The answer was so complicated, it couldn’t be phrased properly. “Euterpe, I can’t answer that. I hardly know my own mind and heart, let alone what the future will bring.”
“But you dream prophecies, for Zeus’s sake!”
“I can’t lie.” I shrugged her comment off. “Plus, like I’ve told everyone a million times, I’m not sure exactly where the prophecies come from or exactly what they mean.”
“But you told me! One of the visions was that I’d love one from the sun line!’” She was close to hysterics now.
“Euterpe!” I put up my hand to silence her. “Shh, the mortals will overhear. I’ve thought about that prophecy over and over again. What if…what if that part of the prophecy was about Hymenaios? Maybe I was just a pawn of the Fates to give him to you. He’s my son, and I am the sun god, and it’s clear that he adores his mother—”
“Typical,” she scoffed. “I should’ve known you’d take the blame off yourself. Never your fault, huh?”
“Euterpe—”
“No, and I suppose all that nonsense you fed me ages ago about you believing we were meant to change the world together, that we were the Spírto Teleíos, was all lies to win me over?” She referred to the prophecy I had made ages ago about a perfect match, a couple who would somehow change the world forever. I had believed back then that the prophecy was about myself. Certain clues had seemed to point in my direction, but now I wondered if it could be Archer and Callie, although the signs didn’t quite line up. Prophecies were vague and usually were told far in advance of when they actually occurred. I had volumes of them written down, where I crossed them off after they happened. There were hundreds, if not thousands, that hadn’t happened yet.
Euterpe stared me down with her dewy eyes and little scowl.
I swallowed hard. “No, I believed all that then. I can’t lie, remember?”
“And now? Do you believe it now?”
I couldn’t say the word, so I shook my head.
“I can’t believe you!”
“Euterpe, I don’t think we’ll ever be together again. Please stop hoping. But…I will start trying to make it up to the boy. I’m a terrible excuse for an immortal, and I know it. I wish you’d never fallen for me. All I do is hurt you. I’m so sorry.”
She took it wordlessly, staring down at her hands. I couldn’t keep stringing her along, allowing her to wait in the wings for a slight chance in the future.
“If I miss Hymenaios again, tell him I’ll send for him soon. That is, if he wants to come to New York.”
“I won’t give him any more of your empty promises,” she muttered.
“Fine then, I’ll tell him. I am sorry, Euterpe. What else am I to say?”
She nodded, but I wasn’t sure what she was agreeing with. Then she stood up and walked gracefully away. I watched her disappear into the crowd, where she most likely would meet up with Hermes, Iris, or one of the four Winds. How else could she get to Nice on such short notice? I regretted hurting her again, but I hoped it would be for the last time. I would ask Archer to try again to make her love another. Maybe this time it would stick.
I stood up, but before I could head back to the library, another familiar voice broke me from my reverie. “Sit back down, little sun god.”
Iris stood before me. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the husky voice. She always sounded like she’d screamed herself hoarse. And she was always just as disrespectful to her elders, but we needed her abilities often, so we rarely reprimanded her.
I relaxed as she sat down and took up my untouched coffee. “Thanks,” she said as she took a sip.
I shrugged off her petty theft and awaited her message.
Iris was a goddess of…well, her title is kind of tricky—she was the personification of the rainbow, and like Hermes and the Winds, a sort of teleporter. Only, instead of being a messenger by punishment, she was a free agent and traveled for profit, leaving a rainbow trail behind when she traveled. She was the UPS of the gods: she delivered messages, news, and physical items. Also, she had the ability to morph herself, which was why I didn’t recognize her. Iris could change her hair, eyes, and skin color, but she always remained human, female, and limited to the tiny five-foot frame her genetics dictated. Today, she had short-cropped black hair, purple eyes, and pale skin devoid of any blemishes or freckles.
“So, what’s the message? I’m kind of in a hurry,” I pressed, losing my patience. It was half past two, and the curator would be back soon.
“Whatever you find in that library, you mustn’t tell anyone. If you find you must tell someone, then trust Athena and only Athena. Do not tell your friends or Father.”
“What am I going to find in there?” I asked.
“Holy Hades, Apollo, how would I know?” She giggled, judging my question as outrageous. “I’m just delivering a message.”
“From whom?”
“Now, that’s a secret.” She smiled. “And before you try to bribe it out of me, he or she made me swear on the Styx.”
“But obviously, someone out there already knows the answers to what I seek. Why can’t he—or she—tell me?” I asked, annoyed. I knew she couldn’t tell me, but this trip was pointless if I could’ve gotten the answer through a phone call.
“Maybe because you’re the god of truth. Apollo, you could be forced to tattle, now couldn’t you?” She took a large gulp of the coffee. “You mustn’t tell anyone, though. Force yourself to withhold the truth. Many mortal and immortal lives depend on secrecy, especially the one of whom you are searching.”
“But—”
“My client said nothing more, and my client didn’t want a response. So, if I’m done here…” She faded into thin air, leaving only a rainbow behind her.
I looked around at the mortals, but no one was acting as if they had seen a girl vanish into thin air. Fearing yet another interruption, for it seemed gods were on the go these days, I got up quickly and hurried toward the library.
This wasn’t good. Somewhere out there, some other god knew what I was up to. He or she already had the answers I was seeking about Callie and didn’t trust me. I felt exposed and vulnerable.
It wasn’t Zeus because Iris never worked for him. And why should I trust Athena above my mother, my twin sister, or even Archer? Athena was just and noble, but she was always in cahoots with Zeus, working for him and often by his side. Why her? Worrying about whom to trust was pointless until I found out the information that needed to be kept hidden. The problem was, could I truly hide this information? What if someone directly asked me about it? Could I keep lying?
I pushed the worries from my head as I entered the library. I was led by a stern middle-aged man, who was very businesslike and strict about the rules, into a lower room, where he unlocked many doors to get to our destination: a pressurized and temperature-controlled archive room. He pulled out a book that barely held together and placed it gently on an old desk. He made me put on latex gloves and told me to be careful.
“Pas de probleme, monsieur,” I told him, eager to search the book. Carefully turning the pages, I skimmed for the date of March 12th, 1571, which I found midway through the bound journal. The old days of using Middle French easily came back. The nun was talking about picking vegetables in the garden when a beautiful creature floated down from the heavens. She truly believed it was an angel sent from god. The angel carried a baby and went to leave it on the steps until she noticed the nun. The angel begged her to take in the child and then floated back up to God.
My fears were confirmed if this woman truly had seen what she’d described. There were only so many goddesses who were “winged” ones, and Psyche had had powers similar to Archer’s. This had to be baby Marshal.
I read on. She took the child in, and a letter was in his blanket. After reading the letter, the nun changed her mind about the angel. She proclaimed the woman was mad or, worse, that she could be a witch sent by the Devil. They baptized Marshal immediately to save his s
oul, and the nun was instructed to burn the witch’s letter. But she did not. She copied it into her journal and then let the priest burn the original. The woman wrote:
To the honorable sisters of Grâce de Dieu, please take this child in good faith, for his mother fears for his life as well as her own. We live in desperate times where neighbors bear witness against one another in hopes of saving themselves from condemning eyes. The term “love thy neighbor” has fallen by the wayside, and the unpredictable judgments here on Earth are not justified as your God’s mercy. In haste, I must leave my child under your protection in hopes…
I turned the page, but the words were concerning the lack of potatoes for stew. Why didn’t the journal have the rest of the letter inside? I studied the page numbers to find four were missing, two pages front and back. There had to be something incriminating on those pages. Why else would a devout nun go from believing an angel to thinking she was a witch? I kept on reading, hoping for answers. Here and there, Joan mentioned certain children by name. Once or twice, she mentioned Marshal Psyches, but only in passing and of how beautiful a child he was. I found only one more passage pertaining to Marshal:
I have always believed Marshal’s mother deranged, but there are things the child can do that no human possibly could. I must write about this because I cannot tell a soul for fear they may murder this child and me, as they must have done to this child’s mother. Such subjects fall under the crime of heresy in these troubling times. He sees beyond what we see, reading our hidden thoughts. I do not know how it is possible. My faith cannot allow it, yet God wouldn’t create this boy and his gift without a purpose. I cannot believe the words of his mother because there is only one God. Marshal was given his gift by God, and for a certain purpose, he was left here. If only we could ascertain how or why he was given this gift. I fear it may not be for good or, more properly, that he may not use it for good. I must watch him, guide him to use it well and to hide it. God does not give us trials we cannot overcome or endure.
“There is only one God” meant Psyche had told them about us. Maybe that was why Zeus let her burn at the stake and never intervened. But I was still missing that definitive proof and her signature. The rest of the journal was useless. It did continue for the rest of her life, so Sister Jeanne was never killed. She’d told no one about the gods, or Zeus didn’t see her as a threat. Or maybe, he wasn’t as all-seeing as we thought? I flipped back to the missing pages, inspecting the crease, but it didn’t appear to be cut, torn, or ripped. However, it clearly wasn’t the original. It had been printed in the seventeen hundreds from the look of the paper. It must’ve been printed at the expense of her family or someone who wanted to preserve this information.
I asked the preoccupied curator where the original could be found. “Museum, but it is a perfect copy.”
“It’s missing pages,” I told him and showed him the evidence.
“The original had missing pages.” He took the book back and gently put it back on the shelf. He motioned me out of the room and into an office.
“Are you sure?”
He gave me a look that could kill. Apparently, I was impertinent for questioning his very ability to perform his job. He quickly typed into the computer as he answered me, “Yes.” He sniffed at me snobbishly. “They appear to have been cut out. The original was part of the private Jacques collection and sold to the museum in 1785. This copy was then made because it was deteriorating rapidly, and it was moved to this archive in 1996.” He showed me the computer screen with the information pertaining to the book.
“Merci, monsieur. Bonsoir,” I told him, masking my disappointment. When I left the library, it was already dark.
I decided to meander toward the hotel so that I could digest the information I’d learned. It did all point to a goddess leaving her child, a goddess who couldn’t return to retrieve him or decided not to during the Inquisition and the heretic hysteria in France during the sixteenth century. Psyche and Hedone were burned at the stake during the Inquisition’s heretic purge. The mother of Marshal, who alluded to polytheism, did not return, and the nun believed her to have been a victim of the times. It was highly doubtful that Hedone had a child. The goddess of pleasure preferred her own gender when it came to love. It all fit: the portion of the mother’s letter and Sister Jeanne’s journal all hinted at our world and our abilities. Marshal must have been a demigod, descended directly from Psyche herself. A half-mortal with the ability to read minds, like Psyche’s ability to “read” souls, to understand someone fully, instantaneously, and not in the way all gods could by entering one’s mind. Psyche had done it through eye contact. His last name was Psyches before it was changed. It was as bright as a neon sign now: Psyche’s. She was signaling to us gods to find her child, knowing she would die. And we failed her.
Others would doubt, deny. I needed tangible proof, real evidence I could show them when the time came. The missing pages were the key. I doubted they’d be there, but the next day, I made my way to the museum mentioned in the records and instantly sought out the original journal. It was tattered, crumbling, and the particles all around it were its own decomposing dust. It stood perched on display in a long glass case with other items from the area and time period, most having to do with artifacts from Grâce de Dieu. I read the simple caption printed on the card beside the book: “Diary of Sister Jeanne Jacques of Grâce de Dieu (1532-1590).” As I thought, there was less information here than in the copy. I examined the other artifacts inside the case: charred toys, a hairbrush without bristles, some old books, an old city map that outlined the city previous to the devastating fire, some old bricks, and many other trivial items. At the end of the case was a caption explaining that everything was donated to the museum by Jean-Charles Jacques III. There was a painting of the Jacques family, consisting of about ten members, and underneath it, a small plaque labeled them. There was Jeanne, and oddly, next to her name was Marshal Syches with no p. Marshal in a family likeness? Then it hit me why the surname of Jacques was so familiar: Marshal’s wife’s maiden name had been Jacques.
I pored over the plaque on the wall next to the family portrait. It was a sort of biography about the Jacques family, who had been wealthy. There were a few sentences about Marshal, explaining that he was raised in the orphanage, then schooled in law under Geoffrey Jacques, who was Sister Jeanne’s brother and the second son, not the heir. Marshal proved a successful attorney—because he could read the minds of those on trial, I assume. He then immigrated to the American Colonies with his wife, Émilie Jacques, who was his benefactor’s daughter. There they lived, prospered, and had three children—two sons and a daughter, with only one son surviving childhood. Marshal died in 1638 in Jamestown. I skimmed over the rest of the information about the family but found nothing important about any of them. The entire Jacques line diminished and disappeared by 1900.
Marshal’s son survived. This much I’d seen in Callie’s family tree. Something still bothered me. It was the missing pages of the nun’s journal. Marshal Syches and the Jacques family had had access to the book prior to its donation. Someone had removed those pages, and they’d done it for a reason. Had it been Marshal himself trying to hide his identity?
I needed someone to talk to, to work it out. My instincts told me to call my twin sister Artemis, but the mysterious message I’d received stopped me. Instead, when I pulled out my cell, I dialed Athena.
“Hello, it’s been a while, Lo.” I could hear the smile in her voice.
“Where are you right now?” I asked.
“London. You?”
“France, Nice. Look, I’ve been doing some research, and I’m stumped. Could I come see you?”
“No need,” she said, so businesslike, you’d think we had only just met. She always was standoffish, like an old hermit preferring her books to our company. “Subject?”
“Marshal Syches.”
“Spell it out, please,” she instructed.
I spelled out the name for her. Th
e phone was silent for a moment. “Thena?”
“Wait, as in I add a p, and I get Psyches, like Psyche’s child,” she whispered.
“That is my concern.”
“Tell me everything,” she said. I could hear her typing in the background.
“Can you keep this secret?” I asked, hoping she’d agree to keep it from everyone else, especially Zeus. Something inside told me that he wouldn’t favor the discovery that Psyche had descendants who still existed. I had always questioned how no one had stepped in to save her or Hedone, but it was a question I couldn’t truly voice without Archer going mad. There were many gods around at the time of their deaths who could be implicated. With Prometheus’s foresight, Zeus’s omniscience, and with several gods having the ability to teleport—it seemed almost like a choice to let them die.
“Yes.” Her conviction allowed me to continue. If there was one thing Athena wasn’t, it was dishonest. “The question is, Lo, how can you?” Athena questioned.
I wasn’t sure if she meant it rhetorically—pointing out the obvious fact I couldn’t lie to others—or if she was onto my newfound ability to lie, but I hung up, not giving her time to question me further. I had wanted answers but stupidly overlooked the fact that she would too. And now I’d pointed Athena—the wisest of us all—to Psyche’s mysteriously hidden line; it wouldn’t take her long to figure out who the last descendant was. Hiding the truth was essential now, and I had to figure out how to go home and lie to my best friend…to his face.
Chapter 15Callie
I tried to buckle down on my homework, but as much as I tried to concentrate, Archer’s piercing eyes kept coming back to haunt me. As did the strange dreams of my possible demise. There was something in my constitution that was utterly wrong. I should’ve been frightened, upset, repulsed. I should’ve seen my dreams as dark omens. Instead, the dreams were puzzles to solve, and I was attracted, mesmerized, drawn in by his alluring eyes. Archer’s eyes, whenever he was upset and angry about something, were amazingly bright. They were brilliant and luminescent, as if his anger and love shone through them. I could no longer ignore that something was amiss. The weird yearbook photo, his eccentric rules, and his overbearing family who kept cropping up—and I sensed a power within him that he kept hidden but that surfaced accidentally in front of us. What kind of power? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t frightened by it. Instead, I was drawn in by it, like a magnetic force that irresistibly pulled me in.
Quiver Page 18