what you see going on around here."
He says that like he wants to stop me from having sex with the other prisoners. Probably he thinks I'll eat them with my vagina or something. At least I know that sex is happening around here, despite the rules—not that I'm surprised. Us godbloods are a hotheaded, horny bunch prone to fucking at the drop of a hat, or the drop of our clothes, which tend to come off easily.
Nothing is bigger proof of this than the cluster of Bacchus sons, and two daughters, I pass by as Damien leads me mulishly towards a cell block on the right. You can tell them by their general frat boy behavior and the smell of fermented grapes that hangs in the air around them. A few of them even have bedsheets tied around their golden, oiled bodies in a modern bastardization of the toga. They're drinking some kind of illicit liquor out of short metal cups and laughing among themselves, their eyes sliding across me as we pass them.
Damien mutters to them, "At least pretend to hide the toilet wine."
One of the men raises his golden brows at the god hunter, a smirk sliding across his face, his chiseled jaw mockingly symmetrical. "You're not the one in charge around here, mortal. Only Mars can force me to bend the knee. Though you're welcome to try to take the cup out of my hand."
As he speaks, he holds out the metal cup of liquor and lets the sheet slide down his arm, revealing his naked wrist. Damien's eyes go to it—and he frowns, his brows furrowed unhappily. I get the sense that he didn't realize this particular son of Bacchus was missing his golden Ares cuffs.
Back stiff, Damien asks, "Did you win your last bout, Donny?"
"I did. And I expect to enjoy the spoils." He lifts his chin and stares the god hunter down, giving the impression of a barely-caged lion. "Or I'll beat you to a pulp."
I can't help myself; I laugh aloud. Trust a drunken lout like Donny over here to make the neurotic god hunter's ass clench like he's got a branch stuck up it. He looks and sounds like he belongs at a house party on Long Island downing beer and snorting coke. He's probably accidentally roofied himself because he put the date rape drugs in the wrong drink. Of course he's won some kind of privileges from whatever fighting Ares has the prisoners do down here—his opponent no doubt punched him in the head to no affect, because there clearly isn't anything in his brain pan.
"Hey." Donny cuts his eyes at me and frowns, his brain taking a while to order his face to make the expression. "Who's the whore?"
"None of your business," Damien says. "Enjoy your party."
As he pulls me past the partying idiots, I make a point to stumble weakly, and I don't have to fake it very much. It's getting harder and harder to stay on my feet. I'm swaying almost as much as a drunk in a windstorm.
Behind me, I hear one of the Bacchus fools leer at Kayla. "Always wondered about the redhead. Think her godmark would burn me when she sucks me off?"
"It would if I got anywhere near your dick," she says cheerily, pulling her baton out of its sheath and ramping up its electric pulse as a casual threat. "Unfortunately for you, and thankfully for me, it's never gonna happen."
"Joke's on you," he mutters, "my dad gave me one that spins."
Of course he did. Bacchus probably has the most kids out of all the gods—the vast majority of them sons. So he likes to screw around a little and "bless" them with certain talents. Always foolish ones that related to sex, drugs, alcohol, or partying. His seed is responsible for every DJ at a Jersey nightclub or porn star named Randy.
I've heard one of his daughters has alcoholic spit, and his favorite son was responsible for the invention of reality television. Bacchus' blessings are many.
"This way."
The god hunters lead me down a short hallway to a cell with matte black bars. I can sense the dampening effect of their energy, like a black hole sucking everything towards it. Though it's a different kind of magic than the Ares cuffs or chains, it gives me a sense of vertigo as I'm pushed through the door.
On the other side, a simple bunk bed sits with two thin mattresses on each level, while a half wall gives the barest impression of privacy to a toilet and sink in the corner. There's nothing else in the cell—not even sheets on the mattresses or a mirror above the sink. I guess that would be too risky for the prisoners to get their hands on.
The only interesting thing within the walls and bars is an impossibly tall blonde with a razor sharp expression in her icy blue eyes. Sitting on the top bunk with her thin legs folded beneath her, she stares at me the way a lioness looks at slow-moving prey. Glancing to Damien, then Kayla, she unfolds her legs like a snake unwinding from a curl and slides off the bunk onto the ground, her height so impressive that it looks like she's hopping off a barstool.
"This my new roomie?" There's a purr in her voice that reminds me of a Ferrari; despite our surroundings, she's wearing what must be a designer blouse and shorts, their linen material somehow pressed and free of wrinkles. "She's short. And fat."
I'm not—just shorter and fatter than her. But there's no heat or rancor behind the new girl's words; she sounds like she's testing me more than anything. So I respond, "And you're flat as a board on both sides. I bet you do squats every morning trying to look more like me. Don't let that stop the middle school bully routine, though."
"Oh, I like her," she says, her tone pleased. "Maybe this one will last longer than the others."
At those ominous words, Damien says, "Mora, meet Portia." Tugging me further into the room, he pulls me around to face him and unclasps the chain from my cuffs. "She'll be your cellmate. Dinner is at eighteen-hundred. Lights out at twenty-one hundred. The cell blocks rotate days outside in the yard—your block will be out first thing tomorrow morning, lucky you." As he goes through this list of information he pats me down one last time, as if I might have weapons hidden somewhere inside my dirty blue jeans. "Outside goods and food are forbidden—"
Portia snorts at this, and Kayla snickers.
Ignoring them, Damien says, "But you may receive gifts from your family if the warden is pleased with your behavior. Most inmates trade for clothes and services. Portia will know the rest."
As he and Kayla back out of the cell and close the door behind them, firmly locking it, the redhead shoots me a sympathetic look. "Good luck!"
"She won't need it," Damien reminds her. "Given her heritage."
Then they leave me alone with the blonde, who is starting to look at me like I might be interesting to dissect. I find myself running my fingers along the edge of my new cuffs, feeling them for any sign of weakness, judging how much death runs through their godspelled golden alloy.
"So," Portia says, leaning back against the bunk, "which god jizzed in a mortal to make you? No, don't tell me—I bet it was Hermes, that bastard. He's always making new tricks. If you have the ability to open locks you have to tell me. I can pay for abilities like that."
Based on her outfit, prison hasn't decimated Portia's net worth at all. I can guess which god bore her. What I don't know is if it's safe to tell her who my mother is.
It's going to be difficult to hide, though. Damien and Kayla may not have told my new roommate, but word will spread. Godbloods are just as gossipy as our parents. I might as well get it over with right now.
Nonchalantly. Calmly. Like it's no big deal.
"My mother is Death."
Chapter Five
Portia has decided to show me off to all the others during dinner. We get to go early and pick out the best food. Apparently she has certain privileges—not a surprise, given that her father is Plutus, the God of Wealth. It certainly explains the perfect salon blonde of her hair and expensive designer fit to the white dress she dons for the evening.
"You'll get new clothes soon," she sa
ys to me, eyeing my black T-shirt and over-dyed denim jeans like they've personally offended her. "Plenty around here will want to curry your favor once they realize you're going to wind up one of the champions. Don't be surprised to get a few brown nosers up your ass today."
Wariness fills me. I don't want to fight in the arena—and I especially don't want to win. The last thing I need is attention from Ares.
"I'm not so sure about that," I tell Portia, hoping she'll turn out to be a gossip as well as a bit shallow. "Between you and me, having Death for a mother hasn't exactly made me strong. It's more of a hinderance than anything. I wouldn't bet on me in the arena if I were you."
She frowns at me, looking personally disappointed at this news. "Really? You sure? My father used to speak about your mother's exploits, especially in the Old World—her powers was legendary."
"Maybe," I hedge, not wanting to think about the version of my mother I know reigned over the world a millennia ago, who struck fear into even the night itself. Death used to cast her shadow over the entire Earth, before mortals came up with ways to defeat her, science fighting her dark magic. "But some things aren't hereditary. Otherwise you'd have golden skin, right? And at least a thousand worshippers. You don't have either. And I don't have my mother's power."
I'm praying that the exact details of my exploits with Omar never make it into the prison.
No one here can know I have the power to raise the dead.
If anyone even suspects it...
Well. Death has her secrets for a reason. Gods have a tendency to seek to destroy that which they don't control, and jealously try to claw power from each other as soon as they discover it exists. Mortality has been an absolute through almost all of history for a reason. If they ever discover just how much my mother and I can do, it'll upend the balance of power in both the Celestial and Earthly Realms.
Better to let them still think me weak. Even Ares might dismiss my one small miracle as a fluke—he can tell himself Omar wasn't completely dead when I rose him. War tends to turn away from facing the truth. I hope.
If he knew that all his beloved battlefields, from his ruins in Syria to lurking land mines in Cambodia could be rendered harmless with a snap of my mother's fingers, he would rip her limb from limb and cast each piece of her into the bottom of the ocean.
Portia, thankfully, seems to buy my claim that I'm too weak to fight. She sighs dejectedly. "It's too bad. I've been looking for a warrior to sponsor. The last one I bet on... well, let's just say even my wealth took a hit. It's too bad I couldn't get Death on my side."
"Sorry," I say, trying to sound dejected and ashamed. I even kick the floor of our cell a little for good measure, staring at the ground and rubbing the back of my neck like a master performer. "Maybe if I weren't so weak... or if it weren't for these cuffs... some of the prisoners don't seem to have them."
She snorts. "Champions. They get rest time without their cuffs on. Especially the two at the top of the leaderboards—Doofus and Dumbass, I like to call them."
"Can you use your powers without your cuffs?"
"A little bit," she says, rubbing her own wrists with a pouty frown on her face. "I've only gotten them off once, and it took, shall we say, doing a few things I'm not proud of. I was able to turn water into wine and found a locked box full of valuables—that a guard took from me before I could hide them away. But it doesn't make it possible to escape, if that's what you're thinking. We're so far under the ground and surrounded by veins of Ares gold. No one gets out of this place."
"No one? I've heard of a few..."
"Very few. And that's across centuries. Millennia, even." Portia shakes her head, giving me a stern look. "If you're too weak to fight in the arena, you're too weak to escape. And I'm not going to be happy if you try—punishments are shared across cellmates around here. If you try to get out and fail, which you will, they'll come looking for me to see what I know. So don't even think about it."
It's all I've thought about even before we got here, but of course she knows that. It has to be all she thinks about, too. Still, I reassure her, "I won't get you into any trouble."
"Mmm-hmmm." Boots echo down the long hallway, and she jerks her chin towards the door. "The guard is here. Time to go get the good dumplings. Before the soup goes cold."
I don't believe Portia's words until we make it to the dining hall and I see it in person. It's actually there, simmering lightly, smelling of green herbs and butter. Chicken and dumpling soup in prison. I'm starting to wonder if every godblood here is spoiled out the ass with favors, goods, and actual food. They—we, I mean—don't even wear uniforms or have rigid schedules. All Portia has to do to get us into the dining hall early is exchange a nod with a guard and slip a smile to the cook on the line.
Of course, there has to be more than that. Surely Plutus is helping massage his daughter's time in prison. He's bribing someone, somewhere, or Portia is herself, to get her these favors.
It should soothe me to see how relaxed and easy things are around here. Instead it just ratchets up the tension. Ares is a cruel and exacting man. If he lets these little things slide, it's because they don't matter to him. He gets his bloodsport elsewhere.
The arena must be ten times as cruel as the prison itself.
A hundred or a thousand times crueler, even.
As Portia leads me to her favorite table, I try to get more info from her. "Have you ever fought in the arena?"
"Never. My father wouldn't allow it." She rolls her eyes dramatically. "I'm stronger than he knows, though. I'm sure that if I got to fight one of those assholes, I'd show that wits matter more than strength."
Not when it comes to physical one-on-one brawls. "You've seen the matches though, haven't you?"
"A few. Mostly when I've sponsored and trained a champion to fight."
"What are they like?"
"Disappointing." She sighs, ladling a dumping out of the warm broth of her soup and cooling it with a breath of air. "Can you believe that every warrior I've put forward was killed? All four of them. After reassuring me they were the strongest godbloods in the land."
Chills go down my arm. "That many are killed to sate Ares' appetite?" Portia shrugged, seemingly disinterested. But I can't stop thinking about it. "I'm surprised the other gods allow it."
"Oh, most of them are sons and daughters of Celestials with plenty to spare. Artemis' hunters, Dionysus' drunks, Poseiden's sea maidens and even Aphrodite's fruit from her lovers' loins—they spare them without a thought." Leaning towards me and lowering her voice as other prisoners file into the room, she mentions casually, "It's those rare children of gods like my father and your mother who don't have to worry as much. Ares would never let a daughter of Death be put down—or a daughter of Wealth, like me. Our parents would notice us missing. Unlike the armies of his own sons he's carelessly made."
Ares' soldiers. The God of War has many, many sons, and a number of daughters as well. It's not much of a surprise—one of the long-standing traditions of war is that to the victor go the spoils. And there's no spoil greater than a general's wives and daughters. After running his golden sword through his foes and feasting on food from their fields, Ares ruts their women and leaves behind carnage and destruction in his wake.
I remember one such battlefield from my youth, deep in a part of what was then the New Country. The army of Spanish soldiers ran through the Navajo like a scythe through wheat. As they marched the survivors off to camps and reservations, prepared to feast off the land they'd cleared, my mother walked me through the carnage and we drank the mortality floating in the air.
There was so much of it. So many souls cleaved from their human bodies that my own soul trembled. It was a smaller battlefield, but there was no denying its impact on me—because of the women and children, the young men and boys. I felt the earth shift beneath me, and the eyes of other gods on me as I moved through their dead.
Ares approached us, a golden flask in his hand overflowing with red wine, hi
s lips stained with what might've been blood. He wore the armor of a soldier, but was taller and more magnificent than them. When the men he led looked to him, they saw a general—but through my eyes, I could see the god beneath.
His gold-touched eyes.
Height no mortal could ever reach.
Hands strong enough to crush souls.
And a power that grew by the day as more and more mortals went to war needlessly, unjustly, egged on by a bloodlust he fed them with the touch of his golden hands and the words that dripped from his godly mouth.
"Mors," War greeted my mother, using the Roman name for her that she favored at the time. "Tell me, was it worth it?"
My mother smiled like a whore at her favorite client. "All that and then some. But tell me, Mars, how did you do it? How did you convince them that all this—" she motioned at the land around her, so much of it, a bounty, "—wasn't enough? That they needed more?"
"I did it by thinking of you."
"How do you mean?"
"I simply reminded them that they fear death, and that they believe these people—these heathens, the red skins as they like to call them—present a threat to them. I used my sons to feed them intel that an attack was imminent. And I reminded them that, however much they have, there is always more. Mortals." His smile chilled me. "They fear Death so much they'll chase their own tails trying to escape it.
He raised his goblet and drank of it greedily, wine spilling down to mix with the blood on his chin.
My mother laughed, even as my own horror mounted. "Thank you, dear friend. I hadn't had a feast like this in so long. So much suffering—and in such short lives. You've fed my daughter and I for weeks."
His eyes skimmed over me as he returned to his men and the women they'd captured for him, and I didn't like the way he looked at me. Nor did I like the shiver at the back of my neck, the sense that other gods, smaller gods, saw what we'd done and rebuked us. The land was new then—it still remembered what it once held. And the little deities knew how to protect their people. If we weren't careful, if we took too much too greedily, the mortals wouldn't be the only ones living with curses above their beds at night.