They Will Not Be Silenced
Page 27
Aster appeared at my side, so that the three of us stood against the god. Apollo didn’t have an aggressive stance, so I didn’t worry that he would kill us.
“It’s fine,” Apollo assured us. “I wasn’t planning on anything with Micha, but this serves Artemis right. She thinks she can go around playing with my people to help her with her game. If you ask me, I didn’t do a thing wrong.”
“It would help if you told us what you did,” Micha growled, blue still on his mouth from the few seconds of bliss. It would be a shame when we couldn’t remember what that felt like.
“Why are you so grouchy?” Apollo asked. “Everyone gets this way with me and I have no idea why. You all could learn a lesson in being nice.”
I took a deep breath, silently thanking the other gods that my parents weren’t around us for this. My dad would have already been screaming for answers, probably resulting in getting fried by the sun god.
Artemis walked down the hallway until she stood with us. She glared at her brother. “What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, I get it, but I don’t approve.”
“What. Is. Going. On?” Aster demanded. “Can we not stand around pretending we all know what’s up?”
Artemis still glowered in her brother’s direction. “Should you tell them what you did?”
Apollo could only grin at her. “I think we can call ourselves even at this point. You took my kids and hooked them up, and I took your Hunter and made him immortal with some stolen ambrosia.”
“What?!” the three of us screamed at the same time.
Aster looked sharply to his father. “Immortal? Did you make Callie immortal?”
I touched my face again. I felt like a regular old human, like always. Even when Apollo gave me my Oracle magic, it didn’t make me feel that different. Wouldn’t I have known if I were immortal?
“Yup,” Apollo said, sealing my fate.
“Oh my god,” Micha breathed.
Aster put his hand on my shoulder as I took in as much air as I could manage. It didn’t work out well for me, and Aster’s shouting didn’t help.
“How could you make her immortal? You didn’t ask anyone before you did it. You just do whatever the hell you want without thinking about what might come of it for other people. You’re selfish.” Aster quickly turned back to me, his tone soft as he held my face and tried to smile. “Not that I’m not happy you’re immortal. I was trying not to think about the human thing, because I thought it would make me too sad and I knew I couldn’t fix it.”
I breathed, smiling too as I tried to talk. “So, you’re good with it?”
“Yeah, of course. I get to keep you, and you’re stronger now.”
Great, so now that I knew he felt fine with it, I needed to figure out if I was fine with it too. I was certainly not okay with Apollo using a cupcake to pretty much poison me with something only meant for gods. On the other hand, literally everyone else in my life was immortal, with a couple of exceptions. My mom and dad. I always knew I would lose them one day, and now that would happen for sure. My demigod friends, they wouldn’t even age. They would always look like they did now, and Aster would eventually be the same. It would have been weird if we stayed together while I got old. And it would have been awful when I knew I would die soon, leaving him behind. It didn’t upset me that Apollo made me immortal, just the way he did it.
“Why is no one focused on me?!” Micha shouted. “No one is giving me a hug!”
Apollo dared to walk to him, ignoring the hard glare he got and putting his arms around Micha. “You’re welcome for the gift.”
Micha sighed, his eyes closed. “You didn’t give me a gift. You lied to my friend and I made the mistake of being hungry.”
“Yes. You’re welcome.”
Artemis tapped her foot, a dagger suddenly in her hands. “You’ll pay for this one, Apollo. Aphrodite is already on my shit list. You think you’ll manage to escape?”
“This is us getting even,” he said. “You set my son up with my Oracle, who would have eventually died. I was making right what you didn’t bother thinking about.”
“Humans die,” she said. “You can’t save every human you like. If we let ourselves do that, it would disrupt the natural order of things. It’s not fair. I hate it, Apollo, I hate watching people die. But you have to let it happen.”
“Not this time. I’m allowed to steal a little happiness for my child.”
“Do not do this again,” she growled at him. “It is our responsibility as gods to run this world in a way that works. If you make all your favorites immortal, it will be chaos. And now you’ve gone and made one of my Hunters immortal. If he makes children, they’ll be immortal too.”
Micha looked to her, eyes big again. “What?”
She nodded. “The ambrosia is very strong, so if you should make children—even with a human—they’ll be immortal. Immortal Hunters. With that magic already in them, it could make a line of immortal Hunters.”
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“It’s unnatural. There’s a reason I made my Hunters human. Because they’re fertile. They were created literally to rid the world of abominations, and the fact that I have one here, and whatever those freaks Aphrodite hooked up make, means I have trouble on my hands. I won’t take action to hurt any one of you, but I am not happy about this.”
I wasn’t all that happy either, but I felt like it would come around. I didn’t really lose anything, and it only meant I would make little immortal babies with Aster one day in the future. And the fact that Micha was on the same boat as me only helped. No one would get left behind.
Artemis rubbed her eyes, dagger still in hand. “I need to go kill something to get this rage out. Apollo, I’m telling dad.”
“NO!” he screamed when she vanished. With a panicked look to us, he said, “Don’t worry. Zeus probably won’t have you killed. I’ll see you later!”
And then he disappeared too.
The three of us stood there for a few minutes, staring at the floor and unsure where to go from there. The day had started out pretty normal, then Apollo showed up, gave Aster what had to have been a few thousand in cash, and then he made me and my friend immortal. I’d just wanted to make out with my boyfriend.
“This is fucked,” Micha decided. “My family might never speak to me again if they find out about this. Only my cousin and uncle.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. So many Hunters are like Artemis. They think that if something is different, it’s an abomination. Something that needs to be killed. I might be hard to kill now, but they wouldn’t view me as an ally anymore.”
Maybe I would have been able to come up with something to say if my body didn’t seize. I stiffened, magic beginning to swirl in my head out of nowhere. It was voices, so, so many voices. I couldn’t even understand them over each other, but I knew the voices themselves. Olympians.
“ . . . Absurd . . . ” one mumbled.
“Hush,” another said. “Let them speak.”
The boys were asking me what was wrong, but I couldn’t make myself speak. I shut my eyes, too many pictures appearing in my mine. I saw flashes of things I couldn’t understand at first, but then they started coming together slowly.
I smelled blood, fresh blood that made my nose wrinkle. Bodies appeared blurry in my vision, the sound of screaming making my ears ring. And then I knew. I heard Kizzy screaming, and I felt the familiar coldness of the underworld.
No . . .
“Death,” I murmured. “It found them.”
“What?” Aster asked. “Who?”
I breathed in, hearing the gods all talking in my head. It had slammed into me out of nowhere, taking over everything else that could have existed in my mind. It was the only way the gods knew how to be, and maybe I shouldn’t have even been able to tap into this. But I closed my eyes, listening.
“The seers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:
; Things Get Complicated
Aster
I HELD CALLIE’S hand while she listened to the gods. It felt like this day couldn’t get any more insane, but I should have known better. The gods always found a way to complicate things. The two of us sat on the couch, while her eyes darted all over the room, too big and too worried.
“Are you sure that she should be listening in on this?” Micha asked from across the room, eating a package of cookies that Callie had gotten for me. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. If there were a Hunter that could defend someone against the gods, it would be me, but I’d rather not get pulverized because Callie couldn’t mind her own business.”
“Shh!” Callie said, her eyes narrowed in concentration.
“She’s going to be fine,” I hissed back at him. “My dad loves her.”
“Okay, but the gods love a lot of people, and it almost never ends well for them. Do you really want to risk her life on the off chance that she’ll be the one person that doesn’t get screwed by the gods?”
“You mean screwed over,” I said
“Sure,” Micha offered with a shrug. I glowered at him, but then had to remind myself that Callie wouldn’t sleep with the gods. For one thing, she was smarter than that. For another, she’d never hurt me in that way.
“You are just a terrible human being,” I said.
“What?” Micha asked.
I huffed out a breath.
Callie grabbed my hand, squeezing it harder than she had before. “Shh!” she hissed with enough ferocity that I stopped arguing with Micha. Even though the two of us did almost nothing but argue. He liked to be a pain in the ass, and I had the self-esteem of an orange. I bit my tongue, then turned back to her. She squelched her eyes closed, chewing on the corner of her lip while concentrating.
“What do you hear?” Micha asked.
“Dude, seriously?” I asked. “She just asked us to be quiet.”
“Well, I want to know what’s going on!” Micha said back, throwing his hands up. “It’s not my fault that the gods only have one Oracle and that can’t broadcast what they’re saying and thinking to us. Nope, not my fault at all.”
“Oh, my gods,” Callie said, angrily. “Could you please shut up?”
Micha grumbled some, but fell silent. I watched Callie’s face while she listened to the gods talking. I couldn’t imagine what it felt like when all the Olympians got together for a meeting, especially one they hadn’t planned on having. Furthermore, I couldn’t imagine the kinds of balls it took to demand a meeting with the gods.
To think that someone tried to enforce their will on gods? Insanity.
Though, from what I’d learned of Callie’s friends, that sounded exactly like the kind of thing they would do.
She shifted around in her seat, squeezing my hand so hard that I felt her nails biting into my flesh. I figured that meant something important had happened. I waited for her to explain, glancing at Micha.
He sat forward in his seat, his eyes darting from one of us to the other. “What’s going on?”
“You know as much as I do,” I barked.
Callie leapt to her feet, jumping up and down. “They’re not dead!” she shouted.
“What?” I asked.
Callie jumped at me, knocking me over easily. My back slammed against the couch, while her arms worked their way around my neck. “They’re not dead!”
“How, what happened?” I asked.
Callie let me go as she sat up. This meant that she straddled me and much to my shame, it became a lot harder to focus on what she said in that position. I wanted her to wiggle around a little . . .
“The gods decided to bring the seers back to life and make them gods!” she squealed in delight.
“What?” Micha and I shouted in unison, with equal tones of disbelief.
“How the hell is that possible?” I asked. “I mean, I know that it’s possible and that the gods do whatever the fuck they want, but . . . how? Why? Not that I’m unhappy that your friends are going to be all right or anything. And not that I’m questioning the gods decisions, even though it sounds like I am. That’s not what I’m doing, I swear.”
“Stop,” Micha said.
I followed his advice. It used to bother me when he told me to shut up, but not so much anymore. It was actually a relief when someone stopped my ranting and gave me the chance to breathe.
Callie jumped off me and I resisted the urge to frown at this. “It was so intense!” Callie said, waving her hands in the air. “They were all in one room together, arguing about something, and then they started to vote, and they decide that the seers should become gods, and that way they can never die! All my friends are going to live forever!” She jumped up and down again.
“So, you were serious? The seers are now immortal and so are you . . . the Oracle?” Micha asked.
Callie nodded, still grinning.
“So, in roughly one day, the gods decided to make four of their mortal hench-people immortal.”
Callie stopped jumping up and down, frowning heavily. “Well, I mean . . . I suppose so.”
My stomach twisted. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You shouldn’t,” Micha said. “I mean, we could argue that what Apollo did to us is just a coincidence, but he chose to do it on the same day that he made the seers into gods. And yeah, yeah, I know that the other Olympians were involved, but they’re all bound to know what he did to us, right?”
Callie nodded, chewing on her lip. “Apollo is one of the ones that voted for the seers to get turned. Not all of them did. Some thought they should stay dead. Apollo said something about not abandoning their children and voted to save them.”
My chest did a funny thing at hearing that. Apollo had genuinely thought that he’d been doing a good job with me, which was terrifying. However, he’d also given me Callie, forever. One could argue that he’d done it for himself or because he liked her, but he’d never done that with any of the other Oracles. There had been hundreds of them, and Callie happened to be the one he made immortal? Yeah, no. He did that for me. I just knew it.
But now with the seers getting changed as well . . . I shifted around uncomfortably for a second. “What does that mean? What are they up to?”
Callie shrugged. “I haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve got all those notes up in my room, and none of them make a clear story. The seers are only one part of it, and their prophecy just came true.”
I sighed, covering my face with my hands. “Are either of you starting to get a really bad feeling about this?”
“Yes,” Micha said. “Absolutely, yes.”
Callie squirmed where she stood, then sat down next to me again. “I know that the gods are up to something. They’ve been building little armies of demigods in camps. The seers have been left out of it because they’re human, but what about Kizzy, Zander, and Verin? They’re demigods too, but they haven’t been included in those camps. It’s just kind of strange to think about now, you know?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding in agreement.
“What if the gods have something planned?”
Micha cursed. “They always have something planned. Even if it’s something that you don’t like. Hell, especially if it’s something that you won’t like.” A bitter expression took over his face for a second before he could wipe it away.
“What do you wanna do?” I asked Callie. “Do you want to wait and see if we figure out what they’re doing, or do you want to contact your friends?”
Callie tapped her knees, then pressed her fingers into her eyes. “They’ve just been through hell. I mean, they literally died and came back. They’ve also just gotten what they all wanted, which is to know that they won’t be forced to separate when the seers die of old age. The seers are gods now. Like, literally gods.” She said this last with awe.
Micha rubbed his head, pacing around the room.
“You want to give them some time?” I asked. “Just to enjoy what they have?”
“That means you can’t tell them about being immortal, yet,” I said.
She nodded again. “That won’t be so hard. They won’t realize anything about me is different and even if they did, I could brush it off. I’ll tell them when they’re not so stressed about everything happening around them.”
“When will that be?” Micha asked, still pacing. “You aren’t the only one that’s noticed weird things going on. Like, the fact that there are so many demigods in Seattle, or that the gods seem determined to bring more people in. Like me, for example. I just go where Artemis tells me to go.”
I shifted, glancing at Callie. “Dad’s the one that got us the apartment.”
Callie nodded. “Yeah, I have that on a sticky note upstairs. Apollo told Aphrodite to make it happen.”
“They won’t let us know what’s happening,” Micha said, shrugging. “If they wanted us to know, then we already would. The gods like to keep their secrets, and it’s not our place to ask questions they don’t feel like answering.” Again, this came out bitter. Micha had a lot of moments like that, and I usually left him to it.
Callie waved her hands. “I trust the gods. They haven’t steered me wrong yet. I know that doing that is kind of insane and that they have this horrible habit of not viewing people as, well, people, but we have to trust them.”
I didn’t think that, actually. My father had done nothing to prove that I should trust him. In my own fucked up way, I loved Apollo, but not enough that I’d blindly follow him wherever he went. I’d almost died because of him several times.
But Callie had the gods in her head all the time. She probably saw a side of them that no one else got to see. I didn’t know if that changed anything, or if that helped her in anyway, but I liked to think that it did. I liked to think that she trusted the gods because they had given her a reason to, and not because Callie always trusted someone until they gave her a reason not to.