by Molly Ringle
“Life is hard,” Zoe said dryly. She lay on Sophie’s other side, belly down, chin on her folded arms. “I wish I could protect you all with magic. Some spell that honestly is bombproof and bulletproof. But the only spells that strong are temporary, more of an emergency measure. They fall apart in a minute or two, after getting you out of a tough spot. So, yeah, I’m useless.”
“You’re not useless,” Sophie said.
“My protection failed you.” Zoe sounded quietly heartbroken.
Though Sophie’s panic leaped up again at the reminder of that night, she insisted, “No. I mean, I don’t know, maybe without your spell, we’d all be dead—me, Adrian, Liam…” This was getting too scary. Her voice didn’t want to work anymore.
“Still. Not exactly a win.” Zoe kept her eyelashes lowered.
“Girl, you rocked it,” Tab told her. “You made Sophie throw Quentin across a field, and shoot Krystal. That was awesome. I mean, I wasn’t even there, but I am sure it was awesome.”
Sophie said nothing. She had fully dropped back into her nauseating fear. She watched the slow black swirl of the river, listened to it gurgle around the rocks. Told herself to breathe.
“Sorry,” Tab said a second later. “I’m a douche. Nothing was awesome about that night—of course it wasn’t. Sorry, I’m really sorry.”
Sophie nodded to reassure her, but her throat still felt too clenched up to speak.
Zoe reached out and curled her hand around Sophie’s ankle. A few breaths, and Sophie’s panic began to subside. The clammy chill receded from her hands and feet, replaced by everyday warmth. Her stomach stopped fluttering, and she breathed deep again.
She glanced shyly at Zoe. “Magic?”
Zoe pulled her hand back, folding it beneath her other arm. “Yeah.”
“Better. Thanks.”
“Only treats the symptoms, though. The cause…that takes time.”
“It’s too early for you to worry about what exactly you’re going to do with your life,” Tab told Sophie. “You just need to start feeling better. Fix your trauma.”
“Jeez, Tab, blunt much?” Zoe said.
But Sophie nodded, unoffended. She looked at that list on her phone every day, and wished she could check off just one damn thing from it. So far, no go.
“Adrian texted me this morning,” she said, “basically just saying hi, and that he was going to the US now. But even that, just seeing his name…I freak out. Everything freaks me out.”
Zoe lowered her arm over the rocks and dipped one finger in the water. “Me too. So I can imagine it’s even worse for you.”
“Is it ‘cause you don’t know whether you want him back?” Tab asked Sophie.
“Again, blunt,” Zoe accused.
“I’m not saying you have to decide,” Tab added. “I totally think you should feel better first before making the big life choices.”
Sophie rearranged her legs in their criss-cross. “Kind of. But I also worry it won’t be him sending the message; that some Thanatos jerk has captured him and is texting me to say they’re about to kill him, or…I don’t know. I imagine all kinds of scary things. As to the relationship…” She swallowed and continued, “I just want to be able to talk to him without feeling all weird.”
Tabitha nodded. “You associate him with what happened. He’s your trauma trigger—or one of them anyway. So, I bet if you get over your trauma you’ll be golden.”
“But how do I do that?” Sophie asked. “Other than having Zoe give me a magic boost every so often.”
“Which I’ll do,” Zoe said. “But it isn’t a long term solution. Time mainly, I’d say. That’s the cure.”
A minor commotion from the tunnels diverted Sophie’s attention. Liam bounded in from the bedchamber, swinging a flashlight. Rosie trotted up behind him, panting. Liam’s clothes were rumpled and his dark wavy hair stood in an unruly cloud, its dyed-green streak corkscrewing up and outward. He had evidently just woken up. He’d been up half of last night playing his new video games with Niko, and had slept in. But now he looked alert and re-energized.
“Hey,” Sophie greeted.
“Hey, man,” Tabitha said. “You’re so late for breakfast it’s pretty much going to be dinner.”
“Dude,” Liam said. He looked at each of the women in quick succession, his gaze ending upon Sophie. “I got to the Poseidon stuff.”
Chapter Twelve
For Liam, these past-life memories were seriously weird. Like, he could remember being an old guy, five hundred years ago or something, and having all these deep thoughts an old guy would have. And they’d make sense at the time, while Liam was dreaming or spacing out and living those memories. Then he’d come back to himself and think, How’d that get into my head? I couldn’t have come up with that.
Which was how he knew the memories were real. Of course, they had to be, since the Underworld and the immortals and the spirit horses and the whole other realm were real. He felt like he’d been dropped into the fantasy world of his video games, which was totally cool with him.
The reason they were living here for now, though…that sucked. No, “sucked” didn’t cover it. Sucked ass. It was a nightmare.
His parents were dead. He and Sophie were orphans. Maybe it would be cool to be an orphan if your parents had been jerks, or if you’d never known them, and after they died you inherited a castle or something. But Liam loved his parents. They’d been dorks sometimes, but they were all right. They had loved him and taken care of him even when he was being a dork. And some freaking evil cult had torched their house to the ground and killed them. They were trying to kill Adrian, but the bastards didn’t even care who else they got in the attempt.
This would have shut down Liam’s brain completely, he figured, except that he still got to see them. They weren’t actually gone. So…he kind of got to put off his grief. After the shock of realizing he’d still get to talk to them for years and years to come, he managed to chill a little.
Their therapist told him to make a list, just for his own eyes, of positive things in life he might look forward to, even if they’d be a long time in the future.
Liam’s list so far was:
go surfing in Hawaii
go parasailing
get a monkey or a forest dragon or a sugar glider or other awesome new pet
see Landon and Krystal and anyone who helped them dead or jailed for life
Yeah, he wanted revenge. In a big way. No one was ever going to talk him out of that, even though the therapist kept telling him to let go of “hostility” and let the police take care of punishment.
But with all this supernatural stuff to explore, past lives plus the good chance of becoming immortal himself—hell yeah, immortal!—well, Liam figured he could survive. Someday he might even use his immortal strength to deal out his revenge personally. That was the kind of idea that kept you going.
But his sister was unhappy. He could see that. She had to be the grownup in the family now, which had to stress her out. And there was some kind of weirdness between her and Adrian, because she felt guilty or Adrian felt guilty or they both did, and Liam couldn’t do anything about that.
Sophie kept telling him it was important to get to the life long ago in which he had been Poseidon. His dad said the same, because now his dad, being a soul, could remember all his past lives without any of the confusion of sorting it out that living people had to go through. His mom and dad just knew everything now, or at least everything they had known in any past life.
And what his dad said was that he—Dad—had been this woman, the immortal Demeter, Persephone’s mom, in the era when Liam had been Poseidon.
“And you ought to be warned about this, Liam,” his dad said in the Underworld a couple of days ago, after taking Liam aside so they could talk privately. “Demeter and Poseidon, they had a…well, ‘relationship’ is too grand a word. It didn’t last. But they hooked up for a short time, as you kids might say.”
Liam’s tongue h
ad frozen in his mouth. His horror must have shown on his face.
“Yeah,” his dad went on. “I’d feel that way too, if I were still alive. But I wanted to assure you, it was just that one life. And it didn’t last long in that one. Didn’t work out. A non-issue basically. Listen, souls get into all kinds of configurations with each other. Ask anyone down here—or your immortal friends. In any case, those Greek days were a long, long time ago. Every other life since, when we’ve known each other at all, you and I have only been friends. Or family when we’re lucky. Like in this life.”
He sounded so encouraging, so not totally embarrassed, that Liam tried to act mature too. He nodded. “Okay. Right. Cool.”
“Would you feel better if we never talked about this again?” his dad asked.
Liam nodded immediately, and escaped to the game-room cave off the bedchamber for a long session of electronic pirate-ship combat.
So yeah, he did want to get to the Poseidon life, but that one detail, even if it was a non-issue, kind of put him off.
Also, getting to that life was taking him longer than the few days Sophie had guessed at because he kept getting distracted by the lives in between. There was so much sex in them. He needed to screech to a halt and observe. So he ended up losing a few days in learning about all the women he’d done interesting things to in past lives. (He’d pretty much always been a guy, and always interested in women, though there’d been the occasional exceptions, which were weird, though also interesting.)
Once he had accepted that sex in real life—at least in his soul’s past—could be all kinds of things, including far more awesome or a lot more boring than it looked in internet porn, Liam finally sped his memories up again to travel backward in time.
And last night, after a marathon of pirate battles played against Niko, Liam passed out on his bed and fell straight into ancient Greece.
When he sensed he was in a new lifetime, one he hadn’t seen yet, he flipped to the start the way he’d learned to do. Everything made a lot more sense that way, like reading a book from the beginning instead of trying to page backward from the last chapter.
You didn’t usually remember anything from birth or the first couple of years. Then the memories started coming in, patchy at first but getting stronger with age.
With Poseidon the first thing he remembered was, of course, the sea.
Chapter Thirteen
Poseidon plowed into the sea on his small legs when he couldn’t have been more than three years old, on his home island of Skyros. His mother shrieked in terror. She and his uncle ran toward him as the waves knocked him down and the undertow pulled him out. But little Poseidon wasn’t afraid, not even when the current flipped him upside-down underwater, and swimming creatures bumped against his arms and legs.
His mother hauled him out. Poseidon coughed the saltwater onto the sand, then beamed at his worried uncle, and looked wistfully at the brilliant blue sea while his mother harangued him to never, ever walk into it again. It was not a promise he kept.
His father had died at sea when Poseidon was a baby, and now he lived with his mother, uncle, and little sister. As Poseidon grew up he learned he was very strong. Stronger than anyone on the island, even when he was only ten. He never got sick. When rocks or barnacles scratched him, the cuts always healed so quickly that no one could believe it. Poseidon figured it was the healing quality of seawater, but he had to admit it didn’t do that for everyone.
Once when he was thirteen, and helping launch a newly-built boat, it slipped off its ramp and crashed onto his leg and broke his bones. That hurt like ten hells. His family and neighbors thought he’d be crippled, or at least that the bones would take months to heal. He had a dark night of thinking he’d never swim or run again. He begged the gods to heal him, promising he’d take extra care of his mother and little sister, would fish for them every day and bring in as much as he could. The gods must have heard him, for in the morning his leg was fine.
This time everyone’s amazement turned to fear. It really must be the touch of the gods, they said.
“Then why aren’t you happy?” he asked his mother.
“Because it probably means the gods have some grand plan for you, and I don’t want them to take you. I want you to stay here with us.”
He assured her that staying on Skyros was all he planned to do. But his curiosity about the greater world, or at least the greater sea, grew along with the rest of him. Poseidon swam tirelessly and handled boats like an expert, even as a child. He understood the water. The curl of a wave, the force of a current, the strength of a surge, the pull of a tide; he saw or felt them easily, and navigated his boat or turned his body accordingly, and always avoided being smashed against rocks or menaced by sea creatures.
It even felt like he could influence the water, as if it was listening to him when he was near—but that was impossible, surely. Unless there was a god of the waters who invisibly cooperated with him? Perhaps that was the divine touch everyone spoke of. If so, he judged it a blessing. Despite going out in a boat nearly every day from childhood onward, the vessels he was in almost never overturned; he’d been in far fewer sea accidents than most islanders. And when the boats did overturn, he always easily caught hold of all his shipmates in the water and brought them to safety. Sometimes it felt as if he sent out an urgent wish for the current to shove a sinking friend back up to the surface—and, curiously, the water obeyed.
The island’s position in the middle of the Aegean Sea put them in the path of occasional raiders from Anatolia. Usually these violent men arrived on just two or three ships at a time, and the soldiers of Skyros could fight them off, killing those they could and sending the rest sailing away.
But one cloudy autumn day, as a storm approached, the worst possibility materialized. A fleet of nineteen Anatolian ships appeared on the horizon, arrowing straight for Skyros. Poseidon and his fellow islanders ran to the shore, but they all knew they couldn’t defeat a force like this. The Anatolians would sink any boats they launched or deflect any arrows they shot, then they’d sweep onto shore, rape or kill or kidnap everyone, and steal everything of worth.
So with every bit of his desperate mind, Poseidon embraced the sea, the large patch of it that still lay between them and the raiders. He pulled in the turbulence of the storm, and pushed with all his will.
The sea dipped as if it were sinking, then rose again in a huge wave that rolled toward the Anatolian ships, growing until it was higher than their masts. The sailors scrambled to be ready, but there was nothing they could do against such a wave. It scooped up one ship, then two, three, and four more under its curl before it finally crested and crashed. The ships caught up in the wave were plunged deep below. The ensuing cataract of white water turned the surface into a roiling mess, and swirled and smashed the remaining boats against each other until almost every one was swamped or broken.
The Skyros citizens cheered in victory—except Poseidon, staring stunned at what he had called forth. The Anatolians pulled their remaining men into the two most seaworthy boats, turned tail, and rowed away amid a sea of wreckage.
The people of Skyros chanted grateful prayers, and chattered about the strange wave.
“I’ve heard such things can arise at sea during a storm,” one of the men said.
“My father’s seen such a wave, yes,” another man said. “Swallowed up three ships before his eyes.”
“But waves usually go toward shore, not away from it,” the first man said.
All eyes turned to Poseidon. He gave a sheepish shrug, and turned toward home before anyone could ask further questions.
Poseidon was thankful not to have to throw the sea against anyone for a long while after that. Enemies stayed away, perhaps hearing of the treacherous waters around Skyros, and he was able to return to his calm existence of sailing, fishing, and swimming.
In warm weather, swimming was his favorite. As he grew up, his strength increased, and soon he could easily swim all day. When hi
s mother spent a few days away, visiting family in other villages or taking pigs or linen to markets, Poseidon sometimes took very long swims indeed.
He started by swimming to the tiny island of Skyropoula, just off Skyros, which would have been a challenging swim for any ordinary person. But it was too easy for him, so he continued on, swimming past the little island, southwest all the way to the nearest point of mainland Greece. He knew how to get there from his many voyages by ship, accompanying merchants. From the bearing of passing ships in the distance, along with the position of the sun and the sense that the sea itself gave him, he felt as confident as if he were walking a well-marked road, instead of swimming alone in a sloshing, deep expanse of chilly salt water. The fins of dolphins, whales, sharks, and other great fish slid into view above the surface near him from time to time, but he felt no fear. The creatures wouldn’t hurt him. Being in harmony with them was part of his water-sense.
Euboia, the Greek land he finally reached on such swims, was technically an island, but it was so huge and nestled so close to the mainland that it was practically a part of it. Every time he approached Euboia, swimming in among the boats that came and went from its harbors, the people on the ships shouted to him and tried to rescue him. A man overboard! Surely he needed saving. But he laughed and shouted back that he was fine, only swimming, and waved off any help.
Of course, word did get back to Skyros that he was behaving in this eccentric way. That, along with his other uncanny attributes, damaged his eligibility as a potential husband. He had a string of sweethearts, but their families always wound up disapproving of him, and it was just as well, as he didn’t love any of the women long enough to wish to spend his life with them. After his mother fretted a while, she gave up and let him live his bachelor existence, and turned her attention to his younger sister, who soon did marry and began producing grandchildren for her.
Poseidon’s appearance and strength lingered at around that of a man in his twenties even after he entered his forties and beyond. It became a problem. People who had known him his whole life now looked uneasy when they met him, and kept studying him as if trying to discover the mark of some demon. He got tired of it, and took up residence alone farther down the coast, though he still served in the island’s navy in order to protect his village.