by Molly Ringle
***
The immortals texted at lunchtime, not that Landon had been able to eat a bite today. At the parking lot. Whenever you’re ready.
Landon, Tracy, Krystal, and Yuliya were waiting in their rented van down the highway a quarter-mile from the locked-up church. Tracy said, “Off we go,” and turned the engine on.
They parked on the shoulder of the highway, not in the lot itself. The lot was behind the church, hidden from the road. The former church was a dreary building of blue-painted boards, not much different in structure from the lumberyard office at the next property over. Yuliya got out and assisted Krystal with her crutches. The two women made their way into a stand of trees that ran between the church’s lot and the lumberyard. In their brown and camouflage clothes, they soon disappeared. Even leaning on a crutch, Krystal could fire a gun with accuracy, as long as she got a clear shot.
Landon remembered last time, the blood all over Adrian Watts, the bullet wounds, his weight heavy in Landon’s hands. The world swayed as Landon climbed out of the car, his pulse tapping so fast and his lungs taking in so little air that his vision showed white sparks at the edges. Oh, God, let it be over fast this time. Let this work; let the immortals give up and leave him alone after today.
Tracy stayed behind the wheel. “When I hear the shot,” he reminded Landon, “I’ll drive in, and we’ll load up our…friend.”
They had layers of old blankets spread across the back of the van. To keep bloodstains off the upholstery. Landon suppressed a shudder. He nodded and turned toward the church.
“Be careful,” Tracy said behind him. But he sounded impassive, like a teacher seeing off a kid at the school bus.
As he walked, Landon sent panicked glances all around, half certain the immortals would drop on him and kill him without bothering to check if he’d been lying.
But when he turned the corner into the empty parking lot behind the building, there against the wall lounged the tall, lean stranger who had jumped him last week. The guy was alone. He had one knee bent, the sole of his soccer shoe propped on the wall, hands in his fleece coat pockets. He looked perfectly relaxed. When he spotted Landon he lifted his chin in acknowledgement, but didn’t move. Landon hoped this made it easier for Krystal to take aim. He glanced at the line of trees past the asphalt, but saw nothing; the women were well hidden.
She wasn’t to fire until Landon had handed him the fake artifact. Maybe in less than a minute now.
“And what have you got for me today?” the stranger asked.
Landon held out the earring, wrapped in a scrap of newspaper.
The stranger glanced at it for a second. “Open it and show me.”
Landon hesitated, but decided it wouldn’t matter much if he did the unwrapping. He pulled off the newspaper and handed the stranger the gold disk. “Here. That’s…that’s it.” As soon as it changed hands, Landon drew back three steps. He had no wish to be in the line of fire.
The stranger examined it. Landon’s heart pounded. Any second now. Why wasn’t she firing?
The stranger looked at Landon with reproach and pity. “Come on, mate.” He tossed the earring to Landon, who reflexively caught it. “Clearly a fake. Can’t you do better?”
“I—I honestly thought…” Landon glanced at the trees in increasing panic. Why wasn’t Krystal shooting?
“Oh, Landon,” the stranger said. “Landon, Landon.”
What was happening to Krystal? This was going one hundred percent wrong. He had to escape. Now.
“Look, I tried…” Landon began.
The stranger pushed off from the wall and disappeared.
Landon choked back a gasp. A second later, someone seized him around the middle and yanked him backward.
He yelled in terror. The stranger let go and shoved him so he tumbled across the bumpy forest floor. Which should have been an asphalt parking lot.
Oh, shit.
“Landon,” the stranger sighed again, standing above him with hands on his hips. “We told you what would happen.”
Gigantic, weird-looking trees towered over the stranger’s head and spread out on all sides of them in a massive forest.
Landon’s body shook as if it wanted to rattle itself apart. He curled up, closing his eyes. He fished his latest handgun from the pocket of his coat and tossed it blindly toward the stranger’s feet. “Do it fast. Please.”
More footsteps approached, rustling in the undergrowth, but no one spoke. No one shot him, either. After a prolonged silence, Landon dared to open his eyes.
Now three people were looking down at him with distaste: the stranger, Adrian Watts, and a tall young woman with short hair and a brown ski parka.
The stranger was holding Landon’s gun, but kept it pointed at the ground. He exchanged glances with the other two. They were taking long enough that Landon considered scrambling to his feet and running for it. A lion-like roar somewhere in the near distance checked that thought, though.
“Did you kill the two women?” Landon asked them, his voice creaky.
They looked down at him. “No,” Adrian said. “Only knocked them out.”
“We’re nicer than you lot,” the woman said. Her accent sounded like Adrian’s. Maybe another Kiwi.
“Except that now you have to kill me,” Landon said.
The three exchanged dismayed looks again, as if they really hadn’t made up their minds about that.
“There is still information to be got from him,” the stranger said, with the kind of tone that sounded like he was repeating an argument he’d made before.
“I don’t want to be a murderer,” Adrian said, in a similarly tired way. “But being a jailer doesn’t appeal either.”
“I said I’d take care of it,” the stranger said.
“I’ll help,” the woman added. When Adrian glanced at her, she said, “Really. It’s—look, it’s true about the information.”
They all looked at Landon again.
“Well, Landon,” the stranger said. “Your choices, then. One: turn state’s evidence—and be committed to a mental hospital for your story, most likely. Two: cooperate with us. Give us information we can use. Consider even turning against your former allies, since they were hardly being good to you, were they? Three…” The stranger lifted the gun in a sort of shrug.
While Landon swallowed and tried to grasp the idea that maybe he didn’t have to die today, the woman shoved the stranger’s arm down. “Oh, don’t give him the choice.” She glared at Landon. “You get option number two. You’re coming with us.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Liam had a lot going on. There was of course switching realms as a mortal, both in the Underworld and at the other special sites, which was so cool he insisted on doing it at least ten times that first day before the others told him to chill. He also got to move to his new trailer in the wilderness, which was actually a pretty awesome location, looking out over the land where he caught glimpses of spirit-world animals in the trees now and then.
In Liam’s memories, Poseidon had a lot going on too.
Poseidon found his way to Knossos in Crete. It was an amazing city, with architecture and murals like Poseidon had never seen. Through careful inquiries to the junior priestesses, he got his request taken in to Rhea, and she had him brought in to meet her.
She was tall and brown-skinned and with hair growing in tight curls, like the people of Egypt, which indeed she said was her original homeland. She carried a speckled brown snake that lazily wound and unwound itself around her arms and shoulders as she spoke to Poseidon. He found it unnerving, as he assumed everyone did, which was probably why she wore it. But he soon forgot the snake and became fascinated with her story. They sat in a cool, shaded stone room of the palace at Knossos, sipping mint-flavored water and eating herbed flat bread as they talked.
Rhea was like him, it turned out, though most people didn’t know it. For now she was holding onto her position as high priestess, because she could do a lot of good for he
r citizens that way, as well as looking out for other immortals. She would someday have to step down and leave the island, before everyone noticed she wasn’t aging. However, she estimated she could carry on for many years yet.
As for Poseidon, she instructed him to follow her exact directions to a mountain in the north of Greece, where the other immortals lived, ones she had personally brought together and still corresponded with.
So he was soon off on another sea voyage. After a trek inland to Mount Olympos, he finally met Zeus, Hera, and Demeter. He settled in with them a while, to compare stories and figure out what they were all going to do with these long lives of theirs.
He hadn’t forgotten his home island, nor Amphitrite down in Euboia. He found a traveler headed to the nearest docks, and entrusted a letter with him to send on the next boat going to Skyros, telling his sister where he was and promising to visit at some point. He didn’t dare try writing to Amphitrite. That might get her in trouble with her husband—or “master” was more the term really—and he didn’t know her well enough to be as bold as that.
There was plenty to keep him busy in his new environment. He and his companions compared their uncanny abilities, including a tracking sense of one’s lovers, which Poseidon had always noticed. He had assumed it was connected somehow to his water-related abilities, because it felt a bit similar, but when he mentioned those water affinities, everyone looked in total incomprehension at him. So he mumbled that it was nothing, never mind, and didn’t bring it up again. Not much use for a sea affinity anyway when you were living on a mountain in the interior.
Besides, Poseidon quickly gathered Zeus and Hera were keen on helping favored cities win wars, and in a country like Greece, sea power counted for as much as land armies; sometimes more. Poseidon could too easily see himself being coerced into flinging waves at other people’s enemies in return for gold and worship, and the idea disgusted him. He let his friends know he was good at boat-building, navigating, fishing, and swimming. But the magical relationship between himself and the sea he hoarded as a secret, and used his powers only when alone, off visiting islands or coasts, if he encountered an opportunity to be useful without his abilities being detected.
He got away after about a year and managed to visit his family on Skyros. It could only be a brief visit; his sister’s household didn’t want to risk the island figuring out that Poseidon still hadn’t aged and likely never would. So he departed after a few days, and went to Euboia.
Finding Amphitrite wasn’t simple. Asking around after someone else’s concubine didn’t do any favors for the woman in question, and indeed could get her beaten by her master despite her innocence, since he was a horrid man from what she’d said. But eventually Poseidon learned from a seller of herbs in the marketplace that, yes, Amphitrite still lived in this city in her master’s household, and was now once again with child.
He nodded, feeling more disappointed than he had any right to, and told the herb seller, “Next time she comes by, please tell her that her kinsman Poseidon from Skyros is doing well, and living in the north, and hopes to see her again before long.” Claiming himself as kin, though a lie, would give him the social right to leave her such a message. Perhaps the greeting would provide her some cheer.
He returned to Mount Olympos and his circle of charmed friends. They soon found more like themselves: Apollo, Artemis, Athena. Everyone was around his own age or a little older. Only Rhea had substantial years on the rest of them—she was over a century old already, according to anyone’s best estimation. They had no idea, and no way to know, whether immortals had always been born on occasion and their group had yet to discover the rest, or whether this was a new phenomenon limited to basically the handful of them.
He eventually had lovers once in a while, mortal and immortal both. Here Liam drew back his close focus, because…okay, yeah, it was like Liam’s dad had said. Poseidon and Demeter eventually hooked up. Liam totally sped through those memories, though actually they weren’t quite as horrible as he expected. But even at the time, the affair felt like a mistake. It was short, less than a month, but Demeter latched onto Poseidon in a way that suggested she was hungry for a settled family. Poseidon knew he couldn’t be that husband for her, thus they underwent a lot of conflict.
She’d left behind a family, as nearly all of them did, and for her it had been a serious hardship. She felt bereft without children, a home, domesticity. She kept mentioning to Poseidon her desire to be a wife and mother again. In response he drew back further. They argued, they made up, they got exasperated with each other.
By then the group had acquired Hades, shipped over to them from Crete, as well as others such as Hermes and Aphrodite, familiar souls Liam was now hanging out with again. Events in the memories were unfolding just as Sophie and the rest had told him.
But what the others didn’t know so well, and therefore hadn’t told him, was how Poseidon couldn’t shake the thoughts of Amphitrite. Not only because she was the only other person he knew who had any water magic, but because of her. Her eyes. Her defiance. Her hair in the sunlight and the moonlight. Her touch on his hand. Her bare legs in the tide pools. And she seemed like she could use rescuing and therefore he worried about her.
He managed to see her again a few times over the years, on journeys down the coast. In her twenties she was still a fertile concubine, heavily pregnant when he found her in the marketplace in Euboia. She glowed with health though she claimed to be unbearably tired. They managed to talk a short time, standing close together in the crowd and holding textiles from the nearest stand so it would appear they were discussing the goods. In a rushed undertone he told her he’d found more folk like himself, had been thinking of her, it was so good to see her, and (he dared ask) would she be willing to run away with him? He saw the temptation light up her eyes, but she shook her head. She couldn’t, not with this baby on the way and her other children still young, even though they barely cared about her and considered the head wife their mother…
He had to leave her, and went back feeling twice as lonely as before. He came again a year later. This time he approached her master’s house, and walked back and forth on the road a while in the guise of a traveler until she finally came out on an errand to the market. He fell in step beside her. She was slim again, though looked tired and harassed. Though happy to see him, her answer was the same: she was too busy with the children, and didn’t dare leave. But this time she asked him outright to come again, because she liked his visits. She was itching to hear more about these amazing immortals, she added with a smile.
He kept paying clandestine visits, though long months often stretched between them, as life kept both of them busy in separate regions of Greece. One autumn evening when she was thirty, he found her alone at the same tide pools, at sunset. The beach was one of the few places she managed to get away to on her own. Tonight she admitted she also came here because it made her think of him. Though she said it matter-of-factly, Poseidon’s heart swelled in hope.
But still she refused to come away with him. Her master was ailing, and the illness was making him meaner than ever, and more needy of everyone in his household. So she couldn’t disappear now; she feared what would become of the children if she left before everything was legally settled for his death. Poseidon vowed to return for her. Then he paused and asked, “That is…do you even want me to keep coming back like this? Am I being annoying?”
Her smile brought out fine lines around her mouth and eyes. They made her more herself; his love for her solidified and became less an airy dream. “Wouldn’t I tell you to leave if that’s how I felt?” she said. “Do come back.” She set her hand atop his. “Please.”
He looked into her blue-green eyes, then down at her lips. He knew he shouldn’t kiss her, or if he did, he shouldn’t do more than that. By now he and his friends knew about the danger mortal women ran if impregnated by immortal men. He had remembered, with a chill of horror, how two of his former sweethearts on Skyros
had suffered dangerous miscarriages and almost died. He had even told Amphitrite about it tonight, as part of the discussion of his strange nature.
But she took hold of his tunic, tugged him close, and kissed him. The taste and warmth pulled him down like a whirlpool. From this kind of mutual desire he couldn’t escape, and didn’t want to.
They moved down the beach to a sea cave, a stretch of sand under a hollowed rock ceiling. At high tide it would be full of churning water, but this was mid-tide and ebbing. They had the smooth sand to themselves, and the shadows hid them. Poseidon refused to enter her, despite her invitation—no sense putting her life in even more danger. But they still caressed one another as lovers, and brought each other to joy, surrounded by the low thunder of the surf and the smell of salt.
“Now I can’t go away from you,” he said afterward. “Don’t tell me to.”
She didn’t.
He bought a small house near the shore, and hired a servant, whom he sent back to the north to tell his friends he would be staying here a while. He had the servant fetch the better part of his belongings and bring them back. Then he waited for Amphitrite’s master to die, and for her children to grow until she felt she could live apart from them. If it took years, if she was middle-aged or elderly by the time she was ready to join him for good, he didn’t care. He loved her and would stay near her as long as life allowed. But he didn’t tell any of his immortal friends about her, because he was certain they wouldn’t understand. They’d try to talk him out of an attachment to a mortal, and he would tolerate no such attitudes.
Her master died the following year, but Amphitrite legally became the slave of his chief wife after that, who wasn’t a kind woman. Careful to keep their affair a secret, Poseidon nonetheless managed to observe most of Amphitrite’s household at one point or another, and the wife reminded him of Hera, only without any of Hera’s generous points. Poseidon and Amphitrite exercised extreme caution in how and where they met. An owner could have a slave flogged nearly to death for any perceived wrong, which certainly included sneaking off to meet a lover without permission.