by Amie Gibbons
Maybe it wasn’t what she did to him, maybe it’s what he did to her.
Apollo put together a line of pure magic, almost like he was spilling silk out of his hands. He hooked Millie up first, pushing the line of white magic straight through her middle. She not only cracked a smile, she actually giggled, wrapping her arms around her belly like a Pillsbury dough girl.
He strung up Tyler next, careful not to actually touch her.
“I’m running your magic through Cassandra and then into me. It won’t do anything to her, will it?”
“You mean make her horny?” Tyler arched an eyebrow. “No, it’s pretty sexist that way. Strictly a man eater. So to speak. Unless she actually starts to channel my magic, then it’ll probably make her feel like she’s in heat, like me.”
“Ah.” He waved his hand to make the string plunge through her and she wiggled like he dropped ice down her back.
“Cassandra?” he said a little too eagerly.
Is it just me, or does that string look an awful lot like a leash right now?
I stepped forward and pressed the string into my hand, holding it there and staring into my eyes.
Intense, way too intense.
I looked down.
“So, how did you know you removed your memories?” I asked, looking up and staring at his cheekbone.
“My sister showed me doing the spell on myself to remove memories soon after I met you,” he said mentally. My ears only apparently. “She doesn’t know what I was trying to forget, she claims, and I obviously don’t remember. That is not a good feeling.”
“But you know it had to do with her? Your Cassandra?”
“Yes. It was after whatever my father and I did. I know that much because of the timing and… and the look on my face in the vision. I was broken. It’s the same look Millie got when she was reminded of her ex.”
He straightened. “For her help, I would be willing to take care of him for her. Nothing serious, just break a leg or ruin his career.”
I smiled. “Tyler’s already offered and Millie’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t want him hurt. She always says she doesn’t think she’s a good person, but she’d rather sit and stew in misery than ever make the man she feels for hurt. She even tried to help him find a job so he could stay here.”
“Stay here?”
“He’s foreign. Only way to stay after school was to find a job in the legal field or marry an American. And trust me, she thought about that second one, too.”
“So she would never want someone she loved to be hurt?”
“Don’t say the L word to her. She gets upset whenever we even hint she loved him, because”–I piped my mental voice up, trying to mimic Millie–”‘You can’t love someone you don’t know.’ She spent a year reading through scientific articles on emotions, love, lust, human bonding. Trying to explain why she felt the way she did, because she didn’t know him. Not really. He was a liar and made her think he was someone he wasn’t.”
“She loved him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Still does, if you ask me, but we don’t say that to her. Emotion, caring, that’s okay to say. But love, nope. She is very clear on the fact that she’s never been in love. And trying to explain I’ve seen her aura around him or thinking about him and it looks a lot like love to me, well, that just makes her mad.”
“But she tried to help him? She doesn’t want him hurt for however he hurt her?”
I shook my head. “You don’t hurt the people you care about. Millie thought up a hundred different ways to hurt him One-L year and never did one. She’s a firm believer in not hurting people you care about no matter what they do to you.”
“I suspect she’s a better person than I ever was.”
“You’re not so bad.”
“Cassandra,” Apollo said out loud, then paused. “I want…” He shook his head. “I want to apologize. I was selfish, and I wanted you. I thought I had a right to you. But I don’t. Obviously. And if I could release you after the alignment, I would.”
“Really?”
“I can look into it. See if there’s some spell to undo this connection. I want you to work for me and be with me because you want to, not because of some trap or keeping your bargain, and certainly not because you were drugged with magical hormones.”
“Thank you.” I nodded. “I appreciate that. And yes, if after this you can figure out how to free me, without me losing my mom for breaking the deal, I would like for you to do it.”
His eyes bulged and he blinked them back into submission. “Oh. Okay then. After the alignment, I will try. I would like you to still work for me though. You’re good at your job and you will probably be helpful in shaping our legal system.”
“Deal,” I said, sticking out my hand for him to shake.
He did, using the touch to press the light string in again, shoving it through me.
I collapsed into the soft grass.
Apollo kneeled next to me, hands hovering over me like he wasn’t sure I would want him to touch me.
I really didn’t.
The energy buzzed through me, lighting my nerves on fire and cutting a path from every inch of me to my groin. I brushed my hand over the grass and the touch zapped through me, making me bite my lip.
I froze, taking a deep breath.
“Tyler,” I said through gritted teeth. “You were wrong.”
She snorted. “You’re channeling my magic? Yeah, the hormones make me extremely horny, too. Double sided sword.”
“How do you control it?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Oh well.”
She smiled, dirty and inviting. “I give into it and screw as much as I can in a two day period.”
I looked at Apollo before I could stop my eyes. We stared at each other. Maybe not the worst idea. It could be quick. Clear my mind. We weren’t going to be able to get setup at this rate. He licked his lips and I followed suit, leaning in.
“Guys?” Millie’s voice broke through and I closed my eyes, shaking my head.
“I’m getting really sick of magic making my hormones go nuts,” I said. “Apollo, hook us in fast, before we do something I’ll regret.”
“There is no way to not take that in a dirty way, I’m sorry,” he said, grinning wide. “It should pass once I am channeling the magic into the spell, it will be going through you but not affecting you.”
Someone yelled something in another language and Apollo turned, shouting back.
Tyler jerked her chin at me while Apollo was distracted. I nodded, one quick jerk back, and she tapped her ear.
Sounds like? I shrugged and she held up something small and black, almost electronic looking. What the hell? She fluttered her hands then put them up to her mouth and wiggling her fingers.
Charades was so never my game.
“Buzzzzz,” Tyler hissed with a pointed look, jabbing the little black thing just as pointedly.
Buzz? She sounded like a bug.
Holy shit! It was a bug!
She nodded at my look then quickly looked away, like she was bored and taking in the scene.
Apollo looked back at me, apparently done with his buddy. “Something going on?”
Millie sat on the grass, pulling out her phone. “Will they get mad if I take pictures of this?”
“I don’t think so, just don’t publish anything before asking whoever you photographed.”
“Done.” She started snapping pics, looking up like she was trying to figure out the lighting.
My stomach unknotted and the throbbing down under chilled, washing out like water. I breathed deep and my breasts didn’t tingle as they pushed against my shirt. Apollo must’ve plugged us in.
“Wow,” Tyler said. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Millie asked.
“I’m flaccid. It’s nice. Kind of hard to concentrate when that hits.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was about to… do something I shouldn’t say where anyone of any
age could hear it.”
“Try doing some of those things for a few years,” Tyler said, winking. “Gives you a whole new perspective on yourself when you realize what you’re willing to do when horny.”
“I was about to say I feel left out,” Millie said with wide, innocent eyes. “But never mind, I don’t want to know.”
Tyler and I looked at each other and cracked up, doubling over.
When Tyler straightened, the bug wasn’t anywhere in sight. So she wanted to keep that quiet? Who put it there?
Like I even needed to ask.
I’m guessing I know what that explosion yesterday was really about. And that bug probably isn’t the only one hanging around.
Knowing Tyler, she was thinking we could use this info sometime in the future.
“What are we being plugged into?” I asked, taking a better look at the gathering now. The nearest magical creature was still about fifteen feet away, giving us a nice buffer. They were all facing the middle. I couldn’t even tell if most of them noticed we showed up.
“It’s Hades’ crystal,” Apollo said. “Acting as a catalyst.”
“So, we just sit here and pour in magic for the next week?” I asked.
“No, of course not. It comes out in spurts at different places. This one is in our territory so we are sucking it from the world into this one and trying to control it from here. It won’t last long, maybe an hour.”
“Okay.”
I sat next to Millie, settling in for what was looking like an interesting hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I was wrong. We were in for a boring hour.
It was just us sitting on the edge of the field with everyone else chatting closer to the crystal.
Tyler, Millie and I talked amongst ourselves for a bit until Tyler lay back for a nap and Millie read on her phone.
I wanted to do something, anything else. Dear God, I was bored!
Kind of like when you got stuck at the airport. You’d read, watch DVDs, play around on the internet. Stuff you could do all day at your house and be perfectly happy just hanging out and doing nothing more, but since you were stuck someplace, it suddenly was a hardship to kick back and just do whatever.
And I was hungry.
“Millie,” I said after we’d been there for at least an hour, or ten.
She didn’t answer. I looked over and she was curled on her side, hand under her head on a thick patch of grass as a pillow.
“I’m feeling pretty tired, too,” I said. “But wired. Like chugging coffee during finals so you can pull an all-nighter but you’re pretty near dying by the time the test comes around.”
“I’m not sure that sentence made sense,” Apollo said.
“Me neither.” I shrugged. “I’m tired.”
Apollo scowled at me. “Do you really want me to release you from our bond?”
I sat up straighter. “That’s out of the blue.” I rested my chin on my hand. “Yes. If you can. I would like that.”
“Is being tied to me such a hardship?”
“Being tied to you against my will, basically a slave if you wanted to treat me that way is, yes.”
I shook my head. “This has nothing to do with you. It’s everything to do with me not wanting to be trapped by anyone. If you do find a way to release me, at least I’ll know my own feelings. Until then, I can’t know what I feel for you, and what’s the magic. Until then, there’s no shot for us. If you really want me, you might want to think about that.”
He bit his lip. “I can try. I don’t want to.”
“But you don’t actually need my magic, especially once this is all done. And if I’m an immortal magical being anyway, could you even keep me tied to you?”
“Yes.” He wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve done it before. Not against her will, of course.”
“The original Cassandra?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really want to know whatever it was you made yourself forget?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Can I try to see what happened there?” I held out my hand and he stared at it. “It won’t bite.”
“Haha.” He shrugged. “Not exactly something I want you to see. Besides, if I don’t remember, there’s nothing for your powers to grab onto to see. Also, you’re being drained as well. You must be tired. Too tired to work a spell, I’d think.”
“Maybe, but I could try.”
“I don’t think I want you to, but, if it won’t work anyway, I don’t see the harm.” He scooted over. “I’m surprised you haven’t passed out yet, honestly.”
“Me too.”
“You must be more powerful than I thought.”
“Let’s not go there. Any kind of talk about my power and me being immortal and outliving my family and friends is just going to freak me out. Let me be in denial, okay?”
“Okay.” He sighed, holding his hands out. I rested mine in them, crossing my legs to match his.
“I could be wrong,” he said. “Just because you’re powerful doesn’t mean you’ll actually end up being immortal. The rules of magic have changed. Things that shouldn’t exist do. Maybe you can be that powerful and still be human.”
“Really?”
Hope washed through me, warming me when I hadn’t even realized I’d been cold.
“Possibly, yes.”
“I can take possibly. I like possibly.”
“You really don’t want to be immortal? Doesn’t everyone want to stay young and beautiful and healthy forever?”
“I don’t want to leave the people I love. To watch my friends get older while I stay the same, to be left out of their lives once I’m not able to stay with them and their lives because they’re fifty or seventy and I’m twenty-eight… or twenty-six if I really stopped aging when magic woke up. It would be horrible to be outside the world like that.”
I looked at him. “Is that why you guys are your own little culture and see humans as this other species? Because you guys are perpetually outside the world? You have to make your own culture because you can’t be a part of human’s? You can’t marry a human and watch them grow old and die. You can’t make friends with humans because in a few years you’ll be in different places in your lives.”
“Something like that. It’s very difficult to be a part of a world when the people in it are moving at a different pace than you.”
“I don’t want that.”
“You would be part of our world though. One of us. You wouldn’t be alone.”
“Which is all well and good if you’re raised in this, but I wasn’t. I was raised as a human and I have my family and friends who are human. People I don’t want to leave. I wouldn’t fit in here.” I squeezed his hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do this.”
He nodded. “No, I did not do that.”
“Right,” I sighed. “So, how do I do this? Make a vision come?”
“Most of the time I focus on what I want to see in the other person. Think of it like seeing their emotions in their aura, and then diving deeper. If that makes sense.”
“Kind of. I can try.”
I stared into his eyes, breathed him in, focused on the hands in mine.
Remember, this is work. Right. This was me trying to help out a sort of friend, not staring into the eyes of a lover.
Apollo’s hands glowed, warming in mine. “Lover?”
The glow grew.
Show me his old love.
I let myself go. Let myself fall into it.
# # #
The world was disjointed. Confusing. Sepia toned. Not anything I could put my finger on.
Clips of world swished by, and me putting my finger on one image before it was pulled away wasn’t happening. I just had to sit back and watch, and try to understand.
Things whooshed by in the old photograph world, like ghosts or smudges on the film. They swirled, sucked into something. A white diamond, hard and real in the misty, captur
ed by a nineteenth century camera world. It sparkled, glowing brighter and brighter as the wisps traveled into it.
They screamed.
I opened my eyes.
Apollo crumpled to his side in the grass, clutching his stomach as he squeezed his eyes shut.
“Hey.” I scrambled to him, and grabbed his shoulder. “Apollo, are you okay?”
His lips moved but no sound came out. I stroked his hair and he inched his head into my lap.
“He okay?” Millie whispered behind me, making me jump.
Apollo whimpered and I went back to stroking his hair, murmuring comforts.
“Okay, stupid question,” Millie said.
I smiled at her as she sat next to us. “No, he’s not okay.”
She reached out like she was going to pat him and pulled her hand back, giving me a helpless look.
I shrugged. I didn’t know any more than she did if he’d want her comforting him too or if he just turned to me because he considered me one of his people.
I kept shushing and saying things would be okay, and somewhere along the line he stopped moving his lips and whimpering.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay to talk now?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What happened?” Millie asked.
“I wanted to see if I could see whatever it was he blocked out.”
“I know why I didn’t want to remember that,” Apollo said, the words muffled by my lap.
“Can you tell me?” I stroked his hair again. “I don’t understand what I saw.”
“What’s going on?” Hades asked, making me jerk again.
I’d forgotten about the many, many other gods clumped only a few yards away. Now a good dozen of them were looking at us. Only Hades and Artemis were close and even they were keeping out of arm’s reach.
“What did you do?” Artemis hissed at me.
“Me! What the hell did you do? He said you were the one who told him he wiped out some memories. We were seeing if we could tell what they were.”
She glared at me, mouth pinched up, raw anger painting her eyes. She whirled and stormed off.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Millie yelled after her. “Your brother’s upset. Get your ass back here and help him.”